Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds (Shadowlands / 9.0.2)
Choosing the right PvP and PvE talents is a prerequisite to proper performance in PvP. This guide goes through the various talent choices available to you as an Unholy Death Knight and gives you the best combinations you can take.
This page is part of our Unholy Death Knight PvP Guide.
Talent Choices for Unholy Death Knights
Level | Choices | ||
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15 |
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25 |
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30 |
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35 |
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40 |
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45 |
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50 |
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While the above table provides a generally accurate overview of the viability of talents, some finer points are discussed in the sections that follow, and we recommend you read those for a deeper understanding.
Tier 1 (Level 15) Talents
All 3 talents in this row have value. Infected Claws provides
another form of wound generation, and also resets the duration of wounds
on a target when you are in crowd control, helping to retain your stacks.
You will generally use this talent when using
Necrotic Strike.
Clawing Shadows provides a potent ranged spender which keeps pressure
up even when you are being kited. It also scales with your Mastery, and
Necrotic Aura which heavily increases its value. You will generally
avoid this talent when using
Necrotic Strike.
All Will Serve is passive chip damage that adds up over the course of
an arena.
Tier 2 (Level 25) Talents
Ebon Fever provides a pretty sizeable buff to your rot pressure and
is totally passive, making it simple to use.
Unholy Blight deals a solid
amount of damage when fully stacked, and increases the damage of your minions.
This adds another source of damage to Unholy, making it even more difficult to
peel the rot pressure and sustained output. This is a very good talent.
Bursting Sores could potentially see play against melee cleaves, as it
dramatically increases in value in AoE situations. This also increases the
healing absorption done by
Necrotic Strike, making it a strong pick
if using that talent.
Tier 3 (Level 30) Talents
Asphyxiate is almost always going to be the pick in this row.
However,
Grip of the Dead could see play in niche setups that use the
legendary
Phearomones which rely on the enemy team to remain within
your
Death and Decay.
Tier 4 (Level 35) Talents
Harbinger of Doom has added value as you can use the free
Death Coil procs to heal yourself during
Lichborne. It also
works well with the talent
Army of the Damned as it helps reset the
cooldowns of your burst windows.
Soul Reaper is a solid execute, with enough Mastery, and could
help push a target into the execute window of other classes like Warrior
or Windwalker Monk.
Tier 5 (Level 40) Talents
Spell Eater is extremely potent because even when you are not able
to get perfect use out of its survivability increase, the duration increase
allows to prevent and immune more crowd control effects. This stops you from
being peeled during your burst windows.
Wraith Walk helps deal with some of DK's mobility issues. It is on a
fairly long cooldown, but helps tremendously if you are rooted after your
healer has already dispelled, or if you are LoS.
Death Pact is very
meta-dependant. In dampening metas with a lot of sustain, and passive
self-healing, it is very poor. In burst matchups, with windows where you
need to survive just a few more seconds, it is fantastic.
Tier 6 (Level 45) Talents
Unholy Pact far outweighs the other choices in this tier. It
adds a passive amount of additional AoE damage to
Dark Transformation
as well as granting you Strength which simply increases all of your damage
during that window.
Tier 7 (Level 50) Talents
Unholy Assault provides another ability to your burst window and
helps to setup
Apocalypse by immediately giving you 4 wounds.
Furthermore, it increases the potency of that window by granting haste to you
and all your minions.
Army of the Damned gives a little more damage to
Apocalypse
and
Raise Abomination as well as reducing their cooldowns. These quicker
cooldowns help keep your pressure available and more consistent. This synergizes
very well with
Harbinger of Doom.
PvP Talents for Unholy Death Knights
You can choose 3 of the following PvP talents. Each of them has their uses, but some are better for certain strategies than others. The top three choices are the most useful, but can be replaced with other PvP talents, depending on your team's goal.
Mandatory PvP Talents
Raise Abomination applies wounds, your disease, and deals a fair
amount of damage. This is a lot of value from one cooldown, and helps establish
the powerful burst window that Unholy provides right now. As mentioned, this
talent has great synergy with
Army of the Damned.
Necrotic Aura is very powerful when paired with a teammate
that also does magical damage. For Unholy DK, a significant portion of your
damage comes from spell damage.
Situational PvP Talents
Decomposing Aura is very disruptive to the enemy team, with a near
permanent max health reduction on your main target. This makes your burst
windows much more impactful, because they have 15% less health to go through
every time you set one up. It also lowers the effect of their heals that are
determined by a percentage of their maximum health.
Dark Simulacrum is one of the more interesting spells in the game
currently. It is extremely powerful against spammable CC effects, such as
Polymorph, or
Cyclone as well as powerful healing cooldowns
such as
Life Cocoon. It is a neat addition to Death Knight's toolkit,
while having a high skill-cap and awareness requirement.
Dome of Ancient Shadow is very powerful for team survivability and
should be used in almost every spell cleave where you will not be targeted.
It provides an answer to the 'setups' of any comp that deals with magical
damage. This also handles rot comps extremely well, as stacking in it allows
your team to stabilize through the sustained pressure.
Cadaverous Pallor actually has a niche against spell cleaves, despite being underrepresented, if you are fairly certain you will be the target. The survivability that this provides over the length of the game against two spellcasters is unmatched.
Necrotic Strike is extremely impactful, as the healing absorption
ignores all damage reduction effects, including enemy defensive cooldowns and
other mitigations. It is entirely dependant on how high health pools are
relative to damage done, which makes it fluctuate in value depending on the
tuning of that season.
Changelog
- 20 Feb. 2021: Updated to highlight Necrotic Strike synergies.
- 05 Dec. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands Season 1.
- 26 Oct. 2020: Updated Talent Table.
- 14 Oct. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands pre-patch.
This guide has been written by Flarkness, a multi r1 DK who has reached 3300 rating. He streams competitive gameplay and coaching on Twitch and creates guides, highlights, and news videos on Youtube.
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