Unholy Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — The War Within Pre-Patch

Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Unholy Death Knight for The War Within Pre-Patch. 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.

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BiS Gear for Unholy Death Knight

Overall BiS List Mythic+ Gear BiS List Raid Gear BiS List

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BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

Below you will find the theoretical BiS set of gear for Season 4.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Piercing Gaze of the Risen Nightmare	Tindral/ Raszageth/ Magmorax
Neck	Torc of Passed Time (Crit Haste) with Blue Silken Lining	Jewelcrafting
Shoulder	Skewers of the Risen Nightmare	Smolderon/ Broodkeeper Diurna/ Echo of Neltharion
Cloak	Voice of the Silent Star	Scalecommander Sarkareth
Chest	Breastplate of Soaring Terror	Ruby Life Pools
Bracers	Primal Molten Vambraces with Blue Silken Lining	Blacksmithing
Gloves	Thorns of the Risen Nightmare	Igira the Cruel/ Dathea, Ascended/ The Forgotten Experiments
Belt	Recycled Golemskin Waistguard	Zskarn
Legs	Greaves of the Risen Nightmare	Larodar/ Sennarth, The Cold Breath/ Rashok
Boots	Fused Obsidian Sabatons	Smolderon
Ring #1	Seal of Diurna's Chosen	Eranog
Ring #2	Seal of Filial Duty	Broodkeeper Diurna
Trinket #1	Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows	Dawn of the Infinite
Trinket #2	Neltharion's Call to Suffering	Echo of Neltharion
Weapon	Fyr'alath the Dreamrender	Fyrakk

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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	Piercing Gaze of the Risen Nightmare (Revival Catalyst)	Any Helm
Neck	Torc of Passed Time (Crit Haste) with Blue Silken Lining	Jewelcrafting
Shoulder	Skewers of the Risen Nightmare (Revival Catalyst)	Any Shoulder
Cloak	Cloak of Lost Devotion	The Azure Vault
Chest	Breastplate of Soaring Terror	Ruby Life Pools
Bracers	Primal Molten Vambraces with Blue Silken Lining	Blacksmithing
Gloves	Thorns of the Risen Nightmare (Revival Catalyst)	Any Gloves
Belt	Ravenous Omnivore's Girdle	Halls of Infusion
Legs	Greaves of the Risen Nightmare	Any Legs
Boots	Twenty-Two-League Striders	The Azure Vault
Ring #1	Scalebane Signet	Neltharus
Ring #2	Thunderous Downburst Ring	The Nokhud Offensive
Trinket #1	Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows	Dawn of the Infinite
Trinket #2	Frenzying Signoll Flare	Brackenhide Hollow
Weapon	Fyr'alath the Dreamrender	Fyrakk

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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	Piercing Gaze of the Risen Nightmare	Tindral/ Raszageth/ Magmorax
Neck	Torc of Passed Time (Crit Haste) with Blue Silken Lining	Jewelcrafting
Shoulder	Skewers of the Risen Nightmare	Smolderon/ Broodkeeper Diurna/ Echo of Neltharion
Cloak	Voice of the Silent Star	Scalecommander Sarkareth
Chest	Sarkareth's Abyssal Embrace	Sarkareth
Bracers	Primal Molten Vambraces with Blue Silken Lining	Blacksmithing
Gloves	Thorns of the Risen Nightmare	Igira the Cruel/ Dathea, Ascended/ The Forgotten Experiments
Belt	Recycled Golemskin Waistguard	Zskarn
Legs	Greaves of the Risen Nightmare	Larodar/ Sennarth, The Cold Breath/ Rashok
Boots	Fused Obsidian Sabatons	Smolderon
Ring #1	Seal of Diurna's Chosen	Eranog
Ring #2	Seal of Filial Duty	Broodkeeper Diurna
Trinket #1	Ashes of the Embersoul	Smolderon
Trinket #2	Neltharion's Call to Suffering	Echo of Neltharion
Weapon	Fyr'alath the Dreamrender	Fyrakk

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.

Season 4 has a powerful upgrade system for your gear where you use Flightstones and 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.

There are three primary items to upgrade as an Unholy Death Knight:

1. Weapon
2. Trinket
3. Head/ Chest/ Legs/ Bullion Items

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, it is usually not a very efficient use of crests when considering the DPS upgrade value. Instead, use the crests on Bullion items (that you know are BiS for you) or items bit good DPS upgrade value.

Unholy wants one one-use stat trinket and one passive trinket. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows is the best on-use trinket, tightly followed by Ashes of the Embersoul. 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! Furthermore, you need to loot it from a Mythic Dawn of the Infinite (one try per week)! For the max ilvl, you need to do the dungeon in Hardmode (talk to the NPC at the start) and finish it without anyone dying! Hardmode gives a 522 max upgraded, Hardmode + Deathless gives 528 max upgraded. If you are unlucky with your weekly run here, Ashes of the Embersoul is really close and is a good trinket to fall back on. For passive trinkets, Neltharion's Call to Suffering, Whispering Incarnate Icon and Ominous Chromatic Essence are neck and neck. Icon needs a DPS, Tank and a Healer to equip the trinket to fully unlock its power, Ominous Chromatic Essence needs 3 other people sworn to other Dragonflights to fully unlock. Neltharion on the other hand can be very random in when it procs, increasing the variance of your DPS significantly. A personal preference generally. Cataclysmic Signet Brand is another alternative that is BiS in longer fights (6+ minutes). Manic Grieftorch deserves a mention as well as its cooldown is reset whenever someone in your party/ raid dies. This significantly increases its value in real scenarios, especially during progress, as people are quite likely to die.

For Mythic+, our priority changes slightly. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows is still really good due to helping our otherwise lacking Single Target. For the passive trinket, Whispering Incarnate Icon, Ominous Chromatic Essence, Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge and Neltharion's Call to Suffering 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!

1. Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows
2. Ashes of the Embersoul
3. Blazebinder's Hoof

1. Neltharion's Call to Suffering
2. Ominous Chromatic Essence
3. Whispering Incarnate Icon
4. Cataclysmic Signet Brand
5. Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge
6. Manic Grieftorch

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!

For neck and ring pieces, you can generally 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!

For Season 4, our best weapon is the legendary by far. If you haven't obtained it already in Season 3, getting whatever weapon is the highest ilvl is the best choice (until you are lucky and it drops). The crafted weapons are great potential early pick-ups to get a large upgrade!

Unholy wants to run double Blue Silken Lining as its embellishments in Raid. We choose Neck and Bracers as the crafted pieces due to the low stats and due to the limited number of choices (when considering all the special items etc)

For Mythic+, Blue Silken Lining becomes a lot stronger due to significantly higher uptime and we therefore just run double again.

When it comes to your other crafted slots, we are not wearing nearly as many crafted items generally. This is due to crafted items maxing out at ilvl 525 compared to 528 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).