Unholy Death Knight Gearing Guide

Season 3 has a unique approach to tier sets this time around, as the tier set bonuses are based on your hero talent specialization.

Rider of the Apocalypse Tier Set Bonus:

• 2 Set Bonus:Apocalypse now summons Whitemane for 10 sec. Whitemane’s Undeath deals 20% increased damage and infects 1 additional target when it spreads, and her Death Coil deals 35% increased damage.
• 4 Set Bonus: Casting Death Coil or Epidemic orders Whitemane to cast her Death Coil of Epidemic alongside you at 125% effectiveness. Your Death Coil deals 40% damage to targets affected by Whitemane’s Undeath.

San’layn Tier Set Bonus:

• 2 Set Bonus:Infliction of Sorrow extends the duration of your disease by an additional 4.0 sec on your main target, and Essence of the Blood Queen additionally increases your Mastery by 0.5% per stack.
• 4 Set Bonus: Infliction of Sorrow deals 35% increased damage, and Vampiric Strike increases the damage of your ghoul by 20% for 8 sec. Multiple applications may overlap.

Rider of the Apocalypse Tier Set

As she is mentioned a few times, you can probably guess that this tierset revolves around Whitemane, one of the Riders. Whitemane casts Death Coil, Epidemic and Undeath, all of which are buffed and each cast of Death Coil/Epidemic is duplicated by this tierset. She is also always summoned after Dark Transformation/Apocalypse so this tierset is most effective during these windows.

It also has a lot of multi-target potential with Epidemic also being duplicated by Whitemane, which ends up doing a lot of additional damage, scaling higher with more enemies. Gameplay wise this tierset does not change too much, except for giving Death Coil/Epidemic a bit of a higher priority than normal.

San’layn Tier Set

In the previous season San’layn Unholy was based around using as many Death Coils as possible during Gift of the San’layn windows and ignoring Festering Wounds completely during these windows too. With this tierset your damage profile changes a bit, but you are still going to be ignoring Festering Wounds while Dark Transformation is active. In season 3 the majority of your damage is going to come from Infliction of Sorrow. The tierset greatly increases the extension of Virulent Plague, gives you an additional stacking Mastery buff, a stacking ghoul buff and most importantly increases the damage of your Infliction of Sorrow by 35%, which is a lot when you combined it with Unholy Assault, both scaling multiplicatively together.

So your priory goes on Vampiric Strikes instead of Death Coil/Epidemic this tier, even when you are overcapping runic power you still want to use Vampiric Strike as much as you can until you need runes, then you dump runic power with Death Coil/Epidemic to replenish your runes for more Vampiric Strikes until Dark Transformation and Unholy Assault are about to end. Then you want to let your Dark Transformation finish before Unholy Assault and trigger Infliction of Sorrow in the last second of Unholy Assault.

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+

This section will cover the most notable and strong items that you will want to acquire in this season, as well as alternative trinket options you can use if you don’t have the best ones yet.

Best Trinkets:

• Araz’s Ritual Forge (On use)
• Astral Antenna (Passive)

Good/Decent Trinkets:

• So’leah’s Secret Technique (Passive)
• Ara-Kara Sacbrood (Passive)
• Signet of the Priory (On use)
• Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker (Passive)

Other Notable/Strong Items:

• Interloper’s Plated Sabatons

Everforged Vambracers & Everforged Greatbelt (with Dawnthread Lining).

In Season 3 embellishments are falling further behind natural ilvl upgrades simply because they do not scale with the ilvl of the crafted item. With this in mind, it is a significant enough downgrade to have a crafted 2H weapon with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension than it is to gain the extra 3 ilvls on a 723 2H weapon.

So, as we are not using Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension or Writhing Armor Banding (as it loses all of its value if it’s not buffing a Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension weapon), double Dawnthread Lining is the best option. Dawnthread Lining gives you a decent secondary stat (Crit) which will go up in value this season due to talent changes and Mastery hitting its DR (diminishing returns) threshold. Also, Death Knight in general is a very strong class defensively, so your uptime on Dawnthread Lining is going to be pretty decent as well.

Reshii Wraps

11.2 takes you through a campaign in the new zone K’aresh. After completing Chapter 4 of the campaign you will unlock a new Artifact cloak called the Reshii Wraps. You will upgrade this cloak as you progress through the season and this will be the only cloak you use as no other cloaks are dropping from season 3 content. You can upgrade the cloak by turning in Ethereal Strands which are earned by doing World Content, Raid Bosses, Delves and Mythic Plus.

The Reshii Wraps have a passive damage effect which does not impact your rotation so there’s not much you can do with it other than upgrade and slot a Fibre into the socket slot to allocate a specific secondary stat to it. These Fibres come in two different qualities, with the best versions (Pure Fibers) requiring a Tailor to craft them for you via a `Work Order`.It is always best to sim which Fiber is best for you in your current gear setup, but generally Unholy will want to use either the Pure Chronomatic Fiber (Haste) or the Pure Energizing Fiber (Mastery).

Pure Fiber Stats:

• Pure Chronomatic Fiber (Haste)
• Pure Precise Fiber (Crit)
• Pure Energizing Fiber (Mastery)
• Pure Dexterous Fiber (Versatility)