Why You Should & Shouldn’t Play Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2 – Patch 10.1

Unsure what class to play in Dragonflight Season 2? Whether you’re a returning player coming back to play the new content or a longtime veteran just looking to explore a new main or alt, we’ve got you covered.

We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Unholy Death Knight in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Unholy Death Knight!

Frost DK
Unholy DK

Vengeance DH
Balance Druid

Restoration Druid
Devastation Evoker

Marksmanship HunterSurvival Hunter

Brewmaster Monk

Restoration Shaman

Dragonflight Season 2 Death Knight Tier Set

Why You Should Play Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)

Unholy is a spec with very strong thematic flavour as well as scaling capabilities quite like anyone else. In Dragonflight we can do by far the most AoE damage (as demonstrated by the very skilled players in the MDI) as well as burst incredibly high in single target. We have a core rotation consisting of Festering Strike, Scourge Strike, Outbreak and Death Coil, revolving around the building and bursting of Festering Wounds and maintain our DoT (same since legion). In addition to this, we have a large amount of individual cooldowns that we need to manage properly to optimise our DPS.

Unholy in Dragonflight has a number of different playstyles and buildes. The variety really shines through in Mythic+ where we have 4+ builds depending on scenario and your own taste. Some of these builds take us back to old days of quadratic scaling heaven (Wound Build) whereas others reminds us of days when our DoTs were actually really powerful (DIsease Build). The current main negative aspect is our over-reliance on specific trinkets (looking at you Algeth’ar Puzzle Box) and a damage profile that some could deem as being too bursty. We also don’t quite bring enough utility to make it to the top of the league in the Mythic+ meta. That’s made up to some degree by being incredibly tanky.

If we compare to Dragonflight launch, we now have a smoother rotation that is overall quite free from bugs (thinking about early Unholy Aura issues). Furthermore, we have better choice when picking between Single Target and AoE in raiding scenarios, a space where we previously had to pick either. We can now pick up Defile and Epidemic far more easily due to talent tree changes! There are some still issues like Summon Gargoyle stuttering but I believe we have seen a strong improvement overall throughout the expansion.

Why You Should	Why You Shouldn’t

Why You Should Play Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2

Unholy Death Knight Utility for Dragonflight
The Unholy Death Knight brings a diverse set of utility to the game, primarily helping ourselves with dodging mechanics.

• Anti-Magic Shell: Prevents magical debuffs (allowing you to dodge mechanics) and absorbs a large amount of magic damage.
• Death’s Advance: Moderate movement speed increase and knockback avoidance, very useful in raiding environments.
• Raise Ally: Battle Ress.
• Blinding Sleet: AoE stop and slow, useful for interrupting and slowing enemies.
• Death Grip: Pulls enemies to you, great for controlling adds and sometimes mandatory utility in raid.
• Abomination Limb: Like Death Grip but lasting over multiple seconds.
• Insidious Chill: Attack speed slow, great for helping your tank survive encounters with especially dangerous melee attackers.

Our utility has strengths in two areas: dodging of mechanics as well as add displacement. The combo of Anti-Magic Shell and Death’s Advance means that we can avoid so many mechanics everywhere, just making a lot of fights trivial to use. Whenever there is a dangerous knock-back or magic debuff, we can simply ignore it. Honestly, it sometimes feels like a Death Knight plays the game on an easier difficulty due to the fact that we have these two accessible to us. For the add displacement, we essentially have mandatory utility in limited circumstances. There are generally one or two fights in a raid tier where a grip is incredibly powerful, making it necessary for any raid group to pick up a Death Knight.

Unholy Death Knight Survivability

Outside of this utility, Unholy’s largest strength that isn’t related to DPS is its tankiness. We have such a large amount of defensive tools in our toolkit that makes it almost impossible to actually kill us. Improved Death Strike, Permafrost, Veteran of the Third War, Gloom Ward, Blood Draw and Will of the Necropolis together work to making is one of, if not the most tanky class in PvE content. I always feel like I’m playing on easy mode sometimes due to the inability of dying. Having a very high baseline coupled with shields and damage reductions means abilities that would’ve killed any other class won’t quite kill you.

Unholy Death Knight Damage

If you like doing a lot of damage in dungeons with high mob count, Unholy is the class for you. No other class will do quite as much as Unholy when the number of targets starts increasing to 20. It feels great to just blast and having that damage meter grow higher than you can imagine. I also think dealing damage with Unholy is a lot of fun. The AoE rotation allows you to be very versatile, running around and dodging mechanics without losing much overall. It’s also satisfying to execute in my opinion, flowing well without a lot of downtime. For Raids, you’ll be topping the meters on every single pull. However, once the fight continues that will slowly inch downwards until you join the pack after a minute or two. Some people really enjoy seeing themselves topping in that opening burst, another reason to play Unholy!

Solid Tier Set

The new tier set is very much in line with our current one. The buff fits really well with out cooldowns both in Single Target and AoE, making Dark Transformation feel really good to use. Especially after they buffed the duration to 25 seconds, making it align nicely with our Summon Gargoyle cooldown without messing up any other overlaps.

Why You Shouldn’t Play Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2

Unholy Trinket Reliance

Unholy has a significant weakness moving into 10.1 and its reliance on Algeth’ar Puzzle Box. The trinket synergises so extremely well with our 3 minute burst window, making a 421 version of it increase our DPS by around 15%. This can be compared to the second best trinket at 11%. Moving into 10.1, the impact is that Algeth’ar Puzzle Box is our BiS trinket even in the next patch. Not too fun if you decide to start playing Unholy in 10.1, since you’ll be forever behind your counterparts that managed to obtain a 421 this season. Furthermore, this also means that any nerf to the trinket will hit us hard since there are no viable alternatives in the next patch.

Power Infusion Synergy

Both a blessing and a curse, Unholy Death Knights scale very well with Power Infusion. This is primarily due to very large burst windows with abilities that all scale well with haste. Given this fact, not getting the buff will make it very difficult to do competitive damage. This makes the ability unfun for a lot of people that don’t have the priest available to always give it to them. It has been fine this tier since we have been the obvious target. However, next tier isn’t looking as solid for us and we might see a huge drop in our power if we stop being that go-to buff spec.

Lack of Significant Utility

The final negative aspect of Unholy is its lack of significant utility. I’m talking about things like Bloodlust, Chaos Brand, Mystic Touch etc. This can easily push out an Unholy Death Knight from a competitive melee raid roster and makes it difficult for us to ever become a Mythic+ meta class. Some could argue that Death Grip fulfills this role but the reality is that it’s only ever useful on a few specific encounters and in a few mythic+ scenarios.

About the Author

I’m Bicepspump, a semi-hardcore player currently playing in Pescorus on Kazzak. You can often find me on the Death Knight discord discussing rotations and builds, on my stream (B1cepspump), running some juicy Mythic +, or on my youtube channel where I do video guides. Big shoutout to everyone on the Acherus discord that have given me valuable insight through numerous discussions. I take part in writing and optimizing the action priority list for SimulationCraft and continuously test different hypotheses using the SimulationCraft program. Please feel free to contact me on Discord as Bicepspump#6318, I’m always happy to have a healthy discussion! Outside of playing WoW, I work as a quant and enjoy playing other games such as Dota 2!

For more information on playing Unholy Death Knight, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:

Unholy DK Guide