Death knight

Blizzard's original death knight concept was that of an undead spellcaster unit which made its initial appearance in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. This death knight could be more accurately described as a horseback-mounted lich rather than the traditional undead warrior. Years later, Blizzard introduced a new death knight hero unit in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and this second rendition was revised to reflect the general characteristics of the more traditional death knight design. To understand the key differences between these two different generations of death knight, see the "Lore" section located further down this page. The death knight was later adapted as a prestige class within the Warcraft RPG and they were former paladin warriors. It is the Warcraft III version of the death knight that became the first hero class in World of Warcraft and was introduced in the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

Talents
Death knight talents are split into 3 trees, orginally each of them were fully capable of supporting either a tanking or DPS melee role, however that is no longer the case:


 * Blood:  Tanking Tree. This tree primarily amplifies the death knight's melee spells, weapons, and abilities; and has a prominent health-regeneration theme.
 * Frost: This tree has many control elements, with a strong critical-strike/bonus-damage theme. Last talent provides great AoE.
 * Unholy: This tree has a heavy focus on diseases and related abilities, as well as improving summoned minions. Also has AoE, spell damage shielding, and mobility-improvement sub-themes.

Lore
Death knight is a name shared by several organizations of powerful necromancers. These orders share a few things in common, including riding horses with horned skulls and many of the same abilities. Playable death knights, however, are specifically death knights of the Scourge.

All Ebon Blade death knights possess an addiction to inflict pain. If death knights do not regularly inflict agony upon another creature, they begin to suffer wracking pains that could drive them into a mindless, blood-seeking hysteria.

Immortal Soldiers of the Horde
The original death knights were created for Orgrim Doomhammer by Gul'dan as powerful soldiers of the Horde. These death knights were created by placing the souls of the slain warlocks of the Shadow Council into the corpses of fallen Stormwind knights, the first of whom was Teron Gorefiend. Unlike modern death knights of the Scourge, these ghoulish fiends were not battle hardened warriors; they were insidious necromancers who possessed superior intellect and tremendous magical power. They often favored the use of terror tactics and reanimated the corpses of enemy soldiers who fell in battle to serve them as mindless undead minions.

Most of these death knights were destroyed during and after the Second War, either killed by the Alliance or transformed into liches by Kil'jaeden.

Champions of the Lich King
Years after the destruction of Draenor, the immensely powerful Lich King created a new breed of death knights: malevolent, rune-wielding warriors of the Scourge. The first and greatest of these was the Lich King's chosen champion, Prince Arthas Menethil, once a mighty paladin of the Silver Hand, who sacrificed his soul to claim the runeblade Frostmourne in a desperate bid to save his people. The rest are primarily made up of other fallen paladins whose souls were twisted and bound to the will of the Frozen Throne.

Unlike Gul'dan's death knights, these dark champions do not possess free will and their minds are inexorably entwined with and dominated by the Lich King's vast consciousness. Despite the heavy costs of free will, some powerful mortals are intrigued by the promise of immortality and pledge their souls freely into the Lich King's service to achieve it. (Baron Rivendare is an example of this).

In the years since Arthas shattered the Frozen Throne and merged with the Lich King, the power and fury of the death knights has only grown. Now these unrelenting crusaders of the damned eagerly await the Lich King's command to unleash their fury on Azeroth once again. Unlike death knights of the Old Horde, the Scourge's death knights are not limited to their use of ranged spell casting abilities. However, both generations are equally destructive and terrifying to engage in the field of battle.

The Ebon Blade
A new group of death knights, the Death knights of Acherus, was later created by the Lich King to garrison the necropolis of Acherus: The Ebon Hold for the ultimate purpose of assaulting Light's Hope Chapel and destroying the Argent Dawn. In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, these death knights are freed from the will of the Lich King and ally themselves with their former factions. Working closely under the guiding blade of Highlord Darion Mograine and the bolstered Argent Crusade, the newly-freed death knights have begun their march to Northrend.

The Knights of the Ebon Blade is a faction consisting of the renegade death knights that broke free of the Lich King's control after the battle of Light's Hope Chapel (in other words, player-created death knights). Led by Highlord Darion Mograine, the Knights of the Ebon Blade have allied themselves with the Alliance and the Horde with the help of Highlord Tirion Fordring of the Knights of the Silver Hand, and have pledged to do their part in defeating their former master, the Lich King. Their main base is Acherus: The Ebon Hold, taken from the Scourge after breaking free. It should be noted that the Knights of the Ebon Blade are not a separate player faction such as the Alliance and Horde. For the purposes of gameplay, player-created death knights still belong to either the Alliance or Horde depending on their race.

Horde

 * Teron Gorefiend (The first Death Knight created by Gul'dan)
 * Ragnok Bloodreaver
 * Gaz Soulripper

Scourge

 * Arthas Menethil (Former Lich King; slain by the forces of the Ashen Verdict)
 * Alexandros Mograine (Former leader of the Four Horsemen; freed from undeath by his son)
 * Baron Rivendare (Former leader of Stratholme; leader of the Four Horsemen)
 * Lord Alexei Barov (Former owner of Caer Darrow, Brill, Southshore, and Tarren Mill)
 * Dranosh Saurfang (Known as the Deathbringer, slain during the Battle of Angrathar the Wrathgate and raised into undeath)
 * Trag Highmountain (Raised into undeath by the Orb of Ner'zhul)
 * (Leading member of the Death knights of Acherus during the assault on the Scarlet Enclave; current leader of the Host of Suffering.)

Ebon Blade

 * Darion Mograine (Highlord of the Ebon Blade)
 * Koltira Deathweaver (Horde representative)
 * Thassarian (Alliance representative)

Hero Class Overview
Death knights in Wrath of the Lich King are a new class mirroring their previous incarnations. While boasting powerful melee abilities, as well as plate armor, these warriors supplement their strength with dark magic. Calling upon a rune system of magic, the death knight may summon unholy, blood, and frost spells. The criterion for creating a death knight is the existence of a level 55+ character on the player's account on any realm.

Unlocking your death knight
The death knight is the first hero class in World of Warcraft. The death knight will start at level 55 in Acherus: The Ebon Hold over the Eastern Plaguelands, with multiple spells and abilities ready to use, and a set of gear. When you leave Ebon Hold, you will have a full set of gear ready for Outland. Through the death knight-specific quests in this necropolis and the surrounding areas, the character learns to master the power of the death knight and learns to use this new power for the will of the Lich King. Quests will take them outside the necropolis and into an area within the Scarlet Enclave.

Players can create one death knight per realm, so long as they have a level 55 character already and the Wrath of the Lich King on their account. There are no racial limitations for creating your death knight.

The Rune System


The death knight uses a unique rune-based resource system to govern his/her spells and abilities. Three rune types exist: blood, frost, and unholy, each with an attached color and symbol. Using certain abilities exhausts one or more runes, starting a cooldown of 10 seconds. When both runes of a particular type are used, the second rune does not begin its cooldown until the first one finishes. The death knight can use spells to turn a rune into a Death Rune, which can be used as a blood, frost, or unholy rune. In addition, whenever the death knight uses a rune ability against a foe, it builds up a certain amount of Runic Power. This Runic Power is only used by a few abilities. All abilities that use Runic Power use a set amount, like Death Coil. Death knights cannot reallocate the number and type of runes - they are fixed to two runes of each type.

The original player frame for death knights shown at BlizzCon was changed as feedback showed it was not ideal for displaying rune power for players.

Runeforging is a profession available only to death knights, providing permanent weapon enchants. The enchants work just like the permanent weapon enchants provided by Enchanting, but are self-only and are designed specifically to benefit the death knight class. These are independent of the rune resource system.

Character's Role
In general, the death knight can be considered a hybrid melee class that combines damage dealing and tanking, somewhat akin to Warriors. They wear plate armor and are able to dual-wield or use two-handed weapons. Like druids, they tank without shields. Their tanking mechanics involve high armor and a high chance to dodge and parry a,d. Death knights tanks depend on a combination of high damage abilities, in addition to high threat abilities, such as Death and Decay and Rune Strike, to generate and hold aggro.

Like every other class, the death knight has three different talent trees that enhance certain aspects of his or her specialties. In patch 4.0.1, the Blood Tree has been defined as the tanking tree, while the Frost and Unholy trees are used for DPS. Also introduced in this patch are Mastery Bonuses; each tree has a set of unique mastery bonuses, a long with a special ability, that are only available after putting talent points in the tree and training them at your class trainer.

Blood enhances the death knight's tanking abilities and provides new abilities to use, such as Bone Shield and Vampiric Blood. As the name suggests, the special abilities it grants through talents are based on the Blood Runes. Blood also provides healing utility to party and raids and has some very useful debuffs, such as Scarlet Fever, as well as providing a raid-wide 10% attack power buff (Abomination's Might).



Blood Mastery:

Ability Provided: Heart Strike: A cleaving weapon strike.

Veteran of the Third War: Provides expertise and stamina bonus.

Blood Rites: Death rune generating ability.

Vengeance: Attack power bonus based on damage received.

Blood Shield: Damage absorption shield based on damage healed by Death Strike.

Frost enhances the dual-weapon and two-weapon DPS abilities. It provides some very powerful direct damage abilities like Frost Strike and Howling Blast. Parties and Raids also benefit from this talent tree by gaining a 10% melee attack haste from Improved Icy Talons, as well as a 4% increased physical damage debuff Brittle Bones.

Frost Mastery:

Ability Provided: Frost Strike: A powerful weapon strike that uses runic power.

Icy Talons: Increases weapon speed.

Blood of the North: Death rune generating ability.

Frozen Heart: Increases damage of Frost abilities.

Unholy enhances the death knight's diseases and damage over time spells. It also provides the death knight with a ghoul who is a permanent pet, a gargoyle guardian he or she can summon, and stronger diseases. Raid and party utility is granted by a 8% increased magic damage debuff Ebon Plaguebringer.

Unholy Mastery:

Ability Provided: Scourge Strike: A powerful strike that causes shadow damage.

Master of Ghouls: Turns your ghoul into a pet, much like a Hunter.

Reaping: Death Rune generating ability.

Unholy Might: Increases your strength.

Dreadblade: Increases damage of Shadow abilities.

Runeforging


Runeforging allows the death knight to permanently enchant their weapon. These enchants act as a replacement for the stat enhancements provided by shields or ranged weapons, which death knights cannot wear.

A weapon can have an enchant from either runeforging or from Enchanting, but not both together (the runeforging enchants are always better). A player will have to be near a runeforge in order to forge a rune onto their weapon. Once a weapon has been engraved with a rune it is impossible for the rune to be removed, though it can be changed at a runeforge. Also even if it is not soulbound, once a weapon has been engraved with a rune it is impossible for that weapon to be traded.

Races


The death knight class can be played by all races, with the following stats:

General preview
{{Bluepost|poster=Zarhym|title=Cataclysm Class Preview: Death Knight|time=04/08/2010 05:59:39 PM PDT|link=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24262356308&sid=1|body= World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will bring with it several changes to class talents and abilities. In this preview, you'll get a glimpse at some of the new abilities, spells, and talents in store for the death knight class, along with an early look at some improvements we plan to make to the rune resource system.

New Death Knight Abilities

 * Outbreak (death knight ability) (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.


 * Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike -- the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.
 * This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.


 * Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent's next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can't reflect an ability, you won't be able to copy it either.

Rune System Changes
While we're satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we're making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here's the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.
 * In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they're unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.
 * A death knight's runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn't have any free global cooldowns to use them. We can't grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it's impossible to save resources for when they're most useful.
 * Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight's attacks are weak. The death knight's rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player's timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren't able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.
 * The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra "storage"), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.
 * As this is a major change to the death knight's mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class's current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.

Talent Changes
Next we'll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we're planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we're intending each death knight spec to perform.


 * One of the biggest changes we're making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it's less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn't as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We'd rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the "correct" tree out of three possibilities.
 * Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood's niche was self-healing -- fitting for a tank -- as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.
 * Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

 * Blood
 * 1) Damage reduction
 * 2) Vengeance
 * 3) Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you'll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.


 * Frost
 * 1) Melee damage
 * 2) Melee Haste
 * 3) Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.


 * Unholy
 * 1) Melee damage
 * 2) Melee and spell critical damage
 * 3) Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree's play style.


 * Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.

You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won't see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues. }}