Unholy Death Knight Gearing Guide

Season 2 of The War Within comes with a new tier-set bonus, making Death Coil a much bigger contribution to our damage, this works especially well with the San’layn talent Frenzied Bloodthirst.

Unholy Death Knight Season 2 Tier Set Bonus:

• 2 Set Bonus: Your spells and abilities have a chance to activate a Winning Streak! increasing the damage of your Death Coil and Epidemic by 3%, stacking up to 10 times. Death Coil and Epidemic have a 15% chance to remove Winning Streak!
• 4 Set Bonus: Casting Dark Transformation grants up to 10 stacks of Winning Streak! and while Dark Transformation is active, the effectiveness of Winning Streak! is increased by 100% and it no longer has a chance to reset.

2 Set Bonus

This set bonus gives us a new buff in Season 2 which will heavily increase the potency and importance of Death Coil. This is especially the case when playing San’layn, as Death Coil is also buffed by Frenzied Bloodthirst. Pairing these two with Improved Death Coil makes Unholy San’layn have a decent 2 target damage profile as well.

For Riders of the Apocalypse builds it will just simply increase the potency of your Death Coil and will make it a higher priority, but there is no additional scaling like there is with San’layn. The Epidemic part of this tierset will just be a passive increase to your Epidemic damage, but your priorities will not change as Bursting Sores equates to more damage per gcd (unless you are have a Sudden Doom proc, then you want to consume it with Epidemic).

4 Set Bonus

This 4 set plays perfectly into San’layns damage profile, as all of your damage is mainly done during your Dark Transformation. With the additional Death Coil damage from the 10 stacks of Winning Streak! (+ the 100% bonus making it 70% increased Death Coil damage) and Frenzied Bloodthirst (+35% damage) both scaling multiplicatively with each other, and our Death Coils extending Dark Transformation with Eternal Agony (which then extends the effects of the 4 set bonus, Ghoulish Frenzy, etc.) AND on top of all of that also cleaving to additional targets with Improved Death Coil, it culminates into some strong synergies which work seamlessly together.For Riders of the Apocalypse builds it will just mean your Death Coils just do more damage, so it’s good to keep extending Dark Transformation and using Death Coils, but it’s not as big of a deal as it is for San’layn.

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+

Notable Items

Eye of Kezan

This trinket is one of the strongest items you can acquire this season, beating out most trinkets and it scales exceptionally well in longer encounters.

It has two downsides which are important to address, first is that it has a ramp up time, and will reach its max stacks at around 3 minutes (sometimes it can take longer but that’s just bad luck), so it will fall short of other trinket options in short kill times. The other issue is that dying with this trinket will reset your stacks back to 0, which makes dying super punishing to your overall throughput.

Even with these caveats, it’s still one of the best trinkets in the game that you will definitely want to have.

House of Cards

Unholy is often best paired with a strong on use trinket to buffs its cooldown windows, House of Cards is a great trinket that has a perfect cooldown time to align with Raise Abomination, but also gives you a large Mastery buff which pretty much increases all of our damage.

It should be said however that San’layn is much less cooldown oriented and typically prefers passive proc/stat stick trinkets, as your damage windows are every 45 seconds. House of Cards is still strong for San’layn; but not as strong as it is for Riders of the Apocalypse based builds.

Best-in-Slots

This season is filled with interesting and unique items, this weapon being one of them. While it doesn’t have any baseline secondary stats, it has an on use and passive effect which gives you your highest secondary stat.

It does however share a cooldown with your trinkets, so you will just alternate it between your cooldown windows. It does have a 2 minute cooldown which isn’t ideal for Unholy’s kit, but you will just hold it for your next set of cooldowns, never use it outside of your cooldowns!

The Jastor Diamond

This is another very rare item from the raid which you will want to have. Its stat weights lean heavily into Mastery which is one of your best secondary stats and most importantly, this ring provides additional secondary stats with its unique effect.

With the additional stats from the proc effect, this ring comes with a lot of additional secondary stats which is why it is ahead of other rings in this season's loot table. It’s even better when you are getting Haste or Mastery from the proc! Sadly it is under the “Very Rare” loot table from Gallywix, so it’s very worth saving a Dinar for!

Reverb Radio

With Eye of Kezan being a very rare trinket, it may be a while until you can get your hands on it. Due to this, the next best option is this trinket, Reverb Radio. Haste is one of Unholy’s best stats, and this trinket has a decent proc rate so it’s definitely worth using if you don’t have Eye of Kezan.

Suspicious Energy Drink

Eye of Kezan is a very strong passive trinket if you are in a longer encounter. However, for short fights and Mythic+ type scenarios, the Suspicious Energy Drink from Delves is a much better option, even when it has 13 ilvls less than other Mythic trinkets. It has a strong Mastery proc with a decent proc rate of 3 RPPM, and Mastery is one of our best stats so this trinket does well in both single and multi-target scenarios.

Embellishments & Crafted Gear

Everforged Vambraces & Consecrated Cloak (with Duskthread Lining)

In this season we have access to a very strong 2H Weapon, Best-in-Slots. So with this new weapon in mind, Darkmoon Ascension crafted on a 2H weapon is not as appealing. Instead, we will want to go for the second best option which is double Duskthread Lining (in pretty much all scenarios).

It is worth noting that in pure single target scenarios, double Elemental Focusing Lens takes a very slight lead over Duskthread Lining, however most of the raid encounters have some form of cleave tied to them (which is the only content that could potentially have pure single target scenarios). Duskthread Lining is also solid for additional defensive capabilities, but the main reason we use it is of course for the throughput gain. The difference in single target between these two embellishments is 0.1%... so just go with Duskthread Lining.

Cyrce’s Circlet

This ring is obtainable on the Siren Isle, a zone that came with patch 11.0.7. It’s filled with activities and questlines which will reward you with a ring called Cyrce’s Circlet, and multiple citrines (which are basically gems) which give the ring unique powers/effects.

There are multiple citrine combinations but in this guide I will be covering the best combination you can use as an Unholy DK.

The ring will have 3 different slots:

• Sea
• Thunder
• Wind

Each of these types will have 4 different Citrines, you can only use one of each type. With this in mind, the 3 best citrines for their types are:

Fathomdweller’s Runed Citrine (Sea)

This citrine gives you Mastery and also enhances the effects of your other citrines based on your total mastery. However, currently the citrine does not take into account baseline mastery of your spec, or any racial passive bonuses to mastery. It will only provide extra mastery from the mastery which you have on your equipped gear and flasks/trinkets etc, so its scaling is not as potent as it first seems from reading the tooltip at face value.

Unholy likes to play with a lot of Mastery, so this critrine will gain more value because of that, but again it will not take the baseline amount of Mastery into account.

Stormbringer’s Runed Citrine (Thunder)

This is a simple bonus that gives you a low portion of stats for every secondary stat. The Mastery provided from this citrine will also scale with the Fathomdweller’s Runed Citrine, but it will not create an infinite loop of bonus Mastery, but it’s still a solid combination.

Legendary Skipper’s Citrine (Wind)

This is a Citrine which gives you the chance to proc other citrine effects. This is particularly strong if it procs some of the more high value citrine effects, as it’s also a buffed version. It has a high uptime as it procs at least 4 times per minute, additionally scaling with Haste. This also scales better with the more people that use this Citrine, so when your whole raid is using it then it’s a pretty good throughput gain for you and your raid as a whole.