Unholy Death Knight PvP Guide — Midnight (12.0.1)

Unholy Death Knights match very high sustained pressure with unique and powerful utility. The sustained pressure comes from the fact that Unholy has damage from so many different sources. Up to two diseases, a permanent ghoul, multiple summonable pets, wounds bursting, melee attacks, and powerful cooldowns. This makes the damage very difficult to avoid, and thus teams will struggle to heal through it. Furthermore, its unique toolkit provides it with arguably the most stops for casters in the game, between Death Grip, Mind Freeze, Leap, Asphyxiate and Gnaw. Managing all this utility tends to be tricky for newer players, but the reward is massive.

Damage Utility Mobility Survivability Difficulty

Strong overall damage

Unholy has some of the highest consistent damage in the game and high burst with Soul Reaper and Raise Abomination. The scary part about Unholy is that it does not really feel like it has “downtime.” Even outside of major cooldowns, the pressure from diseases, pets, and constant uptime forces you to respect it at all times.

Average utility

Death Knight in general has okay utility with Death Grip and Chains of Ice, but compared to most other melee, it does not bring a ton of team wide utility.

Weak Mobility

Death Knight has the weakest mobility of any melee, and that is because its goal is anti mobility. With Death Grip it can easily reposition targets, and with Chains of Ice it can catch back up without needing traditional gap closers.

Strong Mitigation Death Knight has strong defensives with Icebound Fortitude and Death Strike, both of which help mitigate enemy burst. The biggest flaw, though, is that every defensive except Icebound Fortitude gets weaker with dampening. As the game goes on, your survivability drops, and it becomes much easier to kill you.

Moderately Difficult Unholy has a rotation that is more complex than most other melee. However, because it has limited utility, the overall learning curve is lower compared to classes with larger, more complex toolkits.

This guide ended up being very long, so we decided to split it in different pages.

• On the Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents page, you will find an analysis of each PvE talent row to help you decide which talent to pick on each row, as well as an overview of the PvP talents, which advice on which ones to take and under which conditions.
• On the Unholy Death Knight PvP Rotation and Playstyle page, you will learn how to use your spells, depending on the situation (damaging, surviving, controlling enemy players, etc.), and what is generally expected of your class and spec in PvP.
• On the Unholy Death Knight PvP Stat Priority and Gear page, you will find the stat priority to follow in PvP, as well as advice for choosing your gear, particularly trinkets.
• On the Unholy Death Knight PvP Best Races page, you will find lists of the Alliance and Horde races, ranked by how good they are for Unholy Death Knights in PvP, as well as explanations regarding why and how their racials benefit you.
• On the Unholy Death Knight PvP Useful Macros page, you will find a collection of useful macros for PvP for Unholy Death Knights.
• On the Unholy Death Knight Arena Composition page, you will find the list of the most powerful Arena compositions featuring Unholy Death Knights, in both 2v2 and 3v3 modes.