WOTLK Classic: How To Increase Unholy Death Knight’s DPS?

Although the skill damage has been nerfed, Unholy Death Knight is still one of the most powerful DPS classes in WOTLK Classic. He’s also one of the most popular classes in Ulduar, so there are a lot of players wondering the best way to play Unholy Death Knight. So here, I will introduce how to increase DPS of Unholy Death Knight.

Talents & Glyphs

First, let’s talk about Talents and Glyphs for this build, which is also the build standard. For this Unholy Death Knight build, we’re using Glyph of Death and Decay, Glyph of Dark Death, and Glyph of Ghoul going into the loop.

Opener Rotation

If you’re facing a boss, usually you start the fight with Bloodlust. Because you’re going to get Ghoul up first, and then you’re going to be using Horn of Winter. Once combat starts, you’ll want to use Icy Touch first, followed by abilities like Plague Strike, Blood Strike, Blood Tap, and Death and Decay.

You then need to summon your Gargoyles and wait about three seconds for all of your Cooldowns to trigger. Then you’ll need to follow up with an Empower Rune Weapon and some of your Army of the Dead, which will give your Gargoyles more uptime during your Cooldowns time. Also, be able to use this Army of The Dead to get a nice Snapshotting.

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After your Opener, you want to prioritize continuing to spread the disease, making us can cast properly sure Desolation and Ghoul. Meanwhile, pour your destructive power into Death Coil. The standard Rotation is Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Blood Strike, Blood Tap will enter another Icy Touch, and the cycle continues.

Sustaining DPS

Now you need to keep an eye on Cooldown’s time after Ghoul casts the spell. If it’s less than 10 seconds, you need to refresh it, then follow up with Blood Boil. If you have more than 10 seconds left, you can cast Plague Strike, then rinse with Boils the blood and repeat.

It’s almost super easy, and you’ll see your overall damage output against a powerful boss take a nice jump. You’ll want to start with Blood Presence and rotate by the standards of these bosses.

There is also the later Lust Rotation. For example, on XT or Yogg-Saron, you wait shortly after the heart drop or brain phase switch to Unholy Presence, then follow your Opener Rotation.

Late Phase Parsing

Now one thing I want to mention is that it is very difficult to get high Parsing number of 90 seconds no matter for any stage or any character. If you’re not on a well-performing team or don’t participate in Cheese Traps, your chances of getting high Parsing are also greatly reduced. Such is the competing nature of Parsing and Warcraft logs work.

But I would say that if you have all the raid buffs and follow a rotation like this, you can even hit the 80 second average target. Then you can start working with elite teams during Phase 3. I suggest that you can use Wotlk Classic Gold to get some suitable equipment, which will make you get high Parsing faster.

If you follow this Opener Rotation, you can easily see high Parsing early on. So I hope this guide can help all Unholy Death Knight players improve their DPS faster. Good luck.