Frost Death Knight Gearing Guide

Season 2 of The War Within comes with a new set bonus, adding damage to your runic power spenders and giving you free Frostscythe procs. Frost already excels at passively cleaving while doing its full single target, and this tierset makes that unique capability even stronger.

Frost Death Knight Season 2 Tier Set Bonus:

• 2 Set Bonus: Your spells and abilities have a chance to activate a Winning Streak! increasing the damage of your Frost Strike and Glacial Advance by 4% stacking up to 6 times. Frost Strike and Glacial Advance have a 7% chance to remove Winning Streak!
• 4 Set Bonus: Winning Streak! causes Frost Strike and Glacial Advance to have a 8% chance to cast Frostscythe per stack at 30% effectiveness. Losing Winning Streak! sends you into a Murderous Frenzy, casting Frostscythe at 100% effectiveness and gaining 12% Mastery for 6 sec. Additionally, Frostscythe deals 40% more damage to the first target struck.

2 Set Bonus

This set bonus brings a lot more potency to the Shattering Blade build, as its bonus damage to Frost Strike means it also scales with Shattering Blade. It is also a solid cleave/multi-target gain for your Glacial Advances, which come from you passively with Killing Machine procs via the talent Arctic Assault. It also works well for Breath of Sindragosa, simply because of the passive gain to Glacial Advance and also your Frost Strikes in between Breath of Sindragosa windows, but it has less overall scaling than Shattering Blade.

4 Set Bonus

This bonus makes Frost have even more passive cleave potential, as well as giving you a nice 12% Mastery bonus on top. It is a bit rng but most things are with Frost, so you just have to hope that the second part of this set bonus procs during your Pillar of Frost window. There isn’t much interaction otherwise, just make sure to always have your character facing your targets correctly so you don’t lose any potential Frostscythe cleave whenever it procs! Naturally you might see more overall procs of this 4 set with Shattering Blade compared to Breath of Sindragosa, as you will only be proccing it from Glacial Advances (from Arctic Assault) during your Breath of Sindragosa windows, however if it does proc then the Mastery buff a nice buff to your Breath of Sindragosa burst too.

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+

Notable Items

Eye of Kezan

This trinket is one of the strongest items you can acquire this season, beating out most trinkets and it scales exceptionally well in longer encounters.

It has two downsides which are important to address, first is that it has a ramp up time, and will reach its max stacks at around 3 minutes (sometimes it can take longer but that’s just bad luck), so it will fall short of other trinket options in short kill times. The other issue is that dying with this trinket will reset your stacks back to 0, which makes dying super punishing to your overall throughput.

Even with these caveats, it’s still one of the best trinkets in the game that you will definitely want to have.

House of Cards

Unholy is often best paired with a strong on use trinket to buffs its cooldown windows, House of Cards is a great trinket that has a perfect cooldown time to align with Frostwyrm’s Fury & Pillar of Frost windows, but also gives you a large Mastery buff which pretty much increases all of our damage.

This large amount of Mastery from the on use effect is also very strong in multi-target scenarios, so it pairs very well with Breath of Sindragosa as well, even if you have to hold it for 45 seconds..

The Jastor Diamond

This is another very rare item from the raid which you will want to have. Its stat weights lean heavily into Mastery which is one of your best secondary stats and most importantly, this ring provides additional secondary stats with its unique effect.

With the additional stats from the proc effect, this ring comes with a lot of additional secondary stats which is why it is ahead of other rings in this season's loot table. It’s even better when you are getting Haste or Mastery from the proc! Sadly it is under the “Very Rare” loot table from Gallywix, so it’s very worth saving a Dinar for!

Suspicious Energy Drink

Eye of Kezan is a very strong passive trinket if you are in a longer encounter. However, for short fights and Mythic+ type scenarios, the Suspicious Energy Drink from Delves is a much better option, even when it has 13 ilvls less than other Mythic trinkets. It has a strong Mastery proc with a decent proc rate of 3 RPPM, and Mastery is one of our best stats so this trinket does well in both single and multi-target scenarios.

Embellishments & Crafted Gear

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 Vambracers (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

Everforged Vambracers & Consecrated Cloak (with Dawnthread Lining)

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.

As we are not using Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension or Writhing Armor Banding (as it loses all of its value if it’s not buffing a Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension weapon) for Mythic Plus, double Dawnthread Lining is the best option. Dawnthread Lining 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.

Cyrce’s Circlet

This ring is obtainable on the Siren Isle, a zone that came with patch 11.0.7. It’s filled with activities and questlines which will reward you with a ring called Cyrce’s Circlet, and multiple citrines (which are basically gems) which give the ring unique powers/effects.

There are multiple citrine combinations but in this guide I will be covering the best combination you can use as a Frost DK.

The ring will have 3 different slots:

• Sea
• Thunder
• Wind

Each of these types will have 4 different Citrines, you can only use one of each type. With this in mind, the 3 best citrines for their types are:

Fathomdweller’s Runed Citrine (Sea)

This citrine gives you Mastery and also enhances the effects of your other citrines based on your total mastery. However, currently the citrine does not take into account baseline mastery of your spec, or any racial passive bonuses to mastery. It will only provide extra mastery from the mastery which you have on your equipped gear and flasks/trinkets etc, so its scaling is not as potent as it first seems from reading the tooltip at face value. Mastery is a decent stat for Frost which scales very well in multi-target scenarios, but also has some good single target value, so it’s one of the best to use.

Stormbringer’s Runed Citrine (Thunder)

This is a simple bonus that gives you a low portion of stats for every secondary stat. The Mastery provided from this citrine will also scale with the Fathomdweller’s Runed Citrine, but it will not create an infinite loop of bonus Mastery, but it’s still a solid combination.

Legendary Skipper’s Citrine (Wind)

This is a Citrine which gives you the chance to proc other citrine effects. This is particularly strong if it procs some of the more high value citrine effects, as it’s also a buffed version. It has a high uptime as it procs at least 4 times per minute, additionally scaling with Haste. This also scales better with the more people that use this Citrine, so when your whole raid is using it then it’s a pretty good throughput gain for you and your raid as a whole.