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

Frost Death Knight has not received a significant number of changes in the Midnight pre-patch. Frost Death Knights received a rework in the middle of The War Within and it seems the developers are happy with this new iteration. We saw some minor changes within the talents, buffing Shattering Blade, adding a frost-damage component to baseline Obliterate and making Empower Rune Weapon have no travel time.

The new Apex Talents and Hero Talents that are coming in Midnight are not available in the pre-patch. You will gain access to them as you level from 80 to 90 once the expansion is released.

Obliterate now deals a portion of its damage as Frost Damage by default. This provides a nice tuning knob for Blizzard to help bridge the huge gap between raw Obliterates and Killing Machine Obliterates. It will have a greater impact at the start of the expansion where our lack of stacks will likely lead to some naked casts. In the Midnight Pre-Patch, we essentially get zero naked casts throughout a fight.

Frostbane now also deals 300% additional damage to the main target when it consumes stacks of Razorice. This is a significant single-target buff to the ability that previously struggled in that scenario. This significantly buffs dual-wield builds and make them more viable in all content.

Empower Rune Weapon is now instant and no longer has a projectile. This is a very useful change to an otherwise great ability. Currently, the projectile aspect of Empower Rune Weapon causes issues on certain bosses where we see up to 0.5 seconds delay before we actually get our Runic Power and Killing Machine proc. This makes the rotation feel a bit more laggy and disrupts your otherwise practiced flow. We can now always reliably expect the Killing Machine to come at a specific time.

The Death Knight class tree has also seen some minor changes. Blood Bond, Death Defiance, and Death Notes have all been added. Some nice defensives and a hook to talent into Death Pact (which is very much needed, we never pick this talent otherwise). Death Notes would have been a nice addition back in the day, when Breath of Sindragosa drained Runic Power. It is still nice to get but not as impactful anymore. Soul Reaper is gone as it has been moved to the Unholy talent tree and Sacrificial Pact has been simply removed. For Frost this really does not matter since we did not pick either talent anyway.

We have also had some movement of nodes around the tree. Death's Reach is in a much better spot as a choice node with Asphyxiate. Wraith Walk has moved further up the tree and is now a choice with March of Darkness. Unholy Momentum is now a 2-point talent as well. Overall we get a bit more access to certain talents and some more options in the tree. Death Strike and Unholy Endurance were nerfed a bit so we also lost some defensive power, but not that much in the grand scheme of things.

We hope this summary helped you prepare for the Midnight launch on March 2nd, or February 27th with Early Access. If you want to prepare for your leveling journey in Midnight, make sure to check out our recommended consumables and items that can help you reach max-level in Midnight faster!