Unholy Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Dragonflight 10.2
On this page, you will find the best gear and best in slot items for your Unholy Death Knight in World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.2.
BiS Gear Guide for Unholy Death Knight
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.
BiS Gear for Unholy Death Knight
BiS List for Unholy Death Knight
Below you will find the theoretical BiS set of gear for Season 3.
Slot | Item | Boss/ Dungeon/ Source |
---|---|---|
Helm | ![]() |
Tindral Sageswift |
Neck | ![]() |
Tindral Sageswift |
Shoulder | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Cloak | ![]() ![]() |
Tailoring |
Chest | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Murozond's Rise |
Bracers | ![]() |
Blacksmithing |
Gloves | ![]() |
Igira the Cruel |
Belt | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Galakrond's Fall |
Legs | ![]() |
Larodar, Keeper of the Flame |
Boots | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Ring #1 | ![]() |
Darkheart Thicket |
Ring #2 | ![]() |
Atal'Dazar |
Trinket #1 | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Murozond's Rise |
Trinket #2 | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Weapon | ![]() ![]() |
Fyrakk, the Blazing (Smolderon) |
Mythic+ Gear BiS List for Unholy Death Knight
This list contains the highest DPS setup, with farmable gear from Mythic+ Dungeons. It answers the question of: "If I can only get gear from Mythic+, what is the best setup to maximise by Single Target DPS?". This is a great place to start on a relatively new character, as you can infinitely grind out these items from Mythic+.
Slot | Item | Boss/ Dungeon/ Source |
---|---|---|
Helm | ![]() |
Revival Catalyst |
Neck | ![]() |
Darkheart Thicket |
Shoulder | ![]() |
Revival Catalyst |
Cloak | ![]() ![]() |
Tailoring |
Chest | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Murozond's Rise |
Bracers | ![]() |
Blacksmithing |
Gloves | ![]() |
Revival Catalyst |
Belt | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Galakrond's Fall |
Legs | ![]() |
Revival Catalyst |
Boots | ![]() |
Everbloom |
Ring #1 | ![]() |
Darkheart Thicket |
Ring #2 | ![]() |
Atal'Dazar |
Trinket #1 | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Murozond's Rise |
Trinket #2 | ![]() |
Atal'Dazar |
Weapon | ![]() |
Dawn of the Infinite: Murozond's Rise |
Raid Gear BiS List for Unholy Death Knight
This list contains the highest DPS setup, only using gear from the Aberrus Raid. It answers the question of: "If I can only get gear from Raid, what's my best setup for optimising my Single Target damage?".
This list is mostly useful for informing your organized guild of what loot is optimal for you for loot distribution purposes.
Slot | Item | Boss/ Dungeon/ Source |
---|---|---|
Helm | ![]() |
Tindral Sageswift |
Neck | ![]() |
Tindral Sageswift |
Shoulder | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Cloak | ![]() ![]() |
Tailoring |
Chest | ![]() |
Fyrakk, the Blazing |
Bracers | ![]() |
Blacksmithing |
Gloves | ![]() |
Igira the Cruel |
Belt | ![]() |
Tindral Sageswift |
Legs | ![]() |
Larodar, Keeper of the Flame |
Boots | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Ring #1 | ![]() |
Larodar, Keeper of the Flame |
Ring #2 | ![]() |
Igira the Cruel |
Trinket #1 | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Trinket #2 | ![]() |
Smolderon |
Weapon | ![]() ![]() |
Fyrakk, the Blazing (Smolderon) |
Gearing a Unholy Death Knight
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.
Unholy Death Knight Gear Upgrades in Dragonflight Season 2
Season 3 has a powerful upgrade system for your gear where you use Flightstones
and Shadowflame 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.
Best Items to Upgrade for Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2
There are three primary items to upgrade as an Unholy Death Knight:
- Weapon
Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows/
Cataclysmic Signet Brand
- Head/ Chest/ Legs
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, since we get free Enchanted Wyrm's Dreaming Crest
, you will reach 476 ilvl already (10 ilvls lower than max). The 60 crests
that it takes to craft to 486 therefore only give you 10 more ilvls. Even if these
items are embellishments that will scale with ilvl, the DPS per crest is generally
much less than what you could get elsewhere (2-7x more DPS by upgrading other pieces).
It is up to you how much you value a guaranteed gain vs a gain that you might replace
shortly in the future!
Overall Top Trinkets
Unholy wants one one-use stat trinket and one passive trinket. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows
is the best on-use trinket, tightly followed by
Might of the Ocean.
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!. For
passive trinkets,
Cataclysmic Signet Brand is best due to its raw damage
output. However, it does come with some self-damage as a drawback. Other alternatives
are
Rezan's Gleaming Eye,
Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge, and
Accelerating Sandglass.
For Mythic+, our priority changes slightly. Might of the Ocean becomes
our best on-use due to strong synergy with our 1.5min AoE burst windows. For the passive trinket,
Accelerating Sandglass,
Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge,
Gore-Crusted Butcher's Block
and
Porcelain Crab 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!
Best Active Trinkets
Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows
Ashes of the Embersoul
Might of the Ocean
Spores of Alacrity
Best Passive Trinkets
Cataclysmic Signet Brand
Rezan's Gleaming Eye
Accelerating Sandglass
Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge
Porcelain Crab
Gore-Crusted Butcher's Block
Stats
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!
Jewelry
For neck and ring pieces, you can 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!
Weapons
For Season 2, our best weapon is the legendary by far (probably). We do not know any specifics of the Legendary so far, but it is very unlikely to be bad. Until you get one of those, though, getting whatever weapon is the highest ilvl is the best choice. The crafted weapons are great potential early pick-ups to get a large upgrade!
Tier Set Bonus
With Season 2, 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 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:
You want to obtain 4 pieces of the T31 set before you swap away from your old set! This is a general rule, and if the ilvl upgrade is big enough, it might be worth to go 2p2p.
Notable Crafted Gear
Unholy wants to run Vibrant Wildercloth Shawl with
Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch and
Allied Wristguard of Companionship
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 relatively strong.
Blue Silken Lining is a potential alternative to
Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch
but you need to reach around 40% uptime on the Mastery buff to be worthwhile (primarily
in your burst windows). You put it on
Vibrant Wildercloth Shawl
for bosses with low damage output or during farm kills. Furthermore, it is
significantly stronger for Mythic+ since you will be at max HP the majority of the
time, always run it in dungeons!
You should also consider wearing Allied Chestplate of Generosity as
one of your embellishments. It brings good Raid DPS by buffing your team. It
comes with the drawback of being located on a stat-heavy slot (meaning the
3 ilvl penalty hurts more) as well as being in a tier slot. This means that
it is difficult to fit it in when you have low availability for your tier items!
When it comes to your other crafted slots, we are not wearing nearly as many crafted items compared to Season 2. This is due to crafted items maxing out at ilvl 486 compared to 489 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).
Changelog
- 29 Nov. 2023: Updated BiS after legendary was revealed.
- 22 Nov. 2023: Updated Dawn drop locations to differentiate between upper and lower.
- 15 Nov. 2023: Added Ashes to Raid BiS and moved it up in active trinket list.
- 07 Nov. 2023: Updated BiS list and embellishment recommendations after sporecloak nerfs.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.2.
- 04 Sep. 2023: Updated for patch 10.1.7.
- 20 Jul. 2023: Updated Bis Trinket and Neck.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Updated trinket bis and added dawn of the infinite gear tips.
- 10 May 2023: Updated trinket bis after Puzzle nerf.
- 08 May 2023: Updated bis list and trinket prio after changes.
- 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
- 30 Apr. 2023: Reviewed and Updated for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Death Knight Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Bicepspump, a semi-hardcore player raiding with Pescorus on Kazzak. He is heavily involved in the DK DPS theorycrafting community, testing hyoptheses and investigating the correct priority to use. He is also a moderator in the Acherus Death Knight Discord, frequently answering questions and discussing optimisations (do not hesitate to reach out). He produces guide content on YouTube and frequently streams on Twitch.
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