To Death Knight Or Not To Death Knight?

By being the only new class added to the expansion of World of Warcraft, and being the only Hero class in the game so far, death knight is definitely going to be tried out by many players. But will people stick with it, or possibly get deterred by the difficulty of class?

It’s hard to say at this moment because there are still a lot of changes Blizzard is going to make to all classes. For example, they’ve admitted that the retribution tree for paladins and the unholy tree for death knights are going to be nerfed because they are overpowered. I’m also guessing that the mutilate tree for rogues is going to go through some changes, and warriors will probably be buffed a bit because they are the most easily killed class now (a ret paladin with blues destroys a warrior in full season three and four). But even through tons of changes to each class, one thing will remain certain, death knight is very difficult to play.

The death knight has two runes for each tree and each rune has a ten second cooldown to it. Certain abilities require specific runes, and there are even abilities that require two different runes. Death knights also will have a ghoul pet they must control and runic power to keep track of, which can be compared to how a warrior uses rage. That’s a lot of stuff to manage, especially when you are also keeping track of your enemies’ cooldowns, mana, and health. It’s definitely going to take too much skill for everyone and their grandmother to have a level eighty death knight as their main.

Death knights are said to counter magic users, even more so than rogues. It also looks like they will be an essential part to any raid or PvP team, excluding 2v2, simply because there are too many viable double dps teams to make death knight exclusive to the bracket. But unfortunately, even after the nerfs, it still looks like almost every death knight is going to have basically the same spec in the unholy tree because of things like anti-magic field, and virulence and unholy command, which are required for PvP just like a rogue’s vile poisons, or a hunter’s improved stings would be.

This information means that most arena teams with a death knight won’t automatically win because of their composition (ex: a brain dead mage and rogue team should beat an amazing shaman and warrior team just because of the composition). Instead, it’s actually going to depend on the skill of the player controlling the death knight. So if you are one of those people who don’t really want to role a death knight but do so just because you are worried that they are going to be completely overpowered and everyone is going to have one except you, don’t do it. Even if everyone does have one, 90% of them are going to suck and go back to their rogue eventually, making up some excuse to avoid accepting the fact that they aren’t good enough to play anything besides rogue. If you are going to make your main a death knight, do so because you enjoy the class, or because you want to have a gnome death knight, which is just hilarious. Both are extremely good reasons.