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Death Knight. Speculations.
retrospectic
Member UncommonPosts: 1,466
I know there is a lot of hatred for World of Warcraft on this forum. Putting that aside I would like to gather some thoughts on the upcoming new WoW class, Death Knights.
The trialer for the expansion shows a very small amount of actual Death Knight game play. The only real spell that we are shown is what looks like an AoE spell that summons random undead. This means multiple pets. This is the first time WoW has decided to give a class many small pets as opposed to many pets which can only be summoned one at a time.
Will this class be a Warlock/Warrior hybrid? Will he be able to tank? DPS? Heal!?
Here is the Warcraft III Death Knight Spell/Ability list:
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Death Coil A coil of death that can damage an enemy living unit or heal a friendly undead unit. |
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Death Coil
The Death Knight's Death Coil ability is a great healer for Undead units and even for the Neutral Heroes Dark Ranger and Pit lord. Death Coil can also be used to heal allied Heroes and your own second Hero. Advanced players often use a Death Knight for this purpose.Death Coil is also good against early rushes where the enemy targets your workers. You can use a Death Coil to heal your Acolytes that are under attack or combat units.
Death Coil is especially useful to finish off running enemy Heroes that are near death.
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Death Pact Kills a target friendly unit, giving a percentage of its hit points to the Death Knight. |
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Death Pact Information
The more powerful a unit you consume, the more healing you receive. Few players understand or use this ability. Often enemy units focus their attacks on your Hero. This spell can make them pay when they do that. As they are attacking your Hero simply use Death Pact to regain his hit points. This ability is best used on Skeletons or Carrion Beetles.Death Pact can be used on invulnerable units.
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Unholy Aura Increases the movement speed and life regeneration rate of nearby friendly units. |
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Unholy Aura
Unholy Aura is very useful for the Undead since they cannot regenerate off of their Blight. The faster movement speed is also great. Often Undead players use both Vampiric Aura and Unholy Aura together with upgraded Ghouls.This ability can also be used to restore the health of mechanical units such as the Meat Wagon and the Obsidian Statue.
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Animate Dead (Ultimate) Raises 6 dead units in an area to fight for the Death Knight. Animated units are invulnerable. |
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Animate Dead Information
It is important to pick the right time to cast Animate Dead. The best time to use it is when there are at least 6 dead units that are very powerful such as Knights, Tauren, Abominations, Huntresses, or Bears. Another possible option is to collect powerful Creeps in a Meat Wagon then unload them in a battle and cast Animate Dead.Up to 6 units can be resurrected. The spell will choose the most powerful corpses to resurrect if there are more than 6.
Animate Dead will raise dead enemy units or neutral units as well as your own.
Units raised by Animate Dead are invulnerable to dispels as well as damage.
While some of these abilities seem impossible for WoW, others are already in the game in one way or another. Will the Death Knight get Death Coil? Oh boy. I can already hear the screams for a nerf.
One ability which intrigues me is that the Death Knight can sack friendly units for health. With the ability that raises dead it should be interesting. Perhaps part of the classes core ability will be to summon dead units and use them as health regen with Death Pact as well as use these dead units to fight. Will these abilties be humanoid/undead/demon only?
Also, the Death Knight in the trailer uses Plate. That also opens many doors for what exactly his abilities may be. With three trees to specialize we could see some very unique play styles. Will he also be a support class? New buffs?
I am not what you would consider a WoW fanboi. WoW appeals to me because of the ease of gameplay and how it suits my lifestyle. I also enjoy the class set-up that we are currently given. I even enjoy that Blizzard gave Horde Paladins and Alliance Shaman.
Now, here's my opinion on a "hero class".
Until we know more, we have no information on how the average WoW player will achieve the use of the Death Knights. All we know is the name and the usual stigma which comes with the past (Jedi). I, for one, am not in favor of having a special class. Balance is always an issue. Players will flock towards a class which is supposedly "better" than others. Will this lead to a skewed number of DKs? Only time will tell.
To be honest, I am more excited about the updated hairstyles. Undead and Trolls need help.
Comments
Army of the Dead - Spell summons undead minions to fight for Death Knight. These creatures run around and attack things at random.Unholy Embrace - 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.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
Supposedly they work on a series of runes rather than mana/rage/energy. It will be interesting to see how this plays.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
The World of Warcraft general forum is not suited for anyone actually trying to discuss the game. Users much like yourself make it nearly impossible to mention the game without some sort of insult. I placed this thread here for actual discussion. Take your commentary back to 6th grade, please.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
This is the wrong forum for Game Specific topics .... this trend needs to end with WoW players using this forum.
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Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
Yes just because this is more populated forum than WoWs doesnt mean you have to get it dirty with your speculations.
WoW sucks. WoW's fans are 12!!! OMG OMG OMG!!!
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
hmmm I wonder what's meant by a series of runes.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
I have no idea. The speed at which they developed this is really mind boggling. I'm hoping this isn't just to compete with Warhammer. Many games have been hurt by rushing content to compete with newer games (see: EQ1)
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
I have no idea. The speed at which they developed this is really mind boggling. I'm hoping this isn't just to compete with Warhammer. Many games have been hurt by rushing content to compete with newer games (see: EQ1)
Thats exactly what they are trying to do, and I believe it is perfectly planned. EQ1 did a great job at competing with new games even though I dont rly like the game. This is exactly what companies need to do in order to stay in business. Competition is offering ice cream seller trade skills, you put that into your game as well.
Hmm could be for WoW section or could be not. Its kinda like news that everyone is aware of so in that respect it can go here. At the same time when every second post is about WoW it could do with being in the WoW section. Anyway since its here best to discuss here. My thoughts are it WILL be a tank simply by the name death KNIGHT.
I have no idea. The speed at which they developed this is really mind boggling. I'm hoping this isn't just to compete with Warhammer. Many games have been hurt by rushing content to compete with newer games (see: EQ1)
Thats exactly what they are trying to do, and I believe it is perfectly planned. EQ1 did a great job at competing with new games even though I dont rly like the game. This is exactly what companies need to do in order to stay in business. Competition is offering ice cream seller trade skills, you put that into your game as well.
The problem isn't the plan. The plan itself is valid and totally understandable. Blizzard wants to release a product to directly compete with Warhammer. The problem is that in the past Blizzard has kept content under wraps for long periods of time in order to develop it. That's why the products they release are usually pretty polished. With a time frame that ends in Q1 2008 there isn't as much time to fine tune a whole new class and many brand new abilties (siege weapons, destructable buildings).
We'll see.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
even though I have no interest in playing WoW again, it'll be interesting to see how they balance hero classes.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
I have no idea. The speed at which they developed this is really mind boggling. I'm hoping this isn't just to compete with Warhammer. Many games have been hurt by rushing content to compete with newer games (see: EQ1)
Of course it's to compete with WAR / AoC. They know that starting October 30th, and going into 2008, the MMO field is getting turned up a notch. EQ2 is doing the same thing by releasing their Kunark Expansion. For the first time in probably 1-2 years, there will be MMOs worth playing again (hopefully). Many of WoW player's are just waiting for something new and exciting to come along, so they finally decided to deliver on hero classes after 3 years. Honestly, I don't think its going to be enough to keep people playing. Unless you are really into raiding PvE, there's no real reason to keep playing WoW once the next round of games come out.It looks like they once again took the easy road and made this class available to both sides instead of having an alliance and horde counterpart. God forbid the sides should actually be different. Those who stay with WoW will probably see everyone and their mother becoming a death knight, and watch as once again they completely obsolete ever single piece of content in the game.
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I don't like the general WoW forum. I can't post topics there without every 8 year old WoW hater posting 6 paragraphs worth of crap about grinding.
I have no doubt that WoW's expansion will be successful. I'm just worried that the direction they are headed is merely to adapt to the changing desires of the crowd (300k that signed up for WARs beta) and development will suffer. The products will come out faster and faster until WoW much like EQ will churn out a poorly authored raid expansion every 6 months so a niche bunch of 34 year old fatties can eat up content almost as fast as the donuts they shovel into their mouths while pressing hotkeys..
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
All of the press I've read seems to hint that Blizzard has not been developing the expansion for a while. Considering that they released a free raid dungeon and multiple new areas for questing I wouldn't be surprised if this is just something they've recently picked up.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
I have no idea. The speed at which they developed this is really mind boggling. I'm hoping this isn't just to compete with Warhammer. Many games have been hurt by rushing content to compete with newer games (see: EQ1)
Of course it's to compete with WAR / AoC. They know that starting October 30th, and going into 2008, the MMO field is getting turned up a notch. EQ2 is doing the same thing by releasing their Kunark Expansion. For the first time in probably 1-2 years, there will be MMOs worth playing again (hopefully). Many of WoW player's are just waiting for something new and exciting to come along, so they finally decided to deliver on hero classes after 3 years. Honestly, I don't think its going to be enough to keep people playing. Unless you are really into raiding PvE, there's no real reason to keep playing WoW once the next round of games come out.It looks like they once again took the easy road and made this class available to both sides instead of having an alliance and horde counterpart. God forbid the sides should actually be different. Those who stay with WoW will probably see everyone and their mother becoming a death knight, and watch as once again they completely obsolete ever single piece of content in the game.
According to a panel at BlizzCon 2007, the Death Knight is planned to be available to every race at this time, though the list may change in development
This is also an interesting idea. Blizzard is currently allowing every single race to be a Death Knight. That's a first.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
It's very difficult to tell what skills these hero classes will have. Many of the hero class abilities have been used in normal classes. The Warlock already has some Death Knight/Necromancer type of abilities. The Paladin is already a hero class so it will be difficult to make a hero version without copying a lot of it's abilities. I'm not sure that hero classes will be much more powerful then other classes. Perhaps they will just add in the classes they didn't have at release over a period of time.
what I think.
they'd said Death Knight would only be available to high level players. This doesn't mean you have to raid to unlock it.
What I think it means, is that this is going to be like LOTRO monster play.
They are going to have different Hero classes unlockable, then a bunch of content only for Heroes. There will be many more then the Death Knight, and it will function like a mini-game of sorts.
Use your main toon to unlock the Heroes, then "become" a Hero and engage in a new "style" of gameplay. Dunno if it's going to be PVP or PVE or just like quests/missions/encounters or a series of dungeons/raids etc, but this is how I forsee them working it.
Like monster play in LOTRO.
This is NOT going to be a class you can start a new character as at level 1 and level to 80 and play like normal. It's going to be it's own, different, little thing.
It is plenty of time, the content on this new expansion is pretty slim. Plus I can guarantee you they were fidling with this pvp idea before release even :P
Well, I hope so. EverQuest is probably not the best comparison, but I've been with games which has expanded themselves to a point which is nearly impossible to fathom. EQ just took the idea of expansions and rubbed steroids all over it. Hopefully Blizzard see that as a bad thing rather than a marketing plan.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
I can't believe WoW would of only just started working on the new expansion knowing how behind they were with the last one. I'll speculate they got multiple teams, some working on the live content and some working on the expansion or something. Additionally, I might argue WoW might be easier to develop for than traditional games because of its warcraft style that they have used for a lot of years now. (I could be wrong on this)
Sorry this is kind offtopic but it is related. Archlord does anyone know what that game is about and is there any chance WoW could be aiming for something similar?
well the way that it sounded in the trailer to me, it was like the players who were death knights were siding with arthas, so i HOPEFULLY smell some nice PVP options