Unholy Death Knight DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.2

Welcome to our Rotation page for Unholy Death Knights. Here, we will go over everything you will need to know to optimally play your spec for Raiding and Mythic+ scenarios.

Unholy is a very interesting Mythic+ spec because it has great single-target and AoE burst potential. For more information about Mythic+ as an Unholy Death Knight, please check out our Mythic+ guide linked below.

Unholy can be a very complicated spec. If these rotations seem fairly complicated, then you may want to check out our Beginner Mode page, which gives you a much more simplistic build and rotation to play.

The guides on this page are for PvE content, so if you are looking for a PvP rotation guide, then please visit our PvP page linked below.

I have opted to include the core rotation in these sections, leaving everything that is considered a cooldown to be explained separately further down!

• Apocalypse Talented
• Empower Rune Weapon Talented
• Abomination Limb Talented
• Unholy Assault Talented
• Unholy Blight Talented
• Summon Gargoyle Talented
• Death Knight Unholy 10.1 Class Set 4pc equipped

1. Use Army of the Dead when your are in combat with the boss.
2. Use Army of the Dead 2 seconds before pull.
3. Use Outbreak.
4. Use Unholy Blight.
5. Use Festering Strike.
6. Use Abomination Limb.
7. Use Death and Decay/ Defile.
8. Use Potion.
9. Use Dark Transformation + Summon Gargoyle + Potion.
10. Use Dark Transformation.
11. Use Death Coil.
12. Use Death Coil.
13. Use Death Coil. Use exactly 3 Death Coils here.
14. Use Unholy Assault + Trinket.
15. Use Festering Strike.
16. Use Empower Rune Weapon.
17. Use Apocalypse.
18. Use Trinket.
19. Use Blood Fury (if Orc), Berserking (if Troll) (See below for exact timings).
20. Follow the Summon Gargoyle priority (details further down).

Make sure to use your second charge of Death and Decay/ Defile after the first one runs out, to make sure your burst benefits fully from Unholy Ground (and Defile Mastery buff).

When it comes to timing your trinkets, you can generally just macro them with Unholy Assault. The trinkets we want to equip in Patch 10.2 all have 20-second duration, meaning they should be used right where Unholy Assault is in the opener!

For racials that benefit our burst, we use them in the following way:

• Blood Fury - 20 seconds before Summon Gargoyle finishes (can be macroed with Unholy Assault).
• Berserking - 15 seconds before Summon Gargoyle finishes. This is at the point where you use your second Death and Decay/ Defile in the opener.

Macros can significantly reduce the amount of keybinds needed for executing the opener, here are two that I personally use:

• #showtooltip Summon Gargoyle
• /cast Summon Gargoyle
• /cast Dark Transformation
• /use Fleeting Elemental Potion of Ultimate Power
• /use Elemental Potion of Ultimate Power
• /use Elemental Potion of Power

• #showtooltip Unholy Assault
• /cast Unholy Assault
• /cast Empower Rune Weapon
• /use 13

• Soul Reaper Talented
• Plaguebringer Talented
• Clawing Shadows Talented
• Defile Talented

1. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35% (if you have taken this talent).
2. Cast Defile during your Apocalypse windows, using two charges back-to-back.
3. Cast Outbreak or Unholy Blight to apply Virulent Plague on the target. Try to maintain 100% uptime on the disease.
4. Use Scourge Strike to maintain your Plaguebringer buff.
5. Use Death Coil when you have 80+ Runic Power or a Sudden Doom proc.
6. Use Festering Strike to apply Festering Wounds on the target. Do this if the target has 0 Festering Wounds. Go to 4+ just before your Apocalypse Cooldown becomes available again.
7. Use Scourge Strike to maintain your Plaguebringer buff.
8. Use Scourge Strike when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
9. Use Clawing Shadows when there is at least 1 Festering Wound on the target.
10. Use Death Coil.

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

• Cast Soul Reaper whenever you can make the secondary effect trigger. In execute, Soul Reaper is your highest priority, and you should save Runes so that you can use it as much as possible! It is, however, not worth casting Soul Reaper if the target dies before the explosion!
• Use Defile if you have taken this talent to leverage the mastery buff. Make sure to use it once you have accumulated two charges so that you can chain the buff window. Save it for your Apocalypse windows and use it exactly twice at that point.
• Ensure 100% Virulent Plague uptime with Outbreak and Unholy Blight.
• Use Death Coil to avoid capping Runic Power. Death Coil is your hardest-hitting button, and you should avoid wasting any Runic Power that could have been spent on the ability!
• Use Festering Strike to build up Festering Wounds on the target. We want to aim for 1-3 wounds at all times! This means casting Festering Strike whenever you dip below 2 wounds, but never when above 3! If you use Festering Strike at 4+ wounds, you risk going above the ceiling of 6, wasting resources! We stay at low wounds to maximize the value from Festermight. Make sure to keep track of your Apocalypse cooldown, as we need to go to 4+ Wounds before we use this ability!
• Use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows to burst your wounds. This is used in sync with Festering Strike to keep your wound count at a healthy level. You go up to 3+ and then use Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows to drop down to 0 again. You use Scourge Strike as a high-priority to keep up your Plaguebringer buff as well!
• 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, it is all about leveraging Death and Decay/ Defile. In conjunction the Cleaving Strikes talent, this creates nice Cleave windows where you leverage your Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows to deal AoE damage. Simply put, whenever you want to do AoE, pop down Death and Decay/ Defile and spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows. Do not worry about your Festering Wounds, ignoring them is actually only a small Single Target priority loss. Furthermore, if you have Epidemic specced, used this instead of Death Coil to spend your Runic Power. Generally, at 2+ targets unless you also have Improved Death Coil (unlikely due to how our builds work), where you instead use Epidemic at 4+ targets.

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 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 (it still counts towards the empowerment, even if it is free of cost).

• Soul Reaper Talented
• Plaguebringer Talented
• Clawing Shadows Talented
• Defile Talented

1. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35% (if you have taken this talent).
2. Cast Defile during your Summon Gargoyle window, using two charges back-to-back (one just before and one in the middle).
3. Use Death Coil when you have 30+ Runic Power or a Sudden Doom proc
4. Cast Outbreak or Unholy Blight to apply Virulent Plague on the target. Try to maintain 100% uptime on the disease.
5. Use Scourge Strike to maintain your Plaguebringer buff.
6. Use Festering Strike to apply Festering Wounds on the target. Do this if the target has 1 or fewer Festering Wounds.
7. Use Scourge Strike to maintain your Plaguebringer buff.
8. Use Scourge Strike when there are at least 2 Festering Wounds on the target.
9. Use Clawing Shadows when there are at least 2 Festering Wounds on the target.

Unholy's Disease AoE rotation is all about high Plaguebringer uptime and lots and lots of Epidemic spamming. The idea is to ensure your DoTs are doing as much damage as possible and generating as much Runic Power as possible to spend on Epidemic.

As we approach a given pack, we execute essentially the same opener every single time, just skipping parts of it if we do not have the cooldowns ready. This is what it looks like:

1. Defile as we run towards the pack.
2. Scourge Strike as we reach the pack and stand in our Defile.
3. Unholy Blight to apply Virulent Plague. Outbreak if Blight is not ready.
4. Dark Transformation.
5. Unholy Assault or Festering Strike to build some wounds on a target.
6. Abomination Limb.
7. Apocalypse.
8. Epidemic until Plaguebringer needs to be refreshed.
9. Defile when your previous Defile buff falls off.
10. Scourge Strike.
11. Epidemic until low RP.
12. Refresh your Virulent Plague when it is about to expire.
13. Scourge Strike.
14. Epidemic until low RP.

The idea is to get your disease up and Plaguebringer quickly. We also make sure to use Defile early to get the mastery buff. We then use all our cooldowns and dump our Runic Power. Apocalypse is used early here to make sure we get good value from our Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 2pc and Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 4pc. As Plaguebringer is about to run out, we use Defile again and Scourge Strike to refresh it. At this point, your pet has applied a ton of Festering Wounds on the pack, meaning we get lots of Runic Power every time we cleave with Scourge Strike. We use this to funnel our damage into Epidemic!

You might notice the lack of Festering Strike in this rotation! As a general rule, we almost never press it in our Mythic+ rotation. It is only ever if we need to set up a Festering Wound for Apocalypse or if Defile is not currently active. Since Defile uptime is so high, we just end up spamming Scourge Strike the majority of the time (ignoring the fact that there sometimes are no Festering Wounds active in the pack). Still, in a long pack, after our Defile sequence is finished (after 40 seconds or so), we will revert back to building and bursting Festering Wounds, spending the Runic Power on Epidemic! Without Deadliest Coil, we do Epidemic at 3 targets. With it, we use Epidemic at 4+ targets.

Unholy's Wound AoE rotation revolves heavily around the application and bursting of large quantities of Festering Wounds with the Bursting Sores talent. We use cooldowns ( Unholy Assault, Vile Contagion and Dark Transformation with Infected Claws) to apply the majority of our wounds, relying on Defile with Pestilence to do the rest. We then burst the wounds by spamming Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows in our Defile.

Outside our Defile windows, we pretty much play our normal single target rotation, swapping out Death Coil for Epidemic as our Runic Power Spender. We do this at 3+ targets if we haven't picked up Deadliest Coil, otherwise we do it at 4+.

To make it hopefully easy to understand, this is a simplified version of what your multiple target opener should look like.

1. Defile.
2. Scourge Strike.
3. Use Outbreak or Unholy Blight to apply Virulent Plague on all targets.
4. Use Dark Transformation.
5. Use Festering Strike.
6. Use Apocalypse.
7. Use Festering Strike.
8. Use Unholy Assault.
9. Use Vile Contagion (on the target that now has 6 Festering Wounds).
10. Spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows until your first Defile runs out.
11. Spam Epidemic until your Defile mastery buff is about to drop.
12. Use Defile.
13. Spam Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows
14. Use Epidemic if the pack has no Festering Wounds or if you have no Runes for Scourge Strike
15. Refresh your Virulent Plague when it is about to expire.
16. After you run out of Death and Decays/ Defiles to use, go to single-target rotation with Epidemic instead of Death Coil.

If any cooldown listed above is not available, simply skip that part of the opener and proceed to the next step. If you are not running Vile Contagion, do not Festering Strike after your Apocalypse!

If the pack lives for up to 40 seconds, your priority will change slightly. When you have your Unholy Assault and Vile Contagion combination, you want to delay your Dark Transformation until after you have used Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows 2-3 times inside your Defile window. This will prevent any overcapping on Festering Wounds, as well as set up for your secondary Defile windows (with Death's Echo). After you have finished with your first window, dump your Runic Power with Epidemic and then move straight into your next window, making sure to refresh the Defile Mastery buff! We want to ideally dump our Runic Power in the short period before Defile windows since Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows has much lower value here (they do not cleave)

Since Death Knights have multiple resources that they need to track, it is very helpful to customize your UI to easily track your resources. Unholy Death Knights have a very clunky opener, so being able to easily focus on your rotation and resources can help you maximize your damage and positioning.

Here is a quick summary of your Cooldown usage as an Unholy Death Knight:

• Empower Rune Weapon should be used with your other cooldowns.
• Abomination Limb should generally be used on cooldown. Hold it for add waves that need grouping up.
• Unholy Blight should be used on cooldown. It is primarily a way of applying your Virulent Plague efficiently, especially in AoE.
• Unholy Assault should be used on cooldown. Especially strong in Mythic+ when paired with Vile Contagion. Used in Single Target with your other CDs.
• Vile Contagion should be used in AoE on a target that ideally has 6 Festering Wounds. This should then be followed by Death and Decay and Scourge Strike to pop all wounds.
• Army of the Dead should be used on cooldown. This is the first ability you press as you run toward the boss. With Army of the Damned, the cooldown is 3 minutes. Make sure to time it with your Summon Gargoyle and Dark Transformation (if you have Commander of the Dead).
• Apocalypse should be used when you have 4 stacks of Festering Wounds. In AoE, use with 1 or more Festering Wounds.
• Dark Transformation should be used off cooldown and as an opener on packs of multiple mobs.
• Sacrificial Pact should only be used to save yourself from death.
• Summon Gargoyle should be used on cooldown. Once used, prioritize spending Runic Power via Death Coil above everything else.
• Defile should be used back-to-back with your Apocalypse. In AoE, use it as much as possible, chaining the Mastery buff you get from the ability.

As an Unholy Death Knight, you have potentially 11 unique cooldowns to keep track of, depending on what you choose from your talents.

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, Summon Gargoyle, Unholy Assault, Empower Rune Weapon, Apocalypse
• 00:45 - Dark Transformation, Apocalypse
• 01:30 - Dark Transformation, Apocalypse, Unholy Assault
• 02:15 - Dark Transformation, Apocalypse
• 03:00 - Army of the Dead, Dark Transformation, Summon Gargoyle, Unholy Assault, Empower Rune Weapon, Apocalypse
• 03:45 - Dark Transformation, Apocalypse

Notice the delay of Empower Rune Weapon, saving it for 1 minute to use with your 3-minute cooldowns. 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 3-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+!

Defile sees play in Mythic+ and becomes an ability you use everywhere once you pick it up. For Single Target, we want to overlap the buff with our Apocalypse windows. Use it twice back-to-back to leverage the Mastery to buff our Apocalypse! For AoE, we use this cooldown as much as possible, generally waiting ~3 seconds between uses to maximize the buff overlap. This will be the first GCD you use as your run towards the pack!

For Raid, we use Defile during our Summon Gargoyle to provide a Mastery buff as well as a haste buff (through Unholy Ground). After this point, we stack up two charges and use them back-to-back for each Apocalypse window.

Death and Decay is used in a similar manner to Defile in Single Target and AoE. Importantly, in AoE, we use it the first time after we have done our initial cooldown usage and Epidemic dump. Note the difference to Defile play here, which is used as we run in to the pack. For Single Target, we only ever use it during our Summon Gargoyle window for the Haste buff. It is technically worth it to use it on cooldown, but any boss movement will invalidate that. It is safest to simply time it with your Gargoyle (using it back-to-back) on pull and whenever it comes up again.

Empower Rune Weapon provides a 20-second buff, granting one Rune and 5 Runic Power every 5 seconds, as well as 15% haste. The first Rune and Runic Power are granted on-use, and the ability is off the global cooldown.

Always combine Empower Rune Weapon with your other powerful cooldowns. Save it for Summon Gargoyle if you are using that, otherwise use with your Apocalypse and Dark Transformation.

Abomination Limb provides you with an extra limb for 12 seconds, pulling targets towards you every second and dealing damage around you. Also grants a proc of Runic Corruption every 4 seconds.

Abomination Limb should be used on cooldown to gain the most benefit from its higher damage. Do save it if there are add waves that you can time it with, especially if gripping these adds helps your group to kill them!

Unholy Blight infects nearby targets with Virulent Plague every second for 6 seconds. Additionally, applies the Unholy Blight disease that lasts for 14 seconds and stacks up to 4 times, dealing increased damage for each stack.

Unholy Blight is primarily an efficient way of applying Virulent Plague, with the added benefit of some extra disease damage. Use this ability on cooldown in all situations. It is especially good at applying Virulent Plague whenever adds enter a pull during some time, like when the tank runs around to pick up all the mobs! Should be timed with Apocalypse and Dark Transformation.

Unholy Assault instantly applies 4 Festering Wounds to your target, deals some moderate damage and provides 20% damage buff for 20 seconds.

Unholy Assault is a strong damage buff as well as a very efficient way of applying Festering Wounds. It should be used on cooldown in single-target, ideally timed with your other cooldowns to leverage the damage buff. In AoE, it should be used early in a pull to help stack up 6 Festering Wounds on a single-target. Vile Contagion is then an excellent follow-up cooldown to quickly spread up to 42 Festering Wounds!

Vile Contagion spreads the Festering Wounds of your primary target to up to 7 nearby enemies.

Vile Contagion is a huge AoE DPS cooldown that helps to set up an AoE pull for a big burst window. It is ideally paired with Unholy Assault (both are 1.5m cooldown) where you do Festering Strike -> Unholy Assault -> Vile Contagion for a 3 GCD 48 Festering Wounds infection. You then follow up with Runic Power dumping, Death and Decay/ Defile, and Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows spam.

Apocalypse summons a member of the Army of the Dead for each stack of Festering Wounds, up to 4. It also generates 2 Runes on use.

For Single Target, Apocalypse should be used when you have at least 4 stacks of Festering Wounds. It will only consume 4 stacks, even when you have 5 or 6.

It generally sits on the same 45-second schedule as Dark Transformation and Unholy Blight, resulting in you using these cooldowns together most of the time.

For AoE, we do not care about the number of Festering Wounds burst by the cooldown, instead, it is used to summon our Magus of the Dead! This cleaves via the Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 2pc set, doing a ton of AoE damage. We do not care about the number of Wounds since the number of Magus of the Dead that is summoned is independent of how many Wounds we burst!

Army of the Dead summons several ghouls to fight at your side for 30 seconds. It is a major cooldown that will end up being a significant part of our overall damage in any situation.

Use Army of the Dead as you run into any engagement, allowing the ghouls to spawn (they spawn over 4 seconds and are stunned an additional 4 seconds before starting combat). The baseline 8-minute cooldown is reduced to around 3 minutes with the Army of the Damned talent, allowing you to use it multiple times in a fight. Ensure to time it with any other cooldown that increases its damage, such as Dark Transformation with Commander of the Dead, Unholy Assault and Empower Rune Weapon. Always use Army of the Dead at least 5 seconds before using any other cooldown to buff it (except Dark Transformation that can be used immediately).

Make sure to leverage this cooldown as much as possible in Mythic+. Even if it is primarily a Single Target burst CD, it also gives AoE via the Death Knight Unholy 10.2 Class Set 2pc set bonus!

Dark Transformation transforms your ghoul for 15 seconds, causing its Claw to cleave all enemies near your pet.

You should use this ability on cooldown. If you have talented into Commander of the Dead, always ensure you time Dark Transformation with Summon Gargoyle, Army of the Dead and Apocalypse.

For Mythic+, it is important to use this cooldown early in a pull, allowing the lots of time to apply Festering Wounds that you can then burst in your Death and Decay window. It will generally be the first cooldown you press.

Summon Gargoyle calls down a Gargoyle to hit your target for 25 seconds. Every 1 Runic Power spent when this cooldown is active increases its damage by 1%. It also generates 50 Runic Power on use.

Once you have activated Summon Gargoyle, your highest priority above all will be pressing Death Coil to ramp up its damage. Ideally, you should be full on Runic Power already as you press the cooldown (remember that it provides 50 Runic Power, so you only need to aim for a maximum minus 50). You also want to ensure that you leverage all your other cooldowns that synergize with Summon Gargoyle when you use it. This includes Dark Transformation with Commander of the Dead, Unholy Assault and Empower Rune Weapon. In reality, you will get these big 3-minute burst windows where you use Summon Gargoyle and Army of the Dead in combination with everything else!

It is very important to note that even Death Coils that benefit from Sudden Doom procs (and which, therefore, do not consume Runic Power) increase the damage of the Gargoyle, so it is important to make sure to use these procs right away during Summon Gargoyle and not have them wasted.

Soul Reaper initially strikes the target for ~70% of a naked Scourge Strike. After 5 seconds, if the target is below 35% health, it hits against 3.5 Scourge Strikes worth of damage. It is crucial as an Unholy Death Knight to trigger as many of these extra hits as possible. Use Soul Reaper whenever your target will reach 35% HP within the next 5 seconds. This means using it at ~36% Raid Boss HP. For adds, it generally means using it earlier. Timing it properly is very rewarding!

To help you better understand how to play the Unholy specialization, we will explain some concepts in more detail below.

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 3 Runes or more 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), 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 you do not need to pay attention to this proc.

Virulent Plague is a Shadow damage DoT that is applied to targets using Outbreak or Unholy Blight. If the target dies while afflicted with Virulent Plague, it erupts for Shadow damage to all nearby enemies. If you are talented into Unholy Blight, this will be the only method of applying Virulent Plague in a single-target encounter.

Each time you use Festering Strike, between 2 and 3 stacks of a debuff called Festering Wound is applied to the target. The debuff lasts for 30 seconds (and each added stack refreshes its duration) and does nothing if left alone. However, using Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows on a target that has Festering Wounds on them consumes a stack, causing the target to take Shadow damage. All of the stacks are consumed if the target dies.

Bursting Sores will cause any Festering Wounds that burst to deal AoE damage around them. This scales well in AoE and is the primary source of our damage in Mythic+. We can also talent into Replenishing Wounds to generate 3 Runic Power every time a Festering Wound is burst.

The ideal number of stacks at which to spend Festering Wounds is 4+. If you have 3 or fewer stacks, you should instead generate some more using Festering Strike.

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.

Festermight is pretty much a mandatory talent, providing a stacking strength buff whenever you burst a Festering Wound. The duration of the buff is always exactly 20 seconds, starting from the time you build your initial stack. Subsequent stacks do not add or refresh the duration in any way.

Maximimising the value of Festermight is all about getting as many stacks for as long of a duration as possible. We want to integral of Stength x Time the largest. To do this, we want to initiate our window by bursting as many Festering Wounds as possible! This is done best with Apocalypse, which instantly provides 4 stacks of the Strength buff. For reference, playing this optimally is around 1-2% DPS gain!

Unfortunately, Festermight windows are on a 20 seconds cycle, whereas Apocalypse comes every 45 seconds. This means that we need to play around the windows to ensure we start every second one with Apocalypse. This means delaying the start of our non-apoc window by 3-4 seconds! The easiest way of doing this is by making sure you end your Festermight window at close to 0 Festering Wounds. You can then naturally spends a couple of GCDs building up to 4-6 Wounds, spending some Runic Power, and potentially refreshing your DoT before you start your new Festermight window by using Scourge Strike/ Clawing Shadows. Make sure to look at your Apocalypse timing and try and initiate the new window when the cooldown is between 23 and 21 seconds remaining. You can salvage a window that you started too early by delaying the Apocalypse window, very much in the same way as you delay the non-apoc window.

Do not stress too much if you end up messing this up. Since the gain is relatively low, you do not lose too much by completely ignoring it. Focus on mechanics before you start min-maxing Festermight!

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. It is only really Festermight, stacking up towards the end of the cooldown, that means later coils add slightly more damage per cast.

The optimization that comes into play here is the priority of Festermight stacking vs Death Coil usage. As we reach the end of the window, using Death Coil to buff that final cast ends up being less valuable than building a Festermight stack to buff said cast. One adds a flat amount of damage; the other increases the damage by a %. To make this trade-off even more clear, imagine an infinite Summon Gargoyle. Let's assume the base damage of Summon Gargoyle is 1, and using Death Coil adds 1 extra damage to this. The first Death Coil will improve the damage by 100%. However, the 100th will add less than 1% extra damage. At this point, it's clear that buffing your strength by 1% ends up being more valuable!

The reality is not that cut and dry, but you can still apply the following tactic to your Summon Gargoyle. At the end of your window, prioritize using Scourge Strike to go to 0 Festering Wounds above spending your Runic Power ASAP. Still, do not use Festering Strike above Death Coil, only Scourge Strike to 0 Wounds!