Unholy Death Knight: Midnight Expansion Preview

Welcome to our Midnight expansion guide for Unholy Death Knight. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Unholy Death Knight spec in the forthcoming Midnight expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates arrive on the Midnight Alpha. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Unholy Death Knight, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Alpha, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel at launch.

Unholy Death Knight has received a significant reworking in Midnight Alpha so far. Festering Wounds that have been a core aspect of the spec since Legion are now gone, replaced with a minion-summoning gameplay loop at its core. More emphasis has been put on our diseases with both a new pure Single-Target disease called Dread Plague as well as more disease interaction within our talents. Our AoE is now decoupled from Death and Decay and we instead passively cleave via standard Scourge Strike. Finally, we have a new core rotational ability called Putrefy which we use to sacrifice the minions we summon.

The feel of the Unholy Death Knight is similar in some cases to previous expansions. We maintain our core rotation of Festering Strike, Scourge Strike and Death Coil, but now also press Putrefy ever so often. Our AoE rotation has seen the most change as it is now very similar to our Single-Target. The rotation is in general simpler with fewer opportunities for skill expression.

Putrefy decays the oldest ghoul you have active, exploding them for AoE damage on nearby enemies. We have several new talents that boost this interaction:

• Unholy Devotion makes the ghoul deal significantly more damage in the period before exploding.
• Unholy Aura provides Haste whenever you cast Putrefy.
• Blightburst consumes 6 seconds of your plagues whenever a ghoul explodes.
• Reanimation reanimates the ghoul you Putrefy as a Magus of the Dead.
• Putrid Echoes increases the explosion damage in Single-Target but reduces AoE scaling.
• Forbidden Knowledge increases the duration of Forbidden Knowledge when you Putrefy.

All these interactions make Putrefy an important spell to cast that has a big impact on your damage.

Festering Wounds are now completely gone from the Unholy Death Knight. Instead of applying a debuff to enemies, Festering Strike now applies a buff on you (3-4 stacks per Festering Strike, stacking up to 8 times). These stacks are consumed by Scourge Strike, summoning a lesser ghoul for 8 seconds. This helps significantly in target swapping and setup as the stacks on yourself stay as you change targets. Furthermore, we get a more necromancer fantasy feel as we summon significant numbers of undead minions. With the removal of wounds, we also lost some iconic abilities like Unholy Assault and Apocalypse.

Midnight Alpha has introduced the Dread Plague disease, applied via our Outbreak, it deals damage to only a Single-Target and is our new source of Sudden Doom procs. It also has an interesting interaction with the Rapid Variant talent which triggers an explosion and spreads the disease to a new target whenever thew existing target dies. This is both an easy way to keep the disease up in AoE, and present some fun scenarios where you get a chain-reaction effect where lots of enemies die at once.

The talent tree also presents a lot more talents that interact with Diseases. Death Coil and Epidemic now extend the duration of Virulent Plague and Dread Plague by 4 seconds by default. Scourge Strike deals extra damage based off your plagues, Festering Scythe now increases plague tick-rate, and the new Blightburst talent consumes diseases. San'layn gets a lot of nice synergy here due to high Virulent Plague duration in conjunction with Infliction of Sorrow dealing more damage the longer your plagues last (they did cap the duration at 36 seconds, used to go to 1min+).

Midnight sees the rework of the Clawing Shadows talent, no longer granting range ( Scourge Strike is now 30 yards by default) but instead being our AoE enabler. Every time we use Scourge Strike, we simply cleave to one additional target, up to 4 extra targets. This does not require Death and Decay at all. No more annoyance as tanks move out of your ground AoE, you can just follow along and keep doing lots of damage. The drawback is that we get a natural ramping nature in AoE, and you ideally want to chain-pull to maintain the stacks (they only last for 12 seconds).

We are a lot more effective from range in Midnight. Scourge Strike is 30 yards by default, and we have lost a lot of talents that would previously benefit from us staying in range. Sudden Doom now procs off Dread Plague hits instead of melee attacks and Unholy Aura now works off your minion summons and Putrefy usage. We just need to get in melee to hit Festering Strike and can then run around for several seconds while losing minimal damage. We do lose melee swings (1% of our damage) and our pets need to run a bit further when they are summoned. Otherwise, we can pretend that we are ranged for significant portions of a fight.

We have received three new extra talents in Midnight that you (optionally) talent into as you level up. Forbidden Knowledge provides a 15-second buff when you cast Army of the Dead that transforms your Death Coil into Necrotic Coil and Epidemic into Graveyard. These new spells do a lot more damage, cost less Runic Power (20 instead of 30) and have a default 1 secoid GCD compared to your normal spells with 1.5 seconds GCD. They make your cooldown window super fast-paced as you can send out significantly more abilities than usual. The other two talents simply empower Forbidden Knowledge, giving you Runic Power and ghoul summons as well as an extension of the buff with Scourge Strike ghoul summons/ Putrefy usage.

Necrotic Coil also has an AoE aspect where it both cleaves to 3 targets total, but also deals damage in the path of the coils themselves. Graveyard has a similar Quadratic Scaling component as Epidemic but in a slightly steeper sense. It deals about 50% of the Single-Target damage in AoE compared to Epidemic that does 40%. We will have a classic case of "use Graveyard at X targets over Necrotic Coil".

Our Hero Talents have received 3 new talents each that you will talent into as you level to 80. These talents are generally not very impactful, mirroring some tier set bonuses we have had in the past. Most interesting new talent is probably Unending Misery which increases the plague extension from 3 to 6 seconds with Vampiric Strike.

The Death Knight class tree has also seen some minor changes. Blood Bond, Death Defiance and Death Notes have all been added. Some nice defensives and a hook to talent into Death Pact (which is very much needed, we never pick this talent otherwise). Death Notes would have been very useful back in the day when Breath of Sindragosa drained Runic Power. It is still nice to get but not as impactful anymore. We have also lost the Soul Reaper (and Sacrificial Pact, which was rarely played) talent. For Frost this really does not matter since the node was not worth picking up to start with. For Unholy we do lose an iconic execute ability which is somewhat sad.

We have also had some movement of nodes around the tree. Death's Reach is in a much better spot as a choice node with Asphyxiate. Wraith Walk has moved further up the tree and is now a choice with March of Darkness. Unholy Momentum is now a 2-point talent as well. Overall we get a bit more access to certain talents and some more options in the tree. Death Strike and Unholy Endurance were nerfed a bit so we also lost some defensive power but not that much in the grand scheme of things.