Hey, guys, welcome to my unholy DK guide. My name is Rugs and I've been playing this class on Wrath for a very long time. I've played DK from the start of a fresh server all the way to ICC three times now.

DKS in Wrath are my pride and joy and I'm very excited to share with you my guide today. Now without any further delay, let's get into it. In today's guide we're going to be talking about the talents you should go, the glyphs you should pick, what stats matter and how much value should each stat have, the gems you should pick, the consumables you should use, the race you should pick and of course a rotation example for you to use.

First of all, we're going to talk about talents. Now there are two talent trees you could go to. This one on the left pictured here is going to be called our blood sub spec. This is used mostly just in the beginning of a phase 1 Wrath server. This is going to give you a lot of good flat crit and a lot of good flat AP for going the blood sub spec.

Now, the spec on the right actually catches up in pace and scale really quickly and will likely be used towards the end of phase one when you have a lot of BIS gear from tier 7 and this will quickly be your best in slot talent build for the entire expansion.

For glyphs, our most mandatory glyph has got to be Glyph of Dark Death. This is going to increase the damage of your death coil by 15. Now next, there are actually three other glyphs that you could basically just pick two from.

I personally recommend Glyph of Icy Touch being in the staple rotation of your glyph choices as I think it does a good amount of damage. And then you picking between Glyph of the Ghoul and Glyph of Death and Decay.

Personally, I really like running Glyph of Death and Decay in most scenarios, although it will obviously be outpacing other glyphs as soon as you include two or more targets in your fight. However, Glyph of the Ghoul is fantastic and I love to have extra Glyphs of the Ghoul in my bags at all times for Patchwork style fights or any fights where it's only single target.

As for stats for the unholy DK, this is how our stats break down. Attack power is going to be one EP value for us, strength being 3.15. This is extra strong on unholy DK for a lot of reasons. One, we have two talent choices that we're speccing into that are increasing our strength by flat percent.

We have the Blessing of the Kings to worry about. We also get Fallen Crusader enchants on our weapon. All these are going to increase our strength by percent amount. So this is going to be extra strong on us. Agility is going to be a 1.29 EP value, crit is a 1.69, haste is a 2.2, armor pen is a sneaky 1.83 and expertise is a 2.14 and hit of course before you are capped is going to be at 3.17, being our highest EP value.

Now talking about hit, we actually only need 263 hit rating if we are Alliance. This means that we're getting the extra 3% from our Virulence which is in our talents. The extra 3% from a debuff either provided by a shadow priest or boomkin and then that extra 1% coming from a Draenei assuming that you have a Draenei in your group.

Or if you are Horde or if you're unlucky and don't have a journal in your group or not a Draenei yourself, you will need 289 hit rating. That's going to be 11 which is 3% coming from our talents and the other 3% being provided by a shadow priest or boomkin.

As for expertise, the cap is 26. However, oftentimes and especially early on in the expansion, we tend to ignore this cap as the sacrifice for gaining expertise is going to be way too much value. Overall, your physical damage will typically be somewhere around 26% to 29% of your entire damage profile, this of course coming from melee attacks, Scourge Strike and Blood Strike.

It's simply just not enough to be getting expertise from all these pieces of gear. Of course, expertise and your physical damage is going to be a bigger portion of your damage profile the later the game goes due to access to armor pen items that are just going to be flat on your gear to begin with that you can't avoid and just the scaling of how your gear works.

You will do more and more physical damage and expertise will be more and more important to you. However, early on it is absolutely not worth the sacrifice and I would try to just stick around somewhere between 8 to 10 expertise and as the expansion goes on, gain more and more expertise on your gear the more and more readily available it is closer to that cap later in the expansion.

For gems and our meta, we're going to throw in the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond. And to get that meta activated, we're going to use either the Enchanted Tear or the Nightmare Tear. And for all other gem slots, we're going to put as much strength as we possibly can.

If you need the hit, you can throw in a hit gem in any of the yellow slots and if you see any good socket bonuses, you can throw in an orange gem for strength haste in those slots as well if you really feel like it's worth it.

As for consumables, this is what you're going to want to bring to every single raid. First of all being our Dragonfin Filet for 40 strength for our well-fed buff. And the Spiced Mammoth Treats to give to our pet so that they can have the well-fed buff as well.

Our flask is going to be Flask of Endless Rage and the potions that we're going to use are Potions of Speed. Below are some engineering consumables that we're always bringing as well which is the Saronite Bomb, the Global Thermal Sapper Charge and, of course, our Gnomish Battle Chicken.

As stated in a previous video of mine, my recommendation for unholy death knights is always going to be jewelcrafting and engineering. The engineering gloves and boots are going to be really useful on an unholy DK and the jewelcrafting is going to give us the absolute most amount of strength possible.

I will always give an honorable mention to our tailoring though because tailoring gives us a cloak enchant which is really nice to play around with our gargoyle snapshot. More on that to come later.

For races, there are actually a lot of choices here. For Horde, you can either go Orc which gives us the axe specialization, the command which also gives us the increased damage by our pets by five percent and blood fury which is an awesome racial CD that we can use in conjunction with our gargoyle and just every time it's available.

Additionally, Troll is a fantastic choice. In fact, it's my recommendation that you go troll for unholy DK as the three minute cooldown on Berserking and the increased attack and casting speed snapshots with your Gargoyle, and is insanely strong.

For Alliance, your options are a lot less exciting. Humans get the mace and sword specialization which is going to increase their expertise with those two by three which is still less than the expertise given by axe specialization and the every man for himself racial is pretty nice, has its niches in PVE scenarios as well.

And of course, you could also go Draenei for the 1% hit. This is actually pretty decent on an unholy DK. You don't really need to be getting the mace and sword specialization, so if you want to be the guy who brings your Draenei buff to your party, they're going to thank you for it.

Now the basic rotation of an unholy DK is actually pretty simple. All it is is keeping your DoTs up with Icy Touch and Plague Strike. You want to try to prioritize using all your runes to get them on CD and then dumping your runic power with Death Coils.

However ,the caveat is keeping good uptime with your Unholy Blight is actually worth spending an extra global on a Death Coil over a Scourge Strike or Blood Strike as long as you're not clipping things and keeping good uptime on Unholy Blight. It's not too much to worry about though so I wouldn't overthink that part.

Obviously, you've got to keep up your Bone Shield and your Horn of Winter if needed. And of course, for any AOE situations which means anytime there are two or more enemies, you're going to use Pestilence to spread your diseases and Death and Decay as often as you can.

Now, the opener for unholy DK is actually the trickiest part of the class and it's really fun and very satisfying to pull off. It's all about getting the largest snapshot on our Summon Gargoyle as possible. We do this in a number of ways.

First of all, we're going to start an unholy presence so that we get the haste buff added to our Gargoyle as well.

25 seconds before the pull, we're going to press Bone Shield.

Around nine seconds before the pull, you're going to hit Death and Decay and Army of the Dead at the same time.

Two seconds before the pull, we're going to press Horn of Winter.

And then one second before the pull, we hit our haste potion.

While we're running towards the boss, we’re going to hit Icy Touch. Plague Strike as soon as we can followed up with a Scourge Strike and then a Blood Strike. At this point, we either do another Blood Strike if we need the extra runic power or if we're missing a proc either from a tier bonus or a sigil that we have equipped.

After that, we need to pop all of our cooldowns and our Summon Gargoyle and hopefully our guild has already used their heroism so we get that extra damage added to our Gargoyle as well.

Immediately after we summon our Gargoyle, we're going to switch back to Blood Presence. We either do this just by using a Blood Rune on it or we can Blood Tap and then go to Blood Presence. After that, everything's going to be on cooldown and we hit our Empowered Rune Weapon and start going into our normal rotation.

#showtooltip Summon Gargoyle

/cast BloodyFury

/use 10

/use Potion of Speed

/cast Summon Gargoyle

To help you out, this is one of the macros that I use when I'm summoning my Gargoyle. This includes my Blood Fury if I'm playing Orc or you can just swap this to Berserking if you're playing Troll.

This has a slash use 10 on it which is going to be our engineering gloves and a ‘use Potion Of Speed’ which is really nice for when we have our second Gargoyle cast in the middle of the fight, we can use that in conjunction with our Gargoyle every time.

I provided a chart here for you to use as a trinket priority system for you. Of course, this is going to go only through phases one to three as this is going to be where all of our most important trinkets come from.

In phase one, our best trinkets are going to be our Greatness and our Meteorite Whetstone. And once you get into phase two, there are lots of really fun options. Obviously Comet’s Trail is going to be our best in slot trinket there but between a Blood of the Old God and our Pyrite Infuser and our meteorite from phase one; those three trinkets are actually very close in sim value. I'm getting all three being within 10 DPS of each other.

So if you really need the hit go for something like Pyrite or Blood of the Old God. But if you don't really need the hit rating, I would pass those trinkets to someone else in my guild that might really need them.

And lastly, here are just some random tips and tricks I've learned over the years that you can use to help you out.

First of all, get in touch with your resto druids and try to get them to give you some runic power before the pull to help you with your opener. They give you this by their Revitalize talent, so just have them heal you. And as long as you have that little bit of extra runic power, it's going to be really helpful for your opener on top of all the extra DPS that you could get out with Death Coil just because of good runic power generation.

Now, if Classic Wrath shows up and we have Gargoyle scripting that involves a Gargoyle that melees, what you'll actually have to do is you'll have to move out of melee range before you cast your Summon Gargoyle. If your Summon Gargoyle is in melee range and they are going to be meleeing, we have to make sure that we summon them outside of melee range so that they stay still casting. This is a big gap in DPS so make sure that we check the scripting once beta arrives on that.

Also, I recommend that you set up some WeakAuras to track your procs. It's extremely important that you track these to make sure that you're capturing the absolute largest amount of attack power and haste as possible with your Summon Gargoyle. This is the one of the biggest factors on unholy DK DPS.

Also, you want to get used to using Blood Tap pretty regularly. It's really good for swapping presences, it's really good for refreshing your Bone Shield or you could even use it to get a rune available for when times that you need it like popping a DND or maybe refreshing a Pestilence on something.

Also, every mechanic that has some type of magic damage going out is a really good way for you to abuse or use your Anti-Magic Shell with every single fight as the cost of runic power for using an Anti-Magic Shell is usually counteracted by the amount of runic power that you actually gain from using it and soaking some damage with it. This is a really good way to get more Death Coils out in your rotation.

Yo, guys, thank you so much for watching. This is my first time making a video class guide so please forgive me for any sloppiness or typos if you caught any. If you ever have any questions, feel free to stop by my Twitch. You can find me at twitch.tv/rugsz or just drop me a line in the comments below if you ever have any questions about DKs. I love you all so much. Have a great rest of your day. Peace.