Unholy Death Knight DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within (11.0.5)

Welcome to our Rotation page for Unholy Death Knights. Here, we will go over everything you will need to know to optimally play your spec for Raiding and Mythic+ scenarios.

Unholy is a very interesting Mythic+ spec because it has solid single-target and AoE burst potential. For some good tips and tricks around Mythic+, please check out our Mythic+ guide, which is linked below. We cover the AoE rotation further down on this page!

Unholy can be a very complicated spec. If these rotations seem fairly complicated, then you may want to check out our Beginner Mode page, which gives you a much more simplistic build and rotation to play.

The guides on this page are for PvE content, so if you are looking for a PvP rotation guide, then please visit our PvP page linked below.

The opener is the sequence of abilities you use right at the start of an encounter. We have split the opener into two discreet sections, as it changes significantly if you have opted for the San'layn Hero Talents. Use the toggles below to make sure you have the right talents selected, and the opener will update to display it properly!

When it comes to timing your trinkets, you can just macro them with Unholy Assault in all your openers.

If you are lucky enough to receive Power Infusion, ask for it when you use Unholy Assault in the opener!

• Any of Plaguebringer/ Ebon Fever/ Superstrain Talented
• Clawing Shadows Talented
• Rider of the Apocalypse

1. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35%.
2. Use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows if the target has Chains of Ice on it.
3. Cast Outbreak to maintain Virulent Plague on the target.
4. Use Death Coil when you have 80+ Runic Power or a Sudden Doom proc or your Death Rot debuff is about to run out.
5. Use Scourge Strike if your Plaguebringer buff is about to run out.
6. Use Festering Strike to apply Festering Wounds on the target. Do this if the target has 2 or fewer Festering Wounds.
7. Use Scourge Strike when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
8. Use Clawing Shadows when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
9. Use Death Coil.

Now, we will take this priority list and put it into a wordier description!

• Cast Soul Reaper whenever you can make the secondary effect trigger. In execute, Soul Reaper is your highest priority, and you should save Runes so that you can use it as much as possible! It is, however, not worth casting Soul Reaper if the target dies before the explosion!
• Ensure Virulent Plague uptime. If you have not taken any talent that buffs Virulent Plague ( Plaguebringer, Ebon Fever or Superstrain), only apply Virulent Plague if you can get 15 seconds worth of the DoT. If you have taken Unholy Blight but no other disease-talent, only use Dark Transformation to apply the DoT (this is the most common case in Raid).
• Use Death Coil to avoid capping Runic Power or to spend your procs of Sudden Doom. Sudden Doom is a very powerful proc, and you do not want to waste any. If you have Harbinger of Doom talented, you can allow yourself to stack up two charges before you spend them. However, most of the time, you simply use them as soon as possible to avoid any potential waste. We also do not want to overcap Runic Power (generating Runic Power when we are at 100), so we use Death Coil to avoid this. Finally, Death Rot can sometimes be at risk of falling off (10 seconds duration), and we need to prioritise Death Coil to avoid this.
• Use Festering Strike to build up Festering Wounds on the target. We want to aim for between 2 and 5 wounds at all times to allow for Infected Claws to generate wounds without overcapping us, and for procs of Sudden Doom to come without us hitting 0. This means that we hit Festering Strike when we reach 2 or fewer§ Festering Wounds on the target!
• Use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows to burst your wounds. This is used in sync with Festering Strike to keep your wound count at a healthy level. You go up to 4-5 and then use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows to drop down to 2 again. You use Scourge Strike as a high-priority to keep up your Plaguebringer buff as well if you are running that talent! Finally, if you are running Rider of the Apocalypse, you use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows at a high priority if your Trollbane has Chains of Ice on the target to burst it ASAP. This is higher priority than managing your Festering Wounds so it is fine to burst Chains even at 0 Wounds.
• Use Death Coil as your filler spell when you have nothing else to do!

When you want to deal AoE damage in your Single Target build, it is all about leveraging Death and Decay/ Defile. In conjunction the Cleaving Strikes talent, this creates nice Cleave windows where you leverage your Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows to deal AoE damage. Simply put, whenever you want to do AoE, pop down Death and Decay/ Defile and spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows. Do not worry about your Festering Wounds; ignoring them is actually only a small Single Target priority loss. Furthermore, you use Epidemic at 3+ targets (4+ with Improved Death Coil talented) to spend your Runic power. This does change slightly depending on other talents (like Reaping and Frenzied Bloodthirst) but it is a good general rule. For bosses with a large number of adds spawning at the same time (Tindral), bake up Runic Power so you can spam Epidemic as soon as they spawn.

This priority does not include any cooldowns. Instead, that is something we cover further down in this guide. Any cooldown will come at the top of the priority list!

With the San'layn Hero Talents, your rotation is significantly impacted during your Dark Transformation windows. Scourge Strike gains a significant amount of value, both from the raw extra damage by being transformed into Vampiric Strike and the extra damage coming from Infliction of Sorrow. Stacking and maintaining Essence of the Blood Queen brings even further value. Due to this, we essentially want to maximise the number of Scourge Strikes we can fit into our Dark Transformation window. We drop all spells but Scourge Strike and Death Coil:

1. Use Scourge Strike if at 2+ Runes.
2. Use Death Coil.

This rotation ends up being very spammy, as we only press two buttons for the entire duration of Dark Transformation! Once our Dark Transformation finishes, we use one Scourge Strike to "burst" our big DoT, reapply our Diseases, and continue with the core rotation. During this time, we will also do something called "vamp fishing," where we aim to extend our Essence of the Blood Queen buff to the next window. You can find more info about this in the next section.

When playing with the San'layn Hero Talents, the maintenance of the Essence of the Blood Queen buff is an important aspect to master. We quickly stack this buff 7 times during our Dark Transformation windows (due to unlimited Vampiric Strikes) and then aim to extend it to our next Dark Transformation window (where we can easily maintain it again). Dark Transformation itself lasts around 20 seconds so we only really need to gain a single proc inbetween uses to bridge the 25 seconds gap!

The two important changes in priority comes from Death and Decay and Death Coil. We want to use Death and Decay to benefit from Blood-Soaked Ground as much as possible, as well as prioritising Death Coil as much as possible. This will maximise the chance of getting a proc before the buff runs out! Once we get a proc, we simply use the Vampiric Strike that it triggers, extending the buff to our next Dark Transformation window. At this point, you will be reverting to the standard rotation.

When Summon Gargoyle cooldown is active, our priority changes. Any Runic Power, we spend buffs on the minion we summon, and the idea is to leverage this as much as possible. Using Death Coil, therefore, ends up being much higher on our priority list! Essentially, you use Death Coil as soon as you can, either by going above 30 Runic Power or getting a proc of Sudden Doom (and being above 20 Runic Power). We also try to push our Festering Wounds down to 0 to get as much value as possible from Festermight.

• Soul Reaper Talented
• Plaguebringer Talented
• Clawing Shadows Talented
• Defile Talented

1. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35%.
2. Use Death Coil when you have 30+ Runic Power or 20 Runic Power and a Sudden Doom proc
3. Cast Outbreak to maintain Virulent Plague on the target.
4. Use Scourge Strike to maintain your Plaguebringer buff.
5. Use Festering Strike to apply Festering Wounds on the target. Do this if the target has 0 Festering Wounds.
6. Use Scourge Strike when there are at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
7. Use Clawing Shadows when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.

Unholy's AoE rotation is all about high Plaguebringer uptime, lots of Festering Wound generation and bursting, as well as lots of Epidemic spamming. The idea is to ensure your DoTs are doing as much damage as possible, generating a ton of Wounds in AoE, and spending the Runic Power you generate on Epidemic.

As we approach a given pack, we execute essentially the same opener every single time, just skipping parts of it if we do not have the cooldowns ready. This is what it looks like:

• Vile Contagion Talented
• Apocalypse Talented
• Festering Scythe Talented

1. Raise Abomination.
2. Defile to deal AoE damage and enable cleave.
3. Scourge Strike to initiate Plaguebringer.
4. Dark Transformation (applies Virulent Plague via Unholy Blight. Outbreak if neither Raise Abomination or Dark Transformation was used.
5. Use Abomination Limb.
6. Use Unholy Assault + Festering Strike (2x Festering Strike if you do not have Unholy Assault ready).
7. Use Vile Contagion
8. Use Unholy Assault.
9. Use Apocalypse.
10. Use Festering Scythe whenever you get a proc.
11. Spam Scourge Strike to burst your Festering Wounds
12. Use Defile when your Cleaving Strikes buff runs out.
13. Use Epidemic if you get a proc of Sudden Doom, or if you cannot use more Scourge Strike to burst Wounds.
14. Continue with Scourge Strike spam, Epidemic spam, maintain Cleaving Strikes with Defile/ Death and Decay and maintain your DoTs with Outbreak.
15. After you run out of Defile/ Death and Decays to use, go to single target rotation with Epidemic at 2+ (without Improved Death Coil, 4+ with) targets. This is the only time you use Festering Strike outside the initial GCDs in the opener on the pack.

The idea is to get your disease up and Plaguebringer quickly. We also make sure to use Defile early to start dealing damage and enabling the Scourge Strike cleave. We then build up Wounds on one target to use on Vile Contagion. If you do not use Vile Contagion, only use Festering Strike to enable Apocalypse. After this point, we prioritise Scourge Strike cleave to burst our Wounds, using Epidemic only when we get procs of Sudden Doom or if we run out of Runes. We also maintain Cleaving Strikes as much as possible and keep up our DoTs with Outbreak.

If you are running the Festering Scythe build, your rotation actually becomes easier. You skip any normal Festering Strikes in the opener, instead just sending the Cooldowns you have available (after you initial Defile and Scourge Strike) and then move into your Scourge Strike and Epidemic spam. Once you do get a proc of Festering Scythe, just spend it straight away.

You might notice the lack of standard Festering Strikes in this rotation! As a general rule, we almost never press it in our Mythic+ rotation. It is only ever if we need to set up Festering Wounds for Apocalypse/ Vile Contagion. Since Defile uptime is so high, we just end up spamming Scourge Strike and Epidemic all the time.

Since Death Knights have multiple resources that they need to track, it is very helpful to customize your UI to easily track your resources. Unholy Death Knights have a very clunky opener, so being able to easily focus on your rotation and resources can help you maximize your damage and positioning.

Here is a quick summary of your cooldown usage as an Unholy Death Knight:

• Abomination Limb should generally be used on cooldown. Hold it for add waves that need grouping up. For pure Single Target, use it the first time after your initial sets of Cooldowns have finished.
• Unholy Assault should be used on cooldown. Especially strong in Mythic+ when paired with Vile Contagion. Used in Single Target with your other CDs.
• Vile Contagion should be used in AoE on a target that ideally has 6 Festering Wounds. This should then be followed by Death and Decay and Scourge Strike to pop all wounds.
• Army of the Dead/ Raise Abomination should be used on cooldown. This is the first ability you press as you run toward the boss.
• Apocalypse should be used on cooldown, ideally when you have 4 stacks of Festering Wounds. It is more important to send it on cooldown than to wait to build 4 Wounds. In AoE, use with 1 or more Festering Wounds.
• Dark Transformation should be used off cooldown and as an opener on packs of multiple mobs.
• Sacrificial Pact should only be used to save yourself from death.
• Summon Gargoyle should be used on cooldown. Once used, prioritize spending Runic Power via Death Coil above everything else.
• Defile should be used in AoE. Use it again when your Cleaving Strikes buff drops.

For raids, we always combine our cooldowns as much as possible. This works out nicely as they all align on a 45-second cycle. A cooldown plan for a 4-minute boss fight would look like the following:

• 00:00 — Army of the Dead/ Raise Abomination, Dark Transformation, Summon Gargoyle, Unholy Assault, Apocalypse
• 00:45 — Dark Transformation, Apocalypse
• 01:30 — Dark Transformation, Apocalypse, Unholy Assault, Raise Abomination
• 02:15 — Dark Transformation, Apocalypse
• 03:00 — Army of the Dead/ Raise Abomination, Dark Transformation, Summon Gargoyle, Unholy Assault, Apocalypse
• 03:45 — Dark Transformation, Apocalypse

Due to everything aligning perfectly like this, it is crucial that you use your cooldowns as soon as they come up. Any delay means that your 1.5 and 3-minute burst window will be delayed, potentially making you miss out on a ton of value.

In Mythic+, the name of the game is cooldown efficiency. It is so easy to lose out on a ton of value by holding your cooldowns "for that one big pack that comes soon." As a general rule, use your cooldowns as much as possible. It is by far the easiest way to improve your DPS in Mythic+!

Defile/ Death and Decay is primarily an AoE cooldown and is used to enable Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows cleave via Cleaving Strikes. You also use it in Single Target in specific scenarios. Just before your Summon Gargoyle (if you run this talent) to benefit from the haste buff via Unholy Ground, in the opener with San'layn talented as well as in your normal rotation when fishing for procs of Vampiric Strike to extend your Essence of the Blood Queen buff.

With Defile (in dungeons), you use it on bosses with your 45-second cooldown window. It deals solid damage and you gain the 5% buff from Unholy Ground. With Death and Decay, this is technically worth it as well but can often be ignored, as any boss movement will quickly end up making the button press a negative action.

Abomination Limb provides you with an extra limb for 12 seconds, pulling targets towards you every second and dealing damage around you.

Abomination Limb should be used on cooldown to gain the most benefit from its damage. Do save it if there are add waves that you can time it with, especially if gripping these adds helps your group to kill them!

For pure Single Target, use it after your first set of cooldowns has finished.

Unholy Assault instantly applies 4 Festering Wounds to your target, deals some moderate damage, and provides 20% damage buff for 20 seconds.

Unholy Assault is a strong damage buff as well as a very efficient way of applying Festering Wounds. It should be used on cooldown in single-target, timed with your other cooldowns to leverage the damage buff. In AoE, it should be used early in a pull to boost your initial burst window. It is also used to help stack up 6 Festering Wounds on a single target when one plays Vile Contagion. Vile Contagion is then used as a follow-up cooldown to quickly spread up to 42 Festering Wounds!

Vile Contagion spreads the Festering Wounds of your primary target to up to 7 nearby enemies.

Vile Contagion is a huge AoE DPS cooldown that helps to set up an AoE pull for a big burst window. Either follows a double Festering Strike or Unholy Assault + Festering Strike for a 3 GCD 48 Festering Wounds infection. You then follow up with Death and Decay/ Defile, and Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows spam.

Apocalypse summons 4 members of the Army of the Dead and bursts up to 4 Festering Wounds. It also generates 2 Runes on use.

Apocalypse should be ideally used when you have at least 4 stacks of Festering Wounds. It will only consume 4 stacks, even when you have 5 or 6. It is more important to send the ability on cooldown than to hit the 4 Wound count, though, so just use the ability even if you have 1-3 Wounds on the target. Getting 1 or 2 Wounds worth of damage is tiny compared to the value from the Magus of the Dead and Army of the Dead minions it summons.

It sits on the same 45-second schedule as Dark Transformation, resulting in you using these cooldowns together most of the time.

Army of the Dead summons several ghouls to fight at your side for 30 seconds. It is a major cooldown that will end up being a significant part of our overall damage in any situation.

Use Army of the Dead as you run into any engagement, allowing the ghouls to spawn (they spawn over 4 seconds and are stunned an additional 4 seconds before starting combat). Ensure to time it with any other cooldown that increases its damage, such as Dark Transformation with Commander of the Dead and Unholy Assault. Always use Army of the Dead at least 5 seconds before using any other cooldown to buff it (except Dark Transformation, which can be used immediately).

Make sure to leverage this cooldown as much as possible in Mythic+. Even if it is primarily a Single Target burst CD, it also gives AoE via the Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 2pc set bonus!

Raise Abomination (replaces Army of the Dead) summons an Abomination that fights your target for 30 seconds. It also applies a Festering Wound every time it auto-attacks and infects all targets around it with your diseases. Used as you run toward the boss and then on cooldown, aligning with all your other CDs. It will start attacking instantly, so there is no need to worry about summoning animation like with Army of the Dead.

Dark Transformation transforms your ghoul for 15 seconds, causing its Claw to cleave all enemies near your pet.

You should use this ability on cooldown. If you have talented into Commander of the Dead, always ensure you time Dark Transformation with Summon Gargoyle, Army of the Dead and Apocalypse.

For Mythic+, it is important to use this cooldown early in a pull, allowing lots of time to apply Festering Wounds that you can then burst in your Death and Decay window. It will generally be the first cooldown you press.

Unholy Blight an extra effect to the cooldown, applying Virulent Plague and Unholy Blight on all enemies around your pet for 6 seconds. Great way of applying DoTs to M+ pulls or maintaining your disease on boss targets. With builds that do not require much on Diseases, Dark Transformation is your only way of applying them!

Summon Gargoyle calls down a Gargoyle to hit your target for 25 seconds. Every 1 Runic Power spent when this cooldown is active increases its damage by 1%. It also generates 50 Runic Power on use.

Once you have activated Summon Gargoyle, your highest priority, above all, will be pressing Death Coil to ramp up its damage. Ideally, you should be full on Runic Power already as you press the cooldown (remember that it provides 50 Runic Power, so you only need to aim for a maximum minus 50). You also want to ensure that you leverage all your other cooldowns that synergize with Summon Gargoyle when you use it. This includes Dark Transformation with Commander of the Dead and Unholy Assault. In reality, you will get these big 3-minute burst windows where you use Summon Gargoyle and Army of the Dead/ Raise Abomination in combination with everything else!

Soul Reaper initially strikes the target for ~70% of a naked Scourge Strike. After 5 seconds, if the target is below 35% health, it hits against 3.5 Scourge Strikes worth of damage. It is crucial as an Unholy Death Knight to trigger as many of these extra hits as possible. Use Soul Reaper whenever your target will reach 35% HP within the next 5 seconds. This means using it at ~36% Raid Boss HP. For adds, it generally means using it earlier. Timing it properly is very rewarding!

To help you better understand how to play the Unholy specialization, we will explain some concepts in more detail below.

Death Knights use a dual resource system of runes and Runic Power. While it is quite straightforward in how it works, we will explain it here for the sake of completion.

You have a total of 6 Runes, which are available by default. Some of your abilities have Rune costs, and whenever you use an ability that consumes one or more Runes, those Runes will immediately begin recharging. The exact amount of time it takes a Rune to recharge depends on how much Haste you have.

Whenever a Rune is consumed, you gain 10 Runic Power (more on that below).

At most, 3 of your runes can be charging up at the same time. It is therefore optimal to keep at least 3 runes on cooldown to maximise the recharge rate over the course of the fight.

Runic Power is a resource that resembles Rage, in the sense that it decays when out of combat, but does not decay during combat. As mentioned above, consuming Runes generates 10 Runic Power per Rune spent, and this is the primary means of generating Runic Power, although some abilities also help with this. You can have a maximum of 100 Runic Power.

In general, spending Runic Power should only be done when 3 Runes or more are charging up or when you are about to cap Runic Power. This is not the case when Summon Gargoyle is active (when using this talent), during which time you should try to maximize your Runic Power expenditure.

Runic Corruption has a chance of proccing whenever we spend Runic Power. It can also proc when we consume Sudden Doom and Dark Succor. The proc will always return a total of 0.9 Runes, regardless of haste. The proc also stacks on itself, adding any new duration to the previous remaining one. All this means is that you do not need to pay attention to this process.

Virulent Plague is a Shadow damage DoT that is applied to targets using Outbreak or Unholy Blight. If the target dies while afflicted with Virulent Plague, it erupts for Shadow damage to all nearby enemies. The power of the DoT varies significantly depending on your talents. From almost not being worthwhile to maintain when you pick up zero synergy to being a 100% uptime priority once you pick up the right talents.

Each time you use Festering Strike, between 2 and 3 stacks of a debuff called Festering Wound is applied to the target. The debuff lasts for 30 seconds (and each added stack refreshes its duration) and does nothing if left alone. However, using Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows on a target that has Festering Wounds on them consumes a stack, causing the target to take Shadow damage. All of the stacks are consumed if the target dies.

Bursting Sores will cause any Festering Wounds that burst to deal AoE damage around them. This scales well in AoE and is the primary source of our damage in Mythic+.

The ideal number of stacks at which to spend Festering Wounds is 2-5. If you have 2 or fewer stacks, you should instead generate some more using Festering Strike.

Anti-Magic Shell absorbs 100% of all magic damage taken, up to 30% of your maximum health, for 5 seconds and grants you Runic Power based on the amount of damage that it absorbs.

While this ability has amazing survivability benefits, allowing you to often taken practically no damage from various raid-damaging mechanics, it also has great benefits for your DPS.

Indeed, the amount of Runic Power you gain if you absorb a lot of magic damage is far from negligible. Therefore, you should always try to make use of Anti-Magic Shell to boost your Runic Power generation throughout the fight. The best way to do it is to know when a raid-damaging attack is coming, and to have Anti Magic Shell up for that time. Then, simply enjoy the extra Runic Power (and do not forget to spend it).

That said, for progression content, we fully recommend first and foremost saving Anti-Magic Shell to mitigate magic damage, before you consider how to use it to increase your DPS.

Rotten Touch adds an additional effect to Sudden Doom, increasing the damage the target takes from Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows by 50% for 10 seconds. When picked up, you can expect around 90% uptime on your target. Due to this, you really only want to use Scourge Strike if the target has the debuff on it. Play around this by going low on Festering Wounds when the target has the debuff, so you can spend 1-2 Festering Strikes when the target does not have it. This gives you time to get a new proc of Sudden Doom and add the debuff on the target again.

We have previously discussed the rotation during Summon Gargoyle, highlighting the high priority on spending Runic Power to buff the cooldown. Putting Death Coil at the top of the priority during the entire duration of Summon Gargoyle is not the optimal way to play, however!

The value of using a Death Coil is directly proportional to the number of Summon Gargoyle casts that will be buffed by said coil. The first couple of Death Coils are incredibly valuable since they buff all the casts of the CD. Compare that to the final Death Coil that might only buff a single cast. Furthermore, the buffing here is additive, meaning that each coil essentially just adds a flat amount. It is only really Festermight, stacking up towards the end of the cooldown, that means later coils add slightly more damage per cast.

The optimization that comes into play here is the priority of Festermight stacking vs Death Coil usage. As we reach the end of the window, using Death Coil to buff that final cast ends up being less valuable than building a Festermight stack to buff said cast. One adds a flat amount of damage; the other increases the damage by a %. To make this trade-off even more clear, imagine an infinite Summon Gargoyle. Let us assume the base damage of Summon Gargoyle is 1, and using Death Coil adds 1 extra damage to this. The first Death Coil will improve the damage by 100%. However, the 100th will add less than 1% extra damage. At this point, it is clear that buffing your strength by 1% ends up being more valuable!

The reality is not that cut and dry, but you can still apply the following tactic to your Summon Gargoyle. At the end of your window, prioritize using Scourge Strike to go to 0 Festering Wounds above spending your Runic Power ASAP. Still, do not use Festering Strike above Death Coil, only Scourge Strike to 0 Wounds!