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All this talk about Cataclysm class changes has made me think about all the changes and speculation that happened in this expansion before Wrath went on sale. I thought it would be nice to go back now and review some of the ways the Death Knight class has changed over time. Its good to know where you come from after all.

The Prelude

Way back in 2007 was the first time we had official word about the Death Knight class. At the time, patch 2.2 was on the PTR and my first character was level 42 in Stranglethorn Vale. I didn’t yet know how frustrating it would be to be a paladin tank, wrestling with mana issues, playing the inferior sidekick to warriors but staunchly refusing to admit the truth, and the pressures to raid as a healer and only a healer. I didn’t yet know how much I would love tanking as a Death Knight in the far future.

Fast forward to Blizzcon 2007 and we have MMOChampion reporting on the brand new Death Knight class. Most notably and relevant to our situation today we have a sneak peek at a few Death Knight abilities:

Known Death Knight skills

• Unholy Embrace
  Instant Cast. 5 min cooldown.
  Target is embraced by a silhouette of darkness for 6 seconds, corrupting any healing spells and effects cast upon or currently affecting the target to cause damage for 50% of their healing potential instead of restoring health. Any damage shields cast upon or currently affecting the target will also be instantly consumed, dealing 50% of their absorption potential in damage. Once afflicted with Unholy Embrace, the target cannot be afflicted with Unholy Embrace again for 1 minute.
• Army of the Dead
  Raises several temporary minions (ghouls)

A clear reminder that a lot of iteration happens during the testing process leading up to the release of a new expansion.

Skip ahead a little and we’re approaching the Alpha testing of Wrath of the Lich King. The most talked about topic concerning Death Knights is which runes they’ll imbue their runeblades with and the various pro’s and con’s of each configuration. Popular configurations include 4 frost, 1 unholy, 1 blood and other setups like 6 frost and the balanced 2 frost, 2 unholy and 2 blood. This period of Death Knight history could be entitled “Ultimately the Most Pointless Phase in Death Knight History” as a result of these discussions.

Alpha

Closed alpha begins. Leaks begin flying around the interwebs with videos popping up on Youtube showing Tauren Death Knights rampaging across the Plaguelands demonstrating what is theorized to be one of the best and most interesting Death Knight abilities: Corpse Explosion. This period of Death Knight history could be entitled “Omg I Can’t Believe I Ever Thought That Ability Would Be the Best” as a result.

We are given our first look at the first talent tree setup for Death Knights: Alpha Build 3.0.1.8303.

A select handful of Alpha testers begin to gain notoriety for their analyses and insights into playing as a Death Knight with Jayde arguably the most popular scoring a win for female Blood Elf Death Knights everywhere. Jayde posts three videos that made a huge impression on me showing the playstyle and abilities as each of the three Death Knight specs. I have the Unholy video but the one that made the biggest impression on me was the Frost one and I cannot for the life of me find that video anywhere. In the video, Jayde is in Terokkar Forest fighting Warped Peons. He casts Hungering Cold freezing them all and then follows it up with Howling Blast to light the screen up with big numbers. At the time, Howling Blast was a guaranteed crit if your target was frozen so it worked fairly well with Hungering Cold. It certainly made for a whoaaaa moment watching the video.

The Vision

The devs have frequent conversations with testers and players generally about their intentions and design goals for Death Knights. They state one of the most important concepts for the Death Knight class is the ability to use any talent tree for tanking and dps alike. They say that the Death Knight is their great experiment in this regard and if it goes well, paladins and warriors will almost certainly get the same treatment. They talk about how they almost gave Arms warriors the ability to block with their two-handed weapons but decided not to for a number of reasons, one of which was to see how the Death Knight worked out first.

Beta

Closed beta begins and I begin spamming the refresh button on my inbox hoping for an invitation. I get my invitation after a short while and I quickly install the Wrath of the Lich King beta. The current talent build at the time: Beta Build 3.0.1.8770.

As you can see even by simply looking over the picture, we’ve come a long way since Alpha. One of the prominent issues being discussed at the time was how blood worms should be spawned. Death Knights were finding Outland leveling a breeze thanks to the enormous amounts of self-healing they could generate and blood worms were a particular concern. They spawned every time you hit Death Strike which led to some pretty strong burst healing. I was Blood even back then and I was enjoying my immortality.

I ran my first instance as a Death Knight around this time. Thanks to the Improved Blood Presence talent it was possible to run instances with groups made up of nothing but Death Knights. Death and Decay had a horrify effect to it that randomly caused enemies to cower in fear before you and that crowd control combined with the damage put out by 5 Death Knights dropping Death and Decay and smashing skulls was more than enough to keep the whole party topped off. Hellfire Ramparts and the Blood Furnace had never been roflstomped so badly before.

Death and Decay, like so many other Death Knight abilities has had a pretty sad history of completely justified nerfs. It was good damage, could be cast to a specific place on the ground at ranged, CC’ed enemies without having them run away from you and provided a ton of self-healing with the Improved Blood Presence talent. Then the Blood Presence talent got reworked, then the horrify effect was shunted to a glyph and then ultimately removed altogether. All of which was necessary because that spell was totally broken. Unholy Blight, Lichborne and Shadow of Death looked to each other nervously in anticipation.

Throughout Beta you can really see the evolution of the talent trees go from a very Burning Crusade mindset to a more “enlightened” Wrath of the Lich King model. Talents like Blood Rune Mastery are phased out and Death Runes become the preferred method for utilizing “wild card” runes to preserve the original intent to let you imbue your runeblade with whichever runes you wanted.

Wrath Live

Wrath of the Lich King goes live with this talent build: WotLK 3.0.3.9183.

The night the expansion goes on sale at midnight, I’m walking into the mall alone. There’s more cars in the parking lot than I expect. I enter the door and turn the corner and see three very long lines already formed. I stand in the first line to pre-pay and talk to some guys who I would describe with my best raider leet-speak as “total noobs” until we’ve paid for our copies. As we finish paying we’re instructed that the lines for distribution are divided into a Horde line and an Alliance line. The noobs as it happen are Alliance players. This strikes me as being very right.

The employees of Gamestop rally the people in line by having the Horde line shout out “For the Horde!” as loud as they can. The Alliance people shouted something too but its quickly drowned out by continual Horde shouting. Rude? Sure, but come on Allies, give it a little oomph.

I race home with my copy and find myself headed to the Dark Portal a few hours later. Nine days later my Death Knight, Shayzani, dings level 80. I leveled entirely as Unholy since I wanted to give something new a try and because I was wise to the On a Pale Horse’s value while questing.

My first heroic is Violet Hold which I dps’ed as Unholy. I was in one of the first ventures into Naxxramas on my server and saw Patchwerk die when the raid was mostly decked out in leveling greens and tier 6. My first epic is the Chained Military Gorget. My tank spec was likely 7/8/56 (as pictured below) or some such nonsense and I had Rune of the Fallen Crusader on my tank weapon since we weren’t spoiled with Stoneskin Gargoyle like today’s kids and also maybe because I forgot about Rune of Swordshattering.

Changes

Throughout this long process of ups and downs in Death Knight iteration a lot of really cool abilities were introduced, some were radically changed seemingly every patch and some were lost forever. Notable mentions include the following:

Lichborne – Today its nigh on useless but early on, existing even into the live builds for a short time, Lichborne was one of the most rockin’ tank talents ever. When you popped it you were given an additional 25% chance to be missed by enemy attacks and you could use your Death Coils to heal yourself a bit. It was a great emergency button and once it was gone Blood and Unholy tanks were free from having to put 11 points into Frost.

Dancing Rune Weapon – Sure its only a little different now but back when it was first implemented there was no damage penalty on the Rune Weapon’s swings. You could also cast Army of the Dead and your Rune Weapon would cast its own Army right along with you. I ended up beating Krystallus in my first Heroic Halls of Stone run with only myself, another Death Knight and our 26 ghouls left alive at the end. The word you’re looking for is “epic”.

Death and Decay – I covered Death and Decay earlier but as a quick recap its history is as follows: awesome ranged AoE with built-in CC > good ranged AoE with glyphed CC > good ranged AoE.

Bone Shield – The original implementation of Bone Shield led many people to believe that Unholy would be the strongest tank spec in endgame raiding due to avoidance reaching a point where Bone Shield’s uptime would allow an amazing amount of damage reduction. But 20% off isn’t all that much though right? I mean its good and all bu—wait, what? Bone Shield granted 40% damage reduction? That’s right, 40% damage reduction. Awesome.

Shadow of Death – One of the most novel talents we’ve ever had in the game was this talent. It proved to be a nightmare for pvp where after killing off your stupidly over-powered Death Knight opponent she would get right back up off the ground and start eating your face off as a ghoul. Also, if you died in an instance you could run out as a ghoul and if you finished zoning out before the Shadow of Death buff expired you were alive and whole once again. Ultimately the devs pronounced Shadow of Death to be way too difficult to balance right and scrapped the whole concept.

Unholy Blight – This spell was deemed too awesome for players to have and was mutated into the horrifyingly lame version it is today as a result. At one point, popping Unholy Blight gave a self-buff that generated a black cloud of insects around your body that would do damage to all enemies in a 10 yard radius. The spell effect looked awesome, it added a truly unique flavor to the Death Knight experience and wreaked havoc on groups of enemies, npc’s and players alike. Rather than overwhelm players with such a high amount of pure awesomeness, the devs decided making it into a simple debuff with no visible particle effect was a better idea.

Suffer Well

We’re at the end of the Wrath expansion now and its been a long ride. Now we’re looking ahead at another expansion and with it, a host of new changes and radical shifts in gameplay. The great experiment with three tanking talent trees has concluded and the developers have decided to do an “about face” on the issue entirely. Some people are overjoyed, some people are disappointed. No doubt the change will free up developer time and ease their workload but I still see the vision of using any talent tree for tanking as the most brilliant idea Blizzard ever had for class design and wish it could have gone further by extending the same treatment to other tanks as well.

Regardless of whatever changes are made, be they to the rune system or to the talent trees or any of a myriad of individual spells, its going to be interesting to see where the Death Knight class goes in the future and what creature it becomes. No doubt we’re in for a lot more growing pains but hey, we have to grow quickly to catch up to the other classes right?

Through it all, suffer well.