How To Improve As Frost Death Knight — Midnight Season 1

Because you can have 3 Runes recharging at the same time, any time you are holding 4 or more Runes, you are effectively capped on Runes and wasting potential Rune regeneration. There is never a point in your play where it would be valuable to not cast anything or where you need more than 3 Runes saved up; always keep 3 Runes on cooldown.

Similarly, every point of Runic Power you generate when already at maximum Runic Power is a fraction of a lost Frost Strike or Glacial Advance. You will sometimes overcap Runic Power as you prioritise other things but you should in general avoid overcapping!

Frost Death Knight has many procs like Killing Machine, Rime, Exterminate and Frostbane. It is crucial that you spend these procs quickly to avoid "overcapping" them. This is the scenario where you generate a proc while you already have one active, effectively wasting the proc completely.

When playing the Obliteration talent, your damage is highly dependent on how many powerful GCDs you can fit into your Pillar of Frost windows. If you mess these up ever so slightly, it will have a significant impact on your DPS. Practice the weaving rotation a lot and try and anticipate ahead of time what you are pressing next during the window.

It is also important that you use your first GCD as soon as possible within the window. For Deathbringer, macro Reaper's Mark with Pillar of Frost. For Rider of the Apocalypse, create one macro for each relevant ability to start your Pillar window with. Keep in mind that your GCD must be "free", wait for the previous one to finish before pressing the macro! Please see the macros page for more details:

Pillar of Frost amps up your damage significantly, making it really important to prepare yourself properly for the window. Make sure to save up some Runes and Runic Power before the ability comes off cooldown, so you do not end up starving in the middle of it!

Especially for Mythic+, it is easy to hold cooldowns in anticipation of larger and more difficult packs. It is generally a mistake to do so, though. Try and use your cooldowns as soon as they come up! It sounds easy, but it is a major improvement for many people.

In raiding scenarios, it is crucial to properly align your cooldowns. If they are all used as soon as they come up, they naturally align later in the fight. As soon as you start to delay CDs, you end up delaying further cooldown windows, or just failing to combine CDs at all.