Death Knight Guide

Unholy Death Knights are the masters of death and decay, summoning undead minions to do their bidding, as well as infecting their enemies with powerful diseases. They are the kings of AoE scaling, dealing insane damage at large target counts. They are also incredibly tanky, having both a significant health pool as well as providing several tools to mitigate incoming damage, especially magic damage. Finally, the Unholy Death Knight is a bit like a battle mage, having multiple tools that help them deal damage from range.

The Unholy Death Knight is not among the most popular specs in a raiding environment at the moment. They do solid damage and can deal with spawning adds quite well. However, the lack of a good raid buff as well as the relatively high popularity of Frost Death Knights mean that in terms of popularity, Unholy is at the bottom third of all specs.

In Mythic+, Unholy sees play right up towards the cutting edge of keys. Being incredibly tanky, in conjunction with having among the highest AoE DPS throughputs in the game makes them highly desirable. However, like in raiding, Frost Death Knight is very popular and take away quite a lot of the shine off Unholy. When looking at total number of keys done, Frost sits at roughly 4 times as many compared to Unholy.

The Frost Death Knight is the player-controlled embodiment of The Lich King, sharing the frost and death theme to obliterate their enemies with powerful physical and magical attacks. Wielders of both two-handed and one-handed weapons, the Frost Death Knight uses spells like Obliterate, Frost Strike and Howling Blast in conjunction with proc-based gameplay to create an interactive and fun rotation.

Frost also has a lot of depth in its rotation, whether its the optimization of Breath of Sindragosa uptime, tracking buff, or its resource management. The rotation seems simple at a glance but in reality has a lot of complexity that can make a great player excel. It is also very satisfying with its damage numbers - and who does not enjoy hitting massive Obliterates?

Frost's strength comes from it's high cleave damage, dealing huge damage to any adds that spawn, without losing much priority DPS. Furthermore, we are incredibly tanky with a number of tools to both increase our health, as well as mitigate incoming damage, especially magic damage. Frost is currently Meta in both Raid and Mythic+ and one of the most popular melee specs!

Frost Death Knight is really quite popular in raiding, having seen play in the Race to World First on the majority of bosses. In terms of number of parses, we are the fourth most popular spec and the third most popular melee (coming after Retribution and Fury), with just a small difference between them. Frost fits the bosses really well with its high priority damage and great cleave potential. It does really well on certain raid bosses like Ulgrax the Devourer, Broodtwister Ovi'nax and Silken Court.

Frost Death Knight is currently the meta DPS spec of Mythic+. Running the Breath of Sindragosa build which provides an insane amount of AoE burst every 2 minutes, can provide extremely good DPS in a coordinated group. We also do not need to sacrifice any single-target DPS to achieve this, simply running our best raiding single-target build in Mythic+ as well! Combine this with being the most tanky spec in the game as well as having some solid group utility, combines it all into an exceptional choice for Mythic+.

The Blood Death Knight harnesses and corrupts life energy to sustain themselves and deal damage. They are the kings of self-sustain, quickly healing up any non-lethal damage they take all by themselves. Death Strike is their primary ability, healing the Death Knight based off the damage they've taken in the last 5 seconds, as well as generating shields through their Mastery, based off of the amount healed. Furthermore, they build and sustain stacks of Bone Shield to continuously keep up their damage mitigation.

The Blood Death Knight can often avoid multiple mechanics via Anti-Magic Shell and Death's Advance, and sustain very high damage in raiding environments. Additionally, they also have great control over groups of enemies that might spawn in any given encounter through the use of Death Grip, Abomination Limb and Gorefiend's Grasp. This mix of survivability and utility makes them a great option for raiding!

The Blood Death Knight is by far the most popular tank spec in the Mythic raiding environment, representing almost 40% of all logged parses, three times as many as the second most popular tank spec. It is the most effectively tanky of the specs, having the least amount of deaths among all tanks. This is due to having good self-sustain, but also possessing a lot of tools to help mitigate predictable tank mechanics, so called tank-busters. Their own damage output may not be that high, but their tankiness and the utility they bring, i.e. Gorefiend's Grasp for Broodtwister Ovi'nax or Silken Court more than makes up for its mediocre DPS output!

In Mythic+, across all key-levels played, Blood Death Knights are the second most represented spec (21%, behind Protection Warrior at 24%). It sees some representation at the very high-end of Mythic+ keystone levels, but its popularity drops noticeably as you reach the very top end of Mythic+. Blood Death Knights tend to struggle a lot harder than other Tank specs in surviving the absolute highest keystone levels of Mythic+, and does not bring the same DPS that some other specs have available to them. Their utility is still incredibly useful, but it just isn't enough to Break the Meta (yet!).