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 Covenant section gives you a general idea of the relative performance of each covenant. 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. 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.

Covenants

Below is a general ranking of the covenants. Anything in green is going to perform really well. Yellow will be a little behind, but still perfectly fine. Orange you might feel a little weak.

You don't have to always pick the one at the top of the list! We use the colors to give you some context and encourage you to branch out to other covenants. There are a lot of reasons to choose a different covenant, such as situational usefulness of the abilities, you prefer the story or aesthetics, etc.

Talents

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

Why are all the bars almost full? If you optimize your rotation, soulbind tree, and gear for each and every talent + covenant 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 covenant), 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.

Click on any talent to lock it in. The remaining data will be filtered to only combinations using the talent(s) that 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 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 that fall in:

Tier 1

Tier 2

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

Talent Name

Tier 1 combos are within

Tier 2 combos are within

of max potential output

Choose a covenant:

Kyrian

Venthyr

NightFae

Necrolord

The talent explorer tool and rotation viewer tool are completely separate. Choosing talents or a covenant 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, covenant, legendary, and conduits. Change your talents, covenant, legendary, and conduits 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 covenant to see the rotation for a different build. Load a specific character to customize the rotation to that character's actual talents, covenant, and current gear. For DPS specs, you will also get an instant single-target DPS estimate! Cool.
The talents, covenant and gear on this generic character are not meant as recommendations.

AMR Addon

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Covenant

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Conduits (Choose up to two potency conduits)

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.

Unholy Death Knight Guide

Basics

Covenants

Talents

Rotation

Covenant

Legendary

Set Bonus

Conduits (Choose up to two potency conduits)

Gear

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