Why You Should & Shouldn’t Play Frost Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2 – Patch 10.1

Unsure what class to play in Dragonflight Season 2? Whether you’re a returning player coming back to play the new content or a longtime veteran just looking to explore a new main or alt, we’ve got you covered.

We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Frost Death Knight in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Frost Death Knight!

Frost DK
Unholy DK

Vengeance DH
Balance Druid

Restoration Druid
Devastation Evoker

Marksmanship HunterSurvival Hunter

Brewmaster Monk

Restoration Shaman

Dragonflight Season 2 Death Knight Tier Set

Why You Should Play Frost Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)

The Frost Death Knight, arguably the closest you can get the playing the actual Lich King in World of Warcraft, is a thematic melee DPS that can wield both big 2-handed weapons as well as agile one-handers. In Dragonflight, the Frost Death Knight can pick between insanely long and strong Breath of Sindragosa windows or going all-out on huge crits via the Obliteration talent. The core rotation is relatively simple with Obliterate, Frost Strike, Howling Blast and Remorseless Winter being the spells you use.

Frost in Dragonflight has two primary builds that we choose from depending on situation. The short and strong burst cleave windows from Obliteration makes it the perfect build for Mythic+. Who doesn’t love hitting Obliterate and doing 3 x 360k damage in a single button? Breath of Sindragosa is king in raid due to the power injection coming from magic damage soaking with Anti-Magic Shell and Anti-Magic Zone generating a lot of Runic Power.

Since Dragonflight launch we’ve received a number of buffs and talent changes. Notably, Fatal Fixation being added as well as talents like Might of the Frozen Wastes becoming baseline. These talents both opened up the talent tree to a bit more choice, as well as making us generally stronger.

Why You Should	Why You Shouldn’t

Why You Should Play Frost Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2

Frost Death Knight Utility for Dragonflight
The Frost Death Knight brings a diverse set of utility to the game, primarily helping ourselves with dodging mechanics.

• Anti-Magic Shell: Prevents magical debuffs (allowing you to dodge mechanics) and absorbs a large amount of magic damage.
• Death’s Advance: Moderate movement speed increase and knockback avoidance, very useful in raiding environments.
• Raise Ally: Battle Ress.
• Blinding Sleet: AoE stop and slow, useful for interrupting and slowing enemies.
• Death Grip: Pulls enemies to you, great for controlling adds and sometimes mandatory utility in raid.
• Abomination Limb: Like Death Grip but lasting over multiple seconds.
• Insidious Chill: Attack speed slow, great for helping your tank survive encounters with especially dangerous melee attackers.

Our utility has strengths in two areas: dodging of mechanics as well as add displacement. The combo of Anti-Magic Shell and Death’s Advance means that we can avoid so many mechanics everywhere, just making a lot of fights trivial to use. Whenever there is a dangerous knock-back or magic debuff, we can simply ignore it. Honestly, it sometimes feels like a Death Knight plays the game on an easier difficulty due to the fact that we have these two accessible to us. For the add displacement, we essentially have mandatory utility in limited circumstances. There are generally one or two fights in a raid tier where a grip is incredibly powerful, making it necessary for any raid group to pick up a Death Knight.

Frost Death Knight Survivability

Outside of this utility, Frost largest strength that isn’t related to DPS is its tankiness. We have such a large amount of defensive tools in our toolkit that makes it almost impossible to actually kill us. Improved Death Strike, Permafrost, Veteran of the Third War, Gloom Ward, Blood Draw and Will of the Necropolis together work to making is one of, if not the most tanky class in PvE content. I always feel like I’m playing on easy mode sometimes due to the inability of dying. Having a very high baseline coupled with shields and damage reductions means abilities that would’ve killed any other class won’t quite kill you.

Frost Death Knight Damage

The Frost Death Knight damage has historically been good in all instances. We can often leverage any add spawns in the raid to boost our overall. Furthermore, our intrinsically cleave-heavy toolkit means that we pretty much always do solid damage in Mythic+. Looking at our performance in season 1 and extrapolating based on the trinkets, gear and tier sets we get in 10.1 I think the Frost Death Knight will be a strong spec in season 2 as well.

Solid Tier Set

The new tier set is nicely aligned with the current one. It will be a bit better in AoE and provide a similar amount of damage in single target. It’s also fun and thematic, making it an overall good reason to play the spec next season.

Why You Shouldn’t Play Frost Death Knight in Dragonflight Season 2

Uptime Requirement

The Frost Death Knight is heavily reliant on the boss design to do effective damage in the raid. Fights like Molgoth in the new raid which requires heavy movement without boss uptime relatively frequently just ruins the whole idea of Breath of Sindragosa in the raid. This means that we’re very much at the mercy of raid design (more so than other specs) when it comes to our power level.

Lack of Significant Utility

The final negative aspect of Frost is its lack of significant utility. I’m talking about things like Bloodlust, Chaos Brand, Mystic Touch etc. This can easily push out an Frost Death Knight from a competitive melee raid roster and makes it difficult for us to ever become a Mythic+ meta class. Some could argue that Death Grip fulfills this role but the reality is that it’s only ever useful on a few specific encounters and in a few mythic+ scenarios.

About the Author

I’m Bicepspump, a semi-hardcore player currently playing in Pescorus on Kazzak. You can often find me on the Death Knight discord discussing rotations and builds, on my stream (B1cepspump), running some juicy Mythic +, or on my youtube channel where I do video guides. Big shoutout to everyone on the Acherus discord that have given me valuable insight through numerous discussions. I take part in writing and optimizing the action priority list for SimulationCraft and continuously test different hypotheses using the SimulationCraft program. Please feel free to contact me on Discord as Bicepspump#6318, I’m always happy to have a healthy discussion! Outside of playing WoW, I work as a quant and enjoy playing other games such as Dota 2!

For more information on playing Frost Death Knight, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:

Frost DK Guide