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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King will add a new option to the game’s class roster with the introduction of the first hero class, the necromantic death knight. During the Second and Third Wars, the people of Azeroth learned to fear these merciless, unholy opponents and their terrifying powers. Leading legions of the undead into battle during the Third War, the Lich King’s death knights proved both their strength and their cunning on several occasions, making them an invaluable part of the Scourge army.

In Wrath of the Lich King, you will be able to pick up a runeblade, don some plate armor, and wreak serious havoc using both melee abilities and offensive magic. To give you an early glimpse at the design philosophy behind the new class, we sat down with the World of Warcraft design team to talk about the role the death knight will play in the expansion’s story as well as in its gameplay, and to get their thoughts about goals and ideas for the new class.

The biggest news at this year’s BlizzCon was the announcement of World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, which will introduce the game’s first hero class, the death knight.

What made you choose this particular class?

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In a recent interview, Blizzard’s Tom Chilton had this to say about the new Death Knight rune system in Wrath of the Lich King:

“The current idea we’re playing with is you have a fixed time, say 10 seconds, for a rune to fade back in and become usable again, and there are potentially things you can do to speed that up or immediately light up runes. We have this one idea for an ability called Blood Boil — it’s a damage-over-time ability, and after the end of the duration, it lights up two of your Blood runes.”

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I just noticed the Wrath of the Lich King page on Wikipedia where they have a nice overview of the new Death Knight hero class.  No new information that can’t be found on other posts here, but their entry gives a nice summary of what we know so far.

The Death Knight is the first announced Hero class for World of Warcraft. Death Knights, according to Blizzard developers, will be able to fulfill the tank and DPS roles efficiently. Death Knights can use plate armor and new rune weapons like Runeswords and Runeaxes, but they cannot use shields. They will have summon abilities which resemble those of the Warlock. According to an interview, a Death Knight’s summoned pets will be more similar to a Priest’s Shadowfiend or Mage’s Water Elemental in that they are pets with a set duration. The Death Knight is not considered a pet class because of this.

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World of Warcraft poster Bornakk recently answered a few Death Knight questions on the official WoW forums:

Question: Everyone will roll death knight alts because they startat lvl 60, so they have less work to do.

Bornakk: We do hope a lot of people try out the class, it should be a lot of fun. But we also know that people have their preferred style of play so we don’t expect everybody to drop their current character(s) and play the Death Knight exclusively.

Question: It forces you to master a class in high-level areas where you need to know your class to suceed, and most new Death knights won’t know how to play their class at all.

Bornakk: Just leveling up to reach Northrend will take time and should provide players some great experience in learning the new class.

Question: You will get less hours out of your death knight alt.

Bornakk: I’m a little confused here, but are you saying that it’s a problem that you can’t spend more hours at lower levels?

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In the September 2007 issue of Games for Windows, World of Warcraft lead game designer Tom Chilton dropped a few hints about the Death Knight Rune System.

The current idea we’re playing with is you have a fixed time, say 10 seconds, for a rune to fade back in and become usable again…

According to the article Blood runes will be damage related, Frost runes are for crowd control and Unholy runes will be for various utility and damage over time spells. There will be some crossover but these are the general categories.

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Today’s discussion is regarding flying mounts in Northrend. The opening post (OP) cited an interview with Jeff Kaplan (aka Tigole) recently discussed the Wrath of the Lich King and factors the Blizzard development team had to consider and change for the new WoW expansion.

1. They decided to open the Death Knight class to lower levels to prevent players power leveling to get level cap.

2. As for flying mounts in Northrend, according to reports, players will have to venture forth by foot until they reach level 78 at which time flying mounts will be usable.

From Blizzard’s Bornakk:

From a design standpoint, we don’t want people to just fly over continent and skip things when they are leveling up. Instead we want people to explore and experience the environment around them when they first reach the shores of Northrend. You will walk (or ride) from one quest to another as the zones unfold before you instead of just flying over it without batting an eye.

At some point though you will definitely be able to fly in Northrend. We are currently thinking around level 78, but haven’t made a final call on this yet.

It looks like they want you to actually experience the expansion and that’s not a bad thing. Without the lore and other stuff World of Warcraft might become only a grind fest.

Blizzard’s Lead Designer for World Design in World of Warcraft Jeff Kaplan (otherwise known as Tigole at the official WoW Forums), recently spoke at the Leipzig Games Convention about what’s going to be in the latest expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

Judging from what he said, it looks like happy times are coming to gamers everywhere. He gave word that there are quite a few things that weren’t announced in BlizzCon regarding WotLK. Among them includes the five man level 80 raid Caverns of Time which will be in Stratholm.

Kaplan also gave word that they’re looking into pursuing what the Bronze Dragon Flight is up to as well as give players a chance to fight beside Arthas before he was corrupted by the power of the Lich King.

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The whole Death Knight questline, if you can call it that, starts at around level 55 to level 70, so you won’t be waiting till level 80 to start on that. You will be able to play with the Death Knight while keeping the old character. It’s also not going to be this all-powerful unit, and when asked about how hard it would be to get a Death Knight, I got the sense that the team wants to make it as accessible as one such class would allow.

I jokingly made a comment about a thousand Death Knights running around and Blizzard (also semi-jokingly) responded with approval to that comment. So, obviously, the Death Knight hero class is not something that they plan to keep exclusive to a select few of the most hardcore players. At least that’s the impression I got.

(From an interview with Chris Robinson, Blizzard Entertainment Art Director)