Unholy Death Knight DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

• Blightburst Talented
• Soul Reaper Talented

1. Use Putrefy when your plagues fall off on your target. Try to have a charge ready to use right when the plagues fall off. Use Outbreak if you have no Putrefy charges.
2. Use Outbreak to maintain your plagues on the target.
3. Use Soul Reaper if the enemy is below 35% health or you have triggered the Reaping effect from Dark Transformation.
4. Use Death Coil when you have 80+ Runic Power or a Sudden Doom proc.
5. Use Putrefy
6. Use Festering Strike if you have less than 3 stacks of Lesser Ghoul.
7. Use Scourge Strike if you have at least 1 stack of Lesser Ghoul.
8. Use Death Coil.

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

• Maintain your Plagues on the target by leveraging Outbreak or Putrefy with Blightburst. Your plagues do not only do damage but are also the source of your important Sudden Doom procs so keeping them up is crucial. With Blightburst you want to ideally refresh the Plagues with Putrefy every time so you avoid wasting GCDs on Outbreak.
• Cast Soul Reaper whenever you can. Either when the target is below 35% health or you have received the free use from Dark Transformation with Reaping.
• Use Death Coil to avoid capping Runic Power or to spend your procs of Sudden Doom. Sudden Doom is a 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.
• Use Festering Strike to build up stacks of Lesser Ghoul on yourself. We want to aim for between 2 and 5 stacks at all times to give ourself some flexbility, either when we are forced out of melee range or if you we need to prioritise Scourge Strike due to Trollbane's Icy Fury.
• Use Scourge Strike to consume your stacks of Lesser Ghoul. This is used in sync with Festering Strike to keep your stack count at a healthy level. You go up to 4-5 and then use Scourge Strike to drop down to 2 again.
• 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, you really do not change much. If the adds are pulled on top of your current target, you simply use Scourge Strike to spread your diseases to them. If we engage a new pack, you start by applying your Plagues with Outbreak or Putrefy with Blightburst. Your Scourge Strike cleaves by default so the main decision comes when using Death Coil vs Epidemic. In general, you swap to Epidemic at 3+ targets but sometimes stay with Death Coil if you want to do priority damage.

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!

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 15 Runic Power).

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 extremely similar to its Single Target rotation. The only change we introduce is our Runic Power spending priority where Epidemic is used whenever we face 4 or more targets. Otherwise, you simply do your standard Single Target rotation when fighting multiple enemies.

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 + Dark Transformation
• 00:45 — Dark Transformation
• 01:30 — Army of the Dead + Dark Transformation
• 02:15 — Dark Transformation
• 03:00 — Army of the Dead + Dark Transformation
• 03:45 — Dark Transformation

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 -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 Reaping, you get a free cast of Soul Reaper regardless of the target's HP as well!

You should use this ability on cooldown. Aligning it with Army of the Dead every second time.

Putrefy sacrifies a Lesser Ghoul to strike the target and then explode with AoE damage. It gains additional effects through talents, mainly with Blightburst making it also apply your Plagues if they are not already up and the summoning of a Magus of the Dead with Reanimation.

The primary considerations with Putrefy are the following. You want to avoid "overcapping" the stacks when running Putrid Echoes (gives you two charges) so you always send when at 2 stacks. Furthermore, you want to ideally bank up charges for Dark Transformation as Commander of the Dead increases the damage of the spell, as well as the Magus it summons by 50%. Finally, you want to use the stacks to refresh your Plagues to avoid spending GCDs on Outbreak.

Summing up:

• Bank charges to use for Dark Transformation windows.
• Prioritise reapplying Plagues with Putrefy when running Blightburst.
• Avoid sitting at 2 charges.

Death and Decay is generally not worth using for its damage. There is synergy with San'layn when using the Blood-Soaked Ground which makes it worthwhile. Otherwise you primarily use it for the slow in conjunction with Grip of the Dead.

Desecrate increases its damage but only by an average of 40% when you do the math...

Army of the Dead summons several ghouls to fight at your side for 6 seconds. It is a major cooldown that will end up being a significant part of our overall damage in any situation.

Raise Abomination additionally summon an Abomination for 30 seconds with this Cooldown. The Abomination has an AoE Disease cloud that increases the damage enemies take from your minions by 20%. It also uses Putrefy on two Lesser Ghoul's automatically.

Summon Gargoyle additionally summons a Gargoyle for 25 sdeconds with this Cooldown. The Gargoyle attacks your target with an attack that ramps in damage based off the amount of Runic Power you have spent. Incentivises spending Runic Power as a priority when the pet is out. It also uses Putrefy on two Lesser Ghoul's automatically.

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 three or more Runes 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) or during Dark Transformation with San'layn, 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 Putrefy with Blightburst. It is our AoE plague.

Dread Plague is a single-target only DoT (can only be applied to one target) that is applied in the same way as Virulent Plague. This is also the source of our Sudden Doom procs.

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.

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.

The optimization that comes into play here is the priority of buffing the Gargoyle vs prioritising other spells. In general, the further you are in the Cooldown, the lower your Death Coil priority should be.