Frost Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — The War Within (11.2.5)

Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Frost Death Knight for The War Within Season 3. Check this page to learn everything you need to know about gearing a Frost Death Knight, including the BiS Gear from all sources, Raiding, and Mythic+, information on the best Trinkets, Tier Sets, and much more.

We have three BiS lists below, each detailing the best gear you can obtain from a specific source. We have the overall list, a raid-only one, and, finally, a mythic+-only list. They are all optimised to give you the highest single target DPS. The various builds we run do have somewhat different stat priorities, meaning that the BiS list will be slightly different. What is shown below corresponds to the Deathbringer with Breath of Sindragosa that is running a 2H weapon. A build with Rider of the Apocalypse would generally run more Haste.

When it comes to weapon choice, 2H is generally better than 2-handed in pretty much all Single Target scenarios (about 5% behind with the best Single Target build). Dual-Wield can do well in Mythic+ however with Frostbane builds.

A good tip is to go into Unholy loot spec so you exclusively loot 2H weapons!

2.

BiS Gear for Frost Death Knight

Overall BiS Mythic+ Raid

3.

Overall BiS List for Frost Death Knight

Below, you will find the theoretical BiS set of gear for The War Within Season 3.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Hollow Sentinel's Stonemask	Forgeweaver Araz
Neck	Salhadaar's Folly	Nexus King Salhadaar
Shoulder	Hollow Sentinel's Perches	The Soul Hunters
Cloak	Reshii Wraps	Quest
Chest	Hollow Sentinel's Breastplate	Fractillus
Bracers	Everforged Vambraces (Crit Mastery) with Writhing Armor Banding	Blacksmithing
Gloves	Breached Containment Guards	Forgeweaver Araz
Belt	Girdle of Absolute Faith	Eco-Dome Al'dani
Legs	Hollow Sentinel's Stonekilt	Loom’ithar
Boots	Interloper's Plated Sabatons	The Soul Hunters
Ring #1	Logic Gate: Alpha	Plexus Sentinel
Ring #2	Radiant Necromancer's Band	Priory of the Sacred Flame
Trinket #1	Araz's Ritual Forge	Forgeweaver Araz
Trinket #2	Astral Antenna	Loom’ithar
2H Weapon	Charged Claymore (Crit Mastery) with Ascendance	Blacksmithing

3.

Mythic+ Gear BiS List for Frost Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, with farmable gear from Mythic+ Dungeons. This is a great place to start on a relatively new character, as you can infinitely grind out these items from Mythic+.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Wing Commander's Helmet	Halls of Atonement
Neck	Sin Stained Pendant	Halls of Atonement
Shoulder	Stoneflesh Spaulders	Tazavesh: So'leah's Gambit
Cloak	Reshii Wraps	Quest
Chest	Muckdiver's Wading Plate	Operation: Floodgate
Bracers	Flameforged Armguard	Priory of the Sacred Flame
Gloves	Jumpstarter's Scaffold-Scrapers	Operation: Floodgate
Belt	Girdle of Absolute Faith	Eco-Dome Al'dani
Legs	Quantum Leapers	Tazavesh: Streets of Wonder
Boots	Implacable Weatherproof Treads	Tazavesh: Streets of Wonder
Ring #1	Radiant Necromancer's Band	Priory of the Sacred Flame
Ring #2	Devout Zealot's Ring	The Dawnbreaker
Trinket #1	Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker	Operation: Floodgate
Trinket #2	Cursed Stone Idol	Halls of Atonement
2H Weapon	Fatebound Crusader	Eco-Dome Al'dani

3.

Raid Gear BiS List for Frost Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, only using gear from the Manaforge Omega Raid.

This list is mostly useful for informing your organized guild of what loot is optimal for you for loot distribution purposes.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Hollow Sentinel's Stonemask	Forgeweaver Araz
Neck	Salhadaar's Folly	Nexus King Salhadaar
Shoulder	Hollow Sentinel's Perches	The Soul Hunters
Cloak	Reshii Wraps	Quest
Chest	Hollow Sentinel's Breastplate	Fractillus
Bracers	Yoke of Enveloping Hatred	The Soul Hunters
Gloves	Breached Containment Guards	Forgeweaver Araz
Belt	Fresh Ethereal Fetters	Soulbinder Naazindhri
Legs	Hollow Sentinel's Stonekilt	Loom’ithar
Boots	Interloper's Plated Sabatons	The Soul Hunters
Ring #1	Band of the Shattered Soul	Dimensius The All Devouring
Ring #2	Logic Gate: Alpha	Forgeweaver Araz
Trinket #1	Araz's Ritual Forge	Forgeweaver Araz
Trinket #2	Astral Antenna	Loom’ithar
2H Weapon	Supermassive Starcrusher	Dimensius The All Devouring

Patch 11.2.5 re-introduces Puzzling Cartel Chip (3 weeks into the season) that allow you to target specific raid and dungeon items that you might have otherwise been unlucky in obtaining. This includes weapons, trinkets and cantrip items. For the quality of the gear, you need to defeat a specific raid boss on normal difficulty to buy the item initially (hero-track). For mythic track, you need to defeat the boss on Mythic difficulty, and you need to complete all dungeons on +12 in time to be able to buy the respective dungeon gear.

When it comes to our priority, we are looking to purchase our BiS trinkets from the vendor, followed by the special effect boots. This means that we go for the following priority:

1. Astral Antenna
2. Araz's Ritual Forge
3. Interloper's Plated Sabatons

Important to note is that Unyielding Netherprism is a great trinket as well, especially in Mythic+ and certain raid encounters where you want a big damage boost in the middle of the fight.

Patch 11.2 introduced a new cloak that can be obtained and upgraded via a questline. This will be our BiS cloak for Season 3! We can customise it to some degree, adding a single secondary stat to the cloak. We want to add Mastery via the Pure Energizing Fiber item. Furthermore, we can combine the cloak with a pair of boots that interact with it: Interloper's Plated Sabatons. These boots are also part of our BiS list! As always, sim yourself for upgrades but the cloak and boots are likely to be better than what you have!

If you have a new piece of gear for which you need gems and enchant advice, you can find everything on our dedicated page below.

While gearing up, item level will be your primary target. Strength is our best stat, and you shouldn't focus too much on your secondaries at first. Once you start to receive gear pieces with the same ilvl but different stats, that is when you want to start optimizing your stat distribution. Generally, Frost Death Knights want to prioritize Crit, Mastery and Haste! We recommend simming your character to determine what upgrade is best for you! For a more detailed explanation, you can read the Simulations page.

Our Season 3 Tier Set is now specific to the Hero-Talents we run, with unique effects for both Rider of the Apocalypse and Deathbringer. The sets are strong with the following raw cumulative values:

• Rider 2-set: 3.7%
• Rider 4-set: 14.7%
• Deathbringer 2-set: 5.1%
• Deathbringer 4-set: 12.1%

You only need 4 pieces out of 5 to get both set bonuses. We recommend you get all items except for the Gloves, due to their Versatility stat. Check out the BiS List for more information.

The 2-set summons Trollbane with Pillar of Frost, giving you a bit higher uptime on the specific Horseman. Furthermore, his Icy Fury and Obliterate abilities do more damage.

The 4-set makes Trollbane cast his version of Obliterate and Frostscythe whenever you do so. Furthermore, your Obliterates deal increased damage against targets affected by his Icy Fury. This is a significant buff to Obliterate which is one of the reasons the 4-set is powerful.

The 2-set grants you 1 stack of Exterminate when you cast Reaper's Mark with 150% first Scythe and 125% second Scythe effectiveness. This gives you a free extra Killing Machine at the start of your Pillar of Frost and a free application of Frost Fever.

The 4-set increases Exterminate damage and the amount of stacks Reaper's Mark can achieve by 15. When Reaper's Mark explodes, it increases your Critical Strike chance by 10% for 8 seconds. This increases the potential explosion damage of Reaper's Mark (it is based off the number of stacks you generate) and provides a nice Crit buff for after your main burst window, something that is helpful when generating Killing Machine procs for you Breath of Sindragosa.

The War Within has a powerful upgrade system for your gear where you use Valorstones and Crests to upgrade your gear. These are obtainable from practically all forms of content in the game.

For more information on the new Gear Upgrades system, check out our dedicated page for it below.

There are three primary items to upgrade as a Frost Death Knight:

1. Weapon
2. Trinket
3. Head / Chest / Legs

With how the upgrade system works with Crests being the limited currency, you want to upgrade the most powerful slots you can. For Frost Death Knights, this will be your weapon (Attack Power scales with weapon ilvl). You ideally want to use your crests to craft a weapon ASAP since it is also part of our BiS list. Start out with it in your Mainhand slot and only swap when your non-crafted weapon ends up a higher ilvl. After you have crafted your weapon, and upgraded your other one, move on to trinkets and high-stat slot items like Legs, Helm, Chest, etc.

Frost wants to run a 2H crafted weapon Charged Claymore (Crit Haste) with Ascendance and Everforged Vambraces (Crit Mastery) with Writhing Armor Banding as the crafted combo. This is great from an early power perspective as you can craft a high ilvl weapon early! Furthermore, the power of the Writhing Armor Banding does not scale with ilvl so it is not a big loss to have that on your wrists. Double Dawnthread Lining is really close, only 0.1% behind or so. However, the early weapon craft is so powerful which is why we recommend going that route.

For Mythic+, you can go for Blessed Weapon Grip and Dawnthread Lining lining. Ideally, you want to run double Dawnthread Lining as Ascension loses power in Mythic+.

When it comes to your other crafted slots, we are only wearing two crafted items in our BiS setup (due to the ilvl loss). Use crafting as a way of "filling in the gaps" in your gear, trying to find the best value upgrade in a slot where you already do not have a good piece. Sim yourself to find the best option for you!

Frost aims to use one on-use Trinket as well as one passive one. In The War Within Season 3, our best on-use is Araz's Ritual Forge slightly ahead of Araz's Ritual Forge. For passive trinkets, Astral Antenna is best followed by Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker (-1%). Furthermore, double passive is a solid option with Astral Antenna + Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker being only 0.3% behind the BiS setup.

Many of our best on-use trinkets are 2-minute Cooldown unfortunately. This means that we cannot easily time them with our major 1.5min Cooldowns as a rule. Instead, we need to consider the total fight duration and plan ahead based off this. The usage looks like the following (always make sure to use the final use to get the full value before the fight ends. 30 seconds for Araz, 20 seconds for Signet). The first range is the fight duration span, the second list is when to use the trinket. You should ideally get at least 50% uptime in your major CDs for it to be worth to hold over a full Pillar of Frost overlap.

• 00:00-02:30 -> 00:00, 02:00
• 02:30-03:15 -> 00:00, 02:15
• 03:15-04:45 -> 00:00, 03:00
• 04:45-06:15 -> 00:00, 02:15, 04:30
• 06:15-09:15 -> 00:00, 03:00, 05:15, 07:30

Many people overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is usually better than a better quality of stats. Because of this, wearing higher item-level gear with worse stats tends to be better than lower item-level gear with great stats. Keep this in mind when considering gear. For more information on stats, please refer to our dedicated page.

For Frost specifically, we aim for a good balance between Crit, Mastery and Haste. For a closer look at stats, please see the below article./p>

For neck and ring pieces, you can generally afford to drop 5-10 ilevels in most cases to avoid our worst stat, Versatility. That said, you should always sim yourself to see what is better as the secondary stat diminishing returns can still change your ideal setup. It can be useful to wear crafted jewelry due to how you can control the stats; just remember that you cannot craft the maximum ilvl possible!