Unholy Death Knight DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities - Wrath of the Lich King Classic

By Deance Updated: 2023/01/19

Best PvE Rotation for Unholy Death Knight DPS in Wrath of the Lich KingSummon GargoylePestilenceEbon PlagueDeath GripUnholy Death Knight DPS Standard Rotation

"Morb" Unholy

Scourge StrikeDeath and DecayIcy TouchPlague StrikeDesolationBlood StrikeBlood BoilBlood StrikeGhoul FrenzyPlague Strike

Your opener as Unholy is heavily reliant on stacking as many haste procs with bloodlust and on use items to maximize Summon Gargoyle damage, an important part of that is starting fights in Unholy Presence or swapping to it before casting gargoyle and staying in it until it despawns.

Your absolute priority in every situation is to keep your dots active on your target, if they aren't active you should make reapplying them your first move.

When playing around Death and Decay in single target, it's a large damage loss if the boss moves out before its full duration, plan ahead before each usage, even if it means delaying for a moment.

Blood Tap is a great way to swap back into Blood Presence after Summon Gargoyle despawns, as chances are you'll have used your two blood runes on a DnD and Blood Strike.

Scourge Strike Unholy

Sigil of VirulenceSigil of the Hanged ManIcy TouchPlague StrikeScourge StrikeDeath and DecayIcy TouchPlague StrikePestilenceDeath CoilBlood TapBlood BoilDeath and DecayBlood BoilCooldowns for Unholy Death Knight DPS in Wrath of the Lich KingSummon GargoylePotion of SpeedHyperspeed AcceleratorsLoatheb's Shadow

Racial abilities like Arcane Torrent, Blood Fury, or Berserking.

Activated trinkets/items like Loatheb's Shadow, Hyperspeed Accelerators, or Incisor Fragment.

Triggered buffs like Darkmoon Card: Greatness, Mirror of Truth, or Grim Toll.

Summon GargoyleBlood FuryDarkmoon Card: GreatnessBloodlustBlood FuryPotion of SpeedEmpower Rune WeaponArmy of the DeadSummon GargoyleArmy of the DeadArmy of the DeadUnholy PresenceIcy TouchPlague StrikeBlood StrikeBlood TapDeath and DecayGhoul FrenzyRune of the Fallen CrusaderDarkmoon Card: GreatnessBloodlustSummon GargoylePotion of SpeedHyperspeed AcceleratorsBerserkingMark of NorgannonEmpower Rune WeaponArmy of the DeadBlood PresenceAbilities for Unholy Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich KingOne Rune Abilities

Blood Presence
Blood Rune

This is the presence you'll spend the vast majority of your time in, as the 15% increased damage is just too powerful to pass up, especially for our uncapped AoE.

Pestilence
Blood Rune

Pestilence is how we apply our diseases and debuffs to targets in AoE situations, one of the most powerful spells you can press as an Unholy Death Knight.

Blood Strike
Blood Rune

Blood Strike by itself doesn't hit very hard, but because it applies Desolation it becomes one of our most important buttons, empowering all of our other damage.

Blood Boil
Blood Rune

Blood Boil is an incredibly strong AoE ability for Unholy, and is even stronger than Blood Strike on single target if you're using a fast main hand.

Frost Presence
Frost Rune

This presence doesn't offer us any damage increases, but it can be mildly useful when you have a mob hitting you that you shouldn't and you need to mitigate some extra damage, or if you need to tank a mob or two in an AOE pack.

Icy Touch
Frost Rune

Icy Touch is how you'll apply your Frost Fever to targets, you'll want to press this button as little as possible if you're playing using Scourge Strike, but is a main part of your rotation if you aren't.

Unholy Presence
Unholy Rune

The attack speed increase on Unholy Presence is interesting, as is the reduction in our global cooldown, but unfortunately it's just outweighed by the pure damage gain of Blood Presence, and you'll only ever use this presence in your opener to empower the attack speed of your Summon Gargoyle.

Plague Strike
Unholy Rune

Plague Strike falls into the same role as Icy Touch whether you're using Scourge Strike or not, providing the second of your diseases Blood Plague.

Multi-Rune Abilities

Scourge Strike
Frost Rune
Unholy Rune

This ability will act as a filler ability/buff to manage in later versions of the spec, with its damage low enough to never really warrant any focus outside of maintaining the strength buffs from our sigils.

Death and Decay
Blood Rune
Frost Rune
Unholy Rune

Your main DPS ability if you're playing the Morb sub-spec, this ability hits incredibly hard if you're talented and glyphed into it, but has the setback of being a stationary ground AoE. In AoE situations very few things will hit as hard as it, as a ground effect it has no maximum target cap, and only gets better the more mobs are standing in it.

Utility & Defensive Abilities

Blood Tap

Blood Tap is an essential skill for Unholy Death Knights, it instantly regenerates one of your blood runes should either be on cooldown, and then converts one of them to a death rune. It's because of this ability that we're able to do our full opener in Unholy Presence and then swap to Blood Presence once our gargoyle is spawned.

Dark Command

This is our standard taunt, it won't be commonly used as a Unholy Death Knight, but should a mob be attacking a target that can't take as much damage as us (like a caster or a healer) and there are no tanks around, taunting it off them can save their life.

Death Pact
40 Runic Power

A powerful self heal, death pact will often save your life in tricky situations, with the caveat that not only does it cost 40 runic power, you must also have a ghoul alive in order to sacrifice it, either from Army of the Dead or Raise Dead, which kills it instantly. This is a much bigger damage loss for Unholy compared to Frost, as our ghoul is a large part of our damage, it can also kill our summoned gargoyle if you're not careful, so use this with caution.

Strangulate
Blood Rune

Strangulate functions not only as a ranged silence, should the mob be silenceable, but it also provides us with a secondary ranged interrupt for the low cost of a single blood rune. This ability is especially strong on trash and in dungeons, where mobs are more likely to be able to be silenced, but a secondary kick at range is still incredibly useful.

Chains of Ice
Frost Rune

A ranged pseudo-root, Chains of Ice also applies our dot Frost Fever, though it doesn't have the initial damage component of Icy Touch. This ability is great for kiting dangerous mobs, as it functions at first as almost a root, reducing the targets movement speed by 95% at first, and then decays down 10% every second until the slow fades entirely.

Horn of Winter

Horn of Winter is one of the buffs we provide to the raid, one only available from Death Knights and Shamans, but that's only half of the benefit from this ability. On a 20s cooldown, Horn of winter provides a free 10 runic power in exchange for the global it takes to cast it, and you'll want to press it in empty globals when you don't have any other buttons to press to do damage.

Icebound Fortitude
20 Runic Power

30% damage reduction is nothing to scoff at, especially not on such a short cooldown of 2 minutes and at the low price of 20 runic power, only made better by the fact that Icebound Fortitude also makes you immune entirely to stuns for the entire duration, so while this can't be used to break them like the human racial, with some clever timing you can completely ignore certain mechanics.

Mind Freeze
20 Runic Power

Now, normally this ability would cost 20 runic power, but as a Unholy Death Knight, our 'kick' is free because of our talent Endless Winter, this means we can interrupt targets with literally no cost.

Anti-Magic Shell
20 Runic Power

One of the hallmark abilities of the Death Knight, Anti-Magic Shell is unmistakably our best defensive cooldown, providing us complete immunity to all magical debuffs and affects for 5s. To top it all off, it absorbs a large portion of any magic damage we might have taken up to 50% of our max HP, and converts that damage to runic power. This ability will allow you to completely ignore entire boss mechanics with some clever timing, and can be abused to increase your uptime on bosses when you might otherwise need to run out of melee range to avoid something dangerous.

Death Grip

Another hallmark ability for our class, Death Grip is unique in its ability to instantly reposition mobs to exact points, instead of having to drag them around or knock them back. As powerful as this ability is for positioning, it's also a taunt and should be used with care, as bulky as we are we're not tanks.

Death Strike
Frost Rune
Unholy Rune

Another emergency self-heal available to us, though much less powerful than Death Pact. Converting two runes into 10% of our maximum health isn't the best rate, but if you're dying this ability can save your life, and it shouldn't be discounted.

Raise Ally

Raise Ally is an interesting and unique ability, functioning as a pseudo version of Druids in combat resurrection: Rebirth. The only caveat is that they're raised as a ghoul minion, with access to a special set of attacks the same as your raised ghoul. This ability will mess with any player that the group may have wanted to use an in-combat resurrection on, so make sure to only use it when the party member would not have otherwise been brought back so they can get some free damage in.

Comments

Comment by Malogx

- Should I use Death Coil even with "Morb" spec?
- Is there a "Morb" gameplay video around here? I can't find any.
- Should I use DnD and/or Ghoul Frenzy on single target with the "Scourge Strike Unholy" spec?
- Should I "clip" dots?

So many questions, I know.
Thanks. :)

Comment by Leggolem

For Unholy, Death Strike heals for 15% of max health because Crypt Fever/Ebon Plague counts as a 3rd disease.

Death Strike
Another emergency self-heal available to us, though much less powerful than Death Pact. Converting two runes into 10% of our maximum health isn't the best rate, but if you're dying this ability can save your life, and it shouldn't be discounted.

Comment by nathreezim

Hello there,

I was wondering cuz I don t know the answer. At some point is mentioned to use Blood Tap to change to blood pressence. For Morb, is it worth to change to blood pressence in fights? I m seeing melee as top damage and i was thinking that the attack speed from unholy is pretty strong for Morb and i preffer to stay all combat in unholy pressence

Comment by SimonM

What talent/ability passively applies Icy Touch and Plague Strike?

In the Standard Rotation, it states "this makes maintaining diseases incredibly easy, as you'll passively apply them between DnD's."

Comment by Keizerogg

Hey thanks for you great guid . I was wondering if you are going to add 2h unholy rotation guide or not .

Unholy Death Knight DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities - Wrath of the Lich King Classic

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