Frost Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds (Dragonflight 10.2)
Choosing the right PvP and PvE talents is a prerequisite to proper performance in PvP. This guide goes through the various talent choices available to you as a Frost Death Knight and gives you the best combinations you can take.
This page is part of our Frost Death Knight PvP Guide.
Talent Choices for Frost Death Knights
PvP Talents for Frost Death Knights
PvP Talents are very situational with their usage. They tend to fill certain niche roles in your own comp or counters to other comps. Therefore, instead of a cookie-cutter PvP talent setup, you will change them in the gates before a match starts, depending on the enemy classes.
General PvP Talents
Strangulate is a very impactful crowd control effect. It
costs no resources, has no cast time, and lasts 4 seconds on a short
1-minute cooldown. Because of this, you can use it every time you
use
Pillar of Frost on the healer and make the damage much more
difficult for them to deal with. The healer's trinket will have a longer
cooldown than your Strangulate, meaning one of your setups
will not have an answer. This can also be used against certain classes to
prevent them from using certain abilities, such as a Priest's
Greater Fade. This talent is very powerful in any composition as a
result.
Necrotic Aura is used in nearly all match-ups. This provides a
flat 8% magic damage increase. Given that all damage during
Pillar of Frost
is magic damage; this 8% increased damage during your burst window in addition
to buffing your teammates. This talent does get less value when playing with a
pure physical class such as Warrior but is still a solid pick for the increase
it provides.
Situational PvP Talents
Delirium is a unique and powerful anti-movement effect that works
against abilities that will move a player's character; namely, Mage's
Blink, Monk's
Roll and
Transcendence, and Demon
Hunter's
Fel Rush. Because of this, this talent is generally taken
against any of those classes to shut down their mobility.
Bitter Chill is a powerful disruption tool. Every spec and
every class in the game gets some benefit from Haste in the forms of
faster casts, resource generation, and global cooldown reduction. This
means reducing it by a whopping 8% can severely throw off the enemy's
momentum and the power of their burst windows. The ability to reset
this effect and chains by using
Frost Strike just makes it
even more consistent. This talent is key if you are having trouble
surviving a burst-heavy team.
Bloodforged Armor is a new addition to the Death Knight's toolkit. This
ability provides a 20% physical damage reduction for 3 seconds after each death
strike. This should be used in any class with heavy physical damage, such as
feral and Warrior.
Dark Simulacrum is one of the more interesting spells in the game
currently. It is extremely powerful against spammable CC effects, such as
Polymorph, or
Cyclone, as well as powerful healing cooldowns
such as
Life Cocoon. It is a neat addition to Death Knight's toolkit
while having a high skill cap and awareness requirement.
Spellwarden is a remarkably powerful tool. This allows you to cast
AMS on your teammates. This can be used to prevent crowd control from landing
on your healer or to allow your teammate to stay aggressive in caster match-ups.
With the duration penalty being removed in 10.1.5, this may be a viable option.
Shroud of Winter is a very niche PvP talent. It does not have a
set composition. It is good against it because every class has abilities
with important range thresholds on them. This talent is based heavily on
what your team is playing and what it struggles against. If a certain
crowd control setup has been too difficult to stop or swaps during burst
windows are causing your team many losses, this talent prevents both
of those things by limiting the range at which they can happen.
Experiment on your own with this very interesting PvP talent!
Dead of Winter is a strong PvP talent. This ability allows for
Remorseless Winter to serve as an AoE stun every 45 seconds. This talent
is chosen when your team has a lack of AoE stuns or cannot reliably get an
AoE stun every minute with
Pillar of Frost, such as when playing with
an Arms Warrior or caster.
Changelog
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.2.0.
- 01 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
- 05 May 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1.
- 21 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 30 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 22 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
- 31 Jul. 2022: Reviewed for Shadowlands Season 4.
- 31 May 2022: Reviewed for Patch 9.2.5.
- 02 Mar. 2022: Reviewed for Patch 9.2.0.
- 11 Dec. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.5.
- 02 Jul. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.
- 20 Mar. 2021: Reviewed for Patch 9.0.5.
- 20 Feb. 2021: Updates for the developing meta.
- 05 Dec. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands Season 1.
- 12 Nov. 2020: Updates made by new writer.
- 14 Oct. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands pre-patch.
Other PvP Guides
Keator is a Rank 1 Death Knight and has been playing Death Knight since Wrath. After having raided in US Top 50 guilds for multiple expansions, he decided to dive into PvP where he found his passion. He also streams occasionally on Twitch.
- New Love is in the Air Armor Sets in Patch 10.2.5
- Icy Veins Launches Genshin Impact Guides Section
- Dragonflight Season 3 Mythic+ DPS Log Rankings: Week 2
- Full Trading Post Rotation for December 2023
- New Returning Items Tab for Trading Post Items in Patch 10.2.5
- Will Sylvanas Return in Patch 10.2.5?
- Night Elf Paladin NPC Spotted in Patch 10.2.5
- New Trading Post Mount in Patch 10.2.5 - Savage Blue Battle Turtle