glyphs Unholy Death Knight: Mists of Pandaria Rotation Changes, Talents, and Glyphs (Patch 5.0.4)

[Vlad 411]

This article is no longer being updated. Please check our Unholy Death Knight guide, which is fully compatible with Mists of Pandaria, and is being constantly updated. Thank you.

In preparation for the updates to our guides for Mists of Pandaria Patch 5.0.4, we are releasing articles such as this one, explaining what has changed for a particular class and spec, and what the new rotation is likely to be.

Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress (both from Blizzard's side and from our own) and that this article assumes you are at least somewhat familiar with the Cataclysm version of the Unholy Death Knight rotation and playstyle (such as from reading our guide).

We will first list the most important changes to the Unholy Death Knight Cataclysm abilities, and then we will proceed to explaining the (likely to be) optimal rotation. Keep in mind that we do not document every single change or new ability, only those that impact the rotation.

Finally, we will give you some information about the most useful talents and glyphs you should choose.

New Abilities

• Unholy Aura is a new raid buff that increases the melee and ranged attack speed of all raid members by 10%. This effect was previously provided by a talent (Improved Icy Talons) that was only available to Frost Death Knights.
• Control Undead allows you to take control of any hostile Undead mob (only one mob at a time, however). Bosses are immune to this ability. The mob's attack speed and casting speed are diminished, but it retains all of its abilities. You cannot have your own ghoul (Raise Dead) and the controlled mob active at the same time, making this ability nearly useless to you.
• Soul Reaper is a nuke, with "execute" properties. It deals 100% weapon damage and applies a debuff on the target, lasting 5 seconds. If, when the debuff expires, the target is below 35% health, it deals a moderate amount of Shadow damage. The ability's damage, when the target is not below 35% health, does not make it worth casting. Finally, if the target is killed while the debuff is active, you gain 50% haste for 10 seconds.
• Ebon Plaguebringer now provides the Physical Vulnerability debuff, which was previously only provided by Frost Death Knights.
• Tier 1 talents offer a choice between Plague Leech and Unholy Blight (and Roiling Blood, although this is a passive ability). We discuss these talents in greater depth in the Talents section.
• Tier 4 talents offer a choice between Death Siphon, Death Pact, and Conversion. We discuss these talents in greater depth in the Talents section.
• Tier 5 talents offer a choice between Blood Tap and two passive spells, Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption. We discuss these talents in greater depth in the Talents section.

Changes to Existing Mechanics

• The base global cooldown is now 1 second by default. Previously, this was a feature of Unholy Presence.
• Horn of Winter now grants 10% increased attack power to all raid members. This is due to the old buff of Horn of Winter (549 Strength and Agility to all raid members) having been removed. Horn of Winter now also lasts for 5 minutes, instead of 2 minutes (3 with the appropriate glyph).
• Frost Fever and Blood Plague now last 30 seconds.
• Unholy Frenzy is no longer an Enrage effect. This only means that it no longer has particular relevance for Fury Warriors.
• Ebon Plaguebringer no longer applies the magic damage taken increasing debuff.

Removed Abilities:

• Blood Tap has practically been removed. There is a new spell with the same name in Mists of Pandaria, although it has nothing to do with the Cataclysm version of Blood Tap.

Single Target Rotation

The Unholy Death Knight rotation remains practically unchanged from the Cataclysm version (detailed in our guide). The only relevant change comes from the inclusion of Soul Reaper in the rotation (when the target is below 35%). It should be used on cooldown with a very high priority. Other abilities that you gain from your talents will be used sporadically, as described in the talents section or as dictated by their situational benefit.

Multiple Target Rotation

In terms of multiple target and AoE rotations, there are some proposed changes currently on the Beta. We will continue to follow their evolution before commenting on them here.

Talents

Tier 1 talents offer a choice between 3 talents that are related to your diseases.

• Roiling Blood
• Plague Leech
• Unholy Blight

For single-target situations, Plague Leech will result in a small DPS increase, making it preferable to the other two options.

In multiple-target situations, the choice between Unholy Blight and Roiling Blood will depend on the specifics of the encounter.

Tier 2 talents offer a choice between 3 survival talents.

• Lichborne
• Anti-Magic Zone
• Purgatory

Lichborne allows you to heal yourself with Death Coil for 10 seconds every 2 minutes.

Anti-Magic Zone places a protective barrier at a target location, reducing the magic damage taken by any raid members inside it by 75%. The zone lasts for 10 seconds, or until it absorbs a fixed amount of damage (rather low). It is unchanged from its Cataclysm version (except that it can now be placed at a targeted location), and it will remain useful for reducing the damage of a powerful AoE attack, and less useful for reducing damage that comes in over time.

Purgatory allows you to survive an attack that would otherwise kill you, every 3 minutes. The amount of damage that is prevented from reaching you (i.e., the amount of damage that would have been the "overkill" portion) will be turned into a healing absorption effect on you, lasting 3 seconds. During those 3 seconds, you cannot die, and all damage done to you is added to the healing absorption effect. If, after 3 seconds, you were not healed for that amount (so, if the absorption effect still exists), you will die.

The mechanics of the encounter you are progressing on will determine your choice. Anti-Magic zone is useful as a raid cooldown any time there is a big magic damage attack that you want to mitigate. Purgatory can be useful in allowing you to bypass encounter mechanics, while Lichborne simply allows you to help out the healers by keeping yourself alive during times of heavy damage.

Tier 3 talents offer a choice between 3 crowd-control and utility talents.

• Death's Advance
• Chilblains
• Asphyxiate

Death's Advance will probably be the default choice unless encounter mechanics require something else, simply due to the fact that it offers a passive 10% increased movement speed at all times.

Chilblains will be useful when there are adds that must be kited.

Asphyxiate, which is an improved Strangulate (half the cooldown, no rune cost, stun instead of silence, when possible), will mostly have PvP applications and, unless there is a specific encounter where it is for some reason particularly beneficial, it will not show up in PvE.

Tier 4 talents offer a choice between 3 self-healing talents.

• Death Pact
• Death Siphon
• Conversion

Conversion provides a high amount of healing, but it will also negatively affect your DPS.

Death Pact will be the default choice when you need a large amount of healing on-demand, especially considering that it has no resource cost.

At the same time, Death Siphon is quite powerful and, despite the fact that it costs a death rune, it is very useful because it also deals damage to the target.

Tier 5 talents offer a choice between 3 talents that improve your rune regeneration.

• Blood Tap
• Runic Empowerment
• Runic Corruption

In terms of efficiency, the choice will come down to either Runic Empowerment or Runic Corruption.

We believe that Unholy Death Knights will probably opt for Runic Corruption.

Tier 6 talents offer a choice between 3 crowd-control talents.

• Gorefiend's Grasp
• Remorseless Winter
• Desecrated Ground

In a rather disappointing turn of events, the tier 6 talents have no effect on your actual DPS performance. These talents are heavily PvP-centric and we believe that for PvE the choice will be largely irrelevant.

Glyphs

While many Death Knight glyphs are interesting and have applicability for PvP or questing, in terms of PvE performance, there are only a few Major Glyphs that we consider worth mentioning.

• Glyph of Unholy Frenzy removes the damaging portion of Unholy Frenzy, a small but worthwhile benefit.
• Glyph of Death Coil makes your Death Coil castable on allies. When doing so, it will place a damage absorption shield on them.
• Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell allows your Anti-Magic Shell to absorb all the magic damage taken (instead of only 75% without the glyph), up to 50% of your maximum health. In practice, this will allow Anti-Magic Shell to absorb slightly more damage, in some situations, improving your survivability.

This concludes our Unholy Death Knight preview for Mists of Pandaria. We hope you have enjoyed reading it and that it proved useful to you. As always, we are looking forward to reading your opinions on the matter!

[rodalpho 8]

Notes.

- Blood Boil does a great deal more damage than live, and deals 50% more damage with a disease up. It actually deals comparable damage to the AE component of Howling Blast, once you include Unholy's 25% higher attack power. The disease scaling component has been bugged for years, and was recently fixed in beta.

- Blood Boil is on Reaping now, so it refreshes as Death runes

- Unholy sustained AE involves using Festering Strike twice to get 4 death runes, then use them to Blood Boil. All 4 will refresh as Death runes, including the frost rune. This is due to another bug that was fixed.

- Note that this AE can take well over 20s to ramp-up, depending on whether Outbreak is off cooldown and if you chose Unholy Blight, so it is not usable in most content, it's only worth doing on long-lasting (~30s+) sustained AE. In dungeons and on trash, unholy just spreads diseases, Death & Decays, and uses blood boil when it's available. It doesn't bother with the Festering Strike setup.

- Unholy lost its third disease, but Scourge Strike was changed to scale from 25% damage per disease up from 18%, so this is a zero-sum change

- The ghoul pet has a lot less health in 5.x.

- Unholy Frenzy is no longer an enrage effect, so you don't need to feel obligated to use it on a Fury warrior

- Ebon Plaguebringer applies Physical Vulnerability raid debuff now. Previously only frost DKs had this.

- Unholy lost the Spell Damage Taken raid debuff

- Plague Leech is the best single-target DPS talent. Unholy's diseases last 60s when played correctly, so it's worth 1D rune every 60s. UB and RB are worth exactly zero in single-target situations.

- Unholy Blight allows unholy to ramp-up AE more quickly.

- Roiling Blood offers a bit of extra AE damage since you can skip a Pestilence.

- Death Coil innately does 20% more damage for Unholy. It does not heal for 20% more when used with Lichborne.

- Chilblains is terrible for Unholy PvE. If a DK wants to kite, they will spec Frost.

- Blood Tap is being taken (back) off the GCD in the next beta build. It's unclear how exactly they will do that. If it's reverted entirely, so it can be macroed, Blood Tap will be the best choice for everybody.

- Runic Empowerment is not an optimal choice for Unholy because the spec can't game it. Unholy needs to Festering Strike because those runes turn into death via Reaping and the ability also extends disease durations.

- It's worth noting that Soul Reaper is very powerful for unholy. It scales with mastery and unholy has 25% more AP than frost. Using SR is top priority for every DPS DK spec, but it's doubly so for unholy. SR should end up a significant portion of your total damage.

Edited August 5, 2012 by rodalpho

[Vlad 411]

Notes.

- Blood Boil does a great deal more damage than live, and deals 50% more damage with a disease up. It actually deals comparable damage to the AE component of Howling Blast, once you include Unholy's 25% higher attack power. The disease scaling component has been bugged for years, and was recently fixed in beta.

- Blood Boil is on Reaping now, so it refreshes as Death runes

- Unholy sustained AE involves using Festering Strike twice to get 4 death runes, then use them to Blood Boil. All 4 will refresh as Death runes, including the frost rune. This is due to another bug that was fixed.

- Note that this AE can take well over 20s to ramp-up, depending on whether Outbreak is off cooldown and if you chose Unholy Blight, so it is not usable in most content, it's only worth doing on long-lasting (~30s+) sustained AE. In dungeons and on trash, unholy just spreads diseases, Death & Decays, and uses blood boil when it's available. It doesn't bother with the Festering Strike setup.

- Unholy lost its third disease, but Scourge Strike was changed to scale from 25% damage per disease up from 18%, so this is a zero-sum change

- The ghoul pet has a lot less health in 5.x.

- Unholy Frenzy is no longer an enrage effect, so you don't need to feel obligated to use it on a Fury warrior

- Ebon Plaguebringer applies Physical Vulnerability raid debuff now. Previously only frost DKs had this.

- Unholy lost the Spell Damage Taken raid debuff

- Plague Leech is the best single-target DPS talent. Unholy's diseases last 60s when played correctly, so it's worth 1D rune every 60s. UB and RB are worth exactly zero in single-target situations.

- Unholy Blight allows unholy to ramp-up AE more quickly.

- Roiling Blood offers a bit of extra AE damage since you can skip a Pestilence.

- Death Coil innately does 20% more damage for Unholy. It does not heal for 20% more when used with Lichborne.

- Chilblains is terrible for Unholy PvE. If a DK wants to kite, they will spec Frost.

- Blood Tap is being taken (back) off the GCD in the next beta build. It's unclear how exactly they will do that. If it's reverted entirely, so it can be macroed, Blood Tap will be the best choice for everybody.

- Runic Empowerment is not an optimal choice for Unholy because the spec can't game it. Unholy needs to Festering Strike because those runes turn into death via Reaping and the ability also extends disease durations.

- It's worth noting that Soul Reaper is very powerful for unholy. It scales with mastery and unholy has 25% more AP than frost. Using SR is top priority for every DPS DK spec, but it's doubly so for unholy. SR should end up a significant portion of your total damage.

Thank you and sorry to reply so late. We've incorporated many of your suggestions into the guide :)

[rodalpho 8]

Blood Tap was indeed taken off the GCD, so all the DK guides need to be changed. Since soul reaper doesn't cost a death rune, Blood Tap is less advantageous than before, so if the blood or unholy player really prefers Runic Corruption they can use it without hurting themselves too much. Frost is much better off with Runic Empowerment due to its higher efficiency.

Blood: Blood Tap, either macroed or unmacroed as the player prefers (unmacroed for control)

Frost: Runic Empowerment (macroed Blood Tap for PvP/Necrotic Strike or if you pick Death Siphon)

Unholy: Blood Tap, macroed. Gives more Soul Reapers, and SR is very important for unholy. Also helpful for PvP/Death Siphon.

The blood tap macro:

#showtooltip

/startattack

/cast Death Coil

/cast Blood Tap

(Replace Death Coil with your spec's RP dump as appropriate.)

Interestingly, Runic Empowerment sims as a 0.8% DPS gain over Runic Corruption for Unholy, so if Blood Tap was still on the GCD the technical recommendation would be RE for Unholy also, even though you'd be stuck with unpaired runes and can't game it, RE's slightly greater efficiency wins out. Luckily Blood Tap is usable now so that's a non-issue.

Also sims have shown that Plague Leech is a much smaller DPS improvement than previously accepted. It's only a 0.5% DPS gain, and if you mess up at ANY TIME and don't use Plague Leech when your diseases are at <3s remaining duration, you lose that advantage. I personally will be choosing Unholy Blight for this reason.

Similarly, Plague Leech is worth 1.4% DPS over Unholy Blight for frost. That's a more significant gain, but in fights with movement, etc, I still strongly feel Unholy Blight is a better choice. If you play perfectly, get PL. If you're human, UB.

Edited August 15, 2012 by rodalpho

[Vlad 411]

Thank you for keeping us updated as to the changes. We'll update the Unholy DK guide (not this article) over the next few days, and we'll be sure to include it all :)

[rodalpho 8]

From more recent sims, Plague Leech is a 0.8% (Unholy) or 1.8% (frost) improvement over no T1 talent at all. Unholy Blight has no value on single targets. I can't imagine Unholy dealing with the annoyance, but frost players may want to choose PL if they think they can execute it well. I personally will be taking UB.

With all the various nerfs/buffs, Unholy is ~3% behind frost. Remains to be seen if it's buffed up to match frost. Unholy suffers from significant mechanical disadvantages (ramp-up, target switching, lack of burst damage, AE) so if it's not neck and neck with frost, there's really no compelling reason to choose unholy.