The Death Knight Post

One of the most hotly anticipated additions in WotLK is the first hero class, the Death Knight. Here are my thoughts after playing around with one for a bit:

First off, blizzard has really gone out of their way to make DKs as cool as possible. Not only do you get a cool blue glow for your character's eyes, but both the starting DK armor and the blues that it gets upgraded to look better than most tier sets:But there's more to it than just looks. The starting zone for deathknights is some of the best work blizzard has ever done. There is a seamless usage of separate instances to change the area of "EPL" that the starting quests take place in as your character progresses through a seriously kickass story. For the first time in WoW, you can actually see the world progress as you move through it. I don't want to give away too much for fear of spoiling anything, but the amount of lore packed into that one zone is amazing. The "hero class" monkier is fully deserved.

As for playstyle, the death knight has thus far been a lot less interesting than I had hoped. Blizzard has decided against allowing players to change the runes on their blades, instead sticking with 2 of each. The result is that each spec uses almost the exact same ability rotation, with spec differentiation coming almost entirely through passive abilities and runic power abilities. Perhaps I've been spolied by the massive playstyle differences of my druid and paladin, but right now it feels like every spec is pretty much the same (even to the point that some talents are copied with only slight alterations across trees). Overall, I've been pretty underwhelmed by how the deathknight plays. The class as a whole still feels very incomplete (a sentiment echoed by a guildmate who's currently level 76 on his DK), which is probably to be expected at this point I suppose.

However, many of the abilities are still very fun. Death Grip especially is probably one of my top 3 most entertaining abilities, and I can see it being extremely powerful in arena PvP, being able to yank an opponent into a very bad position could win games pretty easily. Ghouls and corpse explosion are also really cool, and the amount of diseases you can throw up on a target is fun from a "look at all the numbers" point of view.

When WotLK goes live, I would highly reccomend that everyone make a death knight, if only to experience the starting area. But as for myself, I don't see a deathknight main in my future, both my paladin and my druid are a lot more fun.