Unholy Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — The War Within (11.1.0)

Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Unholy Death Knight for The War Within Season 2. Check this page to learn everything you need to know about gearing a Unholy Death Knight, including the BiS Gear from all sources, Raiding, and Mythic+, information on the best Trinkets, Tier Sets, and much more.

We have three BiS lists below, each detailing the best gear you can obtain from a specific source. We have the overall list, a raid-only one, and, finally, a mythic+-only list. They are all optimised to give you the highest single target DPS. The various builds we run have very similar stat and trinket priorities and will run the same set of gear.

Cyrce's Circlet is included in these lists as it currently is a very powerful ring. Blizzard is likely to nerf it however so make sure to check back if they do so for an updated lis.

2.

BiS Gear for Unholy Death Knight

Overall BiS List Mythic+ Gear BiS List Raid Gear BiS List

3.

Overall BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

Below, you will find the theoretical BiS set of gear for The War Within Season 2.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Cauldron Champion's Crown	One-Armed Bandit
Neck	Strapped Rescue-Keg	Cinderbrew Meadery
Shoulder	Cauldron Champion's Screamplate	Rik Reverb
Cloak	Consecrated Cloak (Haste Mastery) with Elemental Focusing Lens	Tailoring
Chest	Cauldron Champion's Ribcage	Sprocketmonger Lockenstock
Bracers	Everforged Vambraces (Haste Mastery) with Elemental Focusing Lens	Blacksmithing
Gloves	Cauldron Champion's Fistguards	Cauldron of Carnage
Belt	Coin-Operated Girdle	One-Armed Bandit
Legs	Galvanized Oxxein Legguards	Theater of Pain
Boots	Cauldron Champion's Greatboots	Catalyst
Ring #1	The Jastor Diamond	Chrome King Gallywix
Ring #2	Cyrce's Circlet	Siren Isle
Trinket #1	House of Cards	One-Armed Bandit
Trinket #2	Eye of Kezan	Chrome King Gallywix
2H Weapon	Best-in-Slots	One-Armed Bandit

3.

Mythic+ Gear BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, with farmable gear from Mythic+ Dungeons. This is a great place to start on a relatively new character, as you can infinitely grind out these items from Mythic+.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Waxsteel Greathelm	Darkflame Cleft
Neck	Strapped Rescue-Keg	Cinderbrew Meadery
Shoulder	Unyielding Combatant's Pauldrons	Theater of Pain
Cloak	Electrician's Siphoning Filter	Operation: Floodgate
Chest	Slashproof Business Plate	Cinderbrew Meadery
Bracers	Stonefury Vambraces	The MOTHERLODE!!
Gloves	Jumpstarter's Scaffold-Scrapers	Operation: Floodgate
Belt	Lightning-Conductor's Bands	The Rookery
Legs	Galvanized Oxxein Legguards	Theater of Pain
Boots	Sabatons of Rampaging Elements	The MOTHERLODE!!
Ring #1	Bloodoath Signet	Theater of Pain
Ring #2	Footbomb Championship Ring	The MOTHERLODE!!
Trinket #1	Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker	Operation: Floodgate
Trinket #2	Signet of the Priory	Priory of the Sacred Flame
2H Weapon	Electro-Arm Bludgeoner	The MOTHERLODE!!

3.

Raid Gear BiS List for Unholy Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, only using gear from the Liberation of Undermine Raid.

This list is mostly useful for informing your organized guild of what loot is optimal for you for loot distribution purposes.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Cauldron Champion's Crown	One-Armed Bandit
Neck	Semi-Charmed Amulet	Rik Reverb
Shoulder	Cauldron Champion's Screamplate	Rik Reverb
Cloak	Test Pilot's Go-Pack	Sprocketmonger Lockenstock
Chest	Cauldron Champion's Ribcage	Sprocketmonger Lockenstock
Bracers	Revved-Up Vambraces	Vexie and the Geargrinders
Gloves	Cauldron Champion's Fistguards	Cauldron of Carnage
Belt	Coin-Operated Girdle	One-Armed Bandit
Legs	Hired Muscle's Legguards	Mug'Zee
Boots	Cauldron Champion's Greatboots	Catalyst/td>
Ring #1	The Jastor Diamond	Chrome King Gallywix
Ring #2	Faded Championship Ring	Liberation of Undermine
Trinket #1	House of Cards	One-Armed Bandit
Trinket #2	Eye of Kezan	Chrome King Gallywix
2H Weapon	Best-in-Slots	One-Armed Bandit

The Cyrce's Circlet continues to be BIS in 11.1, even when at an ilvl disadvantage to other rings. As a general rule, you want to play the following:

• Legendary Skipper's Citrine, Stormbringer's Runed Citrine and Fathomdweller's Runed Citrine for both raid and Mythic+.

For more information on how to get the ring, as well as acquiring all of the different gems that you can possibly socket into it, check out our Cyrce's Circlet guide below!

If you have a new piece of gear for which you need gems and enchant advice, you can find everything on our dedicated page below.

While gearing up, item level will be your primary target. Strength is our best stat, and you shouldn't focus too much on your secondaries at first. Once you start to receive gear pieces with the same ilvl but different stats, that is when you want to start optimizing your stat distribution. Generally, Unholy Death Knights want to prioritize Haste and Mastery! We recommend simming your character to determine what upgrade is best for you! For a more detailed explanation, you can read the Simulations page.

Simming your character is far and beyond the best way to determine if a piece of gear is, in fact, an upgrade. The trick is knowing how to do it in a way that produces reliable results. If you follow the Simulations guide page, you can use this to have a more practical gearing guide than simply following a BiS list.

Our 11.1 tier set focuses heavily on increasing our Death Coil and Epidemic damage. It has strong synergy with San'Layn due to Frenzied Bloodthirst giving a 70% boost to Death Coil damage in our Dark Transformation window. This synergy helps San'Layn become a viable Single Target alternative once we equip the 4-set.

The 11.1 tier set for Unholy is significantly worse compared to the Season 1 version. We see something like a 5% total gain for the new 4-set compared to over 8% for the old one. This means that we only swap to the new 4-set once we gain a significant ilvl advantage on the pieces. Sim yourself to be sure!

You only need 4 pieces out of 5 to get both set bonuses. We recommend you get all items except for the Legs, due to their lack of Haste. Check out the BiS List for more information.

The War Within has a powerful upgrade system for your gear where you use Valorstones and Crests to upgrade your gear. These are obtainable from practically all forms of content in the game.

For more information on the new Gear Upgrades system, check out our dedicated page for it below.

There are three primary items to upgrade as a Unholy Death Knight:

1. Weapon
2. Trinket
3. Head/ Chest/ Legs

With how the upgrade system works with Crests being the limited currency, you want to upgrade the most powerful slots you can. For Unholy Death Knights, this will be your weapon (Attack Power scales with weapon ilvl). After you have upgraded your weapon, move on to trinkets and high-stat slot items like Legs, Helm, Chest, etc.

Unholy wants to run double Elemental Focusing Lens on crafted Consecrated Cloak (Haste Mastery) and Everforged Vambraces (Haste Mastery). We pick these two slots since they have the lowest stat value of all pieces, minimising the loss due to the ilvl difference from max ilvl. There are multiple embellishments which are really close here, including Dawnthread Lining and Duskthread Lining. What ends up best depends on your current stat distribution, as both Duskthread and Dawnthread gain value if you have little Versatility and Critical Strike respectively. Elemental Focusing Lens wins out by 0.2% in BiS setup.

When it comes to your other crafted slots, we are only wearing two crafted items in our BiS setup (due to the ilvl loss). Use crafting as a way of "filling in the gaps" in your gear, trying to find the best value upgrade in a slot where you already do not have a good piece. Sim yourself to find the best option for you!

Unholy aims to use one on-use Trinket as well as one passive one. In The War Within Season 2, our best on-use is House of Cards followed by Funhouse Lens. Funhouse Lens here is a drop from Delves and can be obtained at max 665 ilvl. Still, it is only 0.5% behind House of Cards. Furthermore, due to the scaling nature of House of Cards, Funhouse Lens ends up better on fights shorter than 4 minutes. For our passive trinket, Eye of Kezan is our best option. Again, this is a scaling trinket which gains power the longer the encounter is. For alternatives, we have Suspicious Energy Drink, another Delve trinket, as well as Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker. Both of these are better on fights shorter than 4 minutes. Finally, running double passive trinkets are not that bad. The lack of good on-use trinkets mean that setups such as Eye of Kezan + Suspicious Energy Drink lags the BiS setup by only 0.8%.

You will notice a significant amount of Delve trinkets high up in this list. They can be obtained at 665 ilvl via vault drops and perform very well compared to higher ilvl options.

Many people overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is usually better than a better quality of stats. Because of this, wearing higher item-level gear with worse stats tends to be better than lower item-level gear with great stats. Keep this in mind when considering gear. For more information on stats, please refer to our dedicated page.

For Unholy specifically, aim to have Haste as our top stat by raw amount, followed by Mastery. For a closer look at stats, please see the below article./p>

For neck and ring pieces, you can generally afford to drop 5-10 ilevels in most cases to get our preferred stats: Haste and Mastery. That said, you should always sim yourself to see what is better as the secondary stat diminishing returns can still change your ideal setup. It can be useful to wear crafted jewelry due to how you can control the stats; just remember that you cannot craft the maximum ilvl possible!