Cataclysm Classic Frost Death Knight Talent Builds

Frost Death Knight has a relatively restrictive talent build but offers some slight flexibility when it comes to talents after we have reached Howling Blast and Threat of Thassarian. Highlighted below is our guide on what talent set up will yield the most DPS throughout an encounter while offering your group some highly powerful buffs and debuffs.

This spec goes is focused on maximizing our DPS. This build is recommends you are Dual-wielding to take full advantage of Nerves of Cold Steel and Threat of Thassarian. If you choose to play a two-handed version of this spec you can easily shift the points found in Nerves of Cold Steel into Icy Reach after maxing Runic Power Mastery and the points in Threat of Thassarian into Might of the Frozen Wastes. If you find yourself in an encounter where you will need to kite you can easily shift the two points found in Epidemic into Chilblains.

In this section we will go over some of the key talents you will use when you are playing a Frost Death Knight. Be sure to understand your most important talents as they are vital to play the build to its fullest strength.

• Nerves of Cold Steel — increases your chance to hit with one-handed melee weapons by 3% and increases the damage dealt by your off-hand weapon by 25%.

• Runic Power Mastery — increases your maximum total Runic Power, as Frost we will be using Frost Strike quite often so the more Runic Power we have available the more Frost Striks we will be able to cast.

• Annihilation — increases the damage dealt by our Obliterate ability which acts as our primary spender of Frost and Unholy Runes.

• Endless Winter — removes the Runic Power cost of your Mind Freeze making it much easier to reliably interrupt.

• Killing Machine — causes your auto-attacks to have a chance to grant a 100% Critical Strike bonus to your next Obliterate and Frost Strike abilities.

• Rime — causes your Obliterate to have a chance to cause your Icy Touch or Howling Blast abilities to consume no Runes, the largest limiting factor as a Death Knight is the availability of Runes so any free Runes will greatly help our DPS.

• Pillar of Frost — increases your strength by 20% for 20 seconds. This acts as one of our strongest DPS cooldowns as a Frost Death Knight and pairs incredibly with other DPS cooldowns like your Golemblood Potion or Bloodlust and similar effects.

• Improved Icy Talons — increases the Melee and Ranged Attack Speed of anyone in your Party and Raid by 10% and gives you an additional 5% Attack Speed. This is an incredibly valuable buff that not only increases your personal DPS but benefits your entire group.

• Brittle Bones — increases your Strength by 4% and causes your Frost Fever debuff to increase the targets Physical Damage taken by 4% while active.

• Hungering Cold — instantly freezes all enemies within 10 yards that are afflicted by Frost Fever. This effect will break on any damage taken by any source other than diseases.

• Threat of Thassarian — causes your off-hand weapon to deal damage when you cast Death Strike, Obliterate, Plague Strike, Rune Strike, Frost Strike, or Blood Strike.

• Howling Blast — blasts all enemies within 10 yards of your target with Frost damage and thanks to Glyph of Howling Blast this applies Frost Fever to all enemies hit.

• Bladed Armor — 6 Attack Power for every 180 Armor you have, while this acts as a largely passive damage increase this talent is great as it increases the potency of nearly all of our abilities.

Prime glyphs are new to Cataclysm, giving you a third "row" of glyphs you can use on your character. While there are a couple of different options to choose from, there are some very clear front runners for each specialization.

• Glyph of Obliterate — increases the damage dealt by your Obliterate ability by 20% which is our primary spender of Frost and Unholy Runes.
• Glyph of Howling Blast — causes your Howling Blast ability to apply Frost Fever to all targets hit by the blast, making it much easier to quickly apply your Brittle Bones effect to multiple targets.
• Glyph of Frost Strike — reduces the Runic Power cost of your Frost Strike ability by 8. Frost Strike is our primary Runic Power spending so the more Frost Strikes we can cast the better.

Major glyphs typically offer utility-based options and can be highly situational. For Frost there are no real mandatory glyphs, but we have highlighted what we view as the most generally useful.

• Glyph of Dark Succor — causes your next Death Strike while performed in Frost Presence or Unholy Presence within 15 seconds of killing a target that grants Experience or Honor to heal for at least 20% of your maximum health.
• Glyph of Hungering Cold — removes the Runic Power cost of our Hungering Cold ability.
• Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell — increases the duration of our Anti-Magic Shell buff by 2 seconds.

Minor glyphs typically provide very minor benefits. Your choices will typically depend on what quality of life increase is the most meaningful for you.

• Glyph of Horn of Winter — increases the duration of your Horn of Winter ability by 1 minute. This ability is used to generate Runic Power so we will often be using it to do so on cooldown but this can be helpful maintaing the buff when you are otherwise too busy to rebuff.
• Glyph of Resilient Grip — instantly refreshes your Death Grip cooldown on a target that is immune.
• Glyph of Blood Tap — removes the self-damaging component of our Blood Tap ability.