Unholy Death Knight Guide

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Unholy Death Knight Guide

Another WoW class guide! Why would you want to look at this one?

This guide is unbiased by human emotions and feelings. We extended our unique brand of data-driven analysis to talents and rotations. This is a video game! You should feel good about choosing to play in the manner that is the most fun for you. At the same time, holding your team back is not fun. The idea here is to quantify the play styles available to you.

The Talent section of the guide is a fun little tool for browsing simulation results of different talent builds. Our Rotation section is a tool that renders the actual action priority used by the simulator in a human-readable format. The Rotation Analysis section shows some of the analysis that went into developing the rotations. And of course, we have an entire portion of the website dedicated to gear and stat optimization.

Basics

The first and most important thing that all players need to know is "ABC" - Always Be Casting. (For melee it's more like always be in melee range.) Talents, Gear, Rotation - none of it really matters that much if you aren't hitting enemies non-stop. To do this, you need to make use of the game's spell queue. If you are stuggling with this aspect of the game or don't know what the spell queue is, read our Basic Gameplay Tips.

A lot of people have a hard time with the basics because of a sub-optimal keybinding and movement setup. It's weird, but, out of the box the game controls for WoW are not good for doing difficult game content. Read our Key Bindings and Movement Guide to help set yourself up for success.

Once you are confident with your ability to control your character and successfully chain actions together while moving and reacting to the game, it is time to think more about talents, rotation, and gear.

Talents & Essences

Use this interactive tool to see how your favorite talent + major essence combinations stack up against each other.

Why are all the bars almost full? If you optimize your rotation, azerite traits, and gear for each and every talent + major essence build, their max potential output is going to be very close. With few exceptions, they are so close you would have a hard time measuring the difference in-game if you play each build optimally. Talents (and your major essence), more than anything, change how the game feels when you play it. We do not observe much build diversity in WoW. This tool is giving you the real data behind the potential of each talent, and the data shows us that there is no objective reason for a lack of build diversity. Our goal is to encourage players to try more builds by giving you real numbers behind the trade-off between different talents and major essences.

Click on any talent or major essence to lock it in. The remaining data will be filtered to only combinations using the talent(s) and/or major essence you have selected. Use the pickers in the legend to modify the cutoffs between the green, yellow, and orange tiers as you see fit. The color-coding is there to help you visualize which builds you would consider.

Disclaimers: Certain talents and major essences can have situational use that makes them better or worse than this average data. This data assumes you can play every build equally well and have access to optimal gear.

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Number of combos with this talent or essence that fall in:

Tier 1

Tier 2

This bar shows how good the best combo using this talent/essence is

Talent Name

Tier 1 combos are within

Tier 2 combos are within

of max potential output

Major Essence

Role

Essence of the Focusing Iris

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Purification Protocol

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Condensed Life-Force

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Blood of the Enemy

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

The Unbound Force

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Breath of the Dying

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Spark of Inspiration

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Spec-Specific

Vision of Perfection

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Memory of Lucid Dreams

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Conflict and Strife

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Generic

Worldvein Resonance

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

The Crucible of Flame

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

Ripple in Space

rank 1

rank 2

rank 3

The talent explorer tool and rotation viewer tool are completely separate. Choosing talents or a major essence in one does not affect the other.

Rotation

We call this the rotation out of habit. It is actually an action priority. Each time you pick an action, you start at the top of the tree and use the first action that is available.

The actions are automatically filtered to your talents and artifact traits. Change your talents and artifact traits on the left if you want to view the rotation for a different build.

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You are looking at a generic character. Change the talents and azerite traits to see the rotation for a different build. Load a specific character to customize the rotation to that character's actual talents, azerite traits, and current gear. For DPS specs, you will also get an instant single-target DPS estimate! Cool.
The talents and azerite traits on this generic character are not meant as recommendations.

AMR Addon

Paste string from AMR addonCopy from game with Ctrl+C and paste here with Ctrl+V

Recent Characters

Armory or Log

Realm

Name or WCL Report URL

more_horiz

essence

more_horiz

azerite

Major Essence

Azerite Traits (Choose up to six spec-specific traits)

Gear

There is a really great website for picking gear, you might have heard of it: askmrrobot.com

On a more serious note, if the rotation in this guide looks good to you, then our gear optimizer will pick the right gear for you. The two are programmatically linked - you don't need to worry about any human contamination. The rotation in this guide is rendered directly from the simulator. The gear rankings are created with the simulator. Proprietary algorithms find an answer customized to you insanely fast. That whole gear problem? Solved.

Some of you might be wondering, why aren't we telling you to "sim yourself" like you see in most other guides? Wouldn't that be even better? We don't think so. Simulators are a model of humans playing WoW. This model is not perfect and it is inherently noisy. Our gear optimizer takes all that data and filters out the noise. If you want to read more about this, you can check out our blog.

Rotation Analysis

We do in-depth analysis of rotations. Below are a few of the more interesting tests that we ran.

The DPS/HPS/TUF Delta shows how much the tested rotation changes DPS/HPS/TUF compared to the base rotation. The Top Tier Setups column shows what percentage of setups with near-optimal DPS were better, the same, or worse when using the tested rotation. The All Setups column shows the same percentages across all setups tested.

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Unholy Death Knight Guide

Basics

Talents & Essences

Major Essence

Role

Spec-Specific

Generic

Rotation

Major Essence

Azerite Traits (Choose up to six spec-specific traits)

Gear

Rotation Analysis

This spec is coming soon!

Log Comparisons

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