Frost Death Knight DPS Stat Priority — Midnight Season 1

The most common stat priority you will find in your sims for Frost Death Knights is as follows.

1. Mastery
2. Critical Strike
3. Haste
4. Versatility

Crit and Haste (to some degree) have special synergy with Frost Death Knight kit due to several abilities being based off Critical Auto Attacks (which themselves scale via Critical Strike and Haste). Killing Machine, Icy Death Torrent and The Long Winter, to name a few, are all scaled with the number of critical autos you can get off. At the same time, our manual Killing Machine generators counteract this effect as guaranteed Critical Strikes devalue Crit value.

The end result is that we want a balance of stats, mainly Mastery but also a good amount of Crit, followed by Haste. If you were given a pot of 2400 secondary stats with our BiS trinkets, you would allocate like the following: 1400 Mastery, 800 Critical Strike, 200 Haste and 0 Versatility.

The stat priority does not change in a meaningful way between Hero Talents or Single Target vs AoE.

Your stat with the most raw points matter a lot since we are running the Potion of Recklessness. Since this provides your highest secondary stat, you really want that to be Mastery. If you are using on-use trinkets like Light Company Guidon, make sure you use your potion before using the trinket to avoid getting a Haste proc. This also has an impact when you sim your gear as any change to whatever is your "highest secondary stat" has a significant impact on gear upgrades.

Strength is your primary statistic. You should look for it in all of your upgrades. It provides you with Attack Power, which determines the damage your abilities do.

Haste increases your attack speed and your Rune regeneration rate while decreasing the global cooldown. It increases the number of Killing Machine procs via the increased attack speed.

Critical Strike increases your chance to critically hit with all spells and abilities. Crits deal double damage by default, but several effects can increase your crit damage, and make crits even stronger.

Crit also increases the number of Killing Machine procs since it increases the number of critical auto attacks you do! Furthermore, it scales well with several abilities in Frost Death Knight kit like Icy Death Torrent, The Long Winter and Bind in Darkness. At the same time, it is devalued by your manually generated Killing Machines that automatically Crit.

Mastery, through Mastery: Frozen Heart, increases your Frost damage. Frost damage makes up a great part of your total damage.

Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.

The gems, enchants, and consumables that you choose are directly affected by your stat priority. To find the best mix of these, we recommend that you simulate yourself using a program like Raidbots or Simulationcraft. However, we have a page linked below that will give you advice on this topic.