Blizzard’s Tom Chilton on the Death Knights

The announcement of the newest expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, sent many a gamer into spasms of joy. One of the biggest things that was announced was the introduction of the first hero class: Death Knight.

Designed to be both a tank and a damage-dealer, this class can be attained at level 80 by going through a chain quest. Abilities will be based on three schools of runes which are selected by the Death Knight beforehand.

WoW lead designer Tom Chilton was recently interviewed by the Shack News regarding the new class and he had a lot of little tidbits regarding the class and its implementation.

Transitioning into the Death Knight class was one major topic that he discussed. One of the plans was to simply allow each class to just expand in the same method talent trees were handled. This idea did not push through, Chilton pointed out, because a doubling or tripling of character classes could have thrown the entire game out of balance.

Another idea the developers explored was to have the players convert their existing character into the Death Knight class. Chilton stated that this would have been a very awkward process since players would have to choose between keeping their original character class and being a Death Knight.

It really looks like Blizzard put in a lot of time in designing their characters and gameplay balance. When this goes live, there will be more than a few players ascending into the Death Knight class. However, before you do that, Chilton gave word that there might be more hero classes in the pipeline. If you want to see the full interview, feel free to click on our read link. More updates as they happen.

The announcement of the newest expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, sent many a gamer into spasms of joy. One of the biggest things that was announced was the introduction of the first hero class: Death Knight.

Designed to be both a tank and a damage-dealer, this class can be attained at level 80 by going through a chain quest. Abilities will be based on three schools of runes which are selected by the Death Knight beforehand.

WoW lead designer Tom Chilton was recently interviewed by the Shack News regarding the new class and he had a lot of little tidbits regarding the class and its implementation.

Transitioning into the Death Knight class was one major topic that he discussed. One of the plans was to simply allow each class to just expand in the same method talent trees were handled. This idea did not push through, Chilton pointed out, because a doubling or tripling of character classes could have thrown the entire game out of balance.

Another idea the developers explored was to have the players convert their existing character into the Death Knight class. Chilton stated that this would have been a very awkward process since players would have to choose between keeping their original character class and being a Death Knight.

It really looks like Blizzard put in a lot of time in designing their characters and gameplay balance. When this goes live, there will be more than a few players ascending into the Death Knight class. However, before you do that, Chilton gave word that there might be more hero classes in the pipeline. If you want to see the full interview, feel free to click on our read link. More updates as they happen.