Unholy Death Knight Raid Guide

Offensive Nodes

• Rider's Champion - Each Rune spent gives you a 10% chance to summon one of the following Four Horsemen:
  • Mograine
    • Puts up a Death and Decay that follows him.
      • You gain the benefit of Mograine's Might and Unholy Ground if you are standing in this.
  • Whitemane
    • Undeath is a disease with a 24 second duration that spreads and gains 1 stack every time you use Scourge Strike on the infected target.
  • Trollbane
    • Repeatedly casts Chains of Ice over his duration that gets shattered by Scourge Strike with Trollbane's Icy Fury.
  • Nazgrim
    • Grants you 3% Strength, increasing by 1% for every Rune spent while Nazgrim is active.
• Apocalypse Now
  • Summons all 4 Horsemen for 20 seconds after casting Raise Abomination. This lines up with every other use of Dark Transformation and Apocalypse making for extremely large burst windows especially when combined with on-use trinkets.
    • If a Horsemen is already out, it extends the current duration by 20 seconds instead.
      • Mograine does not recast his Death and Decay but all other Horsemen recast their abilities.
• Fury of the Horsemen or A Feast of Souls
  • Fury of the Horsemen increases the duration of your Horsemen when spending Runic Power which has incredible value for Unholy due to Mastery interactions with the Horsemen's abilities. A Feast of Souls enables larger Death Coils and Epidemics but is not strong enough on single target to make it worth it.
• Hungering Thirst
  • Passively increases the damage of your diseases, Virulent Plague as well as Frost Fever and Blood Plague while playing Superstrain, and Death Coil damage.
• Mawsworn Menace
  • Increases Scourge Strike and Clawing Shadows damage by 10% as well as reducing the cooldown of Death and Decay by 10 seconds allowing you to use 2 charges of Death and Decay during Dark Transformation in AoE without being punished.
    • This reduces the cooldown of Defile by 5 seconds if you are playing it instead.

Defensive Choice Nodes

• Death Charge or On a Paler Horse
  • On a Paler Horse does not work at all in this raid so you always choose Death Charge which is not a bad thing as this greatly increases your mobility and allows you to break roots and slows.
• Horsemen's Aid or Pact of the Apocalypse
  • Horsemen's Aid depends on the value of Anti-Magic Shell during the fight as this can be incredibly potent allowing you to pre-immune debuffs or randomly absorb high amounts of magic damage. On the other hand, Pact of the Apocalypse grants you a 5% damage reduction per Horsemen out or a 20% damage reduction during your cooldowns with Apocalypse Now. Due to the situational value of both of these, there is no auto pick for this as it just depends on the fight.

When to Use This Spec

This is the default loadout going into any pure Single-Target boss. Use the Single-Target with Adds build for any fight that has regular add spawns or multiple targets throughout the fight. You have to adjust the class talent tree based on the utility needed for the encounter and to make your life easier, boss-specific talent loadouts are available in the Nerub-ar Palace section for each boss.

Gameplay Altering Talents

Discover all talents that significantly alter your gameplay within the Spec and Class Talent trees. This section gives a concise overview of these talents and their applications but for a more detailed look check out the Rotation and Deep Dive sections below.

Spec Tree

• Clawing Shadows
  • Converts Scourge Strike into pure Shadow damage allowing it to bypass armor and scale considerably more with Mastery.
• Unholy Blight
  • Combined with Raise Abomination, this allows you to not manually refresh your diseases on pure Single-Target.
• Infected Claws
  • A factor in why you don't constantly have to press Festering Strike as this gives roughly 8 Festering Wounds per minute.
  • Every hit in multi-target situations from Sweeping Claws has a separate chance of applying a Festering Wound, meaning you don't have to constantly Festering Strike multiple targets.
• Apocalypse
  • Bursts up to 4 Festering Wounds on the target, summoning 4 ghouls that deal damage for 15 seconds.
• Raise Abomination
  • Replaces Army of the Dead, instead summoning an abomination that applies all diseases when it spawns in a small radius around it and applies a Festering Wound on each of its' auto attacks for 30 seconds.
• Unholy Assault
  • Puts 4 Festering Wounds on your target and Increases your damage by 20% for 20 seconds.

Class Tree

• Soul Reaper
  • Used rotationally when hitting enemies under 35% health.
• Cleaving Strikes
  • Allows Clawing Shadows to hit up to 7 additional enemies while you are standing in Death and Decay or when you have the buff from recently standing in your Death and Decay.
• Abomination Limb
  • Grips enemies to you for 12 seconds with a minimum range of 8 yards and a max range of 20 yards as well as dealing a decent amount of damage over the duration.
• Runic Attenuation
  • A very nice source of passive Runic Power generation to help smooth your rotation out.
• Anti-Magic Zone and Assimilation
  • Your raid cooldown that lasts for either 8 seconds or until 150% of your maximum health has been absorbed in total by everyone standing in the zone.
  • Talenting into Assimilation makes this absorb 10% stronger, 165% of your maximum health, and have a 30 second reduced cooldown.
• Null Magic
  • Reduces your magic damage taken by 8% and reduces the duration of harmful magic effects by 35%. While the reduced magic damage portion of Null Magic works against all magic damage, the reduced duration of harmful magic effects does not work on the vast majority of debuffs in the raid as that could simply break too many things.
• Vestigial Shell or Unyielding Will
  • Unyielding Will increases Anti-Magic Shell's cooldown by 20 seconds but removes all harmful magic effects when cast. While this says all, it doesn't mean all as removing certain debuffs could potentially break encounters if some debuffs were removed early. Make sure to check the Nerub-ar Palace section in this guide to see what you can and can't remove on a fight by fight basis.
  • Vestigial Shell puts a Lesser Anti-Magic Shell on 2 nearby allies that absorbs a small amount of damage and reduces the duration of some harmful magic effects. This does not have any immune capabilities and just acts as a shield on your allies that can reduce the duration of some harmful magic effects.
• Death's Echo
  • Gives you 1 extra charge of Death and Decay, Death's Advance, and Death Grip.
    • Gives you 2 charges of Defile if talented instead of Death and Decay.
• Will of the Necropolis
  • Reduces all damage taken by 35% when below 30% health, including the portion of the hit that takes you below 30%. For example, if you take a hit that takes you from 60% to 10%, the portion of the hit below 30% of your health is reduced by 35%
• Unholy Endurance
  • Transforms Lichborne into a defensive cooldown and increases its' duration.
• Gloom Ward
  • Increases all absorbs on you by 15%, this is incredibly powerful as it increases the absorb of spells like Anti-Magic Shell and Power Word: Shield and other similar abilities.

Opener

• Your goal in the opener is to get your high value casts out of the way so you can get your cooldowns started immediately as you want to get into your normal rotation and begin taking advantage of your cooldowns. Below, you see an example of how your opener looks like using the recommended Rider of the Apocalypse Single-Target build.

Make sure your Ghoul is summoned at least 5 seconds before combat.

• After this opener, there is a lot of Clawing Shadows and Death Coil spamming with some Festering Strikes sprinkled in.

Priority List

• Cast Dark Transformation and Apocalypse on 45 second cooldown windows, they should always be paired together. Raise Abomination and Unholy Assault should be used in combination with the others on 1m30s windows.
• Cast Soul Reaper if the enemy is below 35% health or will be when this expires.
• Cast Death and Decay if you are not standing in Mograine's Death and Decay and your cooldowns are active.
• Cast Death Coil when you have more than 80 Runic Power or when Sudden Doom is active.
• Cast Clawing Shadows when you have 1 or more Festering Wounds and Rotten Touch is on the target.
• Cast Festering Strike when you have 2 or less Festering Wounds.
  • While Raise Abomination is active, you only cast Festering Strike when you are at 0 Festering Wounds
• Cast Death Coil if Death Rot is about to fall off.
• Cast Clawing Shadows when you have 4 or more Festering Wounds.
• Cast Death Coil.
• Cast Abomination Limb if you have nothing else.

Notes

• On Single-Target, you do not refresh Virulent Plague unless it is with Dark Transformation or Raise Abomination as there are only a couple seconds of downtime between Virulent Plague falling and casting Raise Abomination. If there is considerable downtime between your cooldowns, you end up needing to refresh as it is worth the cast at that point.
• Rotten Touch has >95% uptime on the target when you are able to consistently hit the boss so normally you spend down to 1 Festering Wound.

In this Raid, but especially on Heroic and likely Mythic as well, there are no scenarios where you would realistically play a full AoE build so that will not be focused on in this guide. With that being the case, there are only a few fights you would press Epidemic for a short amount of time due to fight design. On these fights, you play a slightly different talent build that focuses more on diseases rather than Clawing Shadows so that is what this section will focus on.

Opener

• Your goal in the opener is to get your high value casts out of the way so you can get your cooldowns started immediately as you want to get into your normal rotation and begin taking advantage of your cooldowns. Below, you see an example of how your opener looks like using the recommended Rider of the Apocalypse Multi-Target build.

Make sure your Ghoul is summoned at least 5 seconds before combat.

• While this is a Single-Target opener, there are no fights in Nerub-ar Palace with immediate AoE on pull.

Single-Target Priority List

• Cast Dark Transformation and Apocalypse on 45 second cooldown windows, they should always be paired together. Raise Abomination and Unholy Assault should be used in combination with the others on 1m30s windows.
  • Cooldowns can be held for AoE scenarios if they are up within a reasonable amount of time.
• Cast Outbreak to refresh your diseases if you are not about to cast Dark Transformation or Raise Abomination.
• Cast Soul Reaper if the enemy is below 35% health or will be when this expires.
• Cast Death Coil when you have more than 80 Runic Power or when Sudden Doom is active.
• Cast Scourge Strike when you have 1 or more Festering Wounds and Rotten Touch is on the target.
• Cast Festering Strike when you have 2 or less Festering Wounds.
  • While Raise Abomination is active, you only cast Festering Strike when you are at 0 Festering Wounds.
• Cast Death Coil if Death Rot is about to fall off.
• Cast Scourge Strike when you have 4 or more Festering Wounds.
• Cast Death Coil.

Multi-Target Priority (When Adds are up)

• Cast Death and Decay if it is not already down.
• Cast Outbreak if any targets are missing diseases.
• Cast Epidemic when Sudden Doom is active.
• Cast Scourge Strike if any targets have Festering Wounds.
• Cast Epidemic if there are no no remaining Festering Wounds.
• Cast Scourge Strike.

Boss Tips

• During Carnivorous Contest, use Death's Advance while soaking to not get sucked to the boss.
  • With Death's Advance active you can walk back to the boss to attack.
    • Do not walk under the boss as Devour kills you almost instantly.
• Clean up any undesired webs from Stalkers Webbing with Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude.

As a Rider of the Apocalypse Unholy Death Knight, your stats generally end up being this until the highest end of gearing due to Mastery overtaking Strength. Clawing Shadows and the Mastery interactions with your Horsemen's abilities makes this stat incredibly strong, while Haste remains consistently strong and necessary for a long time.