Death Knight

Hero Class added with the WOTLK expansion pack.

Creation

With the level cap being raised to 80, Blizzard felt that adding a brand new class and forcing players to level said class from 1 to 80 was just too much. Therefore, they decided Death Knights would start the game at level 55, provided the player had already leveled another class to 55 or higher.

This resulted in a MASSIVE influx of Death Knights across all servers, to the point where they came to represent over 40% of the overall server's population. You'd go into a Battleground and the opposing team as well as yours would consist of at least 50% Death Knights.

Imbalance

When the Blizzard developing team was designing Death Knights, they set out to create the most imbalanced class in the entire history of World of Warcraft. The idea was to have a class that would instantly enhance the player's PvP skills to the point where any casual, keyboard-turning and back-pedaling 13-year old could feel like they were finally competitive in PvP and arenas. In order to accomplish this most noble goal, the following steps were taken:

• Infinite Resources: Death Knights, much like Warriors and Rogues, were given not only once, but TWO sets of infinite resources with which to use their skills. These resources are: Runic Power, which works like warrior's rage, and Runes, which refresh over time and are used to activate certain special abilities.

• Spell Interrupts: Death Knights, like any other melee class (except Paladins), were given a melee-range spell interrupt on a very short cooldown named Mind Freeze, which locks out a spell school by 4 seconds and has a 10 second cooldown. In addition to this, they also have Strangulate, which is a 4-second silence that has a range of approximately 50 million yards.

• Spamable Snare: Death Knights equipped with the arena PvP gloves can spam Chains of Ice, a snare that reduces movement speed literally to a crawl, and has a 30 or so yard range.

• Pets: Death Knights come with two pets: a Ghoul that does more damage than a hunter pet and has a 3 second stun, and a Gargoyle that spits out 3000-damage a pop per bolt.

• DOTs: Yes, Death Knights, much like Warlocks, have the ability to put up DOTs (of the disease category) on their targets. The best part about it is that their DOTs spread to nearby targets.

• Pseudo-Ankh: Once killed, Death Knights come back from the dead as a Ghoul who has roughly 20 million hit points and can do decent damage. On top of this, they get to keep their Ghoul pet as well as their Gargoyle pet while they are in Ghoul-form.

• Death Grip: The ability to use the "Force" to pull targets right towards you. The more Death Knights there are in a battleground, the more likely you are to feel like you are playing pinball instead of World of Warcraft.