Many people are predicting that “”everyone”" will make a new death knight character when the new expansion is going to come out — so many that the world will seem full of them. While it is true that everyone may very well try out the first couple levels of the new death knight hero class, it’s not true that every server will be overrun with them. Here’s why: The addition of death knights to the game is in many ways like the addition of blood elves and draenei in The Burning Crusade. Many people made new characters just to see the new zones, but many others wanted to level their mains through Outland first. Many of those players who tried out the new races only played up to a certain point and then stopped to go back to their main characters. We never saw a flood of draenei and blood elves outnumbering all other races of Azeroth, and for the same reason we will not see a flood of new death knights. There are different things to do in the expansion, and different people make different choices about which to do first. There may be a contstant stream of new death knights, maybe even a river sometimes, but death knights will just feel like the newest kid in the WoW class, not a plague of locusts infesting the entire town. There’s also a huge difference between trying out a death knight, and choosing one as your new main character. Wherever death knights start out in the world may be a crowded area for a while, but most players won’t ever level them out of that starting zone. Unlike the Jedi in Star Wars, death knights are only one of many types of characters in Warcraft. Besides, the death knight play style and thematic mood simply isn’t going to appeal to everyone, in the same way that most WoW players today do not play warlocks, notwithstanding the fact that warlocks are undoubtedly a powerful class.

Most players prefer to do healing, shapeshifting, stealthing, ranged shots, totems, or any number of other abilities that death knights will never have, and they will stay with their favorite classes and play styles. Some players, like myself, probably just won’t like their armor decorated with skulls all the time.” “Blizzard sees the Death Knight as a kind of multipurpose tank. He can’t use a shield, instead picking between dual-wield and two-hander setups. The Death Knight will get something called presences, which work somewhat similarly to Paladin auras in that once activated they’ll stay on until you switch them off. Unlike auras they’ll only apply to the Death Knight. Those that Blizzard showed off included a blood presence, which augments damage per second (DPS), and an unholy presence, which apparently is best used for PvP as it increases attack speed and the speed of your global cooldowns. Along with the presences comes an entirely new resource system. The Death Knight won’t use energy or mana or rage to activate abilities, but instead use a system of runes and runic power. As lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan explained to us, the Death Knight will be able to equip combinations of runes (blood, unholy, or frost types) onto himself and consume those runes to pull off his special abilities. Once used, the rune will then enter a cooldown phase, set right now at 10 seconds. Kaplan explained it won’t be that much of a pain to switch around your rune setups, but you won’t be swapping them in and out after every fight. As runes are consumed you’ll build a runic power meter which can be used to fire off different types of skills. And it sounds like the Death Knight will have plenty of weird skills and abilities to use. No word yet on the specifics of his talent lines, but we did get to see abilities like plague strike (bonus weapon damage and damage-over-time effect), death coil (spell that does damage or heals undead friendly targets), and cage of ice (freezes target in place).