First of all, let's see which are your
Core Abilities:
Festering Strike (your main festering wounds generator)
Scourge Strike (your main festering wounds spender)
Death Coil (your main runic power spender)
Epidemic (the bread and butter of any unholy death knight when it comes to mythic+ dungeons and AoE overall)
Outbreak (used in order to keep up our DoT,
Virulent Plague on targets)
Death and Decay (used in combination with
Scourge Strike can result into huge AoE damage capabilities whenever you encounter trash packs)
Apocalypse (it will help you out whenever you need to burst down enemies)
Dark Transformation (you want to keep this off cooldown most of the time, unless a huge pack of trash is about to be engaged by the dungeon group)
Talents:
Infected Claws and
Bursting Sores make a devastating combo in any environment so we will pick these two together for every dungeon (ignoring
Clawing Shadows may look odd at first considering how good it was back in Legion in combination with
Necrosis but since starting with BfA we no longer have the option to pick
Necrosis , other talents have their chance to "shine"
On the third tier we have the freedom to choose whichever talent we consider more suitable for us. (I personally use
Asphyxiate 8/10 times since it provides an extra CC in most cases)
Fourth row should be reserved to
Pestilent Pustules (you can pick
Harbinger of Doom in combination with a certain azerite trait but we will get there in a moment).
Next row is our survivability/mobility one so pick whichever talent you consider more suitable for your playstyle.
Sixth row, absolutely everytime pick
Epidemic , as mentioned above, this is your bread and butter when it comes to inflicting massive damage in trash packs.
Our build is completed by
Unholy Frenzy on the final row so your talent tree should be looking something like this:
1/1/3/1/3/3/2.
Picture:
http://imgur.com/a/e30c8Ov
Alternatively you can go for this build (
https://imgur.com/a/U4peAXR - 1/1/3/3/1/3/1) which seems to perform as good as the one mentioned above, so let's talk a bit about the talent choices and why we made them.
Our first talent choice which is not found on the previous build is
Soul Reaper . This talent provides great utility when needed due to the fact that it refills two runes instantly.
The second and final talent which we changed from the previous build is
Army of the damned . Even though this won't bring as much utility as
Unholy Frenzy in most of the cases, it is still a great choice for keys where you aren't able to straight up rush from one boss to another (especially in weeks with
Fortified or
Bolstering as affixes.
Azerite Traits:
For those of you who aren't familiar with the concept of Azerite Traits, I'll try to explain on this section as good as I can. These traits can be acquired on
Head,
Shoulders and
Chest armor pieces, coming in a number of three combinations (so far for 8.0.1 gear pieces). Even though their effect may not be as impactful as the one of Legion's legendaries, they are still providing quite a major advantage and, in some cases, even influence your rotation. So, let's have a look at some of them:
Festermight : your absolute BiS choice in any scenario, you want two of these in your gear.
Magus of the Dead : your other sought after trait. It's ideal to have one of these since it provides quite a lot of damage (keep in mind that this trait is more focused on single-target so it may be a little bit worse than
Helchains in dungeons where trash packs are all over the place)
Harrowing Decay : I'd recommend this trait only if you don't have the option to pick neither one of the traits mentioned above (you can combo this with the talent
Harbinger of Doom but overall the results won't be as satisfying as the ones with the first build.)
Helchains : This is currently tied up with
Magus of the Dead in terms of how impactful it can be. You can pick this one in dungeons flooded with a lot of trash packs since Magus is a little pit more single-target oriented.
Stats:
Unholy is a versatile spec so you can "play" with your stats to some extent.
Ideally, you want to focus them on the following order:
Strength > Haste > Critical > Mastery
Keep
Haste as high as possible (ideally
between 21% to 26%, the more you got, the better it is for single-target scenarios).
Critical should be at around 15-20%.
Once you're done with these two stats, you can focus your attention towards
Mastery.
Rotation:
Our main resources are runic power and runes so it's important to get the best out of them. In this section we will see how this can be done:
First of all, always start with
Outbreak . This will apply
Virulent Plague to your target and the enemies which surround it.
The next ability which you want to use is
Dark Transformation (usually we keep this one off cooldown, even better if we have
Helchains as one of our azerite traits).
Now that we applied our DoT and transformed our ghoul, it's time to use
Festering Strike in order to put some
Festering Wounds on enemies. Depending on the size of the trash pack it would be ideal to mark 1-3 targets with it before using
Death and Decay in combination with
Scourge Strike in order to inflict massive amounts of damage.
Do not hesitate to use
Apocalypse and
Army of the dead whenever you get the opportunity. Sometimes is better to dump them on trash patrols, especially on the weeks when the main concern isn't caused by the bosses of the instance which you're doing.
Army of the damned does an incredible job in these scenario since you can use your major cooldowns may more freely.
As mentioned above, we use
runic power and
runes so it's important to not waste valuable resources. We can avoid this by tracking them. For instance, if you are already close or at the runic power cap but
Death and Decay is still active, instead of using another
Scourge Strike you can dump some of that runic power via
Epidemic . This will both inflict a considerable amount of damage and give your runes time to recharge since after
Death and Decay is off you'll still want to be able to keep pushing instead of waiting for your abilities to be available.
I hope that this post helped out some of you. Feel free to pm me on forum or discord if you got any questions.