Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds — The War Within (11.1.7)

You have a few flexible points in the tree, and it will mostly come down to preference. Starting with the Death Knight Tree, you can take Unyielding Will into match-ups where a consistent dispel is useful, such as Affliction Warlocks or Shadow Priests. You can also consider taking Wraith Walk into comps where you expect to be rooted a lot, such as Frost Mages. The point in Grip of the Dead can also be dropped for Wraith Walk.

The Unholy tree has several small talents that can be swapped around based on preference. Defile, Unholy Pact, Magus of the Dead, Ghoulish Frenzy, and Rotten Touch are all interchangeable.

You can choose 3 of the following PvP talents. Each of them has its uses, but some are better for certain strategies than others. These talents are sorted into General PvP Talents that can be applied to almost any situation and Situational PvP Talents that require certain enemy compositions, brackets, or environments to excel in. Unholy has a great deal of viable PvP talents, so all the best use cases will be outlined here for you to choose the proper three for the type of content or composition you are playing.

Doomburst is a very synergistic talent as there are a lot of current effects that happen when a wound is burst. Having another way to burst wounds, especially at a range, can be extremely impactful. Furthermore, if you are using it at range, you can apply a massive 90% slow to the enemy, allowing you to stop them from kiting for a brief moment and increase uptime. This is another pressure-oriented PvP talent, but it can be very impactful.

Necrotic Wounds is a very powerful Mortal Wounds-type effect that stacks with other effects of a similar nature. It is a somewhat tricky talent to use, as when you burst a wound, you will start a 12-second timer. Any additional wounds you burst in this period stacks this Mortal Wounds effect higher, and it will cap out at 6. However, it will not reset the duration of the effect. Therefore, you will want to burst as many wounds at the beginning of each of these 12-second windows as you can, resulting in you pooling your wounds near the end of the windows. If you can master this cyclical pattern, you will be extremely disruptive toward enemy healers who will struggle to heal through the 24% healing reduction at maximum stacks!

Spellwarden is a remarkably powerful tool. This allows you to cast AMS on your teammates. This can be used to prevent crowd control from landing on your healer or to allow your teammate to stay aggressive into caster match-ups. This is a great default pick due to the amount of magical CC in the game.

Necromancer's Bargain is an amazing damage pick. In addition to applying Crypt Fever It can deal upwards of 20-30% of an enemy's health on a 30-second cooldown.

Rot and Wither is actually quite useful now due to the fact that Defile saw significant damage buffs. This can be a solid pick into any comp that will consistently stack, such as melee cleaves.

Strangulate is a very impactful crowd control effect. It costs no resources, has no cast time, and lasts 4 seconds on a short 45-second cooldown. Because of this, you will tend to set up your own CC chain with Asphyxiate into Strangulate. This is going to be very difficult for a healer to deal with because even if they use their trinket on one effect, they still have to sit the other. You will want to use your burst cooldowns during these windows to make sure the CC will result in a kill.

Life and Death is pretty lackluster and while it can be useful in Rated Battlegrounds, it is not a standard pick and generally not something we will ever consider in arena.

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.

Bloodforged Armor is a new addition to the Death Knight's toolkit. This ability provides a 25% physical damage reduction for 4 seconds after each death strike. This should be used in any class with heavy physical damage, such as Feral and Warrior.