Unholy Death Knight Gearing Guide

The first season of The War Within has quite basic tier set bonuses, this is mainly due to all of the new tools and passives that we are gaining with Hero talents, so these tier sets are pretty self explanatory.

• 2 Set Bonus: Your minions deal 8% increased damage.
• 4 Set Bonus: When you summon a minion, your Haste is increased by 2%, up to 8% for 8 sec.

2 Set Bonus

Very simple minion damage increase which favors minion based builds. This damage bonus does not apply to the Riders from Riders of the Apocalypse, but will apply to all of your minions such as Army of the Dead / Apocalypse Ghouls, Magus of the Dead, your own Ghoul and Raise Abomination.

4 Set Bonus

Everytime you summon a minion (Army of the Dead / Apocalypse Ghouls, Magus of the Dead, Raise Abomination etc) you gain Unholy Commander which is a 2% haste buff that stacks up to 4 times. Unholy Commander is refreshed whenever you summon a minion, which makes Sudden Doom procs very important to time well so you can extend the buff and keep it at 4 stacks for as long as possible (Sudden Doom will summon a Magus of the Dead via Doomed Bidding).

If you have a Sudden Doom proc waiting, do not immediately need runes and are not on 2 stacks of Sudden Doom, you can hold it for a bit until your Unholy Commander buff is about to drop, this will greatly help to maintain the haste buff.

The tables below aim to give you a general list of gear that is good for Unholy Death Knight, these lists are not a perfect replacement for simming your character.

• Raiding
• Mythic+

Ovi’naxs Mercurial Egg

This trinket is a very strong stat stick which changes its stats based on your movement.

Ideally you want to stand still as much as possible for the strength buff, but you still want some secondary stat stacks from it due to the 60% diminishing returns above 20 stacks of either of the buffs. Ideally you want 20 strength stacks and 10 secondary stat stacks which is easier said than done to consistently pull off during an encounter, but worth noting nonetheless.

Another great part of this trinket is that it does have an use effect which will hold the current stacks of Strength / Secondary stat that you have, so if you’re using cooldowns during movement intensive situations you can use this on use effect to keep all of your banked up Strength.

Treacherous Transmitter

This trinket can be very difficult to play around, so it may not be a viable choice in some boss encounters and you will want to use Skarmorak Shard instead. This is a very powerful trinket that is on a 1.5 minute cooldown (which aligns perfectly with Raise Abomination and your other cooldowns) that gives you an insanely big Strength buff for 15 seconds once you have completed one of the three tasks that it gives you at random (you have 15 seconds to complete the task):

• Jump 3 times
• Walk into the orb
• Stand in the portal pad

You will want to always use this trinket alongside Unholy Assault, and you can delay completing the task for a bit so that you still have it active for Infliction of Sorrow consumption at the end of your Gift of the San’layn window (if playing San’layn).

Mark of Khardos / Skarmorak Shard

Both of these trinkets are very similar in their uses and are easier to use than Treacherous Transmitter. You use both with Unholy Assault so you get a big mastery buff during your cooldowns. They are both strong because they have a 1.5 minute cooldown, aligning with both Raise Abomination and Unholy Assault. Both give you a big amount of mastery which will increase your minion and shadow damage (which is the majority of your damage).

However, they are both good but outshine each other in different scenarios. Mark of Khardos is generally more single target throughput value, as you gain 5.2% more Mastery with the on use effect than you do with Skarmarok Shard. However, as soon as there are multiple targets/adds dying at the same time, then Skarmarok Shard pulls much further ahead as you can gain a total of 10.5% additional mastery from its secondary effect (triggered by enemy deaths).

So with this in mind I generally recommend using Skarmarok Shard over Mark of Khardos, as the single target difference between the two is pretty small and as soon as there are additional enemies involved, that small difference goes away completely, so it’s a lot more flexible across different target profiles/fight styles.

Raiding

Charged Claymore (with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension)

With the current tuning of embellishments, Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension is the best you can get. It does need to be crafted on a weapon, so you will lose the 3 ilvls on the weapon vs a max mythic ilvl 2H, however the embellishment bonus is that much better vs other embellishments that it’s still the best option for Unholy.

The secondary stats this embellishment gives can be a bit rng and results will vary, but even then it’s still the best option for us. This should be paired with an low stat budget crafted piece, embellished with a Writhing Armor Banding to increase the Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension’s effects by 50%.

Consecrated Cloak (with Writhing Armor Banding)

As mentioned above, this is a low stat budget piece you want to craft just so you can increase the effects of Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension. Cloaks are one of the lowest stat budget pieces (making the -3 potential ilvl loss much less of a blow to your overall throughput) so it’s the ideal piece to apply a Writhing Armor Banding to.

Mythic Plus

Everforged Vambraces & Consecrated Cloak (with Dawnthread Lining)

In Mythic Plus, Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension is not as strong as it is in raids. This is because it takes time to ramp up its stacks, and you are not always in combat so you will often drop this buff between pulls/bosses. You also lose out on 3 weapon ilvls, which has much more of an impact to your multi-target throughput compared to single target.

With these things in mind, you want to use different embellishments for Mythic Plus scenarios as there are better options, such as two low stat budget pieces (bracers & cloak) embellished with Dawnthread Lining. Crit gains a lot more value for Unholy in multi-target, and in Mythic Plus you often take bursts of damage rather than consistent rot damage. So, your uptime on Dawnthread Lining is going to be much better than it would be in a raid scenario which makes double Dawnthread Lining the best option.