Unholy Death Knight Battleground Blitz Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

In Battleground Blitz, Death Knight, regardless of spec, is focused on disrupting the enemy team. This is done using Chains of Ice, Blinding Sleet, and even Strangulate can be useful.

The strengths of a Death Knight in the Battleground Blitz format are the pressure during an extended team fight, the ability to stop healer drinks through walls using Epidemic, and their ability to interrupt base captures using pets.

Death Knight lacks mobility, so you will find yourself often playing Defense and being in the team fight. You should not be looking to drift between nodes unless it is necessary. This role is typically reserved for more mobile classes such as Druids and Demon Hunters.

Where possible, you should ramp your damage before using crowd control on healers. However, at the beginning of a game, when you know your whole team have their offensive cooldowns ready; it is better for your teammates to use their CC as Death Knight has relatively short CC.

When you are able to, it is a good idea to pressure casters such as Mages and Warlocks, as you are the best anti-caster DPS in the game. You can also look to shutdown healers, especially immobile healers like Discipline Priests. Simply throwing Chains of Ice on the healer can make it difficult for them to keep up with their team.

Save Death Grip for high-priority targets. For example, you can grip the enemy flag carrier (EFC) into your team or you can grip healers to coordinate stuns and land a kill.

Death Grip is one of the primary reasons that Death Knight is useful in Battlegrounds. As mentioned, this allows you to bring high-priority targets into your team. You can even use grip to save your teammates when they are Mind Controlled if you grip them before the Mind Control ends.

You should also be using Anti-Magic Zone on your teammates as early in the fight as possible. This can be used to counteract strong offensive cooldowns such as Combustion and Avenging Wrath.

Whenever you are supporting a flag carrier that is kiting enemies, you can continually spam Chains of Ice to prevent enemies from catching them and ensure that they are able to escape.

You have a number of defensive cooldowns which can be used to carry flags or stall at a base while waiting for help from teammates.

• Icebound Fortitude
• Anti-Magic Shell
• Anti-Magic Zone
• Lichborne (if talented into Unholy Endurance)

Death Knight does have the option to get additional self-healing by using a Death Strike and this can keep you alive for quite some time but this does not mean you should try and tank enemies if you do not need to.

At the start of a Capture the Flag map, you should either:

1. Identify who the likely enemy flag carrier is and move to slow/crowd control/kill them to delay their push to your base for as long as possible
2. Join the team fight, shutting down an enemy healer or caster as soon as possible and getting your damage rolling

Death Knight is great at fulfilling both of these roles.

On both Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks, if you are defending your own flag carrier, you should encourage them to take high ground as you can grip enemies down if your flag carrier stands near the edge.

Similarly, when attacking enemy bases, you should look to grip players off the high ground. You can do that either to make sure that your teammates can attack the enemy flag carrier or to separate the flag carrier from their healers.

Generally, you will never want to pick up the flag as a Death Knight. You have okay defensives, but you lack mobility and will quickly become overwhelmed. The only time you will pick up the flag is when there is no one else around, and the enemy is about to capture the flag

Before a Resource Race battleground starts, you should decide with your team which base you should focus on first, but generally, you will want to go for the team fight.

Whether defending or attacking, whenever you are in Arathi Basin at Lumber Mill, you should try to get value from your Death Grip. Simply grip an enemy near the edge and have a teammate with a knock use it when they are in position such as Ring of Peace or Blast Wave.

Death Knight can excel at defending/attacking bases or controlling the fight in the centre map, and during the game, you can choose whichever your team needs most. Usually, you will aim to join the fight in the middle as soon as possible, although if nobody on your team is going to take and defend a base when the Battleground starts, you should focus on that instead.

During any skirmish at mid, you want to be careful not to overextend, as it can be easy to get caught behind the enemy team and die. This can set your team back significantly.

As a Death Knight, you will almost never pick up the orbs but rather focus on defending the orb. Using Chains of Ice will make it very easy for the orb carriers to escape. You can pickup the orb in rare circumstances where no one else is available to do so, and you are at risk of losing.

This build sacrifices some single-target damage in favor of more cleave and AoE. Keep in mind that the standard Unholy build will work for Blitz, and there are only minor differences. At the end of the day, the playstyle is largely the same. Your goal is to keep up your DoTs on as many targets as possible and maintain Plaguebringer with near 100% uptime.

Your default talents will be:

1. Doomburst
2. Rot and Wither
3. Life and Death

These talents might seem out of place, but Life and Death actually provides a noticeable damage increase due to the fact that healers will be dispelling non-stop in Blitz and Battlegrounds in general.

With the damage increase to Defile, we actually see Rot and Wither providing a sizeable healing absorb and rivals Necrotic Wounds in heavy cleave situations. With many of your globals requiring you to continually use Outbreak it makes your rotation much easier to manage.

If you feel more comfortable with standard arena talents, those will work in Blitz, as our PvP talents do not have enough impact to dictate the outcome of a game.

1. Versatility,
2. Haste, to 20%;
3. Mastery;
4. Crit (should be avoided)

The stat priority for Death Knight is the same in Battleground Blitz to Arena. There is no benefit for going for a different gearing strategy

In Battleground Blitz, the strongest Embellished gear bonuses are Duskthread Lining which will significantly increase your versatility.

You can also play the defensive Embellishment option Captured Starlight. However, this is generally not needed on Death Knight.