how do i play unholy

[Mr. Casual]

yea new to dk kind of (played frost since release, always thought ice was cool lol) and im thinking of going unholy just to switch things up and do something different. Yes i know its not the best but i want to try it. So im asking for a quick summary of the play style of the class and what i should be prioritizing in terms of damaging abilities.

[Soisoisoi]

Read the guides, they will help you more.

As for a quick summary;

• Soul Reaper < 35%
• Keep diseases up
• Make Timmy big
• Festering Strike to change Blood and Frost (?) Runes to Death.
• Scourge Strike to get rid of Unholy/Death Runes. D&D if the target will stay in place for the full duration (assuming this still holds true, not looked for MoP).
• Death Coil to dump RP.
• Horn of Winter

[Absintheminded]

What Treelife said, a few little things might also change depending on your talents. For instance if you wanted Runic Corruption like in 4.x then make sure you're weaving the Death Coils so you're maximizing its uptime. Also, as your ghoul buff is wearing down try to save as much RP as you can without leaving dead spots in your rotation. That way you have a few DC's available to get him going again soon.

[Deleted]

Read the guides, they will help you more.

As for a quick summary;

• Soul Reaper < 35%
• Keep diseases up
• Make Timmy big
• Festering Strike to change Blood and Frost (?) Runes to Death.
• Scourge Strike to get rid of Unholy/Death Runes. D&D if the target will stay in place for the full duration (assuming this still holds true, not looked for MoP).
• Death Coil to dump RP.
• Horn of Winter

No DnD anymore

[ghostomc]

from what ive been reading DnD is stilll a dps increase on single target fights

[Sinzaram]

Yeah indeed, DnD is still a thing. It still does more than a Scourge Strike over the whole duration.
It gets even better if you have some procs during it, because the ticks dynamically update to the higher AP values each tick. (just tested that yay )

[Deleted]

Last I checked numbers-wise DnD was at the break-even point and only worth using if you were going to get extra ticks off a second target. I don't have access to wow atm but I think some logs/numbers would be good to settle that debate. It's definitely not a huge dps boost by any margin, even if it is at all these days.

Other than that, hit/exp>str>haste>crit>mastery

Uber timmy uptime is one of the most important things so monitoring his timer and banking RP I would rate as one of the most important aspects of Unholy play (long time unholy fan and previous regular parser).

[Sliippy]

No DnD anymore

Yes you DnD on cd homie. Dont go posting if you dont know what you're talking about.

[Deleted]

Yes you DnD on cd homie. Dont go posting if you dont know what you're talking about.

Oh so i must not know stuff becacuse i dont use DnD?
My damage and dps was increased after i stopped using it.
I had several unholy ranks below 50 before i cchanged guilds.

[Deleted]

Yes you DnD on cd homie. Dont go posting if you dont know what you're talking about.

Equally, if you don't have numbers then don't bash other people for 'not knowing' what they're talking about. You have no evidence to prove you're correct.

[Deleted]

Yes you DnD on cd homie. Dont go posting if you dont know what you're talking about.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/xuqvzo65h8g2sa87/ log from last month, so clearly i know how to play.
Id show you all ranks but i have changed guild so you cant see them on WoW-Heroes, go through Avalerion / Epoch on Bronze Dragonflight if you want to see them.
If you look at the logs you see that im doing good damage WITHOUT DnD, you dont need DnD and its in my eyes a waste of time.

[Berri]

Unholy is about keeping diseases up and keeping your pet transformed as long as possible.

You'll be spending all your Death Runes / Unholy Runes on Scourge Strike. The only exception here is to try and save one for Dark Transformation.

You need to festering strike ASAP when you have a frost and a blood, but it's not worth wasting death runes on it unless your diseases are gonna fall off and you have outbreak on cd (shoould never happen - you can also spec unholy blight to cover this).

It's important you try to time Gargoyle with Bloodlust or your unholy frenzy. It's not beneficial to stack unholy frenzy and bloodlust.

You death coil to regenerate runes and dump RP (also does nice damage)

It's important you keep track of your pet's transformation timer, and try to save some RP for death coils around 10 secs before it falls off.

Soul Reaper becomes priority after 35%

I never use DnD unless there are more than two targets that it could hit.

[FuxieDK]

Read the guides, they will help you more.

As for a quick summary;

• Soul Reaper < 35%
• Keep diseases up
• Make Timmy big
• Festering Strike to change Blood and Frost (?) Runes to Death.
• Scourge Strike to get rid of Unholy/Death Runes. D&D if the target will stay in place for the full duration (assuming this still holds true, not looked for MoP).
• Death Coil to dump RP.
• Horn of Winter

Thank you so much.. It just made my (un)life a living hell.. :-/

I'm levelling, and have reached 89,77 before I read this.
Before I did diseases, Blood Boil, Death Strike and Death Coil. If I was low at RP I could just reapply diseases.. I did ~18k dps plus Timmy (4-5K extra).
Now, after reading this guide (and do it proper), I do 5-10k dps plus Timmy, simply because I wait for runes the whole time..

And how do you stay alive with this rotation? THere is (as I see it) absolutely no self healing.. My old rotation made me almost unstoppable, because I could Death Strike every 3 sec on average..

PS, Timmy is pretty pissed, because I Death Pact him on CoolDown now, to stay alive.. He says it hurts...

[Deleted]

I haven't levelled at a low end for a very long time but 85-90 I covered with death pact and the very occasional DS. If you're desperate you can always throw a bandage on or if you feel like you're losing timmy too often because of death pact + timmy aggro then you can always switch to death siphon, the healing/damage combo is pretty solid and you have a lot more death runes readily available as unholy.

Other than that if you're AoE pulling remember to be using IBF and AMZ for any casters or alternatively pick up strangulate and CC them like a boss.

[yurano]

For instance if you wanted Runic Corruption like in 4.x then make sure you're weaving the Death Coils so you're maximizing its uptime.

I thought Runic Corruption's duration is extended 3s if you get a new proc before it ends.

[Deleted]

RC is additive now, the only disadvantage to multiple procs in a row if that you have a much higher chance of rune capping due to the regen speed and only having a single rune nuke. When I was playing unholy I only tended to dump 3+ DC's at once if I was sitting on BF runes regenning so I could easily dump them into FS instead of the 2 globals for 2x SS

[Meejum]

PS, Timmy is pretty pissed, because I Death Pact him on CoolDown now, to stay alive.. He says it hurts...

Target Timmy with one Death Coil and he'll love you again after death pacting

Also, comparing skills while leveling to endgame is not fair. Things sometimes scale very strangely, like blood boil did until just recently.

[AndyF1069]

For healing, use the glyph that causes any killing blows to make your next death strike free and heal for 15% hp. It's awesome for big pulls

[Deleted]

It's 20% of max health actually but he was referring on boss fights i think.

[AndyF1069]

Could have sworn it was 15, maybe it got bumped up with mop? And judging from the posts, I got the impression he hasn't tried many boss battles and it was more in general since he took death strike out of his rotation.

As far as bosses would go, keep death strike on your bar. If you're in a situation where healers can't help you and you think it would prevent you from dieing, you use death strike. It's better to lose dps from the runes spent on that than the damage lost from hugging the floor. Our weapon enchant also heals us for 3% of our max hp and it procs fairly often.