Tier Sets
The first season of The War Within has quite basic tier set bonuses, this is mainly due to all of the new tools and passives that we are gaining with Hero talents, so these tier sets are pretty self explanatory.
- 2 Set Bonus: Your Runic Power spending abilities deal 8% increased damage.
- 4 Set Bonus: Consuming Runic Power has a chance to increase your Strength by 10% for 8 sec.
A lot of Frost's damage does come from Frost Strike / Glacial Advance / Breath of Sindragosa, so this is a nice and simple damage bonus that puts more emphasis on Runic Power spending abilities and the passive effects which empower them, such as A Feast of Souls from the Riders of the Apocalypse hero talent tree.
The 4 Set bonus goes hand in hand with the (2) Set Bonus, essentially giving you a passive strength proc whenever you spend runic power, which you will be spending almost every other global with Frost Strike / Glacial Advance / Breath of Sindragosa, so there’s not much else to say about this talent other than it’s a completely random buff that you ideally want to overlap with your Pillar of Frost and Rune of the Fallen Crusader procs.
Trinkets
Ara-Kara Sacbrood
This is one of your best trinkets in Season 1 and comes from the dungeon Ara-Kara, City of Echoes. It’s a passive trinket which gives you haste and can proc a 1 minute strength buff. Multiple strength buffs can overlap, which means you can sometimes get a really good overlap with multiple stacks and Pillar of Frost together. Haste is one of our best stats and this trinket gives a strong and steady flow of strength, as well as some additional damage from the trinket itself (although it’s very negligible).
Ovi’naxs Mercurial Egg
Frost has a damage profile which is quite consistent, or involves frequent burst windows. This makes finding on use trinkets for Frost quite tricky as you could be getting better value overall from stat stick which is giving you a benefit during all of your cooldowns, not every other set of cooldowns. This trinket is a very strong stat stick which changes its stats based on your movement.
Ideally you want to stand still as much as possible for the strength buff, but you still want some Haste stacks from it due to the 60% diminishing returns above 20 stacks of either of the buffs. Ideally you want 20 strength stacks and 10 haste stacks, as Crit (which is what you will want to be your highest secondary stat) is very good for increasing your proc chance of Killing Machine, Icy Death Torrent and The Long Winter. This is of course not very easy to consistently pull off during an encounter, but worth noting nonetheless.
Another great part of this trinket is that it does have an use effect which will hold the current stacks of Strength / Crit that you have, so if you’re using cooldowns during movement intensive situations you can use this on use effect to keep all of your banked up Strength.
Treacherous Transmitter
This trinket can be very difficult to play around, so it may not be a viable choice in some boss encounters and you will want to use Skarmorak Shard instead. This is a very powerful trinket that is on a 1.5 minute cooldown (which aligns perfectly with Pillar of Frost when using Icecap), which gives you an insanely big Strength buff for 15 seconds (which is also increased by 30% with Pillar of Frost) once you have completed one of the three tasks that it gives you at random (you have 15 seconds to complete the task):
- Jump 3 times
- Walk into the orb
- Stand in the portal pad
You will want to always use this trinket just before Pillar of Frost so that you gain this massive strength buff at the start of your Pillar of Frost window.
Skarmorak Shard
This mostly synergises with Riders of the Apocalypse, with Frostwyrm’s Fury triggering Apocalypse Now every 1.5 minutes (with Absolute Zero). It’s a big amount of Mastery which will increase all of your Frost damage, generally pretty good for a burst window like Apocalypse Now with an Obliteration window.
It also works for Deathbringer if you are playing with Painful Death and Icecap, so you will have Skarmarok Shard active for every other Reaper’s Mark + Obliteration window, although stat sticks are generally better due to potential Reaper’s Mark reapplications.
For Breath of Sindragosa it’s not really that ideal, as you will want to hold this trinket for Breath of Sindragosa (which will be for 30 seconds). So you're probably going to lose an entire use of this trinket in most encounters, greatly diminishing its overall value.
Embellishments
DISCLAIMER: Embellishments we’re not tested much if at all and will most likely see some major changes/tuning! While I compete in the RWF, I will not be able to update the Embellishments recommendations until after the race, so wait before crafting anything and double check in the Acherus Discord!
Consecrated Cloak + Everforged Vambraces with Dawnthread Lining
This is quite a simple embellishment that gives you a flat amount of Crit when you are above 80% health. As a Death Knight you are very tanky and can immune a lot of incoming damage via Anti-Magic Shell. So with this in mind you can keep quite a good uptime on this embellishment.
Sadly the current tuning on most embellishments is pretty sub-par, so these will be the best choice for maximum throughput. They are also crafted on a Cloak and Wrists, as these two are the lowest stat budget pieces across all of your gear which this Embellishment can be crafted on. Crafted pieces are 3 ilvls below the maximum (max = 639), so we want to craft our embellishments in slots that don’t have a high stat budget. This is why Cloak and Bracers are chosen, as they are both low stat budget slots.