Frost Death Knight PvP Talents and Builds (Dragonflight / 10.0.5)
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
they 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 into any composition as a
result.
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.
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 shutdown their mobility.
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 survivability tool. It gets
most of its value against wizard compositions, but can actually provide
a lot of healing against any class with spell damage including other
Death Knights or Retribution Paladins. This talent also provides a lot of
disruption in the form of cast speed reduction making it a no-brainer
into any spell cleaves.
Shroud of Winter is a very niche PvP talent. It does not have a
set composition it is good against, 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
- 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.
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.
- Dragonflight Patch 10.0.7 Hotfixes: March 24th
- Dragonflight 10.0.7 Class Tuning: March 28th + Retribution Nerfs March 24th
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