Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds (Shadowlands / 9.0.2)

Level	Choices
15	✔ Infected Claws	✔ All Will Serve	✔ Clawing Shadows
25	✔ Bursting Sores	? Ebon Fever	✔ Unholy Blight
30	? Grip of the Dead	✘ Death's Reach	✔ Asphyxiate
35	✘ Pestilent Pustules	✔ Harbinger of Doom	? Soul Reaper
40	✔ Spell Eater	✔ Wraith Walk	✔ Death Pact
45	✘ Pestilence	✔ Unholy Pact	✘ Defile
50	✔ Army of the Damned	✘ Summon Gargoyle	✔ Unholy Assault

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.