WotLK Classic Frost Death Knight Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

Frost Death Knight talents focus primarily on increasing your personal damage, buffing your group, and increasing survivability.

If you were looking for a leveling-oriented build, please refer to our Death Knight leveling guide.

The talent build above is the standard Frost with Blood sub-spec. This build is exceptionally strong in lower gear levels, due to the smoother Runic Power generation thanks to Butchery, the Critical Strike bonuses granted by Subversion and Dark Conviction, as well as the bonus Attack Power from Bladed Armor, which synergizes exceptionally well with Unbreakable Armor.

Black Ice is helpful since a considerable amount of damage you deal is either Shadow or Frost, making this talent a massive damage increase.

Endless Winter increases your Strength, but more importantly removes the Runic Power cost of Mind Freeze, allowing you to spend your Runic Power freely.

Improved Icy Talons is a massive group buff that considerably increases the damage done by nearly every melee in game.

Killing Machine can somewhat change your rotation, but will always result in you dealing more damage.

Glacier Rot drastically increases your damage dealt to enemies afflicted by your diseases.

Annihilation allows you to cast Obliterate without removing your diseases from the target.

Blood of the North allows your rotation to be a bit more flexible as your Blood Runes will become Death Runes after casting Blood Strike or Pestilence.

Unbreakable Armor greatly increases your damage thanks to the added Strength, and the added Armor synergizes well with Bladed Armor.

Frost Strike will be your go-to Runic Power spender.

Howling Blast deals a massive amount of damage in AoE situations, but also is a core part of your single-target rotation with Rime procs.

Butchery will passively generate Runic Power for you while in combat.

Bladed Armor increases your Attack Power based off your Armor, making your gear even more important.

Dark Conviction increases your crit not only with attacks but spells as well.

Glyph of Obliterate massively increases the damage dealt by your Obliterate spell, which will be a massive part of your damage breakdown and is your default spender of Unholy and Frost Runes.

Glyph of Frost Strike reduces the cost of Frost Strike by 8 Runic Power and will allow for considerably more casts over the course of any encounter.

Glyph of Disease causes your Pestilence ability to refresh your diseases' durations, so instead of using an Unholy Rune and a Frost Rune you can use a single Blood rune, allowing you to cast additional Obliterates. Your main limitation on ability casts will be having your Runes off coolddown, so trading one Rune for two, especially when both runes you are saving are used for your main damage dealing ability in Obliterate, is incredibly helpful.

Glyph of Raise Dead removes the reagent cost of summoning a ghoul.

Glyph of Pestilence increases the radius of your Pestilence ability by 5 yards.

Glyph of Blood Tap removes the self damage portion of Blood Tap.