Death Knight

102,280pages on
this wiki
Revision as of 20:49, April 5, 2013 by Fandyllic (Talk | contribs)

Quests Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Abilities Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Spec Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Talents Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Trainers Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Glyphs Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Builds Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Tactics Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
PvE Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
PvP Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
Macros Dk Dr Hu Ma Mo Pa Pr Ro Sh Wl Wr
This article is about the hero class in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. For other uses, see Death Knight (disambiguation).
"DK" redirects here. For the old PvP mechanic, see Dishonorable Kill.
Death knight crest

New Class Icon

Blizzard's original death knight concept was that of an undead spellcaster unit which made its initial appearance in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.[1] This death knight could be more accurately described as a horseback-mounted lich rather than the traditional undead warrior. Years later, Blizzard introduced a new death knight hero unit in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and this second rendition was revised to reflect the general characteristics of the more traditional death knight design.[2] To understand the key differences between these two different generations of death knight, see the "Lore" section located further down this page. The death knight was later adapted as a prestige class within the Warcraft RPG and they were former paladin warriors.A&HC 24 It is the Warcraft III version of the death knight that became the first hero class in World of Warcraft and was introduced in the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion.


Main article: Death knight talents

Death knight talents are split into 3 trees; originally each of them were fully capable of supporting either a tanking or DPS melee role, however that is no longer the case over time with the release of class changes in patches and the release of Cataclysm-Logo-Small. Though Blood is the dedicated tanking tree, any of the three talent trees can effectively tank anything under heroics as long as one stays in Blood Presence.

  • Blood: Tanking Tree. This tree primarily amplifies the death knight's melee spells, weapons, healing, and abilities. It also has a prominent health-regeneration theme, with abilities and talents such as Improved Death Strike, Blood Parasite, Vampiric Blood, Rune Tap, and the Mastery: Blood Shield. Blood players will wield 2H weapons, and tanking is done using Blood Presence for its damage reduction, stamina boost, quick melee health regen and threat generation boost. Blood is also widely considered to be the new leveling spec for Death Knights.

Suggested Runeforging Enchants: Rune of the Nerubian Carapace/Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle

  • Frost: DPS Tree. This tree has many control elements, a strong critical-strike/bonus-damage theme, and also several talents that improve physical-damage output, including Brittle Bones and Improved Icy Talons. Frost players can choose between dual-wielding or using a 2H; dual-wielding will provide 10% more DPS than 2H, however. Damage is done in either Frost Presence (dual-wielders) or Unholy Presence (2H users). Most of the Frost tree's damage comes from Obliterate (with Killing Machine procs), Melee strikes, Frost Strike, and Howling Blast (for AoE fights).

Suggested Runeforging Enchants: Rune of Razorice/Rune of the Fallen Crusader

  • Unholy: DPS/PvP Tree. This tree has a heavy focus on diseases and related abilities, as well as improving summoned minions with the passive talent Master of Ghouls. The Unholy tree also provides AoE damage, spell damage shielding, and mobility-improvement sub-themes. Unholy users may also choose between dual wielding (which requires some Frost talents) and using a 2H. Damage is done using Unholy presence, and most of the Unholy tree's damage comes from the summoned Ghoul, Death Coil, Melee strikes, and Scourge Strike.

Suggested Runeforging Enchants: Rune of Cinderglacier/Rune of the Fallen Crusader/Rune of Lichbane



Immortal Soldiers of the Horde


Death Knight by Red Knuckle.

Dwarf death knight

Dwarf death knight


Human death knight


Death knight as depicted in a teaser (very early concept).

Main article: Death knight (Warcraft II)

The original death knights were created for Orgrim Doomhammer by Gul'dan as powerful soldiers of the Horde. These death knights were created by placing the souls of the slain warlocks of the Shadow Council into the corpses of fallen Stormwind knights, the first of whom was Teron Gorefiend. Unlike modern death knights of the Scourge, these ghoulish fiends were not battle hardened warriors; they were insidious necromancers who possessed superior intellect and tremendous magical power. They often favored the use of terror tactics and reanimated the corpses of enemy soldiers who fell in battle to serve them as mindless undead minions.

Most of these death knights were destroyed during and after the Second War, either killed by the Alliance or transformed into liches by Kil'jaeden.

Champions of the Lich King

Years after the destruction of Draenor, the immensely powerful Lich King created a new breed of death knights: malevolent, rune-wielding warriors of the Scourge. The first and greatest of these was the Lich King's chosen champion, Prince Arthas Menethil, once a mighty paladin of the Silver Hand, who sacrificed his soul to claim the runeblade Frostmourne in a desperate bid to save his people. The rest are primarily made up of other fallen paladins whose souls were twisted and bound to the will of the Frozen Throne [2].

Unlike Gul'dan's death knights, these dark champions possess unholy strength; however, they do not possess free will and their minds are inexorably entwined with and dominated by the Lich King's vast consciousness. Despite the potential loss of free will, some powerful mortals are intrigued by the promise of immortality and pledge their souls freely into the Lich King's service to achieve it. (Baron Rivendare is an example of this).

In the years since Arthas shattered the Frozen Throne and merged with the Lich King, the power and fury of the death knights has only grown. Now these unrelenting crusaders of the damned eagerly await the Lich King's command to unleash their fury on Azeroth once again. Unlike death knights of the Old Horde, the Scourge's death knights are not limited to their use of ranged spell casting abilities. In addition, these tireless death knights are considerably stronger, faster, and more agile than they were in life. However, both generations are equally destructive and terrifying to engage in the field of battle.[3]

The Ebon Blade

A new group of death knights, the Death knights of Acherus, was later created by the Lich King to garrison the necropolis of Acherus: The Ebon Hold for the ultimate purpose of assaulting Light's Hope Chapel and destroying the Argent Dawn. In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, these death knights are freed from the will of the Lich King and ally themselves with their former factions. Working closely under the guiding blade of Highlord Darion Mograine and the bolstered Argent Crusade, the newly-freed death knights have begun their march to Northrend.

The Knights of the Ebon Blade is a faction consisting of the renegade death knights that broke free of the Lich King's control after the battle of Light's Hope Chapel (in other words, player-created death knights). Led by Highlord Darion Mograine, the Knights of the Ebon Blade have allied themselves with the Alliance and the Horde with the help of Highlord Tirion Fordring of the Knights of the Silver Hand, and have pledged to do their part in defeating their former master, the Lich King. Their main base is Acherus: The Ebon Hold, taken from the Scourge after breaking free. It should be noted that the Knights of the Ebon Blade are not a separate player faction such as the Alliance and Horde. For the purposes of gameplay, player-created death knights still belong to either the Alliance or Horde depending on their race/faction.

Notable death knights



Ebon Blade

Shadowfang keep

Hero Class Overview

Death knights in Wrath of the Lich King are a new class mirroring their previous incarnations. While boasting powerful melee abilities, as well as plate armor, these warriors supplement their strength with dark magic. Calling upon a rune system of magic, the death knight may summon unholy, blood, and frost spells. The criterion for creating a death knight is the existence of a level 55+ character on the player's account on any realm[4].

Unlocking your death knight

Main article: Starting a death knight

The death knight is the first hero class in World of Warcraft. The death knight will start at level 55 in Acherus: The Ebon Hold over the Eastern Plaguelands, with multiple spells and abilities ready to use, and a set of uncommon gear. When you leave Ebon Hold, you will have a full set of rare gear ready for Outland. Through the death knight-specific quests in this necropolis and the surrounding areas, the character learns to master the power of the death knight and learns to use this new power for the will of the Lich King. Quests will take them outside the necropolis and into an area within the Scarlet Enclave.

Players can create one death knight per realm, so long as they have a level 55 character already and the Wrath of the Lich King on their account. Currently the Pandaren cannot become death knights.

The Rune System


Runes as shown at BlizzCon 2007 (outdated).


Early beta frame removed due to pet difficulties (outdated).

Death Knight portrait with runes

The final frame art used since WotLK public release.

The death knight uses a unique rune-based resource system to govern his/her spells and abilities. Three rune types exist: blood, frost, and unholy, each with an attached color and symbol. Using certain abilities exhausts one or more runes, starting a cooldown of 10 seconds. After the cooldown, the runes refresh. The death knight can use spells to turn a rune into a Death Rune, which can be used as a blood, frost, or unholy rune. In addition, whenever the death knight uses a rune ability against a foe, it builds up a certain amount of Runic Power. This Runic Power is only used by few abilities.[5] All abilities that use Runic Power use a set amount, like Death Coil. Death knights cannot reallocate the number and type of runes - they are fixed to two runes of each type.[6]

The original player frame for death knights shown at BlizzCon was changed as feedback showed it was not ideal for displaying rune power for players.

Runeforging is a profession available only to death knights, providing permanent weapon enchants. The enchants work just like the permanent weapon enchants provided by Enchanting, but are self-only and are designed specifically to benefit death knight class. These are independent of the rune resource system.

Character's Role

In general, the death knight can be considered a hybrid melee class that combines damage dealing and tanking, somewhat akin to Warriors. They wear plate armor and are able to dual-wield or use two-handed blade weapons (and maces, as revealed later). Like druids, they tank without shields. Their tanking mechanics involve high armor and a high chance to parry.[7] Death knights tanks depend on a combination of high damage abilities, in addition to high threat abilities, such as Death and Decay and Rune Strike, to generate and hold aggro.

Like every other class, the death knight has three different talent trees that enhance certain aspects of his or her specialties. However, the differences between the trees are not as clear-cut as those of other classes, both for PvP and PvE environments. Notably, death knights can tank or deal damage regardless in which talent tree they specialize, although a careful talent selection is still required to bolster their preferred role. In patch 4.0.1, the trees became more defined, with Blood becoming the Tank specialization tree, and the others being DPS.

Blood enhances the death knight's melee abilities and damage and vastly improves the ability to heal itself. As the name suggests, the special abilities it grants through talents are based on the Blood Runes. Blood also provides healing utility to party and raids and has some very useful buffs and debuffs that the death knight can cast on others, such as Unholy Frenzy and Blood Shield Mastery, as well as providing a raid-wide 10% attack power buff (Abomination's Might). Blood is considered the tree for soloing and should be given a thought when it comes time to level your Death Knight. Many 80-85 dks suggest to start as unholy and then switch to your blood spec depending on what suits you best.

Frost enhances melee abilities and focuses on increasing both AoE and single target damage. It provides some very powerful direct damage abilities like Frost Strike and Howling Blast. Parties and Raids also benefit from this talent tree by gaining a 20% melee attack speed haste (Improved Icy Talons).

Unholy enhances the death knight's diseases and damage over time spells, making them effective at AoE DPS. It also provides the death knight with a ghoul who is a permanent pet, a gargoyle guardian he or she can summon, and stronger diseases. Raid and party utility is granted by a 13% increased magic damage debuff Ebon Plaguebringer.


Main article: Runeforging


Runeforging allows the death knight to permanently enchant their weapon with enchants that are typically more powerful than enchants available to other classes. Death Knights can wear Relics in their ranged slot, but Relics are not enchant-able.

A weapon can have an enchant from either runeforging or from Enchanting, but not both together (the runeforging enchants are always better for the death knight). A player will have to be near a runeforge in order to forge a rune onto their weapon. Once a weapon has been engraved with a rune it is impossible for the rune to be removed, though it can be changed at a runeforge. Also even if it is not soulbound, once a weapon has been engraved with a rune it is impossible for that weapon to be traded.

Runeforges can be found in Acherus: The Ebon Hold or in some of the Icecrown questing areas inside of the metal dams.


Main article: Death knight races

The death knight class can be played by the following races, with the following stats:

Sortable table
Race Strength Agility Stamina Intellect Spirit Armor Health** New Health
Official alliance mini-icon IconSmall DraeneiDeathKnight MaleIconSmall DraeneiDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 109 70 99 29 44* 140 2169 2939
Official alliance mini-icon IconSmall DwarfDeathKnight MaleIconSmall DwarfDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 113* 69 100* 28 41 138 2179 2979*
Official alliance mini-icon IconSmall GnomeDeathKnight MaleIconSmall GnomeDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 103 75 99 33* 42 159 2169 2939
Official alliance mini-icon IconSmall HumanDeathKnight MaleIconSmall HumanDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 108 73 99 29 43 146 2169 2949
Official alliance mini-icon IconSmall NightElfDeathKnight MaleIconSmall NightElfDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 104 77* 99 29 42 154 2169 2939
Official alliance mini-icon IconSmall Worgen MaleIconSmall Worgen Female Cataclysm-Logo-Small 111 75 99 25 41 0 2169 2949
Official horde mini-icon IconSmall BloodElfDeathKnight MaleIconSmall BloodElfDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 105 75* 99 32* 40 150 2169 2929
Official horde mini-icon IconSmall Undead MaleIconSmall Undead Female Wrath-Logo-Small 107 71 99 27 47* 142 2169 2959
Official horde mini-icon IconSmall GoblinDeathKnight MaleIconSmall GoblinDeathKnight Female Cataclysm-Logo-Small 105 75* 99 32* 40 0 2169 2949
Official horde mini-icon IconSmall OrcDeathKnight MaleIconSmall OrcDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 111 70 100* 26 44 140 2179 2969
Official horde mini-icon IconSmall TaurenDeathKnight MaleIconSmall TaurenDeathKnight Female Wrath-Logo-Small 113* 69 100* 25 44 138 2246 3117***
Official horde mini-icon IconSmall UndeadTroll MaleIconSmall UndeadTroll Female Wrath-Logo-Small 109 75* 99 25 43 150 2169 2959

Cataclysm changes Cataclysm-Logo-Small

Tanking as blood

Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm | 2010-04-06 21:45 | Ghostcrawler
We're doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we'd go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.

View original post

General preview

Cataclysm Class Preview: Death Knight Zarhym

New Death Knight Abilities

[Outbreak] (level 81)
Outbreak infects the target with both [Frost Fever] and [Blood Plague] at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.
[Necrotic Strike] (level 83)
[Dark Simulacrum] (level 85)
The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent's next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike [Spell Reflection], Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can't reflect an ability, you won't be able to copy it either.

Rune System Changes



Talent Changes


  • Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see [Vampiric Blood] and [Will of the Necropolis] remain, while [Bone Shield] will move over from Unholy.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

  1. Damage reduction
  2. Vengeance
  3. Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you'll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.
  1. Melee damage
  2. Melee Haste
  1. Melee damage
  2. Melee and spell critical damage



View original post

Concept artwork



New abilities and talents preview by TGN
Part 1 Part 2
DPS Rundown by TGN
Frost Unholy

Death knight intro Wrath-Logo-Small Beta

See also

Patch changes


  1. ^ Death Knight. Blizz Blizzard. Retrieved on 2009-06-20.
  2. ^ a b Death Knight. Blizz Warcraft III. Retrieved on 2009-06-20.
  3. ^ Death Knight Lore. Blizz Blizzard. Retrieved on 2009-06-20.
  4. ^
  5. ^ Cody Bye 2008-05-09. World of Warcraft: An In-Depth Look at the death knight. Ten Ton Hammer.
  6. ^
  7. ^ Gerald Villoria 2008-05-09. Enter the Death Knight. GameSpy. Retrieved on 2009-06-20.

External links


Facts about Death KnightRDF feed
Patch date20 January 2009 +

Around Wikia's network

Random Wiki