Method Unholy Death Knight Guide - Stats Races And Consumables

Stat Priorities

Stats will always vary and change based on your gear situation, as stats can lose a lot of value once you reach certain thresholds. The best way to ensure you are using the best gear is to use Raidbots and check via the Top Gear option. You can learn how to sim your character by going to the ‘How to Sim Your Character’ section at the end of this guide.

Stat Ranking

Single Target: Strength > Haste > Mastery > Crit > Versatility

Multi-Target: Strength > Mastery > Haste = Crit > Versatility

Stat Summary

Strength - Primary stat is typically always the best. It's a simple, straightforward throughput increase to every aspect of Unholy Death Knight in both single and multi-target scenarios.

Mastery - This increases your Shadow damage and the damage of your Minions. Most of your damage as Unholy is shadow or minion damage, so this naturally makes Mastery a very potent secondary stat that scales in both single and multi-target scenarios (with very significant scaling in multi-target).

Haste - Haste is going to be your main focus in most scenarios, mainly due to the increased tick rate of your diseases and haste thresholds that increase the amount of attacks/casts from your minions. It is especially potent for San’layn because it means you can use more Vampiric Strikes in your Dark Transformation window, which will significantly increase the output from Infliction of Sorrow.

Crit - Crit is not as valuable as Haste or Mastery in single target encounters, but it will gain more value once you meet a certain threshold of Haste. In multi-target scenarios Crit will pull ahead of Haste and will be more of a priority, but you will still want to have a sufficient amount of Haste even in these scenarios before going for more Crit. The value of Crit can be hard to determine when there are so many thresholds and target profiles, so make sure to sim your character via Top Gear to optimize yourself properly.

Versatility - Versatility is a very simple stat that does what it says on the tin, it just gives you a flat damage & healing increase and some mitigation. It’s not a very valuable stat early on, but once you start hitting diminishing return thresholds on your other stats, Versatility will start to gain value but this is something that happens towards the later half of an expansion.

Races

The races are not a massive throughput gain, sometimes they are, but generally, the gain is not that big for playing ‘the best race.’ For the most part play whatever Race you want; but for the players that want the best possible throughput, here are the best Races listed here:

Horde - Troll

Alliance - Mechagnome

Troll: Unholy generally scales exceptionally well with haste, especially during cooldowns for both Riders of the Apocalypse and (especially) San’layn. This makes the Troll racial ability Berserking very potent and one of the best racials for Unholy. It also has a 3 minute cooldown, which aligns well with your cooldowns which are typically 45sec - 1.5min.

Mechagnome: Primary stat (Strength) is the best stat for Unholy Death Knight, so gaining +1532 strength after the first 50 seconds of a fight with Combat Analysis is very strong, so Mechagnome is one of the best races to play as Alliance.

Enchants

Gems and Ring enchants heavily depend on your current stat weights and will often fluctuate depending on your current gear. I will list the enchants and gems you will generally want to use, but you should always check on Raidbots to see which are currently the most valuable for you.

General Enchants/Kits:

Cloak: Enchant Cloak - Chant of Winged Grace
Chest: Enchant Chest - Crystalline Radiance
Wrist: Enchant Bracer - Chant of Armored Avoidance
Legs: Stormbound Armor Kit
Boots: Enchant Boots - Scout’s March
Weapon: Rune of the Fallen Crusader

Ring Enchants:

Enchant Ring - Radiant Critical Strike: +315 Crit
Enchant Ring - Radiant Mastery: +315 Mastery
Enchant Ring - Radiant Haste: +315 Haste

Gems

Blasphemous Gem

Culminating Blasphemite: +181 Primary Stat + 0.15% Critical Effect per unique Algari Gem color

Gems

All gems are colored based on the stats they give:

Emerald (Green) = Haste
Ruby (Red) = Crit
Onyx (Purple) = Mastery
Sapphire (Blue) = Versatility
Amber (Orange) = Stamina

You will always want to use the dual stat gems as they give you more stats overall (example: Masterful Emerald). The best way to find out the best gems for your character, make sure to sim multiple gem combinations!