Unholy Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Season 4

Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Unholy Death Knight for Dragonflight 10.2. Check this page 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.

Season 4 offers a way to target specific, powerful items with the new Antique Bronze Bullion. This allows you to buy raid trinkets, weapons and rare items from a vendor. You will get enough Bullions to buy one item per week. The items start at ilvl and can then be upgraded 12 or 14 times (depending on the max ilvl of the item) using crests and flight stones.

The by far best item to buy with the bullions is the Scale of Awakening that sets your Fyr'alath the Dreamrender to 502 ilvl and allows it to be upgraded to 535. The combination of weapon ilvl and the effect makes this by far the most valuable upgrade out there.

After your weapon, you are looking at trinkets. Neltharion's Call to Suffering is your best option in terms of pure DPS. However, it can be very random when it procs. Some alternatives are Whispering Incarnate Icon, Ominous Chromatic Essence and Cataclysmic Signet Brand. Both Icon and Ominous require raid/party members to also wear the trinket to be really good. Signet Brand ends up being BiS in longer fights (6+ minutes). For your on-use trinket, we ideally want to loot Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows from doing Mythic hardmode Dawn of the Infinite. If you are unlucky with your drops, Ashes of the Embersoul is only 0.2% behind and can be bought with a Bullion.

Finally, rare items in the form of two rings and a cloak can be bought as well. We pick up Seal of Diurna's Chosen for the fire damage proc, Seal of Filial Duty for the high max ilvl and finally Voice of the Silent Star for the ilvl and proc effect. Here it is broken down into a list:

1. Scale of Awakening
2. Neltharion's Call to Suffering ( Whispering Incarnate Icon/ Ominous Chromatic Essence for less variance and if you have allies)
3. Ashes of the Embersoul if unlucky with Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows drops
4. Seal of Diurna's Chosen
5. Seal of Filial Duty
6. Voice of the Silent Star

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 then 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.

Season 4 has a powerful upgrade system for your gear where you use Flightstones and Crests to upgrade your gear. These are obtainable from practically all forms of content in the game. They can be used to upgrade some gear up to Item Level 489, which is maximum Mythic ilvl!

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

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

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

With how the upgrade system works with Crests being the limited currency, you want to upgrade the most powerful slots you can. This means your weapon is generally by far the largest priority, followed by trinkets and high stat slot items like Legs, Helm, Chest, etc.

You can make an argument for upgrading your embellishments as a high priority as well. Once at their max ilvl, you will simply never replace them, reducing the risk of wasting crests down to 0. However, it is usually not a very efficient use of crests when considering the DPS upgrade value. Instead, use the crests on Bullion items (that you know are BiS for you) or items bit good DPS upgrade value.

Unholy wants one one-use stat trinket and one passive trinket. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows is the best on-use trinket, tightly followed by Ashes of the Embersoul. Importantly, Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows is only BiS if you can make it proc Mastery, so do check your stats when you sim this trinket for an upgrade! Furthermore, you need to loot it from a Mythic Dawn of the Infinite (one try per week) and no one in the party can die so that it drops at a higher upgrade track. If you are unlucky with your weekly run here, Ashes of the Embersoul is really close and is a good trinket to fall back on. For passive trinkets, Neltharion's Call to Suffering, Whispering Incarnate Icon and Ominous Chromatic Essence are neck and neck. Icon needs a DPS, Tank and a Healer to equip the trinket to fully unlock its power, Ominous Chromatic Essence needs 3 other people sworn to other Dragonflights to fully unlock. Neltharion on the other hand can be very random in when it procs, increasing the variance of your DPS significantly. A personal preference generally. Cataclysmic Signet Brand is another alternative that is BiS in longer fights (6+ minutes). Manic Grieftorch deserves a mention as well as its cooldown is reset whenever someone in your party/ raid dies. This significantly increases its value in real scenarios, especially during progress, as people are quite likely to die.

For Mythic+, our priority changes slightly. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows is still really good due to helping our otherwise lacking Single Target. For the passive trinket, Whispering Incarnate Icon, Ominous Chromatic Essence, Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge and Neltharion's Call to Suffering work best due to providing secondary stats. Raw damage trinket are generally devalued in AoE scenarios.

I have listed the best active and passive trinkets below!

1. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows
2. Ashes of the Embersoul
3. Blazebinder's Hoof

1. Neltharion's Call to Suffering
2. Ominous Chromatic Essence
3. Whispering Incarnate Icon
4. Cataclysmic Signet Brand
5. Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge
6. Manic Grieftorch

Many people overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is nearly always 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 stats information, please refer to our dedicated page.

For Unholy specifically, aim to have Mastery as your top secondary by raw amount, tightly followed by Haste. This optimises the value of Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows!

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 max ilvl possible!

For Season 4, our best weapon is the legendary by far. If you haven't obtained it already in Season 3, getting whatever weapon is the highest ilvl is the best choice (until you are lucky and it drops). The crafted weapons are great potential early pick-ups to get a large upgrade!

With Season 4, we have an Unholy Death Knight Tier set bonus that buffs how we play.

• 2-piece set bonus: Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 2pc
• 4-piece set bonus: Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 4pc

The ideal 4 items to use here are Head, Shoulder, Legs, and Hands

The only real impact this set has on gameplay comes in the AoE rotation. Since Magus of the Dead now cleaves, Apocalypse and Army of the Dead becomes useful in AoE. We want to use these Cooldowns early in our opener against packs in Mythic+! For a full rotation breakdown, please see the rotation page:

The Season 3 and Season 4 are the same, however they do not stack when you equip your new pieces. This means that you generally need 4 new pieces before you swap from your old set. Sim yourself to be sure!

Unholy wants to run double Blue Silken Lining as its embellishments in Raid. These slots are low on stats (meaning a smaller penalty from missing out on the 3-ilvls at max craft level), and the passive effects are really strong. We choose Neck and Bracers as the crafted pieces due to the low stats and due to the limited number of choices (when considering all the special items etc)

For Mythic+, Blue Silken Lining becomes a lot stronger due to significantly higher uptime and we therefore just run double again.

When it comes to your other crafted slots, we are not wearing nearly as many crafted items generally. This is due to crafted items maxing out at ilvl 525 compared to 528 on Mythic items. We will use crafted item as a way of "filling the gaps", generally crafting things in slots where we currently have a low ilvl piece. Having said that, crafting a weapon is generally a good idea if you haven't been able to obtain a strong one yet (such as the Legendary).