Welcome to Skill Capped’s Overview of the Best Talents for Unholy Death Knight in PvP in Dragonflight 10.2.7
To make it easier to navigate, we’ve divided the guide into the corresponding sections, covering everything from race and talents to gear and macros. These will give you a good idea about what to expect from Unholy Death Knight in PvP in Dragonflight, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to get your character ready to conquer the arena. In this section, we will cover the most important change that came with Dragonflight – talents. We will go over the class and spec trees, as well as the best PvP talents for Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight.
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Table of Contents
Unholy Death Knight Talents Overview
Since the talent system received a huge revamp going into Dragonflight, we will cover both the class and the spec tree. They both have some mandatory and some optional talents. Those will depend on the situation and the comp you are playing. The Core talents will be the ones you pick almost all the time either because they are that good on their own, or simply better than all other options.
Death Knight Class Talents
Some of the core picks are quite obvious. For example, you are never going to pass up Mind Freeze, so that is an easy pickup.
For the first time ever Blinding Sleet is available to all three DK specs, not just Frost. This talent is very strong and fun to play with, so there is no reason not to take it. Given that Unholy depends heavily on doing setups for kills, access to an AoE blind makes doing so much easier.
Will of the Necropolis is up next. Although it received a 50% nerf in PvP, it is still incredibly strong. First of all, it is still a 17.5% damage reduction whenever you drop low, which you don’t have to press or even think about. It just happens automatically. But what’s really insane is that it kicks in even if you are above 30% HP. Let’s say you take a massive Elemental Blast from a Shaman and you are at 50% HP. That will almost certainly drop you under 30%, but Will of the Necropolis will reduce that incoming damage regardless. We highly recommend picking this talent to prevent yourself from being put in someone’s oneshot montage.
Your three flexible talent points are Anti-Magic Barrier, Anti-Magic Zone and Improved Death Strike. The first two anti-magic talents only get value if there is magic damage on the enemy team. In the case you are playing against purely physical specs, you can safely drop these. Improved Death Strike is more neutral, but can even be dropped if you are not worried about being the kill target.
These three points can be distributed elsewhere, like picking up Wraith Walk, which gives you extra mobility against Mages and Hunters. You could also put one of these points into Unholy Endurance, giving your Lichborne some added damage reduction.
Before we move on to the Unholy tree, let’s talk about Soul Reaper. This talent is terrible. Do not get baited by it. As tempting as it is, there is too much counterplay to this ability with dispel. Not to mention, even if you do get the damage off, it is incredibly lacking and not worth going for. You could also put these points into Unholy Bond for a slight damage increase. In case you want to drop Anti-Magic Zone, you will need to pick up Merciless Strikes in order to path to Asphyxiate.
Unholy Spec Talents
The build is fairly standard. Unholy Assault was recently changed with 10.2 and now buffs your damage by 20% for 20 seconds. This has made this talent an automatic lock in.
Defile provides a consistent 8% mastery buff while allowing your Clawing Shadows to cleave.
This build gives you an explosive unmatchable opener to the game with all of your cooldowns. If done properly, it will leave the enemy with nothing left for your next round of cooldowns. At the same time, it unlocks an insane amount of easy to pull off consistent pressure. The best part about it is that the spec is very versatile. You could go into any arena game with it and still perform extremely well.
Unholy Death Knight PvP Talents
There are two PvP talents that are all but mandatory and you shouldn’t really be dropping them under any circumstances.
Doomburst is taken by default. While you can drop it for other talents, a damage proc of at least 130k damage makes it a solid talent pick into nearly all matchups.
Necrotic Wounds absorbs healing and stacks with other MS effects, making it incredibly strong.
From here you have some situational talents, including Bloodforged Armor, which is excellent into any team which has one pure physical damage dealer, like Windwalker Monks, Feral Druid, BM Hunter, and Warrior.
In case you don’t need Bloodforged Armor, your next situational PvP talents include Necrotic Aura, Strangulate, or Spellwarden. Since most of your damage is spell based, Necrotic Aura acts as a flat damage increase. Strangulate is good, but not 100% necessary as Unholy. The main use case for this ability is if you want to train down enemy healers, specifically Priests, Paladins, and Monks. Spellwarden is a great pick into comps like Rogue Mage where you would benefit from using AMS on your teammates to stop a go or prefer a shorter cooldown on AMS.
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