Frost Death Knight DPS Stat Priority — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

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

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

Crit and Haste (to some degree) have good synergy with the 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 Critical Strike but also a good amount of Mastery and Haste. If you were given a pot of 1000 secondary stats, you would allocate like the following: 400 Critical Strike, 300 Mastery, 300 Haste and 0 Versatility.

Deathbringer values Haste lower compared to Rider of the Apocalypse and aims a bit less of it overall. The stat prio does nog change significantly in Mythic+.

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 the 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.