Frost Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — The War Within (Season 1)

Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Frost Death Knight for The War Within Season 1. 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 have very similar stat and trinket priorities and will run the same set of gear. The real change is 2H builds running a different weapon, of course; we include that as well in the lists..

2.

BiS Gear for Frost Death Knight

Overall BiS List Mythic+ Gear BiS List Raid Gear BiS List

3.

Overall BiS List for Frost Death Knight

Below, you will find the theoretical BiS set of gear for The War Within Season 1.

Slot	Item	Boss/ Dungeon/ Source
Helm	Wrathbark Greathelm	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Neck	Trailspinner Pendant	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Shoulder	Exhumed Centurion's Spikes	Rasha'nan
Cloak	Wings of Shattered Sorrow	Rasha'nan
Chest	Exhumed Centurion's Breastplate	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
Bracers	Everforged Vambraces (Crit Mastery) with Writhing Armor Banding	Blacksmithing
Gloves	Exhumed Centurion's Gauntlets	Sikran
Belt	Crystal-Fissure Girdle	The Stonevault
Legs	Exhumed Centurion's Chausses	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Boots	Ballast Sinkers	Siege of Boralus
Ring #1	Seal of the Poisoned Pact	Queen Ansurek
Ring #2	Seal of the City Watch	Siege of Boralus
Trinket #1	Mark of Khardros	Grim Batol
Trinket #2	Ara-Kara Sacbrood ( Treacherous Transmitter for non-Breath builds)	Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
Mainhand Weapon	Ansurek's Final Judgment	Queen Ansurek
Offhand Weapon	Charged Slicer (Crit Mastery) with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension	Blacksmithing
2H Weapon	Charged Claymore (Crit Mastery) with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension	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	Wrathbark Greathelm	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Neck	Trailspinner Pendant	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Shoulder	Vile Butcher's Pauldrons	The Necrotic Wake
Cloak	Troggstitched Drape	Grim Batol
Chest	Dark Priest's Carapace	The Dawnbreaker
Bracers	Bracers of Umbral Mending	Grim Batol
Gloves	Fogweaver Gauntlets	Mists of Tirna Scithe
Belt	Crystal-Fissure Girdle	The Stonevault
Legs	Legplates of Unholy Frenzy	The Necrotic Wake
Boots	Ichor-Stained Sollerets	City of Threads
Ring #1	Devout Zealot's Ring	The Dawnbreaker
Ring #2	Umbriss Band	Grim Batol
Trinket #1	Mark of Khardros	Grim Batol
Trinket #2	Ara-Kara Sacbrood ( Skarmorak Shard for non-Breath builds)	Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
Mainhand Weapon	Saber of Dread Pirate Lockwood	Siege of Boralus
Offhand Weapon	Shipwrecker's Bludgeon	The Dawnbreaker
2H Weapon	Surgical Heartstopper	City of Threads

3.

Raid Gear BiS List for Frost Death Knight

This list contains the highest DPS setup, only using gear from the Nerub-ar Palace 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	Visor of the Ascended Captain	Sikran
Neck	Locket of Broken Memories	Rasha'nan
Shoulder	Exhumed Centurion's Spikes	Rasha'nan
Cloak	Royal Emblem of Nerub-ar	Ulgrax the Devourer
Chest	Exhumed Centurion's Breastplate	Broodtwister Ovi'nax
Bracers	Devoted Offering's Irons	Queen Ansurek
Gloves	Exhumed Centurion's Gauntlets	Sikran
Belt	Nether Bounty's Greatbelt	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Legs	Exhumed Centurion's Chausses	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Boots	Shattershell Greaves	Silken Court
Ring #1	Seal of the Poisoned Pact	Queen Ansurek
Ring #2	Seal of the City Watch	Siege of Boralus
Trinket #1	Skyterror's Corrosive Organ	Rasha'nan
Trinket #2	Treacherous Transmitter	Nexus Princess Ky'veza
Mainhand Weapon	Ansurek's Final Judgment	Queen Ansurek
Offhand Weapon	Ansurek's Final Judgment	Queen Ansurek
2H Weapon	Mutineer's Fate	Siege of Boralus

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 and Mastery! We recommend simming your character to determine what upgrade is best for you! For a more detailed explanation, you can read the Simulations page.

Simming your character is far and beyond the best way to determine if a piece of gear is, in fact, an upgrade. The trick is knowing how to do it in a way that produces reliable results. If you follow the Simulations guide page, you can use this to have a more practical gearing guide than simply following a BiS list.

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.

Do not craft your Embellishments early, as Blizzard is likely to tune them before the release of the Raid. Wait for the dust to settle before you make your choice.

Frost wants to run one Charged Slicer in your offhand with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension embellishment. You then combine this with Writhing Armor Banding on your crafted Consecrated Cloak for your two embellishments. Your weapon is a great choice to craft at a high ilvl early. You can start off with it on your mainhand slot before you manage to obtain another weapon at a higher ilvl, at which point you move the crafted weapon to the offhand. For 2H builds, craft Charged Claymore as your first craft. Notably, it does not matter which type the weapon is; axe, sword, polearm, mace, etc all work! Simply make sure you select the right type (1-hand or 2-hand) and that the weapon has strength.

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!

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 of choice. The weapon is already great crest value, as well as providing one of our embellishments in the BiS setup. After you have crafted your weapon, upgrade your second one (if dual-wielding) or move on to trinkets and high-stat slot items like Legs, Helm, Chest, etc.

Your second crafted item will be a cloak with Writhing Armor Banding. These are generally not worth spending crests on to upgrade since the embellishment effect does not scale with ilvl, and the cloak is the worst stat piece in general.

Frost aims to use one on-use Trinket as well as one passive one. In The War Within Season 1, our best on-use is Mark of Khardros, closely tied with Treacherous Transmitter. We recommend Mark of Khardros since it does not require the extra effort of making Transmitter work by playing the little minigame when you use the Trinket. DW Obliteration can run double on-use builds with Mark of Khardros and Treacherous Transmitter (or Skarmorak Shard) being the best combination. In this situation, use the Transmitter on pull and delay your second Trinket by one pillar window, using it at 45 seconds and 2min 15 seconds. For passives, Ara-Kara Sacbrood is the best followed by Skyterror's Corrosive Organ.

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, aim to have Crit as our top stat by raw amount, followed by Mastery. 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 get our preferred stats: Crit and Mastery. 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!