Unholy Death Knight DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

For a more Mythic+ centric discussion regarding talents, please have a look at our dedicated Mythic+ page:

The Rider of the Apocalypse Hero Talents focus on minion damage, summoning Horsemen to deal heavy damage to your enemies. You have minor rotational updates with Trollbane's Chains of Ice, where you want to burst them ASAP and you want to stay in Mograine's Death and Decay to get 5% damage boost. Otherwise, the main benefit comes from Death Charge which is an amazing mobility ability for Death Knights!

The San'layn Hero Talents focus more on Plague damage and direct damage via Vampiric Strike and Death Coil and Epidemic boosts. Furthermore, it has an interesting quadratic scaling component via the Blood Beast ability. The main rotational difference is the introduction of Vampiric Strike that we get to press lots in our Dark Transformation. We also try and proc it in-between our Dark Transformation windows to maintain the Essence of the Blood Queen buff.

Talents can and usually do change your rotation or add new abilities to your priority. For a more detailed breakdown of how your rotation will look with optimal talents, check out our rotation page, which is linked below.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents that are best for leveling and doing open-world content.

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• 10% increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 10% more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points, which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended enabling the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will make yourself available for open-world PvP, and the possibility of being "ganked" while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

1. Life and Death heals you for 10% of the amount your target afflicted by Dread Plague receives. Not relevant for PvE really.
2. Dark Simulacrum places a debuff on your enemy, activating when they cast a spell that uses mana. It allows you to use that same spell for some time. Not useful in PvE content.
3. Necrotic Wounds - your Putrefy now applies a Necrotic Wound to the target, absorbing 8% of all healing received for the next 15 seconds (max 3 stacks). Not useful in PvE content.
4. Zombify - Costs 30 Runic Power and reanimates a nearby corpse into a zombie. The zombie will slowly walk towards you target, exploding and stunning all enemies in an area if it reaches the target. Somewhat useful stun in PvE content.
5. Stitchmaster heals you for 5% of your Lesser Ghouls max health when they die (about 2.5% of your health). Death Strike sacrifices all active ghouls when pressed. A nice additional sustain in AoE with a DPS drawback as you might lose lesser ghoul uptime.
6. Strangulate silences your target for 4 seconds. Inferior to just running Asphyxiate (it replaces the talent) and a pretty useless PvE talent.
7. Doomburst causes your Death Coils to deal 25% of your plague damage an additional time and slow the target by 45% for 3 seconds. Useful PvE talent is it is a DPS increase.
8. Rot and Wither adds an absorption shield to any target hit by Death and Decay for 100% of the damage amount. Useless pretty much.
9. Bloodforged Armor provides 4 seconds of 25% physical damage reduction whenever you press Death Strike. Solid defensive gain!
10. Spellwarden lowers the cooldown of Anti-Magic Shell by 10 seconds and allows you to use it on allies. It's just a nice defensive gain because it allows more AMS usage.

Doomburst is a solid choice due to its nice DPS gain. No other talent does much for us in PvE, and are primarily PvP choices. For a second and third option, we don't have much to choose from. Bloodforged Armor is generally best due to providing a good defensive gain, and Spellwarden is a small defensive gain!