Unholy Death Knight DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within (11.2)

• Army of the Dead Talented
• Raise Abomination Talented
• Legion of Souls Talented
• Apocalypse Talented
• Summon Gargoyle Talented

1. Use Army of the Dead as you run towards the boss.
2. Use Festering Strike
3. Use Apocalypse + Potion
4. Use Raise Abomination.
5. Use Summon Gargoyle.
6. Use Dark Transformation + Potion
7. Use Vampiric Strike 2 times( Death Coil with any Sudden Doom procs)
8. Use Unholy Assault + Racial + Trinket
9. Use Legion of Souls.

• Army of the Dead Talented
• Raise Abomination Talented
• Legion of Souls Talented
• Apocalypse Talented
• Summon Gargoyle Talented

1. Use Army of the Dead as you run towards the boss.
2. Use Raise Abomination.
3. Use Festering Strike.
4. Use Summon Gargoyle.
5. Use Death Coil 2 times.
6. Use Unholy Assault + Racial + Trinket + Potion
7. Use Apocalypse
8. Use Dark Transformation
9. Use Legion of Souls.

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

1. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35%.
2. Use Clawing Shadows if the target has Trollbane's Chains of Ice on it.
3. Use Scourge Strike if the target has Trollbane's Chains of Ice on it.
4. Cast Outbreak to maintain Virulent Plague on the target.
5. Use Vampiric Strike when it procs.
6. Use Death Coil when you have 80+ Runic Power or a Sudden Doom proc or your Death Rot debuff is about to run out.
7. Use Scourge Strike if your Plaguebringer buff is about to run out.
8. Use Clawing Shadows if your Plaguebringer buff is about to run out.
9. Use Festering Strike to apply Festering Wounds on the target. Do this if the target has 2 or fewer Festering Wounds.
10. Use Scourge Strike when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
11. Use Clawing Shadows when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
12. 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/ Apocalypse to apply the DoT (this is only relevant for specific Rider of the Apocalypse builds).
• 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. This is also true when running San'layn and you get a Vampiric Strike proc. It is very high priority and you do not care about Festering Wounds on the target.
• 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 / Vampiric Strike to deal AoE damage. Simply put, whenever you want to do AoE, pop down Death and Decay/ Defile and spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows/ Vampiric Strike. Do not worry about your Festering Wounds; ignoring them is actually only a small Single Target priority loss.

When it comes to how you prioritise your Runic Power spending in AoE it gets a bit more complicated. San'layn generally run Improved Death Coil for the cleave and use Death Coil at up to 5 targets. Rider of the Apocalypse generally do not use Improved Death Coil and use Death Coil at up to 3 targets.

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 now Vampiric Strike and Death Coil gain a significant amount of value, both from the raw extra damage by being transformed into Vampiric Strike, the extra damage coming from Infliction of Sorrow (in conjunction with Season 3 tier set) and Frenzied Bloodthirst. Stacking and maintaining Essence of the Blood Queen brings even further value. Due to this, we drop all spells but Scourge Strike and Death Coil (still using Festering Scythe in Single Target in M+ build). Finally, we prioritise Death Coil vs Vampiric Strike depending on our active tier set, as Season 2 and Season 3 tier sets buff different parts of the window:

• Festering Scythe talented
• Season 3 Tier Set Equipped

1. Use Death Coil.
2. Use Festering Scythe when you get a proc.
3. Use Vampiric Strike.
4. Use Vampiric Strike.
5. Use Death Coil.

This rotation ends up being very spammy, as we only press two buttons (3 with scythe) 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 Summon Gargoyle cooldown is active, our priority changes. Any Runic Power we spend buffs 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.

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 20-35 seconds so we only really need to gain a single proc inbetween uses to bridge the 10-25 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.

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

How exactly you spend your Runic Power here ends up being quite a complicated topic. We have a number of talents that interact with Death Coil to boost its damage in AoE. This is primarily Improved Death Coil as well as Frenzied Bloodthirst with San'layn as well as the Season 3 tier set with Rider of the Apocalypse. In general terms and with the builds we play, we do Epidemic at 5 targets with San'Layn and 3 targets with Rider.

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:

• Army of the Dead Talented
• Legion of Souls Talented
• Raise Abomination Talented
• Apocalypse Talented
• Festering Scythe Talented
• San'layn Talented
• Defile Talented

1. Use Army of the Dead as you run towards the pack.
2. Use Raise Abomination.
3. Use Festering Strike (ideally on a mob as your tank is gathering up the pack). Skip this if Apocalypse is on Cooldown.
4. Use Apocalypse (use Outbreak if Apocalypse is on Cooldown)
5. Use Dark Transformation (use Outbreak if Dark Transformation is on Cooldown)
6. Use Unholy Assault
7. Use Legion of Souls, Death and Decay if Legion of Souls is on Cooldown.
8. Use Legion of Souls, Defile if Legion os Souls is on Cooldown.
9. Death and Decay
10. Defile
11. Use Vampiric Strike 2 times( Death Coil/ Epidemic with any Sudden Doom procs)
12. Use Unholy Assault
13. Use Festering Scythe when you get a proc
14. Use Death Coil when you get a proc of Sudden Doom
15. Use Epidemic when you get a proc of Sudden Doom
16. Spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows/ Vampiric Strike to burst your Festering Wounds
17. Use Death and Decay to refresh your Cleaving Strikes buff.
18. Use Defile to refresh your Cleaving Strikes buff.
19. Use Death Coil when you do not have any Runes
20. Use Epidemic when you do not have any Runes
21. Use Outbreak when your DoTs fall off.
22. Use Soul Reaper if you can trigger the execute effect (not if the target dies before the explosion).

The Unholy AoE rotation essentially has a "opener" phase followed by a "burst" phase. In the opener phase, we use all our cooldowns as we enter the pack. The exact order here depends on your talents as well as what is currently available. Use the buttons above to ensure it represents your current build! After this, we enter a burst phase where we spend the majority of the time:

• We maintain Cleaving Strikes by using Death and Decay/ Defile whenever it runs out.
• We refresh our DoTs with Outbreak when they fall off.
• We spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows/ Vampiric Strike as much as possible.
• We weave in Epidemic/ Death Coil when we get procs of Sudden Doom or we cannot use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows/ Vampiric Strike.
• We use procs of Festering Scythe when we get them.
• We use Soul Reaper when possible to leverage Reaping.

The burst phase lasts until the pack is dead, and we then start the next pack with an opener phase.

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. Since Cleaving Strikes uptime is so high, we just end up spamming Scourge Strike and Epidemic/ Death Coil all the time.

Rotten Touch adds an additional effect to Sudden Doom, increasing the damage the target takes from Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows by 60% 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.

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

Dark Transformation transforms your ghoul for 15 seconds, causing its Claw ability to cleave all enemies near your pet. If you talent into Apocalypse, Dark Transformation instead becomes part of the Apocalypse button (with the same effect)!

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 Legion of Souls.

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!

This cooldown significantly changes your rotation when running San'layn, make sure to read up in the above rotation section to understand how!

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.

The reason we delay Unholy Assault when running San'layn is to overlap it with our highest burst phase. Sanlayn very much ramps over the duration of your Dark Transformation with buffs such as Essence of the Blood Queen stacking up and your Virulent Plague increasing in duration (increasing Infliction of Sorrow damage).

Defile/ Death and Decay is primarily an AoE cooldown and is used to enable Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows/ Vampiric Strike cleave via Cleaving Strikes. You also use it in Single Target when running San'layn to fish for Vampiric Strike procs.

When running Desecrate, you can re-cast Death and Decay when it is active. This is done when the tank moves heavily with the enemies, allowing you to keep cleaving as you gain the full remaining duration of Cleaving Strikes when using Desecrate. You can also leverage Desecrate at the start of a pack to quickly apply Festering Wounds. Simply double-press it to get your Wound cycle going!

Apocalypse summons 4 members of the Army of the Dead and bursts up to 4 Festering Wounds. It also generates 2 Runes on use. It replaces Dark Transformation when talented, inheriting all the effect of Dark Transformation.

The number of wounds consumed by Apocalypse should generally be 4, so you make the most out of the Festering Wound damage and Festermight stacks.

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. Use it once you reach the boss (exact timings depends on Hero-Talents) 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.

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!

San'layn significantly disrupts how many Soul Reapers you actually use during a fight. It drops it from the priority during Dark Transformation which ends up being more than 50% of the encounter.

With Reaping, Soul Reaper also gives 10% minion damage when it explodes. This makes even better in Single Target and worthwhile to use to snipe enemies in Mythic+, as it will buff your AoE damage from your minions. It does have to trigger on the enemy, it does not work if the target dies before the explosion!

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!

Big Cooldown (replaces Army of the Dead) that is especially strong in AoE, deals AoE damage over 12 seconds and applies up to 6 Festering Wounds to everything it hits (over the duration). Also provides Cleaving Strikes for its duration. Importantly, the damage scales with our other minion-buffing spells so making sure to combine it with Dark Transformation/ Apocalypse when you have Commander of the Dead for instance!

Used on Cooldown in conjunction with Dark Transformation/ Apocalypse and Unholy Assault.

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.