Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds (Season 4)

You can choose 3 of the following PvP talents. Each of them have their 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, allowing you to increase uptime. This is another pressure-oriented PvP talent, but can be very impactful.

Necrotic Wounds is a very powerful Mortal Wounds-type effect that stacks with other effects of 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 that will struggle to heal through the 30% healing reduction at maximum stacks!

Necrotic Aura is a very simple talent that will increase the magical damage taken by any enemy within an 8-yard radius of you. All spellcasters are primarily magic damage, but many melee, such as fellow Death Knights or Demon Hunters will also do a fair amount of magic damage. Therefore, if your composition could use just a little bit more "oomph" to land kills, this talent is a very simple pick that will increase all your pressure in every window.

Strangulate is a very impactful crowd control effect. It costs no resources, has no cast time, and lasts 4 seconds on a short 1-minute 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 a PvP Talent that should only be used in Rated Battlegrounds. It scales tremendously well with the amount of players on the enemy team, and RBGs have the most players available in them for rated content. The more players getting dispelled and healed, the more impact it will have, and it is practically a mandatory talent for that environment.

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.

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.

Bloodforged Armor is a new addition to the Death Knight's toolkit. This ability provides a 20% physical damage reduction for 3 seconds after each death strike. This should be used in any class with heavy physical damage, such as Feral and Warrior.

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, allowing you to increase uptime. This is another pressure-oriented PvP talent, but can be very impactful.

Necromancer's Bargain was one of the weaker talents previously , but due to the 310% increase in festering wound damage that came with patch 10.1.5, this is now one of the strongest picks. In addition to applying Crypt Fever It can be upwards of 20-30% of an enemy's health on a 30-second cooldown. This will be taken in nearly all match-ups.