Unholy Death Knight DPS Stat Priority — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

The most common stat priority you will find in your sims for Unholy Death Knights is as follows.

1. Mastery
2. Critical Strike
3. Versatility
4. Haste

Unholy mainly aims for Mastery and Critical Strike. These two stats synergise well with eachother and generally have more value than the rest. As an example, you wanted to allocate a total of 1000 secondary points, you would get something like 600 Mastery, 300 Crit, 100 Versatility and 0 Haste. Mastery is generally quite a lot better than Crit whereas Versatility is relatively close to Haste.

The priority remains the same in Mythic+!

Usually, a higher item level piece of gear will be a bigger upgrade than a lower item level piece of gear, even with better stats. We highly recommend you sim your character to find the stat weights that work best for you.

Strength is your primary statistic. You should look for it in all of your upgrades. It provides you with Attack Power, which determines the damage your abilities do.

Mastery, through Mastery: Dreadblade, increases your Shadow and minion damage. Furthermore, it increases the Critical Strike damage of your Diseases and Minions and your minion duration when talented into Commander of the Dead. We get some higher-order scaling with Mastery both due to the Critical Strike damage interaction as well as the commander pet increase (you get both duration and damage which double-dips). This helps making Mastery as well as Crit strong stats.

Haste will increase your attack speed and Rune regeneration rate. It also reduces your Global Cooldown. For you pets, it increases their attack speed as well as the rate at which they generate energy, making them use their abilities more frequently.

Critical Strike increases your chance to critically hit with all spells and abilities. Crits deal double damage by default, but several effects can increase your crit damage, and make crits even stronger.

Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.

For Unholy, your pets and minions inherit your stats. Increasing your Haste will make them hit faster and regenerate Energy faster. Critical strike will increase their Critical Strike chance, etc. Stats are dynamically updated for the pets, meaning a new buff you receive will then also be applied to any pets you currently have. This means that you do not need to worry about applying buffs before summoning any minions! However, it is important to recognize the fact that this inheritance is not instantaneous! It takes anywhere between 0 and 5 seconds for the pets to actually inherit the stats from us (both when we gain and lose the stats).

The gems, enchants, and consumables that you choose are directly affected by your stat priority. To find the best mix of these, we do recommend that you simulate yourself using a program like Raidbots or Simulationcraft, however, we have a page linked below that will give you advice on this topic.