Unholy Death Knight PvP Best Covenants, Soulbinds, Conduits, and Legendary Powers (Dragonflight / 10.0.2)

For more information about what Covenants bring you, please refer to our page about Covenant abilities for Monks.

Covenants are an extremely important choice in PvP. They give both a signature ability and a class ability, as well as many additional effects through Soulbinds and Conduits. These mechanics will vary heavily based on the Covenant that you choose. Below are the best Covenants for Unholy Death Knight.

1. Necrolord is the best overall Covenant to use. Abomination Limb is one of the most impactful buttons to press in Unholy Death Knight's entire toolkit. It groups up the enemy team for both you and your partners' cleave damage, deals a tremendous amount of damage on its own as it scales with Unholy's Mastery, and also peels every enemy in range from your teammates. All of this from a single button press, while gaining some of the best survival options with Fleshcraft and the Soulbinds makes Necrolord easily the top pick.
2. Night Fae is very powerful sustained damage when coupled with the PvP Talent Death's Echo. This will provide additional Strength, Mastery, and even Haste when used alongside the Phearomones Legendary. Night Fae requires this specific build to work well, but has a very formidable sustained damage package that drains a healer's Mana quickly.

Soulbinds are unlocked as you progress your character with a Covenant. These unlock powerful paths that can be taken to give you powerful spells, important passives, etc.

Here are the Soulbinds and paths you should take if you chose Necrolord:

This path earns you a decent shield as well as Ultimate Form, which is an extremely efficient CC prevention tool. You can use this before any casted CC on you to prevent it, as well as predict stun setups from the enemy team to immune them.

This Soulbind and path emphasizes survivability and sustained damage. The Mastery proc you get from this path will be active nearly all the time which will increase your damage during every setup. The survivability should help you last longer to reach each setup as well.

Here is the Soulbind and path you should take if you chose Night Fae:

This path gives you the great deal of secondary stats that helps bring the Night Fae build together. You gain stacking Mastery with a large amount given every time you use your Covenant ability, which is extremely frequently. You also gain a decent movement speed boost and a slow which is helpful for maintaining uptime.

Conduits are passive buffs that you can use to fill empty slots in your Soulbind Trees. There are three types of Conduits: Potency, Endurance, and Finesse. Here are the best Conduits for each of those different types:

1. Eternal Hunger is just passive addition damage to your minions, which provide heavy output in PvP, especially when you are being kited or in CC. Furthermore, increasing the duration of Dark Transformation allows more opportunities for your Pet Utility from Gnaw or Leap in addition to increasing output.
2. Convocation of the Dead is fantastic as it just speeds up the frequency of our burst windows. You get even better use out of this in a PvP setting because we have access to Raise Abomination which adds more wounds being bursted.
3. Withering Ground makes Death's Due hit significantly harder making the damage from this ability formidable as well as all the stats that it provides. This will be used if you have chosen Night Fae as your Covenant.
4. Brutal Grasp adds a ton of damage into an already potent burst window making it even more difficult to deal with, if you have chosen Necrolord as your Covenant.

1. Insatiable Appetite increases the healing done by Death Strike, which is valuable in every situation.
2. Hardened Bones gives much needed damage mitigation to Lichborne making it a much more potent survivability option.

1. Chilled Resilience reduces the cooldown on our most impactful defensive and is good in every situation.
2. Fleeting Wind gives additional mobility to Death's Advance and mobility is one of our biggest weaknesses.

Legendaries have many different effects and some can alter how you should use some of your abilities. For more information on Legendaries, check out our general guide on them.

Here are the best Legendaries for a Unholy Death Knight.

1. Frenzied Monstrosity is a very simple but powerful Legendary. This will just add additional pressure to every burst window. This makes it very easy to use.
2. Phearomones should be used in conjunction with the Night Fae Covenant. It will give you 15% more Haste nearly permanently and provide a pseudo-CC effect from the fear. This is constant value and creates the sustained damage build that works so well with Night Fae.
3. Death's Embrace is extremely potent for all Death Knights because of how much CC immunity and survivability it provides every time it is active, but it is particularly powerful for Unholy Death Knight as they already gained increased duration to Anti-Magic Shell through Spell Eater. This makes it an unmatched 24-second duration, which is truly overtuned CC prevention.
4. Deadliest Coil adds a good amount of single-target damage to your toolkit and even slightly improves survivability as a lower cost on Death Coil will increase your healing done during Lichborne.
5. Death's Certainty is an excellent pick given the 30% buff to Death Coil. This Legendary provides a flat 35% increased damage to Death Coil. For sustained damage this is a valuable option.
6. Unity is the new Legendary with 9.2. Unity provides your Covenant's Legendary power in addition to the Legendary you are using. As a Death Knight you will be Necrolord which means you will receive Abomination's Frenzy. In most cases, you will pair this with Frenzied Monstrosity for massive damage during your burst.