Details for the Oath of the Ebon Blade and Forsaken Species

 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.

Baseless Speculation on the Oath of the Ebon Blade Paladin

 As I've documented on this blog many a time, I have a deep love for the "dark is not evil" trope, where you have heroic people who nevertheless give off scary, sinister, macabre vibes. And WoW's Death Knights are... well, it's complicated.

At least prior to Shadowlands, when post-Cataclysm races weren't able to be Death Knights, all members of the class went through the "Death Knight Starting Experience," starting you at level 55 (you needed to have a character of at least level 55 to make one, but it's still a fully separate character - I just happened to delete my Draenei Shaman to make room on my server for my Death Knight, and re-created his appearance and name, flavoring it as the Shaman being raised as a Death Knight). Anyway, the DKSE, as I don't think anyone has abbreviated it, had you fighting for the Scourge (the iconic undead villain faction, led by the Lich King) against the Scarlet Crusade (who are basically the evil fundamentalist zealots, though they do have civilians among them). Most of your quest-givers here are actually bosses from the Naxxramas raid (which originally released as the final raid of Vanilla WoW, but was revamped for level 80 when Wrath of the Lich King came out to serve as the expansion's starter raid).

The quests here actually have you do some real nasty things, including killing fleeing civilians (while you were high-level, some of the people fleeing you were like, level 15). It's only after you defeat the Crusaders and turn your attention to the Argent Dawn (the good-guy faction focused on combating the Scourge) that events play out that both break your Death Knight's loyalty to the Lich King (upon finding you you've been sent basically as cannon fodder for the paladins of the Argent Dawn to kill and hopefully draw out Tirion Fordring, who was basically the greatest living paladin) but also, it's implied at least, that the holy power of the location severs the mental control the Lich King has over you. You then go to your faction's capital with a letter of introduction from Tirion that basically says "hey, I know this is a Death Knight, but they've broken free of the Scourge and could reintegrate into society). From then on, you're basically just another adventurer, and can be a real hero, even if your methods are... dark (well, I don't know, Frost Death Knights aren't too bad, except for the occasional undead dragon they summon to breath frost in a big line).

When Shadowlands came out, they opened up the class to all playable races, but given that many of these joined the game after the events of that starting experience, they instead had these Death Knight begin as lieutenants of Bolvar Fordragon, who heroically took on the role of Lich King after we defeated Arthas and, with some notable exceptions, mostly used his power to restrain the Scourge and protect the world. So, these Death Knights were basically heroes from the start, albeit using, you know, dark methods.

All that preamble aside:

Death Knights, of course, as precedented in D&D, had a lot of shared flavor with Paladins. Indeed, back in the original talent system, Retribution Paladins had a set of talents called Conviction, which increased their critical strike chance, while Blood Death Knights had Dark Conviction, which did the same. And, of course, in Warcraft III, it was the former paladin Arthas Menethil who served as the primary death knight character, with mirrored abilities.

Thus, it makes plenty of sense that D&D's approach to the Death Knight would be to make it a Paladin subclass. There's even some precedence, with the Oathbreaker Paladin functioning as a sort of proto-Death Knight.

But given that they've explicitly said this is a brand-new subclass, we have to wonder what it will look like as expressed as a 5E subclass, using the existing chassis of the Paladin.

That said, in an interview with James Wyatt, he mentioned that, true to the "hero class" origins of the Death Knight and Demon Hunter (an ironic term given that they're more like "anti-hero classes," though this was mainly that they started at higher level, which was also true for the Evoker,) you're expected to start these characters at level 3, as the subclass sort of needs to be there from the start for the character to make sense. He mentioned that the subclasses will go back to level 1 and 2 features for the classes and alter some features.

I suspect that one such thing might be that Divine Smite might be altered, giving us something like "Rune Strike" or maybe "Rune Smite" (to keep it in line with such spell names. Death Knights doing radiant damage feels weird, so we might get a version that does necrotic damage.

I also wonder if these two subclasses in particular will have a larger set of subclass spells - while I think you could reflavor something like Bone Shield to just be Armor of Agathys, there are so many iconic abilities that it might be weird to give to all Paladins.

Another challenge is going to be to allow for all three specs of Death Knight to find representation in a single subclass. In WoW, Death Knights have Blood, Frost, and Unholy as their three specs. Blood is the tanking spec, which is all about healing yourself by striking your foes (primarily through an ability called Death Strike) and maintaining a protective Bone Shield. Frost is all about lining up massive strikes, hitting like a truck with an attack called Obliterate, and radiating frost damage or sending waves of frost (and as a big cooldown ability, they can send a Frostwyrm - think Dracolich - to breathe on all foes in front of them). Unholy is WoW's closest equivalent to a Necromancer, having a permanent ghoul pet and summoning additional temporary ghouls and skeletal mages frequently over the course of combat.

I suspect we'll probably be able to distinguish the specs mainly via spell choice (and possibly using dual-wielding to go Frost - a spec that allows dual-wielding or using a two-handed weapon, while the other two are exclusively designed around using a single big weapon).

While Unholy gets a permanent ghoul pet, the other two specs can still summon a temporary one, and this ghoul actually lasts a minute, with a two-minute cooldown on the ability that summons it, so it can be up around 50% of the time.

Thus, I'm sort of inclined to imagine that we might get something like the UA Oathbreaker, which can use Channel Divinity to summon a skeleton or zombie as a pet. The one thing I'd really hope they do is make the summoned undead minion scale with our level. A zombie's +3 to hit is going to be pretty useless if you're in Icecrown Citadel at level 19 fighting Sindragosa (the mother, kind of literally, of all Frostwyrms, late consort to the Blue Dragon Aspect, Malygos).

Usually Paladins don't get much beyond a Channel Divinity option and Oath spells at level 3, though as we mentioned earlier, we might get more extensive changes with this.

For a level 7 feature, we often get some kind of additional benefit to our Aura of Protection. This isn't universal, but many paladin subclasses do this. Again, if they want to lean into the "necromancer"/Unholy vibes of this subclass, we could potentially get something like the Oathbreaker's Aura of Hate, which buffs the damage of undead creatures in the aura (which did get fixed to only buff friendly creatures in the UA). We'd probably leave fiends out of it, given that Death/Necromancy is fairly distinct from Demonic/Fel magic in WoW (the lore on the Scourge is a bit complex and somewhat subject to retcons - while initially it was presented as being created by the demonic Burning Legion, in Shadowlands we learned that the power behind it was totally separate, and even in Warcraft III, the Lich King very quickly started plotting against the Legion).

We don't actually get a third paladin subclass feature until level 15. Usually this is some sort of defensive or group-support feature. Again, while they were pretty explicit about the Ebon Blade being a wholly original option here, I'm tempted to say we call this Icebound Fortitude (the main all-specs defensive cooldown ability) and just let them get the Oathbreaker's resistance to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage. (Actually, in WoW, this ability both reduces incoming damage and also gives you immunity to being stunned. Maybe the latter could be part of this? The flavor is that you freeze your own blood).

Finally, all Paladin subclasses have their level 20 "ult." The only class with a subclass feature as its capstone, these basically have to be flashy. While it's now an Unholy-only ability, the real show-stopper Death Knights have had since 2008 (it's even featured in the Wrath of the Lich King announcement trailer) is Army of the Dead, where you summon like a dozen ghouls to attack your foes.

Here's how I'd handle it in D&D: make the Army work more like the "Conjure" spells in 5.5, filling your Aura of Protection emanation (which is now 30 feet) with undead creatures and have them do damage and other effects to anyone that's inside of the aura. While the WoW ability is just damage, I think for D&D it might also be difficult terrain, maybe even potentially restrain foes inside of it, and maybe you get cover from them.

Now, last thing to cover: spells.

I don't know if we're going to get a massive number of Death Knight abilities as spells, but I think the following might be iconic enough to make them in. They might also be presented as Wizard/Warlock spells that we get as Oath spells.

Death and Decay: This is a spell where you place an area of nasty shadow damage that ticks on any foes standing inside of it for a few seconds. In D&D, this could be maybe a cylinder spell that lasts for a minute and does damage to creatures starting in it. Indeed, in WoW, you can often take talents to make foes inside of it slowed, which could be covered by just making it Difficult Terrain inside.

Death Coil: A bolt of shadow energy that damages foes but also heals friendly undead. It's a bit like Negative Energy Flood, to be fair, but maybe it'd be balanced a little differently.

Lichborne: A sort of odd defensive cooldown, this actually turns your creature type to Undead for a short duration and also makes you immune to things like fear. (Notably, it lets you cast Death Coil on yourself to heal). I think this could be a fun bit of utility.

Death Strike: I'm curious to see how the book handles the various "strike" abilities that characters in WoW have. Death Strike is used by all three specs, though for Unholy and Frost, it's more of a situational thing to help recover while soloing (you get to use it for free after you kill a foe of reasonable level,) while Blood uses it constantly.

Rune Strike: This one's a bit odd, because it's not in the game anymore, but it was called out explicitly in the announcement. In WoW, Death Knights have a kind of two-part resource system. They have six runes that take 10 seconds each to recharge (though this is reduced if you get more of the Haste stat on your gear) and every Rune you spend on abilities generates 10 Runic Power, which you typically spend on a smaller number of abilities, like Death Coil or Death Strike. In earlier expansions, Death Strike cost two runes (originally, it was more complicated, because you specifically had two runes each of Blood, Frost, and Unholy, and different abilities used different specific runes) and so Blood Death Knights would spend their Runic Power on Rune Strike, which was mostly just a physical damage attack (I think it couldn't be dodged or parried). So, yeah, no real idea of how this will work, but we know it will be in there.

Death Grip: A really iconic ability, Death Grip lets Death Knights grab a target from afar and pull them to them, which is pretty nice for a melee-only class. Notably, before Wrath of the Lich King, I don't think any classes had any spells or abilities that could forcibly move enemy targets, so this felt incredible (and naturally got a lot of people to macro the ability to also have their character yell "Get Over Here!" like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat). I could see this being maybe a 2nd level spell (though if it can only pull them toward you, maybe it should be 1st level, as Vortex Warp is 2nd level). Make it a bonus action, too, please (and that might justify making it 2nd level).

    Anyway, I'm really very excited to see how they handle the Death Knight and Demon Hunter in the WoW book. If I can get my best friend and fellow long-term WoW player to run an Azeroth-based adventure, I'd probably be more eager to play my Death Knight than my main Paladin, given that the Paladin is sort of not that different from someone I could have always played in D&D. My Death Knight has, since 2008, been kind of my "Vice Main," and actually hit 80 before the paladin back in the day because it was so fun to play Blood DPS (an option that vanished in the next expansion, though these days soloing as a tank spec is much less painful than it used to be). Also, I think that the very dark backstory I've got for him would contrast very much with my current very naive and innocent young Wizard I'm playing. (A 22-year-old Triton versus a 30,000-year-old undead Draenei. Hm, it'd also continue my ongoing tendency to always play blue people.)

Building a Better Death Knight

 In The Lord of the Rings, we arguably get the most iconic death knights in all of fantasy literature - the Nazgûl, which translates in the Black Speech of Mordor to "Ringwraiths." (Nazg is clearly the word for ring, given the poem on the One Ring, and I wonder if it's simply "ul," or possibly "gul" that means "wraith." The latter seems more likely to me given that it links it to the real Arabic "ghul," which derives from "ghala," meaning "to seize" and is, of course, the basis for the English word "ghoul.")

Death Knights have a certain potency because they turn the most straightforward fantasy hero - the knight in shining armor - on its head. In D&D and many other fantasy RPGs, the Death Knight is a mirror of the heroic Paladin class, and the backstory is often that of a paladin who has turned their back on goodness to instead serve evil. This betrayal places them in a cursed state of undeath, but they have many of the same capabilities they used as paladins, only turned backward - where Paladins are adept at fighting undeath and wield holy light, Death Knights are undead themselves, often commanding undead forces, and wield evil darkness.

Now, more recent editions of D&D have introduced nuance to the Paladin class. Though originally all paladins were lawful good in nature, today the paladin is more simply defined as someone who wields divine magic born out of their conviction and adherence to a sacred quest. They swear an oath, and their faith is rewarded with power to accomplish their quest.

The DMG presents an alternate subclass to the paladin: the Oathbreaker. While this is primarily intended for NPCs, a DM can also allow it as an option for players. Personally, I'd recommend DMs avoid building NPCs as full player characters with a bunch of class features, because that is an enormous thing to have to run along with everything else at the table.

But the Oathbreaker Paladin is clearly meant to represent someone on the path to becoming a death knight.

Returning to our example of the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths are ultimately servants. Indeed, I think you could fairly well approximate the Lord of the Rings using nine Death Knights that are servants of a Lich (the One Ring being Sauron's phylactery). I might argue that Sauron is more accurately a fiend, which means that the Ring might be more akin to the amulets used by the Demon Lords to survive death even in the Abyss (my headcanon, until contradicted, is that Orcus taught Vecna how to make a phylactery based on this process of creating a demonic amulet, and that liches have borrowed demonic magic to become what they are). Of course, Sauron is 100% Lawful Evil, not Chaotic Evil (Morgoth is the latter) but you get the gist.

And, in a sense, I suppose this is why in the Monster Manual they are not legendary creatures - they serve some greater power that corrupted them.

That being said, one of my other major influences is the Warcraft series, and its most iconic villain is Arthas, the corrupted prince of Lordaeron, who eventually becomes the Lich King - the lord of the Undead Scourge. While later lore would reveal that the Lich King was at least intended to be a puppet for a god-like entity of death, the Lich King is like a Death Knight who commands an army of liches and other, lesser death knights along with countless undead in myriad forms. (Before he becomes the Lich King, Arthas undergoes the classic paladin-to-death knight transition). The point is, Arthas would most certainly be depicted as a legendary creature in D&D.

Indeed, I think that even as a minion of some greater evil, I still find it odd that the Death Knight is not a legendary creature. A Death Knight is no rank-and-file minion, but should fill the role of top lieutenant. The Ringwraiths are the most powerful of Sauron's weapons, and the Witch-King of Angmar is the closest he gets to a second-in-command (indeed, the Witch-King is more or less the world's most dangerous evil when Sauron is in hiding in the early parts of the Third Age, and successfully destroys Arnor, Gondor's sister-civilization in the north where Aragorn's ancestors ruled as king).

(As a note, we should also remember that most stories don't have "levels," so we shouldn't read too much into the fact that a single ranger scared off five Ringwraiths with a torch when considering the power level of our stat block.)

Now, in terms of creature design, Death Knights have a number of paladin spells. However, given the new focus on moving away from player-style spellcasting in recent designs, we can shift things around. Death Knights are already quite formidable in melee, so I don't think we need to add any kind of ranged spell attacks as part of their general rotation.

We're going to aim for our DK to be CR 17, like the 2014 Monster Manual version of it.

But let's also think a little more broadly about what we want out of a Death Knight.

First, we want them to be really deadly with their weapons. This is already reflected in the fact that the 2014 version deals an extra 4d8 necrotic damage with their weapons. With a normal attack, the death knight deals an average of 27 damage per hit, and gets to attack three times a round, which means a total average damage output (assuming all three hit) of 81 damage. The necrotic damage dealt also lets them get around the fact that their weapon isn't inherently magical (they have the Magic Weapon spell, but we're going to get rid of their spellcasting trait, except perhaps for some utility stuff like dispel magic). Player characters almost never care whether the damage is from a magical weapon, though, so especially with the necrotic damage in there, I don't think we need to worry much about making their weapons magical. We're going to take this into consideration when figuring out their Offensive Challenge Rating, or OCR.

But just being able to put out a lot of damage isn't really that exciting. We've got to think about what it means for these dread beings to act. One thing that I think is core to Tolkien's sense of power is the effect of being able to inspire emotions in others. In the books, the army of the dead that Aragorn brings with him to break the siege of Minas Tirith works primarily by terrifying the orcs, not so much killing them as driving them into disarray and breaking their lines, so that the defenders can pour in and mop up the invading army. Conversely, one of Gandalf's most potent traits is the ability to inspire those around him - he rarely goes around casting obvious magical spells, but instead fills the mortals around him with the courage and resolve to fight against the darkness.

As such, I think that this could play into our Death Knight design. And, because they're related to paladins, we're going to borrow something from a paladin subclass - no, not the oathbreaker, but the Oath of Conquest, which is another "evil" subclass - and one that I think is more lawful evil than the out-for-themselves Oathbreaker. Essentially, I think that they should have something similar to Conquering Presence, but that they can do continuously, and potentially fold in the Aura of Conquest, or something similar.

Now, fear effects are relatively easy to overcome, thanks to Paladins' Aura of Courage and things like the Halflings' Brave trait. But the DC here should be relatively high and coupling it with immobility could be quite powerful. Still, generally speaking I think a lot of fights wind up locking down in melee, and it becomes a race of trading blows. Mobility makes monsters a lot deadlier.

On the other hand, the Death Knight is not nimble and quick. If anything, the dread fear they inspire is only enhanced by their slow, plodding advance. How do we square these?

Borrowing a little from Blizzard, both Death Knights in World of Warcraft and Leoric, the Skeleton King in Heroes of the Storm (Leoric had it first) have an ability called Wraith Walk, which allows them to slip into a ghostly form and move quickly for a moment.

I think this does a good job of making them seem like the implacable foe that they tend to be portrayed as. Thus, I might give our Death Knight as bonus action to let them break grapples and restraints, and possibly even avoid opportunity attacks. While I'm tempted to simply make this additional movement, I don't think Death Knights should be particularly fast - they should be able to follow you slowly, like a slasher villain, and take all the time they need to catch up to you.

The only downside to this is that if it's a bonus action it's always on, rather than being a special moment where the party realizes just how much trouble they're in. We could limit this to a certain number of times a day, or make it a recharge ability (though recharge abilities I feel should be scary and deal extra damage).

Instead, this might be best done as a legendary action (though I'm finding myself drawn more and more to "extra, powerful reactions" as we saw with Vecna or the Eldritch Lich in favor over legendary actions,) which would probably mean giving them extra movement, but it might work the most elegantly - and costing two legendary actions would be a decent price to make sure you're not spamming this.

Going back to the Ringwraiths, when I first saw the Fellowship of the Ring, the screams they unleashed were very loud in the theater. You could feel how their screeching would fill someone with dread and cause a sort of involuntary shudder. This is, to be fair, very specific to Lord of the Rings (and perhaps very specific to Peter Jackson's films). But perhaps that could just be one way to skin some kind of dread wail effect - if we wanted to make it very scary, we could have it not only do psychic damage but also stun those who fail (if we want it to be a little less powerful, we could make this "fail by 5 or more and you're stunned.) I think stunning, especially for a melee monster (to speak nothing of paralyzing, which would probably be too powerful) is quite strong, so the damage itself of this ability should be only around the same as their regular melee attacks (though with the potential multiplier thanks to it hitting anyone nearby.)

I was going to get into a whole thing about raising the dead, but I think D&D has an unfortunate lack of mid-tier undead monsters that can be a decent threat as henchmen to a high-level undead monster - ideally you'd just use a ton of zombies and skeletons, but I think that unless you are using MCDM's excellent minion rules (they have a zombie minion in the latest free pdf, and a simple chart for scaling these up in level) that tends to just be tedious.

One thing I think is a sort of interesting question is whether a Death Knight counts as corporeal. Often, they're depicted as skeletal or zombie-like, and sometimes still more or less living but with a kind of pale complexion. Tolkien's Ringwraiths, though, were fully ghost-like. The Witch King is described as basically being a pair of floating red dots for eyes in an empty crown, their physical form fully passing over into the unseen world.

Their armor and weapons are physical, though, so the only reason I bring this up is how we're going to handle damage resistances and immunities. Ghosts, Wraiths, and other incorporeal undead in D&D tend to have full immunity to necrotic damage (and poison, but that's basically all undead) and resistance to a most common elemental damage types like acid, cold, fire, lightning, etc. (While few actually have vulnerability to radiant damage, their resistance to nearly everything else kind of effectively makes this true.)

The Monster Manual, interestingly, gives them immunity to necrotic and poison damage, but none of the other resistances (even nonmagical weapons work fine on them.) This feels like a reasonable balance.

As always, when using the DMG to figure out the CR of a monster, we run into the problem that the "Making a Monster" CR chart doesn't actually have any place for ACs of 20 or higher - absurdly, even a CR 30 monster on that chart is shown to have an AC of 19. So we have to kind of eyeball it.

I think my approach will simply to be not to touch the AC, HP, and immunities, and to try to have our new Death Knight put out the same damage as the old one. We'll be making it legendary, but I think the intent is not to account for that in the CR calculation - it's legendary, and thus supposed to be tougher.

Essentially, we're really just swapping out their spellcasting and possibly their Hellfire Orb for some new features.

Like the new spellcasters, we'll likely keep a few utility spells like Dispel Magic, but we won't rely on this for their damage output.

Just attacking with the longsword (one-handed, as they use a shield,) Death Knights put out 27 damage per attack, and get three longsword attacks, for a total of 81 damage per turn. So we'll basically keep that the same and treat that as a baseline for what we should expect them to put out.

Once per day, they get to shoot off a Hellfire Orb, which does an average of 70 damage (half fire, half necrotic) in a Fireball-sized sphere. Generally, when doing AoE stuff, we treat this as if it's hitting two targets, so essentially this is 140 damage. But this is a one-time thing, rather than something we might encounter multiple times.

Unless this is just because I haven't read any Dragonlance novels, the Hellfire Orb feels kind of off-brand. Paladins don't have Fireball. The DK does have the Destructive Wave spell, which is a paladin spell, which does half that (and has friendly-fire protection so they don't roast their ghoulish companions.

But given that we're leaning into the simplifying of stat blocks, here's what I'm going to propose:

We have our regular melee attacks, unchanged.

Then, we give them an AoE option with a relatively small radius centered on themselves, but that they can use every turn in place of their melee attacks, and this is meant to feel a bit like Destructive Wave. Because it's no recharge, we make it on par or slightly less damage when hitting two targets than focusing the longsword on a single foe - this is for when they are truly surrounded and can hit three or more targets. Also, I feel like it should be cold and necrotic rather than fire and necrotic, because I like associating cold magic with undeath (perhaps a nod to Warcraft's Scourge).

Then, we give them a really nasty recharge ability (our stunning dread wail). This might then take the place of a fear aura, as we're getting that effect from this. This is going to be psychic damage.

For legendary actions, it might be a little too powerful to let them make a full strike with just a single legendary action, but I think we'll allow it just because of how legendary this foe should be.

So, I think we give them a single longsword attack for 1 legendary action.

We then take two to give them their mobility thing, which disengages them, frees them of grapples and restraints, and moves them perhaps only 20 feet (rather than a full 30).

And then, I think we give them something a little different that costs 3 legendary actions.

Here's my thought: zombies and skeletons feel worthless against high level players because they are so likely to miss and deal pitiful damage. However, one spell fixes this: Danse Macabre. This adds your spellcasting ability to both their attack and damage rolls, which means your Zombie can be attacking with a +8 to hit and dealing 1d6+6 damage - which makes them an actual threat. (1d6+6 isn't that amazing, but when you have five of them, it adds up.) I think we thus give our DK an aura that buffs undead creatures other than the death knight. We're not really changing their stats, so the DK is only adding 4, but that's enough to make these minions more than a nuisance. So, I think the 3 legendary action thing will essentially be Danse Macabre, but we're going to go back and fold that buff into an aura the death knight projects.

Let's bang out this stat block! (Also, we're doing the full legendary treatment). 

DEATH KNIGHT

Medium Undead, typically Chaotic Evil

Armor: 20 (plate, shield)

Hit Points: 180 (19d8+95)

Speed 30 ft.

STR 20 (+5) DEX 11 (+0) CON 20 (+5) INT 12 (+1) WIS 16 (+3) CHA 18 (+4)

Saving Throws: Dex +6, Wis +9, Cha +10

Damage Immunities: necrotic, poison

Condition Immunities: exhaustion, frightened, poison

Senses: darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 13

Languages: Abyssal, Common (I might add "any languages they knew in life.")

Challenge 17

Aura of Unholy Command: Unless it is incapacitated, the death knight radiates an aura of unholy will, empowering nearby undead. Other undead creatures of the death knight's choice that are within 60 feet of the death knight add the death knight's charisma modifier (+4) to their attack and damage rolls. The death knight and creatures affected by this aura also have advantage on saving throws against effects that turn undead. A creature can only benefit from one of these auras at a time.

Legendary Resistance (3/day). If the death knight fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead.

Magic Resistance. The death knight has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.

Actions:

Multiattack. The death knight makes three longsword attacks.

Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack. +11 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (1d8+5) slashing damage, or 10 (1d10+5) slashing damage if used with both hands, plus 18 (4d8) necrotic damage.

Remorseless Chill. A cloud of darkness swirls around the death knight. Each creature of the death knight's choice within ten feet must make a DC 18 Constitution saving throw. On a failure, the creature takes 17 (5d6) cold damage and 17 (5d6) necrotic damage, and their speed is reduced by 10 feet until the start of the death knight's next turn. On a successful save, they take half this damage and their speed is unaffected.

Dreadful Wail. (Recharge 5-6): The death knight unleashes an ear-splitting howl, assaulting their foes with agonized terror. Each creature within 60 feet of the death knight that is not undead and can hear it must make a DC 18 Wisdom saving throw. On a failure, the creature takes 65 (10d12) psychic damage and is frightened of the death knight for 1 minute. If the creature fails this saving throw by 5 or more, the creature is stunned for 1 minute as well. A creature can repeat this saving throw at the end of each of their turns, ending both conditions on a success.

Reactions:

Parry. The death knight adds 6 to its AC against one melee attack that would hit it. To do so, the death knight must see the attacker and be wielding a melee weapon.

Legendary Actions:

The death knight can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action can be used at a time, and only at the end of another creature's turn. The death knight regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn.

Longsword. The death knight makes a longsword attack.

Wraith Walk (Costs 2 actions). The death knight ends the grappled and restrained conditions on itself, if it is affected by them, and moves 20 feet in any direction. This movement does not provoke opportunity attacks.

Marshall Undead Forces (Costs 3 actions). The death knight magically conjures five undead creatures that each use the zombie or skeleton stat block. These creatures are friendly to the death knight and obey its commands. They share the death knight's initiative, but act immediately after its turn.

Dreams of Frost and Death: Hopes for Frost Death Knights in Shadowlands

Back in Wrath, I was Blood/Blood - I had a Blood DPS spec and a Blood tank spec, back when that was possible. When Cataclysm came and established Blood firmly as the tanking spec and Frost as a DPS spec, I went with Frost as my DPS spec. (Ironically, when original conceived, Frost was going to be the tanking spec, the notion being that the Death Knight was protecting itself with layers of ice and going with that whole "implacable man" vibe, while Blood made sense as a dps spec that got a bit of self-healing as a flavorful bonus.)

Frost has gone through a few reimaginings over the years, though at its core, it has kept three core abilities: Obliterate, Howling Blast, and Frost Strike.

There was always a difficult balancing act, though, regarding dual-wielding. Death Knights, iconically, were known for their big, two-handed swords, like Frostmourne. But Blizzard wanted to at least allow Death Knights to dual-wield, as some people enjoy that aesthetic.

Thanks in large part to the talent Threat of Thessarian, Frost became the spec that was capable of dual-wielding, but for a while, they wanted to allow those who preferred two-handed weapons the option to do so in a dps spec that didn't require the pet-management of Unholy. Hence, Might of Mograine, a counterpart to Threat of Thessarian, was introduced for those who preferred the two-handed style.

Then came Legion. Legion, with its artifact weapons, needed to make some firm decisions about the sort of weapons that players would use. While Feral and Guardian Druids wound up dual-wielding (despite not being able to do that, generally) for Frost, they decided that making the spec dual-wield only solved a couple problems. Gameplay-wise, they no longer needed to balance the spec for two weapon loadouts. And flavor-wise, it allowed players to wield Frostmourne without having their souls sucked into the sword - the Blades of the Fallen Prince were made from the shards of Frostmourne, but were created in such a way that they no longer drank the souls of anyone who even touched the things.

And so, in Legion and BFA, Frost has been a dual-wield only spec.

I'll be honest, my biggest problem with that is one of aethetics. One-handed weapons just don't look as impressive to me (except perhaps Demon Hunters' massive Warglaives) and for a Death Knight in particular, given the kind of special relationship they develop with their weapons by carving runes into them, it seems kind of cheap in comparison (though I'll grant the sheathed-on-the-back new starting weapons for allied race/Pandaren DKs look pretty good.)

From an aesthetic point of view, I like two-handers, and I also like Frost as a spec that delivers massive, crushing blows rather than a barrage of smaller hits.

So I'm very happy to hear that Frost is going to be allowing two-handers again in Shadowlands.

With that issue solved, let's talk about another issue:

Breath of Sindragosa.

BoS is a talent that really transforms Frost as a spec. For those unfamiliar: it's a 2-minute cooldown ability. You start spraying out a cone of Frost damage that costs a certain amount of Runic Power every time it deals damage (about once a second.) It lasts as long as you have the RP to pay for it, ending when you don't have enough. So, a build that focuses on it will be all about maximizing the uptime of this ability, ensuring that Runic Power generation is as high as possible so that you can get this burst of frost damage.

It's actually a bit like Void Form for a Shadow Priest. But while a SPriest can re-enter Void Form as soon as they build up enough Insanity, DKs with this talent have to wait until the cooldown comes back, and are just doing a more basic rotation while waiting for it to come back.

This means bursts of major damage if you can maintain uptime on your target (Obliterating as often as possible to earn more RP,) but also a chance to have wasted it if you, say, start it off right before a phase in a fight where you have to run away from the boss.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who really like the talent. I don't.

The problem, however, as with a lot of talents, is that there tends to be a cycle in each expansion where Breath of Sindragosa builds become unquestionably the most powerful version of the Frost DK spec. Rather than letting players who like it take it and those who don't to ignore it, it tends to be that at certain gear levels, it's unfeasible, and then at others, it's the only real way to play the spec.

I, for one, have enjoyed a build using Icecap and three stacks of Frostwhelps Indignation (which does a sort of mini-Frostwyrm's Fury and buffs your Pillar of Frost for each target the frostwhelp hits,) which served me decently until I hit higher gear levels, at which point it falls far behind BoS builds.

Now, if the game were designed specifically for me, I'd just say get rid of Breath of Sindragosa and we'd all dance on its grave. But I recognize that, to many, Frost DKs wouldn't be the same without it (they might argue the spec is too boring without it, which I disagree with, given the complexities of playing an Icecap build effectively.)

I don't know how to fix the issue, but I'd love for Breath of Sindragosa to become a truly optional playstyle in Shadowlands.

Of course, given the trickiness of balancing between dual-wielders and two-handers, I'm sure that they'll have a lot on their hands to keep two playstyles within a single spec (among 36) on par with one another.

I don't know that Frost needs a full overhaul like Unholy got in Legion (though I will say I've found Unholy far, far more fun to play since the Legion rework) but I do think there's a question about what, exactly, the fantasy behind Frost is.

To my mind, Frost represents the kind of eternal aspect of the Death Knight. You could imagine someone finding the DK frozen in a glacier after thousands of years, and they're ready to fight right away. Remorseless Winter is a pretty cool aesthetic for them as well, the way that they're surrounded by a biting wind that freezes nearby foes. They're an elemental force on the battlefield. I also love the aesthetic of Frostscythe. Frost feels like it should embody the kind of callous relentlessness of a Death Knight, the grimness of these reapers.

Given that Unholy's damage sources are all divided between many elements - diseases, wounds, ghouls, armies of the dead, and potentially other pets, it becomes something more of a death-of-a-thousand-stings specs. By contrast, I think Frost should be one of cold, bone-shattering blows. Obliterate should hit like a freight train.

Granted, one reason it doesn't these days is that the damage is divided between two weapons. With two-handed Frost coming back, we might start to see massive Obliterate crits once again.

With Shadowlands, I'd really like to see Frost as the sort of Executioner spec for Death Knights - one that maybe needs a buildup - getting your Killing Machine proc, and maybe even building up a debuff via one of the many new runeforging runes - but then taking things out with a felling blow.

Runeforging and Frost Death Knights

At some point, likely due to the talent option from way back in Wrath called Threat of Thassarian, Frost became the DK dual-wielding spec. Still, after DK specs were locked to tanking and dps, (if you didn't play in Wrath, you might not remember that all three specs could do both roles, and in fact, when initially announced, Frost was meant to be the tank spec and Blood the dps spec, while Unholy was expected to be a sort of PvP/Utility spec) the option remained from Cataclysm through Warlords of Draenor for Frost to choose between dual-wielding or two-handed weapons.

For a time, this actually changed their rotation/priority system. It flipped back and forth once or twice, but the Killing Machine proc used to make both Obliterate and Frost Strike auto-crit, and there were talents and later passives that would make Obliterate do more damage for dual-wielders and Frost Strike do more for those using two-handers (again, I'm pretty sure this flipped at some point).

As such, it was always a bit of a challenge to balance the spec, because there were, in fact, two mini-specs within it (similarly, Fury Warriors used to be able to use ordinary one-handed weapons and got a boost called Single Minded Fury when they did).

There were a couple factors at play:

Special attacks like Obliterate used to always be based on the main-hand weapon's damage - your attack power really just increased your weapon's damage, and that then translated to the damage of your attack (which led to some funky math, given that ability damage was calculated as "flat amount x" + "this weapon's damage," which meant that abilities might scale differently at different gear levels). So using a two-handed weapon meant that you'd deal more damage with your abilities, but a dual-wielder would also be hitting with their off-hand weapon to compensate.

Frankly, I don't pay as close attention to the mechanics as they work today, but I believe that ability damage is all calculated simply based on attack power, which means the type of weapon loadout you use shouldn't matter (and given that all melee specs are currently locked to one weapon loadout style, it's not like you have a choice).

For auto-attack damage (which also used to be a far larger percentage of the damage that melee classes did) I imagine they just balance off-hand weapon damage so that it makes up the difference for the higher damage of the single 2-hander.

For Frost Death Knights, however, it gets a little more complicated.

Death Knights have always had a very nice advantage, which is that they get weapon enchants for free as a class feature. I think Blizzard initially wanted you to swap out your forged runes based on the encounters you expected (there was one that did extra fire damage to undead, for example) but ultimately they wound up narrowing these down to the only ones you were likely to actually use.

Rune of the Fallen Crusader actually mimics the vanilla-era "Crusader" enchant, boosting strength for a short duration and also healing you a bit, and is the default rune for Unholy. Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle makes you tougher, though I think the self-heal and boost to strength from Fallen Crusader sees a lot of Blood DKs going with that one as well.

Rune of Razorice is the one designed for Frost, and causes a bit of frost damage to the target as well as stacking a debuff that increases their frost damage taken.

Now, the thing is, when dual-wielding, you can easily stack up this debuff with just one weapon, leaving the other free for Fallen Crusader, whose buff is obviously good for any melee combatant.

If you're using a two-hander, you have to give one of them up. Historically, Fallen Crusader was so good that you'd lose out on the boost to frost damage.

The thing is, if all attacks are based on attack power and they can easily balance auto-attack damage between two-handers and dual-wielding, in theory it shouldn't be hard to keep Frost balanced between these two weapon choices. But the runes create a bigger problem that plays into scaling, and that is where things get hairy.

Consider, for example, that if you drop Razorice, thus lowering your overall Frost damage you deal, that also means that your mastery, Frozen Heart, is less useful, given that all it does is boost Frost damage.

You could buff Razorice to the point that two-hander Frost DKs want to take it, but then they miss out on Fallen Crusader, and you've got to come up with some way to compensate them for the lack of Fallen Crusader's periodic strength boost.

Given that I'm by no means a game designer (apart from some D&D homebrew stuff) I wouldn't even know what problems to anticipate here. It's possible that the proper formulations - giving Obliterate and Frost Strike a little buff when using a two-handed weapon, or something - would solve this issue. But it does seem like a little imbalance that might cause problems in the long run.

Or, it could mean a .05% difference in DPS, and thus only matter to those who are chasing world first raid achievements.

What I do know is that I think two-handed weapons look cooler, so I'm going to go with that.

Future Races and Hero Classes

Allied races are increasing the options for playable races at an explosive rate. Announced races in BFA alone are going to give us just as many as the original World of Warcraft had, and Blizzard has explicitly said that more will be coming (though not explicitly in BFA itself.)

This actually means that some old sacred concepts are starting to change: Druids, for example, have been mirror-image balanced between the factions since Vanilla, but as the Horde gets both Highmountain Tauren and Zandalari Troll druids, the Alliance is only getting Kul Tiran Humans (who, in my opinion, have by far the coolest druid forms, though I can also appreciate the appeal of the Zandalari dinosaur forms.)

We don't know if the "Allied Race" term will always refer specifically to these variants on existing races, or if we'll get brand-new races that follow a similar pattern, starting at level 20 and not really having a starting zone.

But one issue that seems to arise is the question of hero classes.

Hero classes, of course, are a bit different than the other classes. Generally, the way I'd define them is that most classes in the game are something that an ordinary person, perhaps with certain talents, but none that go beyond natural ability, can pick up, and with enough training and willpower, can grow more and more skilled in the techniques of the class.

A Hero Class, by contrast, requires a fundamental change to the character's physiology. Their class is not like a job or lifestyle that they can quit and just become a regular person when they're done adventuring - it's ingrained in their very being. Death Knights are straight up undead. They literally start to suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they stop hurting living things. Demon Hunters have become half-demons, with a demonic soul sharing their body, and if they ever stop struggling with that demon within, they will become its instrument.

It's a big commitment, basically, and not always one taken by choice.

The fact that it's a physiological change sort of justifies the fact that you start at a higher level. So much of your power was imbued into you that you do sort of emerge from the process far more powerful than some guy who just took up a bow and decided it's time to be a Hunter.

But I think another aspect of Hero Classes is that they have a far more specific story. Of the non-hero classes, I'd say Druids and Paladins had had the most specific backgrounds and traditions. Yet we're seeing the mololithic nature of these class traditions break down, even as Legion had them join together in class orders. In Vanilla, all Paladins were Knights of the Silver Hand, because you only had Humans and Dwarves. Then you got Vindicators and Blood Knights (Blood Elf Paladins even got a different ability that Alliance Paladins during BC that pushed them more toward Ret while Alliance ones got a better ability for Prot,) and then Sunwalkers. While these all boiled down to using holy magic to fight off evil monsters like demons and undead, the source of that tradition varied widely. (A Draenei Vindicator who hears Uther the Lightbringer described as the "first paladin" would, very respectfully, call that absurd.)

Druids have been more explicitly a single tradition, but we're seeing that break down as well. In Vanilla, you only had Night Elves and Tauren, and the latter, while they claimed an ancient and vaguely-remembered period of having practiced Druidism long in the past, ultimately learned the tradition from the Night Elves, before the Alliance and Horde turned them into adversaries. While Gilneas had Harvest Witches who practiced a rudimentary form of druidic magic, it wasn't until they were afflicted with the Worgen curse and taught by the Night Elves that they learned true Druidism. The Darkspear are a little trickier - Blizzard has gone back and forth on whether the tradition had existed earlier or if they had mostly learned it from the Tauren.

Well, there's none of that ambiguity in the new druid races. Sure, the Highmountain far more explicitly are connected to Cenarius and Malfurion (Huln was blessed by Cenarius with those moose antlers,) but the Zandalari connection to their dinosaur Loa looks like it has nothing to do whatsoever with Malfurion, and one even wonders if the tradition long-predates Malfurion or even the existence of Night Elves. Meanwhile, the Kul Tirans' Thornwatchers almost certainly derived their form of Druidism by learning the magic of the Drust, which makes them unique amongst Druids as mistrusted outcasts amongst their people.

But if there used to be a specific origin for Druids, the two existing hero classes are way more specific. Because they have a unique starting experience, both classes have a specific time in which they start, within a specific organization, regardless of race.

And the fact that the time period is specific makes adding new races complicated.

Death Knights begin right on the eve of Wrath of the Lich King, when Arthas has left the Frozen Throne to begin his campaign. Demon Hunters actually begin a little before that, literally during the raid on the Black Temple (like, literally the Raid where you might have fought Illidan during BC) before having a ten-year time jump.

That means that adding new races is complicated, especially if they're literally new races. The Void Elves, for instance, seem like they'd make perfectly good Demon Hunters. They clearly have no qualms with experimenting with dangerous magic, and as former Blood Elves, they have just as much of a reason to hate demons as any son or daughter of Quel'thalas. But, you know, there were no Blood Elves when Illidan was training his demon hunters. Similarly, Nightborne existed, but they were trapped in their bubble while Illidan was traipsing through the Tomb of Sargeras, just across the narrow waters from their city.

The only time either hero class got new races was in Cataclysm, when they decided to give them Goblins and Worgen (DKs are even the default class for Worgen when you start a new character.) Goblins were easy, as they had been plentiful in WoW since vanilla (though the connection to the Bilgewater Cartel and the Horde specifically was less obvious.) Worgen had been in the area, for sure, though generally in Silverpine, where the Scourge was less of a threat. Still, despite the fact that the Worgen of Shadowfang Keep (for those who came into the game in Cataclysm or later, SFK used to be "the Worgen dungeon") were all feral, the notion was that some had escaped Arugal's abuses and been taken by the Scourge, and that the process of Death-Knighting a Worgen calmed the rage enough to make them useful soldier for the Scourge.

But Blizzard hasn't done this since, and they've even backed down on ideas of adding things like Dark Iron Dwarf Death Knights.

Now, one reason is that this makes the earning of heritage armor sets way easier if you can do it on a hero class, to the extent that people might feel pressured to play a DK or DH in order to earn this achievement.

Still, the prospect is that these classes might not get any new race options for the rest of WoW's lifetime, even as the other classes get more and more.

Personally, I think that as long as new races are getting added, every class ought to get a new option or two. So how would you do that?

First, I think you could just think logically:

Illidan had more than Night Elves and Blood Elves in his employ. With Naga and Broken Draenei NPCs within the Demon Hunter class hall, it would make perfect sense if either were to be added to make them an option for the class.

Death Knights could really encompass anyone who might have been in Lordaeron prior to Wrath. Kul Tiran humans, for example, would not become isolationists until after the Third War, meaning you could easily have some Kul Tiran death knights dating back to those early days. There was, after all, a rather prominent Kul Tiran mage who was fighting the Scourge in the very early days. If we ever get an Undead allied race, they would probably fit this too.

But another option would be to change the way that these classes start:

Allowing the story to move forward for these classes, you could craft a different starting experience - maybe a shorter one, more like the allied races, who more or less get a welcome package and boot in the ass.

While the threat of Demons specifically is probably far smaller than it was during Legion, Demon Hunters could easily start training new recruits in their methods, perhaps offering a path to revenge against other supernatural threats.

And with the way that Bolvar is acting, we've seen three very prominent new Death Knights created during Legion - there's absolutely nothing preventing them from raising new DKs from amongst the other races, and the Ebon Blade doesn't seem to worry too much about whether people want to become Death Knights either.

I don't know if either of these are likely to happen, though I think the former is more likely, as it would require less content design work.

But it also remains to be seen how Blizzard is going to keep implementing new races.

Can 2H Frost Return?

As an icy harbinger of doom, the Frost Death Knight is meant to be the embodiment of the icy chill of Northrend, the frigid cold of death.

If you ask me, (and this is my post so if you're reading that's kind of the equivalent of asking me,) the image of the Death Knight evokes the idea of an executioner or the Grim Reaper. Swinging a massive weapon just feels right for the class. Ghouls and zombies are there to savagely attack the Scourge's foes, clawing and scratching, but the Death Knight comes in to end things. The most iconic weapon associated with the Death Knight is Frostmourne, a two-handed sword. Executioners' axes are two-handed, the Grim Reaper's scythe is two-handed.

It just feels right.

Now, way back ten years ago when the Death Knight was first introduced, they decided that it would be the only plate tanking class that wouldn't use shields. Instead, they'd have other ways to reduce damage to compensate. Instead, a Death Knight's equipment would be either a two-handed weapon or dual-wielded swords.

For whatever reason, Frost always seemed to be the spec that allowed for dual-wielding, but from Wrath through Warlords, they always allowed Frost DKs to make a choice between using a two-handed weapon or dual-wielding.

Personally, I loved the style of two-handed frost, with its massive and very satisfying Obliterate crits. The class and spec fantasy - of being that implacable doom marching toward your foes and then executing them with cold, unfeeling efficiency (see "Killing Machine" as one of Frost's major procs) - really fit with that playstyle.

But in Legion, with a single weapon type available for the spec, they decided to go with dual-wielding. It makes sense, to be honest. As the only spec that ever really allowed for dual-wielding, they'd either need to make Frost use two weapons or just get rid of the idea that Death Knights would ever dual-wield. You'll notice that no class got all weapons of the same type. Warlocks and Priests got two specs with staves and one with a dagger and off-hand each, and so forth.

And I'll certainly acknowledge that there is a place for the idea of dual-wielding fitting a certain type of fantasy for Frost - where you sort of emulate the bitter, frozen winds by striking relentlessly.

But let's talk about whether they can walk that back.

Now first, you could ask the question of whether they should. Frost has a very simple and easy way to identify itself amongst the DK specs - it's the dual-wield one. By going back to two-handed weapons, the distinction between Frost and Unholy becomes a little (only a little) more subtle. Still, as an old fan of the look and feel of 2H, I'd like to think about whether it's possible.

I think the biggest challenge is pretty obviously how to balance between two weapon loadouts. Unless you got rid of dual-wielding entirely (which would mean losing a ton of transmog options, for one thing) you'd have to ensure that both styles were viable. Blizzard has come a long way since the days of "there's one right spec to play" back in vanilla. So there would have to be reasonable parity between these two sub-specs.

One piece of good news for this prospect is an under-the-hood mechanical change that actually de-emphasizes the importance of a weapon's damage. Ability damage in BFA will be based entirely on Attack Power, and not on weapon damage. The only thing that weapon damage will be used for is your autoattacks. So unless I'm mistaken, this might actually mean that your Demon Hunter can use their proficiency in daggers without paying a price in damage.

And what that also means is that, assuming that having the same item level weapons for DW and 2H gives you the same value of strength and secondary stats, the damage of Obliterate and Frost Strike shouldn't change at all with your choice of weapon(s.)

Easy enough, then, right? So that fixes it?

Well, the problem is a little rune called Razorice (also any talent that activates on auto attacks.) Two-handed Frost never gets this buff to Frost Damage that you get with dual-wielding. This was sort of off-set by the massive Obliterate crits, making 2H a more physical-damage based spec and making DW more Frost-damage-based, which of course also changed the value of Mastery and... yeah, it got complicated.

With two weapons, you get the benefits of both Fallen Crusader and Razorice, while 2H generally just went with Fallen Crusader - the big strength buff was kind of hard to pass up.

Allowing two weapon runes with dual-wielding inherently unbalances the system. Even if all other things are equal, you need some way to counterbalance this or Dual-wield will always come out better.

Beyond just giving you Razorice automatically if you are wielding a two-handed weapon (and even then you have the problem of the frost damage it does on application - something that happens more frequently while dual-wielding) you'd have to play some really tricky games with the Runeforges to make this balanced.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I think it's not the fire-and-forget kind of design Blizzard would look for. Restricting the spec to only DW has, I'm sure, made it far easier to balance.

But if we're talking class and spec fantasy, I do really feel like we lost something when 2H frost was taken away.

We've been told that Frost is getting some significant changes in BFA, but those changes are not yet in the latest build. I'm certainly looking forward with interest to see to what degree things are changing - so far, Frost has been more or less identical to its Legion incarnation on the Beta.

At the risk of going down the rabbit hole, I do think Frost needs some rethinking to the base rotation.

Killing Machine, as a proc, was once really important to the spec, largely because it got consumed by multiple abilities. KM used to be consumed by both Frost Strike and Obliterate, and depending on your weapon set-up, you wanted to use it on one or the other. This meant that the game with Killing Machine was avoiding wasting it on the wrong ability. For example, in Mists and Warlords, if you were using a two-handed weapon, you'd want to make sure you had some runes open to spend on Obliterate, and not wind up blowing KM on Frost Strikes while you're hoping for Runic Empowerment to proc.

Nowadays, however, there's not a lot of interactivity with the proc. You basically just try to use it when it goes off, but if you don't get it, you still want to use Obliterate to generate runic power. And there's no fear of losing it for using it on the wrong ability.

It does help set the rhythm of the spec's rotation, but it's not as crucial as it once was. I wonder if Blizzard is satisfied with it as a kind of pacing proc, or if they want to go farther than they did with Unholy (which to be fair, changed a lot more in Legion - significantly for the better if you ask me) and really look at the core rotation.

Maybe there's room in a big redesign for 2H frost to return.

Some Specs That Aren't Changing a Ton

It is, granted, possible that these are awaiting changes, but I've done a bit of testing with Frost and Blood Death Knights and Havoc Demon Hunters and I can say that they feel mostly unchanged.

Starting with Havoc:

One welcome change is that Eye Beam will now deal double damage against a primary target, which should allow one of the most iconic Demon Hunter abilities to be used in single-target encounters. There are some new talents and some that have been shifted around. You can still opt for Fel Blade and then make Demon Bite into the passive Demon Blades talent, which is how I currently run my DH.

Demon Hunters also now place a debuff with their attacks on the target that increases magic damage taken by 5%. This ought to apply to all your Chaos Damage abilities, and is essentially the raid buff you bring.

Now Frost:

Frost is almost entirely unchanged. The one thing that makes it feel a bit different is that, now that most cooldowns are on the GCD, if you're running Obliteration, you'll need to take two solid global cooldowns to get Pillar of Frost and Obliteration running.

Blood:

Similarly, Blood's changes are very subtle - the main thing is that Bone Shield now increases armor proportionately to your strength rather than simply reducing damage taken. Beyond that, though, it's mostly familiar.

If anything, the main oddity in all of this is going from epic Argus/Antorus gear and artifact weapons to a bunch of green gear. I suspect that when we take our characters into the new zones, even without artifacts, they should feel a lot more powerful than the premade characters available on the Alpha.

We also have yet to see how the Heart of Azeroth - essentially the universal "artifact necklace" of the expansion - is going to work. Currently, certain quests reward Azerite, which levels up the necklace, though for now it's just a boost to item level.

It's pretty early alpha though, so we'll have to see how things develop.

Does the Frost Death Knight Need More Death?

Those who played Death Knights during Wrath of the Lich King might remember a lot of spells that used to be available to every DK that really emphasized the necromantic nature of the class. Some were talents, like Corpse Explosion (which was accessible to all three specs as it was only one tier two or so of the Unholy tree) or Raise Dead, which was a cooldown available to all specs but would yield a permanent ghoul for Unholy.

In Warlords, Raise Dead, arguably the most obvious necromancy spell for a Death Knight to use, was made Unholy-only.

Unholy really emphasizes the notion of the Death Knight as a platform for necromantic power, summoning all manner of undead minions or empowering your existing ones.

Blood's interaction with the death-flavor of the class is less about raising the dead and more about consuming life force from your opponents, with a strong vampiric motif (one gets the impression that, if WoW had more graphic violence, Blood Death Knights would look like a character out of Bloodborne after a battle - totally drenched in blood.)

Frost lacks a lot of this flavor, though. If you were to imagine a Battlemage character - a heavily armored wizard-like character who fought with a mix of physical melee attacks and spells - you could use just about every Frost DK ability without changing it. Obliterate? Simple melee strike that would be just as appropriate a name for a Warrior ability. Frost Strike? Very little flavor to that. Howling Blast? Ok, the Howling does give it a bit of a spooky vibe, but the idea of weaponizing cold wind does not seem that far out of the wheelhouse of Frost Mages or Windwalker Monks. Remorseless Winter? Ditto (well, less for WW Monks, but certainly works for Frost Mages.)

Only two elements in the Frost rotation really feel truly Death Knight-flavored: Frost Fever, applied by Howling Blast, and the artifact trait Sindragosa's Fury (oddly listed as simply "Frost Breath" in damage logs.)

Now, even though I think they could have easily just gone with "Frostwyrm's Fury" or something - it doesn't have to be Sindragosa every time - I think this ability does a great job of melding the Frost DK's focuses on necromancy and elemental coldness.

But I think the former of those focuses really gets short shrift. So where do we go?

Well, let's think about the undead. Undead come in many varieties. Zombies are probably one of the most ubiquitous types in genre fiction, but the idea of rotting, shuffling corpses is very well handled by Unholy. Another type is skeletons - essentially fleshless zombies. Frankly, I've always been more into the idea of skeletal armies as my undead threat of choice ever since seeing the old Jason and the Argonauts as a kid (look that up if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

Now, Blood clearly gets a lot out of another popular form of undead, namely the vampire, but they also have something of a skeletal sub-theme as well, with Bone Armor granted by Marrowrend a pretty huge part of the rotation, as well as the talent Bone Storm (or should I say BBOOOOONNNNNNEEEEEESSSSSTTTTTOOOOOORRRRRRMMMMM!)

I think Blood uses it little enough to maybe let Frost borrow some of the skeleton theme, but there's another obvious form of undead: ghosts.

Frost is obviously about the cold of death, the chill of the grave. And ghosts are often associated with the cold.

So I could easily imagine Frost taking on a more ghostly theme. I don't know exactly how this could be implemented - perhaps future talents could replace existing abilities. Changing Howling Blast so that you send out a wave of screaming ghosts? Maybe Remorseless Winter changes into something that haunts nearby enemies with some sort of effect in addition to Frost Fever?

I also think someone ought to be able to become a Lich.

Now, Unholy might feel they ought to be the ones turning into Liches, but our one example of a friendly Lich, Amal'thazad, is not only the Frost instructor but also a Frost champion. I've often found Pillar of Frost to be a somewhat underwhelming (flavor-wise, and kind of mechanic-wise, though I do really like the immunity to knockbacks) ability. What if that were replaced (either baseline or as a talent) with the ability to become a Lich? You could either get new abilities or have certain ones enhanced, a bit like Metamorphosis for Demon Hunters or Ascendence for Shamans.

Without access to Death and Decay or Raise Dead, Frost Death Knights really are missing something from their flavor toolkit, but I think it wouldn't take too much to up the spooky quality to the spec.

Also, when we move on to the next expansion I really really hope that we get to use two-handed weapons again. I'm still pissed I didn't get to reforge Frostmourne in its original form.

7.3 Nerfs Coming to Breath of Sindragosa Build, Buffs to Frost to Compensate

I have a complicated relationship with Frost Death Knights. I started playing Blood DPS when that was a thing, but when Blood became a dedicated tank spec and the other two specs became dedicated DPS, I went two-handed Frost. I still main-specced as a tank in Cataclysm, but through Mists, Warlords, and Legion, I've been primarily Frost.

Now, I really prefered two-handed frost, with its massive Obliterates. So when they made it dual-wield only, I actually started Legion as Unholy, then went Blood, but then went back to Frost. The thing is, my favorite color is blue. I know that seems really minor, but I've gotten so used to my Draenei (blue skin) wearing blue-tinged dark armor, wielding a weapon with a blue glow, and having all my attacks cause bursts of blue death, that it's really hard to get back to thinking of Death Knights as having another dominant color palate.

And given that look and feel are basically the main appeal to video games for me, that's a big deal.

It is a difficult trade-off, wielding two dinky swords versus wielding a much more impressive runeblade. Basically the only real saving grace of the Blades of the Fallen Prince as an artifact weapon is that they literally used to be Frostmourne. Given the option to actually wield, somehow, Frostmourne itself in its intact form (and seeing variants on it the way that the other artifact weapons have,) I'd really prefer it, but I'll have to content myself with the swords made from it. Sadly, Blizzard feels that at least one DK spec should be a dual-wielding one, and with Blood as the tank spec and Unholy already having the whole "summoning undead" schtick, it's not terribly surprising that Frost got stuck with it. I only hope that in a post-artifact world, we can go back to using two-handed weapons (and maybe if we all beseech the Lich King like good little Knights we'll someday get a Frostmourne transmog piece. A DK can dream, can't he?)

Anyway, in the last few patches, the love-it-or-hate-it Breath of Sindragosa talent has been dominant - basically if you want competitive DPS as a Frost DK, you have to pick it and all the talents that allow you to sustain it as long as possible.

Thus Frost winds up being a kind of two-phase spec. You have the Breath phase where you desperately need to generate as much runic power as you can and get seriously penalized if you screw up or if you need to stop whacking the boss for a couple seconds, and the waiting phase where you just do the baseline Frost rotation while you wait for Breath to come off cooldown.

I'll be honest and say I've started to get used to this build, but the panicked resource generation required from the build isn't always what I want, especially given that I feel Frost, flavor-wise, should be more about being slow and steady (the "fight" against Arthas in Halls of Reflection is a great example of what I think a Frost Death Knight should feel like.) In fact, I could imagine a whole redesign of the spec that would have you build up Runic Power and unleash it in a massive single swing, but the point is that I don't know that Breath of Sindragosa fulfills my particular image of the spec's fantasy.

The changes they're making are fairly extensive - I believe the Hungering Rune Weapon talent is getting a bit of a redesign, and many talents are swapping around. The goal is not to nerf Frost in general (as far as I know they're not really exceptional these days) but to allow for greater build diversity, which is something I'm right on board with.

The Nature of the Lich King

The official story is that the Lich King was created by Kil'jaeden - Ner'zhul, a mortal orc, had his soul torn from his body and placed in the suit of armor (especially the Helm of Domination) that would form the original Lich King.

This implies that, powerful as the Lich King is, he's ultimately just an empowered undead mortal, and that power is ultimately derived from a demon (who is himself a former mortal.)

But there are a couple things that have never really sat well with me. In Warcraft Chronicle, there's a chart that delineates six primal forces that each have an associated type of magic. The one generally see as "good" are Light, Life, and Order, embodied by Holy, Nature, and Arcane magic respectively. The "evil" ones are Void, Death, and Chaos, embodied by Shadow, Necromancy, and Fel magic, also respectively.

In the game, however, we've tended to see Void and Chaos as the two really grand pillars of Warcraft villaindom. The Void Lords and their creations, the Old Gods, seek to corrupt the universe with Shadow, while the demons of the Burning Legion use Fel magic to try to utterly destroy the universe.

(Side note: one would think that the servants of the Void (described by Star Augur Etraeus as "avatars of non-existence") would be more into utter universal annihilation while the demonic Fel force would seek to corrupt it. But it could be we're just not seeing the long game here.)

Death as a force, however, doesn't seem to get the same kind of top billing as Void and Chaos, but perhaps that's something Blizzard will remedy in the future.

The origins of the Lich King's necromantic powers are somewhat enigmatic. We know that Fel-affiliated demons and warlocks have performed necromancy in the past - consider the original Death Knights, for example, who were created by Gul'dan. And so perhaps it wouldn't be too crazy to think that Kil'jaeden could tap into necromancy to create the Lich King.

On the other hand, seeing Ner'zhul B in Draenor showed us that using Shadow magic, one can also raise the dead, as we saw in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds.

So maybe I'm getting too hung up on that chart, but if we want to run with it, it would seem to suggest that necromancy really is its own thing, not beholden to Shadow magic or Fel magic.

Considering that the Burning Legion employs Voidwalkers (there's a whole section to the Broken Shore that's purple-void-corrupted rather than the usual green-fel-corrupted) despite the fact that such beings are theoretically the exact thing the Legion was founded to defeat (though in a Halo-like "cutting off the food supply" manner,) it wouldn't be that odd to think that Kil'jaeden dabbled in other kinds of magic.

But the explanation that I prefer, and I think that Blizzard would benefit a lot from in terms of future story potential, is that Necromancy is, in fact, totally independent, and the the Lich King, or whatever dark entity that served as the basis for the Lich King, existed long before Kil'jaeden got involved.

Now, it's also possible that some "prime representatives" of these primal magics still owe their origins to others. The Druid artifact backstory implies that the Wild Gods (aka Night Elf Ancients, Pandaren August Celestials, and Troll Loa) were originally just ordinary animals that Freya (yes, the one we fought in Ulduar) empowered and linked to the Emerald Dream. And while he was once a mortal, Kil'jaeden is now a being of nearly god-like power (the Warcraft universe is pretty strict on who gets to be called a god, though that's getting looser, with the Titans getting confirmed god status - albeit non-immortal gods) so if someone like Freya could create beings of such power, Kil'jaeden ought to be able to do so as well.

Still, I think there are elements of the Lich King that we really have not explored yet. Chronicle Vol. 2 ends right before the Third War, so we don't get anything about the Lich King.

In addition to the primal power of Death, there are a couple of other sort of related concepts in that chart of magic and planes. Moving to the elemental plane, there's two forces in addition to the four basic elements. One is Spirit, which is aligned with life, and is used by Shamans as a kind of binding agent for the four elements and is used by Monks as their primary power on which they draw (they call it Chi.) Spirit is demonstrably powerful - the Elementals on Azeroth are so chaotic because the Titan world soul requires so much of it to grow. Meanwhile, on Draenor, with no world-soul and an abundance of Spirit, the plantlife grew so powerful that it threatened to overwhelm its own resources and ironically wind up starving itself out of overgrowth, which is why Aggramar created a giant who was the ultimate ancestor to the Magnaron, Gronn, Ogron, Ogres, and Orcs.

The opposite of Spirit is something called Decay, which, unlike the harmonious Spirit, is all about force. Dark Shamanism is distinguished from classical shamanism because of its emphasis on this. While a typical Shaman beseeches the elements for aid and is something of a conduit for consensual elemental power, Dark Shamans enslave the elements to do their will. The result, as we saw with the Korkron in Mists of Pandaria, is that Dark Shamanism leads to environmental damage - polluted air and water and treacherous earth.

Finally, getting to the real semi-physical planes, we get one that is truly associated with death: the Shadowlands. While the Emerald Dream is a place of vibrant life (except where the Nightmare corrupts it, though I think we've officially destroyed almost all of the Nightmare,) the Shadowlands are an empty and cold land of death.

It has never been officially confirmed, but there is very strong evidence that in-game, if we die and go into ghost form, we're actually running around in the Shadowlands (and that the Spirit Healers are actually rogue Val'kyr who defied both Odyn and Helya for the sake of the greater good, namely returning the heroes of Azeroth to life so that we can continue protecting the world.)

If the Emerald Dream is the domain of the Wild Gods, it would stand to reason that the Shadowlands would have some sovereign. A King, if you will.

Now, perhaps that Sovereign was actually Helya - Helheim's location isn't ever really defined, and could be its own plane (we also don't know where the Halls of Valor are, exactly) and given that Helya assisted Ra-Den in creating the Elemental Planes, it's not that hard to imagine her creating Helheim from scratch.

But Helheim certainly looks like it could be a part of the Shadowlands.

Still, if we're talking about Death as being a primal force that is independent from other primal embodiments like Old Gods, Titans, and Demons, it seems to me that you could imagine there being some entity within the Shadowlands that was the embodiment of death and necromancy.

And perhaps that entity was amorphous - not in any way human-like. Perhaps Kil'jaeden poured that entity into Ner'zhul not just as a weapon, but also as a way of controlling an entity that was likely more powerful than Kil'jaeden himself.

And this actually begins to explain why "there must always be a Lich King." It wasn't really clear what the Scourge "running rampant" would look like, given that they weren't exactly friendly at the time, but maybe we really haven't seen anything yet.

Prior to the Lich King, this Death God was in the Shadowlands - incredibly dangerous but safely in its own realm. Kil'jaeden sought to use its power for the purposes of the Legion, but simply releasing it into the prime material plane would have meant undeath spreading everywhere - perhaps even to demons (and while the Legion's official mission is universal annihilation, but their actions suggest their actual goal is more a kind of universal tyranny - which requires subjects.) The Lich King thus may be a kind of de-powered Death God - something that the people serving as the Lich King may only know to varying degrees.

Kil'jaeden pulled the Death God out of the Shadowlands, putting it in a humanoid-shaped (or armor-shaped at first) vessel to ensure that it didn't escape and simply wash over everything and to ensure that its power could be used productively by the Burning Legion.

So then this opens questions as to what the longterm goals of Bolvar are. He nominated himself to be Jailor of the Damned, which seems like it would mean especially controlling the Death God within himself. But we don't know if he's been as effective at holding out against this influence as he was in the past. He's definitely not a good person anymore, but one really has to wonder what our actions as Death Knights have been doing for his goals. We recruited the Four Horsemen - who seem to serve the Lich King, rather than us Deathlords. And even Darion Mograine has been raised from the dead a second time - which means that his break from the Lich King's control after the Battle of Light's Hope may no longer be in effect! As the folks at Blizzard Watch pointed out in their latest Lore Watch podcast, when we start the expansion, Darion tells us explicitly that we're getting assistance from the Lich King, but we're not rejoining the Scourge. And yet, and yet, every action we take to empower the Ebon Blade is actually making the Scourge more powerful.

Now it's possible that being part of this Bolvar-era Scourge will ultimately be good for Azeroth, even if we do things to seriously piss of the Silver Hand and the Red Dragonflight and anyone else who gets in our way.

But the Deathlord may have really screwed things up and will have a serious price to pay when he or she looks around and finds that all of his comrades are now getting conscripted into the Death God's campaign to wipe out all life on the planet.

The Crimes of the Ebon Blade

So in the last post, I talked about the many objectively bad things the Illidari have done. A fair amount of that post was how they differed from the Knights of the Ebon Blade - the organization for the other hero (I say villain) class.

The Death Knights are a little different. In their bad days, there was no "ends justify the means" kind of rationalization of what they were doing, because their ends were literally the end of all life on the planet, converting everyone into undead under the domination of the Lich King. And their switch from villains to heroes was a very conscious choice at a key moment.

The motivations for this change are actually, I think, a bit open to interpretation. I've always been under the impression that the power of Light's Hope Chapel (the many righteous dead buried there, whose tombs you can now visit if you're a Paladin) broke the connection the Lich King had with the Death Knights' wills - a bit like how Illidan cracking the Frozen Throne allowed the Forsaken to break away.

But there's another element to it, which is that the Lich King used the Death Knights as fodder - he didn't expect them to survive the battle. The key was to draw out Tirion Fordring and hopefully kill him before he could lead the effort against the Scourge in Northrend.

After this point, the Ebon Blade made the Scourge target number one.

Death Knights, by their nature, have disturbing methods. But if we are to judge by Thassarian's example (who granted, is kind of the moral paragon of the Ebon Blade,) the Death Knights are now basically the same people they used to be, only now with a consuming addiction to causing pain.

Thankfully for the Death Knights, Azeroth is a world that is constantly beset by demons and elementals and aberrations who can be fought without remorse. And so for the past few expansions, Death Knights have more or less blended in with the rest of the Alliance and Horde forces.

In Legion, though, thanks to the fact that there are actually class-specific stories again, the Ebon Blade has been up to some really shady stuff.

The 7.0 class hall campaign for Death Knights has you assemble a new Four Horsemen to serve as champions for the Ebon Blade.

First off: the reason you're doing this is because the Lich King told you to. While it's Bolvar, and not Arthas, who you're dealing with, it has become very clear that the Lich King itself is the real dominant personality regardless of who is wearing the crown. Bolvar isn't trying to sweep over the entire planet with undeath, but he's definitely not turning Icecrown into a friendly ski resort town either. There's a definite question of whether the Lich King is truly trying to keep the undead under control or if the Scourge will arise as a threat once more in the future. And if that happens, it has become surprisingly unclear what side the Ebon Blade will be on.

While raising anyone as a death knight without their prior consent (so, basically all death knights except I guess Baron Rivendare?) is of course horrifyingly immoral, the campaign ends with the most brazen and villainous thing any of the classes do during their campaigns.

Seeking the fourth horseman, the Lich King sends you to retrieve the body of Tirion Fordring. Not only would turning this great paragon of the Light who very specifically fought against the Scourge into a Death Knight be a cruel fate to impose on one of Azeroth's greatest heroes, doing so also requires you to attack another order's class hall.

It's also a pretty terrible plan, given how the last attack on Light's Hope Chapel went for the Ebon Blade, but that's neither here nor there.

Death Knights fight their way into the Sanctum of Light, slaying paladins who are guarding the order hall. Ultimately, as they attempt to get to Fordring's resting place, Lady Liadrin shows up and lays the smackdown on them, leaving Darion Mograine dead. However, for a Death Knight that's more of an inconvenience, and he is raised in Tirion's place to lead the horsemen, taking on the role that his father had way back in the original Naxxramas raid.

As of yet, the Ebon Blade has not had to pay any real price for attacking their allies.

But they're not even done.

Spoilers for something in 7.2, just to warn you:

Death Knights will be sent to Icecrown to raise an ancient dragon corpse, but in order to discover its true location, they have to go to the Ruby Sanctum and access their archives.

Now, a normal person would, you know, ask. And given their intentions, they'd lie about what they were going to do with this corpse. But rather than that, you actually go into the Sanctum and kill a bunch of red dragons (and remember, dragons are sterile after the Hour of Twilight, so you're basically killing members of an endangered species.)

After slaying Silver Hand paladins and red dragons, you really have to wonder when the Ebon Blade is going to pay a price for all of this. In fact, unlike pretty much all of the other class campaigns (I think it's them and Shamans,) you don't actually do anything to fight the Legion. If anything, the damage you've done has hindered the war effort.

Death Knights aren't going to be nice, sure, but one would think they couldn't go around doing stuff like this without some consequences.

Tanking Competence and You! A Beginner's Guide

I just ran heroic Neltharion's Lair on my Enhancement Shaman. Our tank was a Vengeance Demon Hunter who seemed perhaps a little inexperienced. We wiped on Dargrul several times, largely due to some mechanics that he was either ignoring or just not dealing well with. Unfortunately, he and our healer were antagonizing each other, and so when we got a new healer and managed to down the boss, he declared in the party chat that it was clearly just the healer. I tried to explain in a polite and helpful way that there were some things he could work on, but he left before I could give him examples (some of which were advice he had ignored after previous attempts.)

Anyway, given that I play four different tank characters, I figured I'd put down a bit of advice.

1. Tanking is not as hard as it seems

First off, tanking can seem difficult, as it's a bit like DPS but with more responsibility, but in fact it's a pretty different set of skills. As long as you can maintain threat (and unless you severely undergear your DPS, you generally can) you don't really need to worry about damage numbers.

Your healer has your back. All you have to do is make sure that the enemies are in the right position and that you do what you can to reduce incoming damage or heal back your own depleted health.

Basically, remember that you're not competing to top meters. If you survive the fight and you don't get your party members killed, that's a victory.

As a tank, it's your job to try to make the healer bored.

2. Situational Awareness

Healers usually just ignore enemies as long as they're not pulsing some AoE that you can't stand inside of. DPS can focus down individual enemies. In general, a Tank can't afford to do this. Any enemy that is in combat with your party needs to get at least a bit of your attention. Thankfully, just about every tank class uses the same ability rotation for single-target and AoE. So just make sure that you get your AoE attacks on everything you're currently in combat with. Sometimes that means moving, because if a party member strays off the path or hesitates long enough to draw some patrol you avoided, you're going to need to pick it up.

Most tanks have abilities I call "snap threat," which are instant-cast abilities that hit multiple targets and that are almost always available. DKs' Blood Boil, Paladins' Blessed Hammer (a talent, but a recommended one,) DHs' Infernal Strike and Throw Glaive, and Druids' Thrash are all good examples. Monks and Warriors might have a little harder time, but while they're less often available, Warriors' Thunder Clap and Monks' Breath of Fire or Keg Smash are also great for picking up adds.

3. Positioning

Because enemies pay attention to you as the tank (assuming you got number 2 above right) you're going to have the power and responsibility to care about positioning.

First, there's the obvious: if an enemy has a big cone-attack that hits everyone in front of it, make sure you're facing the boss away from the group. Likewise, if it has any sort of tail-swipe ability that hits players who are standing at a particular angle, make sure that you're not wildly swinging the boss around. Whenever you can, plant your feet.

However, sometimes you can't. And you'll have to recognize when those situations arise. Some bosses make it obvious - like creating some big pool underneath them that you need to move away from. Sometimes it's less obvious - they might create a pool under one of your melee party members, and while you might be sitting high and dry, you'll still want to move the boss to make sure that everyone has a safe place to stand during the fight.

When moving a boss, be aware of effects that can be exacerbated by your movement. If the boss knocks you back periodically, don't back yourself up to a ledge that you can fall off of. If the boss has a tail swipe or frontal cone attack, make sure that you're not turning it to face your party or spinning that tail right into your friends' faces.

Also sometimes the boss will do something that even you shouldn't be standing in. If there's a frontal cone that they'll do without turning, quickly sidestep out of it, but be sure to get back into your position once the area is safe again to minimize how much your party needs to move.

4. Active Mitigation

Regardless of the fight, you'll always want to use Active Mitigation early and often. This takes a few forms, from increased avoidance to straight-up damage reduction to powerful self healing. In most cases, the effect is good enough on its own to be worth using. On certain bosses, however, there will be abilities that will specifically have extra effects (often doing significantly more damage) they hit a tank that does not have its active mitigation up. For bosses like this, you'll want to pool resources (and cooldowns) to make sure that you have the ability ready for when the thing goes off. (Though you also don't want to cap cooldowns or resources, as you'll still benefit from AM abilities during other parts of the fight.)

I highly, highly recommend using an addon like Weak Auras or something similar to track whether you have these effects up. Weak Auras allows something called "Progress Textures" which will allow you to have an icon that can either fill up or empty out as the buff wears off.

Let's go through each tank's active mitigation abilities:

Warriors: Both AM abilities are self-buffs. Shield Block has a set duration and will increase your block chance to 100%, which effectively causes you to take 40% less direct physical damage during its duration (or more thanks to Critical Block.) You also have Ignore Pain, which is a damage-absorption shield. This can be powerful when dealing with magic damage (that would usually go right through your shield) but can also wear off prematurely if the entire shield is used up. I'd recommend using Shield Block on any boss ability that cares about Active Mitigation, as you'll be guaranteed that it lasts long enough to still be up when the ability goes off.

Paladins: Shield of the Righteous is your main AM ability, reducing damage taken by a significant amount (based on mastery.) This is simply a 4.5 second buff that reduces incoming damage. Its effect (both the damage it deals and the reduction in damage you take) are increased if you're standing in your Consecration, so you should try to keep that up at all times. Additionally, Paladins have Light of the Protector, which heals you for a percentage of your missing health (again affected by Mastery.) This becomes more powerful the lower on health you have, but even if you're not dipping below 30%, it can still help out your healer. This heal does not grant any real buff, so it won't do anything for boss abilities that care about active mitigation, so make sure to use Shield of the Righteous for cases like that. Note that Shield of the Righteous requires you to be in melee range, as it's technically an attack that grants the defensive buff, so if there's a big hit coming in, make sure you can hit them first.

Death Knights: This one's a bit weird. The only official active mitigation buff you get is Blood Shield. If you're searching your spell book for this, you should stop, because it's actually your mastery passive. Instead, you'll want to be using Death Strike, which heals you for a big portion of the damage you've taken over the last 5 seconds (or 10% of your max health if you haven't been taking more than that amount of damage.) Your mastery will then generate a damage absorption shield that is proportional to this heal, and it's that shield that counts for active mitigation boss abilities. You do have other defensive abilities you'll want to use, but unfortunately these don't count for that type of boss ability. The main one is Marrowrend, which is a melee strike that generates three charges of Bone Shield. Each time you get hit with a melee attack, one of the charges on your Bone Shield will be spent to reduce the damage of that attack. Thus, you want to try to maintain at least one charge of Bone Shield at all times (or 5 if you have the talent Ossuary.) However, if you are sitting pretty on many charges, you'll instead want to use Heart Strike, which generates more Runic-Power-per-Rune-spent (15 for 1 or more if there are other targets to hit instead of 20 for 2) and thus means more Death Strikes.

Monks: Primarily, active mitigation for Monks is handled by your Brews, particularly Ironskin Brew. You can maintain very high uptime on this brew, which doubles the amount of damage you stagger from 40% to 80%. While this doesn't actually reduce the damage you ultimately take on its own, it will significantly smooth out the damage that you get, making the healer's job a lot easier. However, if you start to get a lot of staggered damage, you'll want to use Purifying Brew, which reduces your staggered damage by 50%. Be sure to use Keg Smash and Tiger Palm to reduce the recharge time on all your brews, but also be aware that Ironskin and Purifying share a cooldown, so if you use Purifying a lot it will make it harder to keep Ironskin up at all times. Ironskin Brew will be the buff you maintain in the event of boss abilities that care about active mitigation. I recommend taking the talent Black Ox Brew, which is a cooldown that restores you to your maximum Ironskin/Purifying Brew charges of 3 and also gives you full Energy. Because Black Ox Brew is a brew, its cooldown will also be reduced by Keg Smash and Tiger Palm, meaning you can use it very frequently. Aside from your Brews, you should also use Expel Harm to absorb any nearby Gift of the Ox orbs for a rather sizable heal, but again, the only real "active mitigation" buff you get is Ironskin Brew (actually, Fortifying Brew, your long-term defensive cooldown, might also count, but you can't use that rotationally.)

Demon Hunters: Your primary AM ability is Demon Spikes, which, much like Ironskin Brew, Shield of the Righteous, and Shield Block, is simply a buff that lasts a set amount of time. You get two charges of this and it only costs 20 Pain, so you'll have access to it pretty frequently. It also lasts a long time. However, another big part of Vengeance Demon Hunter survival is the use of Soul Cleave. This not only does a lot of damage to targets in front of you (and thus is good for threat in both single-target and aoe situations) but also heals you for a significant amount. It also draws in any nearby Lesser Soul Fragments generated by Shear, potentially healing you for a lot more than just its base healing. Basically, any time you've already got Demon Spikes up or on cooldown, you want to spend your Pain on Soul Cleave. Do not wait to amass soul fragments - while those will increase its healing by a lot, you'll be better served by getting the base healing of the ability and building up for the next one. Again, Soul Cleave does not give you an active mitigation buff, but its healing is a significant piece of the Vengeance survival strategy. You can pool Pain (though try not to cap it) before using Soul Cleave as it will heal you for more based on how much Pain is spent, I believe from 20 to 60.

Druids: I'll confess that my Druid is still sitting in the Dreamgrove having done almost nothing after getting the Claws of Ursoc, so this one's going to be a bit more sketchy. The primary AM ability for Guardians is going to be Ironfur. Unlike other tanks, there's actually a benefit to overlapping multiple applications of this ability, as you'll get the benefit of each stack (with each stack lasting its own separate duration.) Ironfur increases your armor by 100% for a few seconds, which of course will reduce the physical damage you take by a lot. This is the buff you'll want up when a boss hits you with one of those special attacks. Druids also have Frenzied Regeneration, which heals you for an amount based on the rage spent, but again, while this is a buff (it's a heal-over-time effect) I don't think this counts as true Active Mitigation for abilities that care.

5. Situational Awareness Again

As a tank you'll mostly be worried about enemies. But you'll also want to keep an eye on your party. Before charging on to the next fight, make sure that your healer has enough mana. Some healers will be fine with 50% or less, but if you see them struggling, it's ok to slow down a bit. If you see that the party is basically always at full health, you can pull a little faster or even take on two trash packs at a time (though make sure that these trash packs don't interact in dangerous ways - like having multiple healers or enemies within them that can cast fear on your group.) If instead your party is constantly at 50% health or dying, slow things down and try to employ stuns or crowd control to ease the burden.

Also, make sure that your party hasn't accidentally pulled something. Especially in Legion, there's a lot of dungeon trash that you can and should skip when possible. But all it takes is for one person (or one pet) to stray a little too close to them, or for some errant AoE ability to pull an enemy that normally is neutral, and you'll have some extra stuff to fight. Don't get too far ahead of your group.

6. Keep a Cool Head

Some players are awful. You don't need to do a ready check before every trash mob, but it's ok to take a second or two to assess your next fight. If you have a player who is pulling for you, you have a couple options. You can simply roll with it and pick up aggro on the things they've pulled, or you can politely ask them to stop doing that. If they keep doing it, you can try to get them kicked out of the group. You can also drop out of the group yourself if the party isn't cooperating, though this is definitely a last resort.

Ultimately, regardless of whether you're tanking or doing anything else, try to cultivate patience. Mistakes happen, and sometimes people are really just learning the ropes. Offer advice, but be sure to keep it in a helpful tone. If someone's being an ass, there's not much you can do about that, but if someone just genuinely doesn't know something - like boss mechanics or the optimal rotation for their spec, keep your advice friendly.