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First Impressions: Death Knight

Posted on 16. Nov, 2008 by Demonalecks in Gaming News

Hey guys, It’s Alecks here with my first impressions of the new class provided by the expansion Wrath of the Lich King; The Death Knight! Now don’t let the name scare you, nor let the fact that everyone and their mother will be rolling it, and if you’re like me, you have an alliance character on a server that has a 7:1 Horde/Ally ratio. No don’t let that concern you one bit, one thing you should be concerned about how good this class plays and why the other classes should be scared.

Upon starting my game, I log into my main server, and choose to make a night elf death knight, every other class I have, if you can’t tell by the picture, is also a night elf, trust me its not for the 1% dodge, but for the fact that next to the troll, their the coolest looking race. First thing you may notice is that the character model has now more choices for options on skin/face details as a more dead based tone can be chosen for the death knight ( How appealing!), Light blue glowing eyes to show that demon prowess, and the coolest gear get up you’ll ever see for a starting class.

Probably the coolest thing upon starting this class is the fact that you see the lich king’s model, fresh, ready and animating, and if that isn’t enough, your very first mission is given to you from him, The icing doesn’t get any better than that! One of the main things I’ve noticed as I started playing was blizzard ditching it’s give and take quest operations and now made it more visually animated and appealing (See:WarhammerOnline) You no longer just receive an item and turn it in, you actually pick up the item from a prop in the world and use it on another prop, which is a small touch but refreshing at the very least.

The Quests you partake in leveling your death knight range from your starting level,55, all the way up to 58, and if you haven’t played the class just yet, you’re probably wondering “ How do they compensate for the levels you didn’t play” They don’t. When your character starts off, he has no level 55 rank skills, nor any talent points to spend. This probably begs the question “ How do you make up for the lack of that?” Well blizzard has answered within the game, awarding talent points from quests and putting spells and more detail into each of the talents you spend points on, and as you level, each and every level, you get to purchase a new spell and if not, a new rank for existing spell. In my opinion, this is how it should have been from the beginning, now playing the death knight makes me regret ever playing the game before this, every level feels rewarding and every quest done on the death knight,

in the starting area feels fresh, new and not just the same old run here, turn in there.

So now you’re part of the scourge, how do you go about getting around without getting killed by alliance or horde? Well as events unfold you free yourself of the lich kings grasp, taking back to your actual alliance be it horde or ally, but the coolest thing is that there are no trainers for death knights anywhere around the world, no rune forge other than in a certain area, your starting area, in which instead of having a 30 minute cool-down waiting hearth stone, you actually have a spell that takes you right back to the starting area, with a very little cool down for it.

The Death Knight is called the new Hero class, and for good reason. This class can solo everything, from near your level elites, to mobs of 5+ around your level at the same time. Leveling this class has been cake and at the moment I stand at level 62, gaining a level in an hour if I tried,

but with homework and social life, I have not been able to do more levels in less time. This is possible by the three talent trees that it provides, Blood, Frost, Unholy and they’re each specific to their own separate things. Blood is the DPS tree, every attack given, basically returns and heals a percentage of health back, so the talents revolve around this and giving out damage. Frost is the Tank tree, the talents are based upon damage dealing and threat control, to keep threat upon you. Unholy revolves around the Mage/Warlock styled tree where one has a summoned pet and AOE spells , followed with improved DoT’s

and crowd control for faster and easier leveling. Right now I’ve been specced across the board for Blood pure DPS and so far it’s helped my leveling tenfold.

Questing, As from example that can be seen is that for the new content they added a ton of operations that can be done in a quest, from stealing a horse to shooting down hordes of enemies with cannon fire from a boat. They certainly pulled out all the stops and took advice from their fellow competition on how to make questing a better piece of the game, makes me anxious for getting into Northrend. One of the main things that excites me is how they do their version of “Public Quest”. Covering actual lore makes me understand what was going on with certain characters if I did not know who they were, and why it is that we go from scourge to our previous faction.

All in all, I’ll be keeping you updated on my death knight as I level, and hopefully once I’m 80, I’ll tell you how relevant the class fairs in a raid. I’m in outlands running Ramps with a full team of only death knights, this only means bad things for other classes and good things for those who just want to play their death knights, like me!

Tags: Death Knight, First Impression, Leveling, World of Warcraft, wow