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 Unholy Death Knight in the forthcoming Midnight expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going forward.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates arrive on the Midnight Beta. 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 Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel at launch.

Unholy Death Knight has received a significant rework in Midnight Beta so far. Festering Wound, that has 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 every so often. Our AoE rotation has seen the most change as it is now very similar to our single-target. In general, the rotation is simpler with fewer opportunities for skill expression.

Putrefy decays the oldest ghoul you have active, dealing damage to your target and then exploding for AoE damage. We have several new talents that boost this interaction.

• Unholy Devotion makes your permanent ghoul do 25% more damage for 5 seconds when you cast Putrefy (multiple applciations can overlap). This used to apply to two of your smaller ghouls. Moving it to the main ghoul does reduce some complexity as you do not need to track your active ghouls as much.
• Blightburst makes the explosion effect of Putrefy extend the duration of your plagues by 4 seconds and deals 35% of the damage the diseases would do in that duration instantly. Also applies our plagues to unaffected targets - nice synergy with our plagues and a source of plague duration extensionand application.
• Reanimation has a 100% chance to reanimate the ghoul you Putrefy as a Magus of the Dead - Major source of Magus summoning.
• Putrid Echoes gives you an additional charge of Putrefy and increases its damage by 20% - provides some nice flexibility with the additional charge and enables you to both use the ability more efficiently, as well as spending the charges in a more burst-like manner. For example, with Reanimation you can summon 4 Magus of the Dead during your Dark Transformation for some nice AoE burst.
• Forbidden Knowledge increases the duration of Forbidden Knowledge when you Putrefy.
• Both Raise Abomination and Summon Gargoyle Putrefy 2 ghouls when you use Army of the Dead.
• Necromancer's Cunning now summons a lesser ghoul to sacrifice instead of picking an existing one. Removes any skill expression when timing the ability with the expiration of your ghouls, but also prevents the bad feeling of pressing the ability right after you have summoned your first ghouls.

All these interactions make Putrefy an important spell to cast that has a big impact on your damage. Blizzard has iterated heavily on the ability and it now feels pretty good to press. With Necromancer's Cunning, we now have no need to track our ghoul durations before pressing the ability and will simply use it when we get the best power from it, without any negative drawback.

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 (2-3 stacks per Festering Strike, stacking up to 6 times). These stacks are consumed by Scourge Strike, summoning a lesser ghoul for 6 seconds. This helps significantly in target swapping and setup as the stacks on yourself stay as you change targets. Furthermore, we get more of a 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 Beta has introduced the Dread Plague disease, applied via our Outbreak, it deals damage to only a single enemy 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 the 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 default. Scourge Strike deals extra damage based on your plagues, Festering Scythe now increases plague tick-rate, and the new Blightburst talent extends the duration and deals damage based off your plague damage. We have a new Pestilence talent that interacts with out Plagues, proccing off Scourge Strike, it transforms Outbreak into a Disease-consumption spell that deals 50% of the remaining damage of your Diseases when used. This allows you to convert high uptime Diseases into nice burst. However, it currently does not feel that satisfying as you only get 50% of the damage back, and need to reapply the Diseases afterwards (either with another Outbreak or via Putrefy with Blightburst).

The long Plague durations you can achieve on the Beta previously had great synergy with San'layn as Infliction of Sorrow damage would scale with your longer Plagues. However, this has now been removed from San'Layn leaving the Disease interaction somewhat lacking. Pestilence is meant to be the replacement but I would like it to be a bit stronger of a hook when it comes to gaining value with longer Plagues!

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 also gain access to the new Outnumber ability which grants our lesser ghouls the Claw AoE ability during Dark Transformation. This is a nice additional AoE component to our pets which used to be exclusive to our Magi and our main pet. It makes Army of the Dead a stronger AoE cooldown due to the lesser ghoul summons!

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 (3% 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 second 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".

The Apex talent feels great to use with both high burst as well as great synergy with our plague-kit. Especially San'layn benefits greatly as the reduced cost and GCD on Necrotic Coil/ Graveyard leads to more casts and thus greater Plague extension. The single worry is that the gameplay will feel a bit too fast, but that is not necessarily a negative aspect for everyone.

Our Hero Talents have received three 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 Desecrate which has a chance to collapse Death and Decay whenever it deals damage, dealing 300% of the remaining damage in one go. In conjunction with Blood-Soaked Ground, we have some minor Death and Decay interaction with San'layn.

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. Soul Reaper has moved to the spec tree and has been reworking to buff our minions and plagues and Sacrificial Pact has been removed altogether.

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.

The Unholy Death Knight has a Season 1 tier set focuses on plague damage and Putrefy. The 2-set increases the damage of Dread Plague and Virulent Plague and the 4-set increases the damage of Putrefy by 20% and makes the next Scourge Strike cost no Runes. Quite simple bonuses that are unlikely to have a big impact on our rotation.