Frost Death Knight Gearing Guide

The first season of The War Within has quite basic tier set bonuses, this is mainly due to all of the new tools and passives that we are gaining with Hero talents, so these tier sets are pretty self explanatory.

• 2 Set Bonus: Your Runic Power spending abilities deal 8% increased damage.
• 4 Set Bonus: Consuming Runic Power has a chance to increase your Strength by 10% for 8 sec.

A lot of Frost's damage does come from Frost Strike / Glacial Advance / Breath of Sindragosa, so this is a nice and simple damage bonus that puts more emphasis on Runic Power spending abilities and the passive effects which empower them, such as A Feast of Souls from the Riders of the Apocalypse hero talent tree.

The 4 Set bonus goes hand in hand with the (2) Set Bonus, essentially giving you a passive strength proc whenever you spend runic power, which you will be spending almost every other global with Frost Strike / Glacial Advance / Breath of Sindragosa, so there’s not much else to say about this talent other than it’s a completely random buff that you ideally want to overlap with your Pillar of Frost and Rune of the Fallen Crusader procs.

The tables below aim to give you a general list of gear that is good for Frost Death Knight, these lists are not a perfect replacement for simming your character.

• Raiding
• Mythic+

Ara-Kara Sacbrood

This is one of your best trinkets in Season 1 and comes from the dungeon Ara-Kara, City of Echoes. It’s a passive trinket which gives you haste and can proc a 1 minute strength buff. Multiple strength buffs can overlap, which means you can sometimes get a really good overlap with multiple stacks and Pillar of Frost together. Haste is one of our best stats and this trinket gives a strong and steady flow of strength, as well as some additional damage from the trinket itself (although it’s very negligible).

Ovi’naxs Mercurial Egg

Frost has a damage profile which is quite consistent, or involves frequent burst windows. This makes finding on use trinkets for Frost quite tricky as you could be getting better value overall from stat stick which is giving you a benefit during all of your cooldowns, not every other set of cooldowns. This trinket is a very strong stat stick which changes its stats based on your movement.

Ideally you want to stand still as much as possible for the strength buff, but you still want some Haste stacks from it due to the 60% diminishing returns above 20 stacks of either of the buffs. Ideally you want 20 strength stacks and 10 haste stacks, as Crit (which is what you will want to be your highest secondary stat) is very good for increasing your proc chance of Killing Machine, Icy Death Torrent and The Long Winter. This is of course not very easy to consistently pull off during an encounter, but worth noting nonetheless.

Another great part of this trinket is that it does have an use effect which will hold the current stacks of Strength / Crit that you have, so if you’re using cooldowns during movement intensive situations you can use this on use effect to keep all of your banked up Strength.

Treacherous Transmitter

This trinket can be very difficult to play around, so it may not be a viable choice in some boss encounters and you will want to use Skarmorak Shard instead. This is a very powerful trinket that is on a 1.5 minute cooldown (which aligns perfectly with Pillar of Frost when using Icecap), which gives you an insanely big Strength buff for 15 seconds (which is also increased by 30% with Pillar of Frost) once you have completed one of the three tasks that it gives you at random (you have 15 seconds to complete the task):

• Jump 3 times
• Walk into the orb
• Stand in the portal pad

You will want to always use this trinket just before Pillar of Frost so that you gain this massive strength buff at the start of your Pillar of Frost window.

Skarmorak Shard

This mostly synergises with Riders of the Apocalypse, with Frostwyrm’s Fury triggering Apocalypse Now every 1.5 minutes (with Absolute Zero). It’s a big amount of Mastery which will increase all of your Frost damage, generally pretty good for a burst window like Apocalypse Now with an Obliteration window.

It also works for Deathbringer if you are playing with Painful Death and Icecap, so you will have Skarmarok Shard active for every other Reaper’s Mark + Obliteration window, although stat sticks are generally better due to potential Reaper’s Mark reapplications.

For Breath of Sindragosa it’s not really that ideal, as you will want to hold this trinket for Breath of Sindragosa (which will be for 30 seconds). So you're probably going to lose an entire use of this trinket in most encounters, greatly diminishing its overall value.

Raiding

Charged Slicer (with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension)

Frost is a very stat hungry spec, which greatly scales from secondary stats. This makes Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension the best embellishment to use as it gives you a constant, steady flow of secondary stats throughout an entire boss fight, or mythic plus dungeon.

It is a bit rng on which stat you can get, which adds an additional layer of rng to your throughput, but it’s still much stronger than other embellishments that are currently available.

This embellishment is also much stronger when paired with another crafted piece of gear with Writhing Armor Banding!

Everforged Greathelm (with Writhing Armor Banding)

As mentioned before, you ideally want to pair your Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension with a Writhing Armor Banding to buff its effects! Not much to say about this embellishment, it just buffs your BiS embellishment by 50%, making it better than other embellishments available when paired with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension!

Mythic Plus

Charged Slicer (with Blessed Weapon Grip)

In Mythic Plus, Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension is not as strong as it is in raids. This is because it takes time to ramp up its stacks, and you are not always in combat so you will often drop this buff between pulls/bosses.However, there is another weapon embellishment which is a strong replacement, that does not take time to ramp up but instead randomly procs for an upfront amount of secondary stat (Crit ideally), which is much better for Mythic Plus scenarios as you want most of your damage in quick, upfront bursts.

Everforged Greathelm (with Dawnthread Lining)

As we are not using Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension, the Writhing Armor Banding loses all of its value. So a good substitution for it is Dawnthread Lining as it gives your best secondary stat (Crit), and in Mythic Plus you often take bursts of damage rather than consistent rot damage so your uptime on Dawnthread Lining is going to be pretty decent as well.