Insight Check recently posted a video with a bit of content out of the upcoming D&D World of Warcraft book related to the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins, which allows us to create the equivalent of WoW's playable Death Knights, as well as the Forsaken species, which equates to WoW's playable Undead race.
Notably, both of these are doing some unprecedented things.
Let's actually hit up the Forsaken first, as I think it's less dramatic:
Forsaken are free-willed, sentient undead. Mostly former humans, the collective identity is linked less to their original species than their shared experience of having come back from the dead and reconciling their free will and memories of life with the grim reality of being a walking corpse.
For the first time in all of 5E, the Forsaken are a species with the undead creature type (something even Reborn don't have). This, thankfully, is much more viable now that healing spells like Cure Wounds work on Undead and Clerics' Turn Undead allows you to pick which targets are affected. Note, though, that Raise Dead and Resurrection won't actually work on them. Crazily enough, True Resurrection will actually turn them back into humanoids, so you might want to talk to a DM if that means you become a Human (or High Elf, potentially, depending on your backstory). Revivify and Reincarnate will both still work, though. Given the special nature of your undeath, I would talk with DMs to see if you could get special dispensation to allow you to be brought back with these spells.
(As a note, in WoW, despite the race being called, literally, just Undead, your creature type is actually humanoid, for game balance reasons.)
From there, the features are a little more standard. You are Medium or Small, have a 30 foot movement speed, and 60 feet of darkvision. You get resistance to Necrotic damage as well, and like Reborn, you don't have to eat, drink, or breathe, and you only need to stay inert for 4 hours to get a long rest.
Touch of the Grave lets you, once per long rest, add a number of d4s equal to your PB of necrotic damage when you deal damage to a creature, and then you regain HP equal to the amount rolled.
Finally, Will of the Forsaken gives you advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the Charmed or Frightened conditions.
So, overall, I think this reflects the WoW race pretty effectively. I do think the issues with resurrection magic might potentially pose a challenge, though I think at the very least, building some alternate means of bringing a fallen Forsaken PC back ought to be in the cards. Frankly, I think it would be reasonable to allow Animate Dead to work in place of Raise Dead, for example, or maybe you need to conduct some kind of necromantic ritual that works similarly to Raise Dead.
Now, let's talk Ebon Blade Paladins, aka Death Knights.
Here, the video doesn't get the whole subclass, but we get a number of interesting features that are, interestingly enough, for levels 1 and 2, which you'll note is not a pair of levels that any established subclasses get anything for.
That's because while Ebon Blade Paladins use the Paladin class as a framework, they aren't actually meant to be Paladins. Even if a lot of canonical Warcraft Death Knights were Paladins in life, not all of them were. Essentially, this isn't going so far as to make a whole new class, but it's retrofitting the 5.5 Paladin to make it fit the Death Knight better.
First off, more of a flavor thing, you can carve a rune into your weapon, giving you the flavor of Blood, Frost, or Unholy - the three Death Knight specs in WoW. According to the video, this doesn't have extensive mechanical implications, but we'll just have to see.
Next, the first big change: like Forsaken, Death Knights are undead. Similarly to all the issues we discussed before, this will give you immunity to certain spells that affect humanoids, but it also means you have to worry about resurrection magic not working. Once again, the funny thing is that in WoW, even if Death Knights were raised in undeath, they're mechanically still humanoids for game balance (though they do have a class ability called Lichborne that temporarily turns you undead for various reasons, including something we're going to touch on right now:)
Death Coil fully replaces Lay on Hands. Yeah, that's right: you don't get Lay on Hands as an Ebon Blade Paladin. Instead, Death Coil lets you use a bonus action to send out necrotic damage or bursts of healing that affect only undead targets. You have a pool of d8s equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1). As a bonus action, you can spend up to your Charisma modifier of those d8s (makes me wonder if our pool gets bigger at higher levels, otherwise this limitation seems redundant) to force a creature you can see within 60 feet to make a Con save. On a failure, they take damage equal to the number rolled, or half as much on a success. You can also target an undead creature (and you are an undead creature) and heal them for the amount rolled.
You regain these d8s on a long rest.
So, to break this down: this is obviously more aggressive than Lay on Hands, which is purely defensive. Makes sense given the priorities of a Death Knight. The damage will be great at early levels, but I think unless that pool expands to, like, twice your Charimsa modifier or somehow also gets expanded, I'm not sure that this is quite the compensation for the loss of Lay on Hands. Again, unless we get a larger pool later on, we're talking like 5d8 at most extra damage once per day by level 17.
As self-healing, or potentially healing for minions or allies (maybe you have a non-Death Knight Forsaken party member in the group?) it's a bit better, though again, I think it starts to fall behind Lay on Hands pretty quickly.
Runic Smite replaces Divine Smite.
Here, there's a much more direct parallel to the Paladin feature. Runic Smite has the Rune Strike spell always prepared, and lets you cast it once per day for free.
Rune Strike works identically to Divine Smite except for the following changes:
Its damage is Necrotic, and rather than dealing an extra d8 of damage to Fiends and Undead, it instead deals an extra d8 to Celestials.
This makes perfect sense as a flavor change. But we do run into a couple problems: First off, more monsters can resist or be immune to necrotic damage than radiant damage. Second, there are far more Fiends and Undead monsters that we tend to fight in D&D than Celestials. Even in an Azeroth-based campaign, we're far more likely to be fighting Fiends like the demons of the Burning Legion or Undead monsters in the Scourge. In fact, the only creatures I can think of off the top of my head that would inevitably be Celestials are the Naaru, who are both rare and usually friendly (in fact, when they go "dark," they probably become aberrations). Maybe Val'kyr?
Obviously, we need to get the full picture before we can really get a sense of how the subclass transforms the Paladin into the Death Knight. These changes certainly don't make the class unplayable or anything, and I really applaud the boldness to tinker with the inner workings of the base class beyond simply plugging in subclass features at the appropriate levels.
Indeed, if this proves effective with the Death Knight and Demon Hunter, this could be some exciting "tech" for WotC to bring to other supplemental products outside of the Universes Beyond line.
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