Frost Death Knight DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents — The War Within (11.0.5)

The Dual-Wield Breath build combines the minigame of Breath of Sindragosa with Obliteration weaving inbetween your Breath windows. It can perform very well in the right hands, especially when you can achieve high Breath uptime. This build relies on Arctic Assault to build and maintain stacks of Razorice. You run Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle and Rune of the Fallen Crusader as Runeforges.

There are two primary swaps you can do in the spec talent tree. Horn of Winter and Murderous Efficiency are essentially equally good. Horn provides more deterministic resource generation, making your Breath of Sindragosa uptime less random and helping with your Obliteration windows, which is why it is the default pick. The next choice is between Inexorable Assault and Frostwyrm's Fury. You lose around 0.5% Single Target DPS by picking Frostwyrm, but gain a significant amount of AoE burst potential. Do note that for this build, you always run Murderous Efficiency due to pathing requirements.

In the Deathbringer talent tree, we have three choice nodes. Dark Talons is locked in since Reaper's Onslaught desyncs our Reaper's Mark from Pillar of Frost. Grim Reaper is also a locked pick due to being 4% better than Reaper of Souls in all situations. Death's Messenger is always picked since the alternative provides no benefit. Finally, Rune Carved Plates is your go-to, as it always provides some nice defensive benefit. Pact of the Deathbringer is situational for very specific situations and is hard to find value with.

If you really want to run Rider of the Apocalypse with this build, simply pick up Frostwyrm's Fury instead of Inexorable Assault. Going for Absolute Zero is tricky since you need to give up Arctic Assault. You lose around 2.5% Single Target DPS but gain quite a lot of burst AoE.

For the class tree, there is a lot more realistic choice. Above the 20 point delimiter, we do not have too many mandatory spells:

• Death Strike
• Icebound Fortitude
• Runic Attenuation
• Anti-Magic Barrier
• Permafrost
• Icy Talons
• Gloom Ward
• Veteran of the Third War
• Brittle
• Unholy Bond
• Soul Reaper
• Unholy Endurance
• Unholy Ground (pathing)

Picking these up leaves us with 5 points that we can allocate freely. Cleaving Strikes is mandatory on any cleave fight. Mind Freeze for any fight with interrupt being required. Blinding Sleet if you need AoE CC. Wraith Walk and/or March of Darkness for extra mobility. Anti-Magic Zone and potentially Assimilation to get a nice defensive raid cooldown. There is simply a lot of choice here, and you can cater your utility to each encounter!

The bottom part of the tree has a lot less choice. Blood Draw can be exchanged for Runic Protection on fights with a lot of physical damage intake. Furthermore, where you simply do not take any magic damage at all, Null Magic can be allocated to Osmosis or someplace further up the tree. Finally, when you cannot gain particular value from Unyielding Will, this point can be put better to use at Osmosis or, again, further up the tree.

Obliteration builds see two distinct playstyles revolving around the Shattering Blade talent. Without it, you run a Rider of the Apocalypse build that has probably the simplest rotation of all Frost DK builds. With it, you pick up Deathbringer instead and play around the Razorice minigame. It is important to note here that Shattering Blade builds run Rune of Razorice + Rune of the Fallen Crusader as runeforges whereas non-Shatter runs Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle + Fallen Crusader. As a general rule, the Deathbringer is more popular and sees more play. However, they are very close in terms of actual power.

For Hero Talents, when you run Deathbringer, pick up Grim Reaper and Dark Talons. With Rider of the Apocalypse, choose Fury of the Horsemen in the DPS node.

For spec tree choices, we are pretty set on the default builds. Frostwyrm's Fury can be picked up instead of Inexorable Assault in the Shattering Blade version. This sacrifices around 1% Single Target for a big AoE burst gain. In the non-Shatter build, Horn of Winter can be replaced for Inexorable Assault or Piercing Chill. This loses you around 1% Single Target DPS but drops a button from your rotation.

For the class tree, there is a lot more realistic choice. Above the 20 point delimiter, we do not have too many mandatory spells:

• Death Strike
• Icebound Fortitude
• Runic Attenuation
• Anti-Magic Barrier
• Permafrost
• Icy Talons
• Gloom Ward
• Veteran of the Third War
• Brittle
• Unholy Bond
• Unholy Endurance
• Unholy Ground (pathing)

Picking these up leaves us with 6 points that we can allocate freely. Mind Freeze for any fight with interrupt being required. Blinding Sleet if you need AoE CC. Wraith Walk and/or March of Darkness for extra mobility. Anti-Magic Zone and potentially Assimilation to get a nice defensive raid cooldown. There is simply a lot of choice here, and you can cater your utility to each encounter!

A quick note on Soul Reaper. With Dual-Wield builds, the talent is barely a DPS upgrade to pick (0.3% DPS). The rotation simply does not have room for the extra GCDs required to make the most of Soul Reaper. For 2H builds, it is a bit better, and picking Soul Reaper is about 0.5% DPS gain.

The bottom part of the tree has a lot less choice. Blood Draw can be exchanged for Runic Protection on fights with a lot of physical damage intake. Furthermore, where you simply do not take any magic damage at all, Null Magic can be allocated to Osmosis or someplace further up the tree. Finally, when you cannot gain particular value from Unyielding Will, this point can be put better to use at Osmosis or, again, further up the tree.

For Mythic+, we are running Dual-Wield Obliteration builds. Your damage comes from Icy Death Torrent, Glacial Advance via Arctic Assault, as well as Obliterate cleave in your Death and Decay. If you choose to run the 2H version, you add some more Obliterate damage but lose some value from talents that synergize with attack speed and the second runeforge.

Similar to the Single Target case, you go for the Shattering Blade route, picking up Shattered Frost talent as well, with Deathbringer hero talents. This includes a lot of Razorice stack bursting with Frost Strike as well as tab-targeting to optimise your DPS. The other option is to go for a more simple Rider of the Apocalypse build that runs both Glacial Advance and Avalanche, as well as Absolute Zero. This second build is your go-to with a 2H weapon.

As you reach higher and higher keys, the DW Breath of Sindragosa gains a lot of power, especially if you can get your group to play around your Breath windows. You will see the majority of high io DKs running this build. We have linked it below!

For the class tree, we are pretty locked for the most part. Both Blinding Sleet and Mind Freeze are mandatory, along with Cleaving Strikes. Wraith Walk can be exchanged for Grip of the Dead. Furthermore, Coldthirst can potentially be freed up and allocated to Anti-Magic Zone, or Grip of the Dead again.

The Delves build we run is identical to our Mythic+ build. It brings a good balance of Single Target, AoE, and survivability.