New Episode of Building Azeroth Series: Building Death Knights

• Author: Pride
• Date: August 30, 2022
• Updated: August 30, 2022
• Expansion: WotLK Classic

Blizzard has released a new episode of the “Building Azeroth” series, where developers who worked on the original Wrath of the Lich King expansion back in the day get together to discuss how it was created. This episode features Game Director Tom Chilton and Principal Game Designer Kris Zierhut, who discuss the making of the fan-favourite Death Knight class, one of the most popular new features of the expansion. You can watch the video below, or scroll further down for a brief run-down of the topics discussed.

This episode contains a lot of really neat trivia. For instance, the devs reveal that Blizzard intentionally avoided adding a new class in TBC, so players wouldn’t have the expectation that each expansion would come with a new class, as they were worried that doing so and flooding the game with new classes would “water them down”. But with Wrath being centered around Arthas and the Death Knight class being so iconic, it was a “now or never” moment for them to add a new class finally.

This in turn came with many interesting challenges for Blizzard. They wanted Death Knights to be really unique in order to avoid this “watering down” phenomenon. This led to decisions like combining the identities of the scrapped Runemaster class that was originally going to be the 10th class in Classic WoW with the Warcraft 3 Death Knight and Necromancer units, giving them boss-themed abilities like Rage Winterchill’s Death and Decay, having them start out in a unique starting zone with its own narrative as to how you join the Alliance / Horde, etc.

Another interesting bit of trivia: the Death Grip ability, which is now iconic to the Death Knight class, was originally going to be a Warrior ability, with the Warrior throwing a chain that pulls the target to them! They decided to give the ability to Death Knights instead, which affected the game in a larger way; Death Grip was the Death Knight “taunt” spell originally, while it had a 35 yard range. Paladins had a ranged taunt as well, but Druids and Warriors didn’t, which in turn caused them to give Druids and Warriors a longer range on their taunts as well.

Finally, a shocking revelation: Kris Zierhut was the developer in charge of gameplay balance for the Death Knight class! Anyone who played back in the day can tell you that Death Knights were extremely overpowered during WotLK’s release and for a good ~5-6 months afterwards, which Zierhut then goes on to apologize about! In retrospect he thinks it was a good idea for them to be a bit on the OP side as it gave players an incentive to try them out and experiment with them, even though they were forced to nerf them a little bit more with every patch, until they felt they were in a pretty good state in patch 3.3.5.

This episode was very interesting and we recommend that you give it a watch! It’s great to see Blizzard continuing this series, which gives us a very enjoyable glimpse into the development process of World of Warcraft, contextualizing some of the decisions that we have come to love or hate over the years, and making the developers feel that tiny bit more human to us.

Will you be trying out the Death Knight class in WotLK Classic? Let us know in the comments below!