Not to long ago I embarked on a journey to swap my dps spec from Blood to Frost and it’s been a fun ride. It has also taken me pretty deep down the rabbit hole into the mechanics of how to dish out the damage properly and learn many of the small intricacies that when added up can make a substantial difference in performance. I still have a great deal to learn but I’d like to share what I have already learned.

If you are interested in turning in your Heart Strike or Scourge Strike for Obliterate, or if you are feeling a little curious what all the hype is about, read on!

I will not be updating the blog post as the guide gets updated, for the most up to date guide please visit The Official 3.3 Frost Thread

I’m going to take information from a few different sources and start compiling an official Frost thread. I am predominantly my guilds main tank, but I’ve gathered some gear and I dps whenever I can. I am not an expert on Frost dps, but I do a decent job of gathering the information around me and displaying it in a readable format.

Audience
It is expected that you are already somewhat familiar with the DK class. Please see Tiki’s Spec Compendium for pros/cons and other general tree info if you are still deciding on what tree to go to. I will assume from here that you have already decided to go Frost and are aware of it’s benefits.

Sources
Elitist Jerks – An excellent Frost guide and where I have acquired a lot of the info for this guide.
Tiki’s Spec Compendium – Where I first got my hands dirty with the dps frost.

Talent Builds
For the most part, the community has concluded that the starting template should be this: (0/52/15)
This leaves 1 glyph and 4 talent points to spend.

With the 4 points left over you have some options for spending them. I simulated dps per talent based on a pretty standard ICC i264 geared toon with GoIT. I can expand the value of the points later.

Subversion
One of the major benefits of this talent is 8% threat reduction per point. From my sims it has produced the 2nd highest dps per point gain behind BCB.

Blood Caked Blade
The highest dps gain per point according to my simulations and many other resources I’ve read. I’d put 3 points here first unless you are experiencing serious threat issues.

Black Ice
My sims show this behind Subversion and BCB. I haven’t seen any recommendations to pick this up over Subversion or BCB, perhaps there is a reason out there somewhere?

Chill of the Grave
This talent actually simmed higher then Subversion and BCB but mileage is going to vary on your raid composition. The rule of thumb is if you are starved for Runic Power, put a point here. If you have to much RP, take a point out. (If you are running GoD build and have the extra FS available, the value of this talent goes up)

1/52/18
This is the spec that I have chosen to go with. I recommend spending at least 1 point in Subversion for threat reduction. 3 points in Blood Caked Blade as the top dps per point option.

Glyphs
Glyph of Obliterate is a must.
Glyph of Frost Strike is another no brainer.

What we are left with is either:
Glyph of Disease or Glyph of Icy Touch.

GoD – The benefit of GoD is an extra GCD for Frost Strike and an Obliterate instead of an Icy Touch, Plague Strike and one blood strike. The downside is if you have a great deal of lag there can be complications keeping the diseases up. The current fix to that is to use both blood runes for pestilence. So pestilence twice in a row. It will make sense when you see it.

GoIT – I have found this glyph to be more forgiving and reliable. On a fight where you have to apply fresh diseases often (target swapping) or where diseases fall off due to fight mechanics (air phases or having to run away from target) this GoIT is a better choice. The downside is it can be more difficult to squeeze all the frost strikes in to spend your RP.

Rotations
Frost is considered by some to be a priority system when used with GoIT, and a rotation system when using GoD and utilizing Rune Grace Period. Killing Machine is where the fun kicks in and what the “priority” revolves around. Here is a community accepted “priority” list for GoIT which is probably the best place to get comfortable as frost:

Single Target
1- Killing Machine + Freezing Fog -> Howling Blast*
2- Killing Machine -> Frost Strike
3- Keep Frost Fever up
4- Keep Blood Plague up
5- Obliterate
6- Blood Srike
7- Frost Strike
8- Rime
9- Horn of Winter

* Debatable, from what I’ve read it’s better to use Killing Machine proc for Howling Blast if Freezing Fog (Rime proc) is available. The reason is a HB crit + non-crit FS is better then a crit FS + non-crit HB. Additionally, FS crit rates are so high that you have a good chance of critting them both if you HB then FS.

So a simplified beginner example of an opening rotation would look like, making sure to use FS whenever a KM proc is available:
IT – PS – OB – BS – BS – FS – Horn
OB – OB – OB – FS – FS

Once the general concept is down, we’ll get into perfecting the system further below. However one thing you’ll want to learn early on is watching Killing Machine and make sure you use it quickly. It is a high priority. We’ll work on setting something on your UI to make sure you don’t miss any Killing Machine procs further below as well.

More advanced priority and rotations further below.

Runeforging
Mainhand: Rune of the Fallen Crusader
Offhand: Razorice

For most situations you want Razorice as your offhand Runeforge. If there is a fight with a lot of adds and single target dps is not as important, you can swap to Cinderglacier.

Advanced Topics and Techniques

Rune Grace Period
Rune Grace Period is something not talked about much and I don’t think I’ve seen it in a guide but it is something that needs to be understood. Typically after a rune is used, it takes 10 seconds to “refresh” the rune and make it available for you to use it again. However, without a “grace period” we would get less dps the slower internet connection we have. The reason is it takes a certain amount of time for your computer to send the command to the server to use the rune. If it takes 500 milliseconds (or .5 seconds) for the server to receive the command, then you are losing .5 seconds on every rune you are trying to use. So it would be 10 seconds for refresh, 500ms (or whatever your latency), 10 second refresh, etc.

No Grace Period
- Uses Rune
- 10 seconds later the rune is ready
- Player mashes rune again, but due to latency it takes .5 seconds for the server to use the rune.
- 10.5 seconds later the rune is available once again.

So as you can see if this is how it worked, we would see network performance play a huge part in players performance, or DPS. So what Blizz has instituted is a “Grace period” of 2.5 seconds. What this means is when the rune becomes available, you have 2.5 seconds to use the rune and the rune will begin refreshing AS IF you had used it as soon as it was available.

With Grace Period
So if we start combat with the grace period and use a rune immediately, the rune should be available at the 10 second mark.

0 – Rune used
10 – Rune available

Then we use it again, but due to the time it takes for the server to receive it, we lose .5 seconds. However, the grace period begins refreshing the rune with only 9.5 seconds until ready instead of 10 to make up for the .5 seconds lost on the network.

0 – Rune used
10 – Rune available
10.5 – Rune used (begins refreshing with 9.5 seconds instead of 10)
20 – Rune available

So the Grace Period compensated for your network delay. The fun part is we are allowed up to 2.5 seconds of this “Grace Period” where we can actually use other abilities and then use the rune and it will still refresh as if it was used immediately. I’ll discuss why this is important in the next section.

Using Rune Grace Period effectively
So hopefully we now understand the rune grace period. Now how it can help improve our dps. For frost spec, it’s primarily used to squeeze in frost strikes. Without knowledge of the grace period we typically burn all our runes, then dump our runic power while all the runes are on cool down but we don’t want to do this!

Instead we want to weave frost strikes in between rune usage. Let’s look at an example where we use our grace period to weave in a frost strike.

0 – Rune used
10 – Rune ready but we’ll Frost strike instead of the rune. Frost Strike has a 1 second global cooldown.
10 – 12.5 is our Grace Period and as long as we use the rune before the 12.5 second mark, it will still be ready at the 20 second mark.
11 – Rune used. Rune begins refreshing with 9 seconds until ready thanks to grace period.
20 – Rune ready

To explain the above, when the rune was ready we use a frost strike instead of our rune but still got the rune back at the same time we would have if we used it right away. How does this add dps? Well when we look at the big picture when all the runes are being used, there is time to weave frost strikes in between obliterates which provides more potential for using the Killing Machine procs because frost strikes will be separated instead of 3 in a row.

Assuming diseases are up and we have both death runes:
0 – OB1
1 – OB2 (ready at 11)
2 – OB3 (ready at 12)
10 – OB1 (ready again at 20)
11 – OB2 Ready! Frost Strike instead
12 – OB2 used (ready at 21) OB3 ready
13 – Frost strike
14 – OB3 (ready at 22)

As you can see, we weaved frost strikes in between the obliterates, and thanks to the grace period all the runes will be ready as if we didn’t frost strike at all! This is why Grace Period knowledge is important and how it will improve your dps. For more questions about the grace period check out this thread: http://deathknight.info/forum/index.php?topic=8341.0

Hit Rating
Thanks to Nerves of Cold Steel we receive an extra 3% hit. This means we only need 5% hit from gear for all of our special attacks and main hand auto swings to hit. We still gain benefit from extra hit rating for our offhand swings. I’ll look into the value of hit after the 5% cap and update the post.

“Rotations” and “Priority Lists”
Glyph of Disease rotation
When used with GoD this comes pretty close to a solid rotation.
Opening Rotation: IT – PS – OB – BS – Pest
Repeating Rotation: (damage part): OB – OB – OB
Repeating Rotation: (refresh part): OB – OB – BS -Pest

Frost strike mileage may very depending on raid composition/spec but the idea is you are using frost strikes in between each OB.

Glyph of Disease Priority
1- Pestilence to keep diseases up
2- Killing Machine + Freezing Fog -> Howling Blast*
3- Killing Machine -> Frost Strike
4- Obliterate
5- Blood Srike
6- Frost Strike
7- Rime
8- Horn of Winter

The difference between this priority and the GoIT priority is pestilence moves to the top.

Talents and stats
Killing Machine and Haste
reposting and cleaning up Akengro’s post at EJ:
Number of procs per minute including haste formula is : PPM = KM_P * (145 + haste % from gear)/100
KM_P is the number of talent points you have in KM.

Scenarios :
1) no haste on gear, 5pts in KM
PPM = 5*145% = 7.25

2) no haste on gear, 4pts in KM
PPM = 4*145% = 5.80

3) 10% haste on gear, 5 pts in KM
PPM = 5*155% = 7.75

4) 10% haste on gear, 4 pts in KM
PPM = 4*155% = 6.20

Tundra Stalker
If you are using Glyph of Disease, you will need to re-apply your first frost fever to get the effect of Tundra Stalker. This is because when you jump into combat and apply your first disease (usually frost fever because you icy touch as you run in) this disease does not benefit from it (because when you apply it there are no diseases). The next time you apply frost fever, it will receive the added benefit of Tundra Stalker and your Frost Fever can then be rolled with the full damage amount. The exception is if there is another DK in your group and they put Frost Fever up before you, then you will not need to refresh but they will. So coordinate with the other DK in the raid for who puts it up first.