Yes — Frost DK is a viable Mythic+ spec in Midnight Season 2. As of mid-September, Icy Veins places it in A+ while Wowhead ranks it 13th, in B-tier, and both lists predate the September 1 single-target buffs. I play a Mag’har Orc Frost Death Knight, Squizzyy, on Frostmourne US, and a month into Midnight Season 2 my applications for anything past a +7 stopped going anywhere, so I ran a batch of keys through a Mythic plus carry to get my Raider.io score into a range where more of my applications started landing, before the major public tier lists had even been updated to reflect the latest tuning.
I run Deathbringer, which Icy Veins recommends paired with Breath of Sindragosa as the best general balance of single-target and AoE damage for Season 2 Mythic+. My guild, Paradox, wasn’t the problem — this was purely about filling extra keys through the group finder, where nobody knows what your guild thinks of you.
Three Tuning Passes, Not Four
Frost didn’t get hotfixed on some vague weekly cadence — it got three specific, dated changes:
- August 18: all ability and auto-attack damage up 9%, alongside a nerf to the Venomous Abyss 2-piece set bonus.
- August 25: a further 6% increase to all ability and melee damage, plus Obliterate up 15%.
- September 1: Howling Blast main-target damage up 15%, Obliterate up another 15%, Frost Strike up 20%, and melee damage up 10%, specifically aimed at single-target and two-target cleave.
These were three separate balance entries over fourteen days, and their combined effect isn’t just the three headline percentages added together — the August 18 update also cut the Season 2 two-piece set bonus at the same time it raised baseline damage. It’s still a meaningful amount of movement for a single spec, and it’s exactly the kind of thing a pug leader skimming applications on a Tuesday has no way of tracking in real time.
Two Tier Lists, Two Different Verdicts
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting instead of just being a story about bad luck. As of mid-September:
Icy Veins (updated August 30) places Frost DK in A+, describing it as having shifted power out of cooldowns and into sustained damage, still excelling at burst, and calling it “one of the best melee choices going forward to Season 2” thanks to strong damage and durability.
Wowhead (updated August 28) ranks Frost 13th of 27 DPS specs, squarely in B-tier — “a very durable spec with a pretty nice damage profile,” strong on single-target and priority damage while AoEing, but a step behind the top specs on heavily stacked pulls. Wowhead’s own write-up adds that Frost “has been the recipient of a few buffs due to their awful damage in raid,” and speculates it could climb further if that trend continues.
Neither list is wrong, exactly — they’re answering slightly different questions. Icy Veins says damage is its main ranking factor and evaluates casual-to-intermediate keys as the baseline. Wowhead frames its list around top-end pushing value and meta composition rather than pure meter position. Both were also snapshotted before the September 1 single-target buff landed, which is really the more useful takeaway here: whichever list a pug leader glanced at in late August, neither one reflects where the spec actually sat two weeks later.
What I Can Actually Say About My Own Applications
I didn’t track why any individual application got declined or expired unanswered — pug leaders don’t explain themselves, and dungeon finder doesn’t log intent. So I can’t say for certain that anyone saw “Frost DK” and passed without opening my profile. After my Raider.io score increased, I started receiving more invitations in the same general key range. I didn’t track enough applications to separate the effect of rating from gear progression, timing, group composition, or changing perceptions of the spec — I only have the before-and-after, not the mechanism.
What I Was Actually Targeting
I wasn’t chasing +20s. My goals were +9 and up for Myth Mistcrests, and +10 specifically, which is the actual gear ceiling for the week: Hero 3/6 from the end-of-dungeon chest and Myth 1/6, item level 318, from the Great Vault. Keys above +10 — +12 and higher — don’t raise that item level any further; they matter for Mythic+ rating and Resilient Keystone progress instead. That’s a fairly modest target for a spec that two major tier lists rank anywhere from A+ to B, not S-tier, not unplayable.
The Takeaway
Frost DK isn’t in trouble. Three tuning passes in two weeks is Blizzard actively shaping the spec, not neglecting it, and even the more conservative of the two big tier lists still calls it a reasonable second or third DPS option. The mismatch is timing: patch notes and hotfixes move faster than the major public tier lists get updated to reflect them, and there’s no way to prove the gap has closed except by clearing keys — which is the exact thing that’s hard to get invited to while the gap is still open. Getting my score up first, then letting the actual runs speak for themselves, was the way around that without sitting out a month of Vault progress waiting for the tier lists to catch up.
