Frost Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds — The War Within (11.0.5)

You have a few flexible points in the tree and will mostly come down to preference. Starting with the Death Knight Tree, you can consider moving the point in Grip of the Dead to Wraith Walk into comps where you expect to be rooted a lot such as Frost Mages.

In the Frost tree, you can drop Shattering Blade if you are not playing Dual-Wield Frost as this tends to lose value with 2H Frost due to the need to play Rune of the Fallen Crusader over Razorice. This point should be floated to Breath of Sindragosa as this allows you to pop Reaper's Mark faster.

Both Hero Trees are viable. Rider of the Apocalyse is the default as it provides good uptime, increases your sustain damage, and Deathbringer has seen consistent nerfs bringing this more in line with other options. Deathbringer can still be a great option if you are looking for a stronger burst window with Reaper's Mark but generall you will only play this with 2H.

PvP Talents are very situational with their usage. They tend to fill certain niche roles in your own comp or counters to other comps. Therefore, instead of a cookie-cutter PvP talent setup, you will change them in the gates before a match starts, depending on the enemy classes.

Strangulate is a very impactful crowd control effect. It costs no resources, has no cast time, and lasts 5 seconds on a short 45 second cooldown. Because of this, you can use it every time you use Pillar of Frost on the healer and make the damage much more difficult for them to deal with. The healer's trinket will have a longer cooldown than your Strangulate, meaning one of your setups will not have an answer. This can also be used against certain classes to prevent them from using certain abilities, such as a Priest's Greater Fade. This talent is very powerful in any composition as a result.

Delirium is a unique and powerful anti-movement effect that works against abilities that will move a player's character; namely, Mage's Blink, Monk's Roll and Transcendence, and Demon Hunter's Fel Rush. Because of this, this talent is generally taken against any of those classes to shut down their mobility.

Bitter Chill is a powerful disruption tool. Every spec and every class in the game gets some benefit from Haste in the forms of faster casts, resource generation, and global cooldown reduction. This means reducing it by a whopping 8% can severely throw off the enemy's momentum and the power of their burst windows. The ability to reset this effect and chains by using Frost Strike just makes it even more consistent. This talent is key if you are having trouble surviving a burst-heavy team.

Bloodforged Armor is a new addition to the Death Knight's toolkit. This ability provides a 20% physical damage reduction for 3 seconds after each death strike. This should be used in any class with heavy physical damage, such as feral and Warrior.

Dark Simulacrum is one of the more interesting spells in the game currently. It is extremely powerful against spammable CC effects, such as Polymorph, or Cyclone, as well as powerful healing cooldowns such as Life Cocoon. It is a neat addition to Death Knight's toolkit while having a high skill cap and awareness requirement.

Spellwarden is a remarkably powerful tool. This allows you to cast AMS on your teammates. This can be used to prevent crowd control from landing on your healer or to allow your teammate to stay aggressive in caster match-ups.

Shroud of Winter is a very niche PvP talent. It does not have a set composition. It is good against it because every class has abilities with important range thresholds on them. This talent is based heavily on what your team is playing and what it struggles against. If a certain crowd control setup has been too difficult to stop or swaps during burst windows are causing your team many losses, this talent prevents both of those things by limiting the range at which they can happen. Experiment on your own with this very interesting PvP talent!

Dead of Winter is a strong PvP talent. This ability allows for Remorseless Winter to serve as an AoE stun every 45 seconds. This talent is chosen when your team has a lack of AoE stuns or cannot reliably get an AoE stun every Pillar of Frost, such as when playing with a caster.