Frost Death Knight DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Dragonflight 10.0.7
On this page, you will find the best gear and best in slot items for your Frost Death Knight in World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.0.7.
Gearing a Frost Death Knight
Welcome to our Gearing Page for Frost Death Knight; this section will cover everything you need to know about equipping your character correctly.
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. This largely
depends on the build and situation you aim for. Breath of Sindragosa
wants Crit and Mastery in most scenarios, whereas
Obliteration wants
a balanced amount of Crit, Mastery, and Haste. We recommend
simulating 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.
Primordial Stone Gems
Patch 10.0.7 introduces a new set of gems called Primordial Stone Gems.
These can be slotted into Primordial Sockets in the Onyx Annulet ring.
A total of three gems can be allocated here. Unfortunately, due to the lack
of secondary stats, equipping the new ring with Primordial Stone Gems will be
a downgrade compared to any (415+) ring.
We do not recommend using this new ring at all.
For more information regarding the Onyx Annulet, the Primordial Gemstones, and how to obtain them, check out our dedicated guide for it below.
Valor upgrades
In Dragonflight, you can upgrade gear obtained after the patch with Valor points. You can learn more about this system on the dedicated Valor page.
Overall Top Trinkets
Choosing trinkets again depends on your build. Breath of Sindragosa
heavily favors trinkets with on-use effects on a 2-minute cooldown.
Obliteration
favors passive trinkets that you can use often. Due to such a short
cooldown window and consistent damage, you must fix on-use trinkets! Still, the BiS trinket combo for most builds is
Blazebinder's Hoof
and
Whispering Incarnate Icon!



You will see me recommending trinkets with use effects in the passive trinket section. These are simple on-use damage trinkets that don't synergize with our cooldowns. They are in some ways "passive" since they don't interfere with active trinkets that buff our damage windows!
Best Active Trinkets
Best "Passive" Trinkets
Stats
Many people overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is nearly always 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 stats information, please refer to our dedicated page.
Jewelry
For neck and ring pieces, you can drop 5-10 ilevels in some cases
to get optimal stats. That said, you should always sim
yourself to see what is better as the secondary stat diminishing returns
can still change your ideal setup. Jeweled Signet of Melandrus is a nice trinket
due to its additional effect. It is not a huge gain, but it is enough to be our best
choice. For Neck, we want to run
Elemental Lariat
due to its additional socket effect!
Note with the Elemental Lariat this does consume 1 of your 2 embellished
crafted gear. When using this, you can use all of the same gems, but typically you can
get a few extra DPS by having one or two gems of another type to prevent the buffs
from munching each other.
Weapons
For Season 1, our weapon choice is primarily guided by ilvl. Higher ilvl
means higher weapon DPS which scales our DPS a ton! Incarnate Sky-Splitter
is, therefore, our BiS 2H weapon! For Dual-Wield builds,
Strike Twice
is our best option in both hands. High ilvl and an extra effect make it the
best choice.
Tier Set Bonus
With Season 1, we have a Frost Death Knight Tier set bonus that buffs how we play.
- 2-piece set bonus:
Frost Death Knight 2pc
- 4-piece set bonus:
Frost Death Knight 4pc
The ideal 4 items to use here are Head, Shoulder, Chest and Hands
With the 4-piece, you'll have to react quickly to its procs! Killing Machine
might sometimes not be consumed by
Obliterate. In these scenarios, it is
important to spend the proc again as soon as possible!
Notable Crafted Gear
You should look out for two items in terms of crafted gear.
Elemental Lariat and
Unstable Frostfire Belt. Both of these
have special effects that make them BiS in their respective slots!
BiS List
Instead of providing a separate table of gear with the highest theoretical
damage throughput, I'll provide recommendations when gearing. We have already
discussed the absolute majority of items you will equip. Crafted items, tier set,
trinkets, and your weapon. Outside of this, you are better off simulating your
character to determine which item is the largest upgrade. Generally, you'll
focus Crit and Mastery (and Haste with Obliteration). Still, there are cases when your other stats
will become more important (especially if you have meager amounts on them already).
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Death Knight Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Bicepspump, a semi-hardcore player raiding with Pescorus on Kazzak. He is heavily involved in the DK DPS theorycrafting community, testing hyoptheses and investigating the correct priority to use. He is also a moderator in the Acherus Death Knight Discord, frequently answering questions and discussing optimisations (do not hesitate to reach out). He produces guide content on YouTube and frequently streams on Twitch.
- PvP Play with the Blues on the 10.1 PTR: March 31st
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