Unholy Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — The War Within (11.0.5)

Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Unholy Death Knight for The War Within Season 1. Check this page to learn everything you need to know about gearing a Unholy Death Knight, including the BiS Gear from all sources, Raiding, and Mythic+, information on the best Trinkets, Tier Sets, and much more.

We have three BiS lists below, each detailing the best gear you can obtain from a specific source. We have the overall list, a raid-only one, and, finally, a mythic+-only list. They are all optimised to give you the highest single target DPS. The various builds we run have very similar stat and trinket priorities and will run the same set of gear.

2.

BiS Gear for Unholy Death Knight

Overall BiS List Mythic+ Gear BiS List Raid Gear BiS List

3.

Overall BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

Below, you will find the theoretical BiS set of gear for The War Within Season 1.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Wrathbark Greathelm	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Neck	Sureki Zealot's Insignia	Sikran
Shoulder	Exhumed Centurion's Spikes	Rasha'nan
Cloak	Consecrated Cloak (Haste Mastery) with Writhing Armor Banding	Tailoring
Chest	Exhumed Centurion's Breastplate	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
Bracers	Bracers of Umbral Mending	Grim Batol
Gloves	Exhumed Centurion's Gauntlets	Sikran
Belt	Girdle of Somber Ploys	The Dawnbreaker
Legs	Exhumed Centurion's Chausses	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Boots	Boots of the Black Bulwark	The Bloodbound Horror
Ring #1	Writhing Ringworm	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
Ring #2	Circle of Bone	Grim Batol
Trinket #1	Treacherous Transmitter	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Trinket #2	Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
2H Weapon	Charged Claymore (Haste Mastery) with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension	Blacksmithing

3.

Mythic+ Gear BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, with farmable gear from Mythic+ Dungeons. This is a great place to start on a relatively new character, as you can infinitely grind out these items from Mythic+.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Wrathbark Greathelm	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Neck	'Emergency Stop' Keychain	The Stonevault
Shoulder	Earthshape Pauldrons	Grim Batol
Cloak	Anvilhide Cape	The Stonevault
Chest	Experimental Goresilk Chestguard	Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
Bracers	Bracers of Umbral Mending	Grim Batol
Gloves	Machinist's Searing Handguards	The Stonevault
Belt	Girdle of Somber Ploys	The Dawnbreaker
Legs	Gormshell Greaves	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Boots	Ichor-Stained Sollerets	City of Threads
Ring #1	Umbriss Band	Grim Batol
Ring #2	Circle of Bone	Grim Batol
Trinket #1	Mark of Khardros	Grim Batol
Trinket #2	Ara-Kara Sacbrood	Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
2H Weapon	Wild Hammer	Grim Batol

3.

Raid Gear BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, only using gear from the Nerub-ar Palace Raid.

This list is mostly useful for informing your organized guild of what loot is optimal for you for loot distribution purposes.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Wrathbark Greathelm	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Neck	Sureki Zealot's Insignia	Sikran
Shoulder	Exhumed Centurion's Spikes	Rasha'nan
Cloak	Royal Emblem of Nerub-ar	Ulgrax the Devourer
Chest	Exhumed Centurion's Breastplate	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
Bracers	Ravaged Lamplighter's Manacles	Rasha'nan
Gloves	Exhumed Centurion's Gauntlets	Sikran
Belt	Greatbelt of the Hungerer	Ulgrax the Devourer
Legs	Exhumed Centurion's Chausses	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Boots	Boots of the Black Bulwark	The Bloodbound Horror
Ring #1	Key to the Unseeming	The Bloodbound Horror
Ring #2	Writhing Ringworm	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
Trinket #1	Treacherous Transmitter	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Trinket #2	Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
2H Weapon	Anub'arash's Colossal Mandible	Silken Court

If you have a new piece of gear for which you need gems and enchant advice, you can find everything on our dedicated page below.

While gearing up, item level will be your primary target. Strength is our best stat, and you shouldn't focus too much on your secondaries at first. Once you start to receive gear pieces with the same ilvl but different stats, that is when you want to start optimizing your stat distribution. Generally, Unholy Death Knights want to prioritize Haste and Mastery! We recommend simming your character to determine what upgrade is best for you! For a more detailed explanation, you can read the Simulations page.

Simming your character is far and beyond the best way to determine if a piece of gear is, in fact, an upgrade. The trick is knowing how to do it in a way that produces reliable results. If you follow the Simulations guide page, you can use this to have a more practical gearing guide than simply following a BiS list.

You only need 4 pieces out of 5 to get both set bonuses. We recommend you get all items except for the Head, due to its Versatility. Check out the BiS List for more information.

The War Within has a powerful upgrade system for your gear where you use Valorstones and Crests to upgrade your gear. These are obtainable from practically all forms of content in the game.

For more information on the new Gear Upgrades system, check out our dedicated page for it below.

Unholy wants to run one Charged Claymore with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension embellishment. You then combine this with Writhing Armor Banding on your crafted Consecrated Cloak for your second embellishments. Your weapon is a great choice to craft at a high ilvl early since weapon ilvl combined with embellishment value ends up being a great crest value. Notably, it does not matter which type the weapon is; axe, sword, polearm, mace, etc all work! Simply make sure you select the right type (2-hand) and that the weapon has strength.

If your focus is purely on Mythic+, we recommend crafting double Dawnthread Lining. For BiS setup, pick cloak and wrist. If you want more early power, choose higher-stat items like your non-tier piece or boots. A good alternative is to run Blessed Weapon Grip on a crafted 2H weapon.

A good tip is to use crafted PvP gear in the early stages of the season/ gearing. You can easily craft multiple 610 ilvl pieces, which will help you when gearing up.

When it comes to your other crafted slots, we are only wearing two crafted items in our BiS setup (due to the ilvl loss). Use crafting as a way of "filling in the gaps" in your gear, trying to find the best value upgrade in a slot where you already do not have a good piece. Sim yourself to find the best option for you!

There are three primary items to upgrade as a Unholy Death Knight:

1. Weapon
2. Trinket
3. Head/ Chest/ Legs

With how the upgrade system works with Crests being the limited currency, you want to upgrade the most powerful slots you can. For Unholy Death Knights, this will be your crafted weapon. The weapon is already great crest value, as well as providing one of our embellishments in the BiS setup. After you have crafted your weapon, move on to trinkets and high-stat slot items like Legs, Helm, Chest, etc.

Your second crafted item will be a cloak with Writhing Armor Banding. These are generally not worth spending crests on to upgrade since the embellishment effect does not scale with ilvl, and the cloak is the worst stat piece in general. We recommend simulating your character to find the best piece to upgrade for you, something that can easily be done in "Top Gear" at raidbots.com.

Unholy aims to use one on-use Trinket as well as one passive one, or double on-use. In The War Within Season 1, our best on-use is Treacherous Transmitter followed by Mark of Khardros and Skarmorak Shard. Transmitter is about 2% ahead of the second best choice but does present a somewhat annoying minigame, forcig you to deal with extra mechanics as you use the Trinket. Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg is your best passive paired with Transmitter, but both Skarmorak and Mark of Khardros are essentially tied. With a double-on-use setup, simply delay your less powerful Trinket for your next 45-second burst window and then alternate them. Double on-use is great for Mythic+, as well as bosses like Ovinax, where your damage is heavily focused in your 45-second burst window.

Many people overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is usually better than a better quality of stats. Because of this, wearing higher item-level gear with worse stats tends to be better than lower item-level gear with great stats. Keep this in mind when considering gear. For more information on stats, please refer to our dedicated page.

For Unholy specifically, aim to have Haste as our top stat by raw amount, followed by Mastery. For a closer look at stats, please see the below article./p>

For neck and ring pieces, you can generally afford to drop 5-10 ilevels in most cases to get our preferred stats: Haste and Mastery. That said, you should always sim yourself to see what is better as the secondary stat diminishing returns can still change your ideal setup. It can be useful to wear crafted jewelry due to how you can control the stats; just remember that you cannot craft the maximum ilvl possible!