Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0.1)

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 consider taking Death Pact and Death Defiance into one-shot comps or comps you are struggling into. You can also consider taking Wraith Walk into comps with a lot of roots.

The Unholy tree is fairly static. You can consider dropping Blightfall for another point in Commander of the Dead or Morbidity if you are playing the disease build.

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 strong talent as it makes your Sudden Doom cause your Death Coil deal a percentage of your plague damage on the target as bonus damage as well as slowing the talent.

Necrotic Wounds is a very powerful Mortal Wounds-style effect that stacks with other healing reduction effects. This talent is now directly tied to Putrefy, meaning you want to have three stacks of Putrefy ready before you burst so you immediately apply three stacks of Necrotic Wounds.

Spellwarden is an extremely powerful utility talent that lets you cast AMS on your teammates. This can be used to prevent crowd control from landing on your healer or to allow a teammate to stay aggressive into caster matchups. Given how much magical CC exists in the game, this is an excellent default pick.

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 Blinding Sleet 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.

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 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, Windwalker, Beast Mastery Hunter, and Warrior.

Stitchmaster can have value into comps that are extremely difficult to survive against, but you need to be careful. Every Death Strike consumes all of your lesser ghouls, which can severely hurt your overall damage if you are not managing it properly.