That's interesting. My understanding of it is once your current character is 55-60 or above...you do something to unlock the character creation for a Death Knight. Then you make your deathknight, have to go through some type of challenge to actually play it.

I like that much more than having to level up to 80 on a character which you won't necessarily want to play thereafter.

just a thought of mine when i read the interview.. wouldn't it make the quest too easy if you unlocked it with one of your lvl70 toons?
Sure you could have the npc say " oh boy youre too "old" to teach already taht will cost you quite some effort to get on with the DK stuff" but that would be some kind of a big hassle even if they implented it in 2lvl steps.

You've still got to level him 20-25 levels to get to 80. This way people can try him out low but a lot won't have the comittment to level him that high, especially since he probably starts with pretty crap gear.

But they've got a good point. I was seriously thinking of power leveling to 80 simply to do the DK quest and reroll DK then have to do all that content again. This way if people decide to roll a DK straight away then the Northrend content will still be new and fresh to them.

Given this information my guess is that the DK quest will be mostly a lore/story event and any actual combat or fighting will be basically symbolic. It's quite obvious that hundreds of level 70s will be setting out to complete it immediately on the launch of WotLK and they will obviously not be threatened by level 55-60 mobs.

I like this since it did seem dumb to level a character to 80 just to abandon that character in favour of a DK.

Who knows. It might not even be a quest where you have to kill stuff, especially not solo.

I'd imagine it would be some kind of mostly non-combat oriented quest, where you learn the basic background of the class before you're entitled to make one. If it is combat oriented? Who knows. Anything lvl 55-60'ish would be trivialized heavily if you're level 70. Maybe that isn't a concern of theirs so much as you learning how to play a deathknight or learning the background of one.

I'm not entirely sure anymore what was oficially said and what not.
BUT as far as i can still remember it was said that unlocking your DK would involve some kind of "epic" questline.

And at this point the questioning starts:

How epic can it be if anyone can complete it regardless of gear and level?
- It cannot really be a long chain to do every Heroic in under 50 minutes or something then.

Can a Lore check unlock your DK? - seen already in the chain from 1k Needles "Test of xxx"
- Unlikey too since then you could just look up the answers on wowwiki etc.

Could they be testing your endurance - i.e. the chain is just so long that you'd give up if youre not the "truely hardcore"

What i wanna point out is that the easier obtaining a DK char is, the less of a Hero class he becomes.

The only thing they said was it would be something like the warlock epic mount quest in terms of difficulty. I'm pretty much sure myself that they intend people to be able to create Deathknights with very minimal support or help. I'd be willing to bet that there's only one part of the quest that might require more than one person to complete.

As it has been said...Deathknight is just another class...it's not like when you finish you'll be getting this superhuman class that will dominate all others in every category. To be honest I expect it to be like every other hybrid in the game right now. Instead of Tank/Healing or DPS/Healing, it'll be Tank/DPS.

I don't think it's meant to be epic and they certainly wont limit it to hardcore players only. The direction they're going seems to indicate they just want people to have a basic understand of the class (maybe you mind control one or something to learn some mechanics) and some of the lore regarding them. Then you're free to create your lvl 60 or whatever deathknight and go about your merry way after completing some kind of simple "test" of what you learned from the pre-requisate quests you did on your other character.

It depends. There are ways to scale difficulty with the power of players (such as any fight involving Mind Control, especially if the game AI is smart enough to control the most powerful player); you can also include steps that make character gear and level completely irrelevant (think of the quest "Teron Gorefiend, I am" in Shadowmoon Valley -- while it is an easy quest, the same principle could be applied in different ways).

That said, I don't even know if Blizzard desires to make the quest challenging for level 70-80, but it's not impossible while still keeping it doable at 55-60.

Specifically, you could be asked to do a fight as a level 60 DK.

edit: or a pared-down level 60 dk i should say. Obviously the pet bar for a full set of level 60 player character abilities would be extremely confusing, awkward, and unnecessary.

I would not expect a DK at 55 or 60 (their start level) to have a full compliment of level 60 characters skills and abilities. Can you imagine how tough it would be to start playing WoW the first time on a level 60 toon? You wouldnt have a clue what skill to use etc. This is one of the main reasons I think they decided against starting DKs at max level. You need to "ease" the players in to a new class. So those levels 60-80, I would expect a DK to gain completely new skills at the rate a level 1-20 would. Basically giving the user a full level to adjust to 2 or 3 new skills, while starting out with maybe 4 or 5 abilities at max.


If this is the case, you really could have a pet type quest where you control a DK with their full set of 60 abilities.

I know I want to have a deathknight, but it will be more of a case of "just having it" than a case of "its my new main!". Of course, if it turns out to be massive fun, then who knows!

Indeed. Of course most of that is Blizzard's fault. They used the term 'Hero Class' at the early stages of WoW to refer to a 'more progressed' version of the current classes. When they scrapped plans for that they should have scrapped that name. Instead, they just use it as a term of art to refer to the 'Hero Classes' back in WC 3 like Death Knight, Blademaster, etc.

Unfortunately, most of WoW's playerbase doesn't come from WC 3 so they don't understand this point.

Hero Classes are just Blizzard's way of adding new classes to their game, no different than the existing classes, while sparing people the laborious climb from 1-80. That's it. Nothing more.

It's the first new class since release. No matter what its abilities or capabilities, it will be popular. A lot of people will be getting a lowbie DK as soon as the quest details are up on wowhead.

The fact that we do not need to go through the 1-60 content AGAIN makes them pretty heroic in my books. Outland really showed us how much more fun it can be to level from quests thanks to the excellent rewards you recieve.

I think lore check and some exploration of hidden place can be a good way for the first part (@55-60). Something like quests for element totems of shaman.

The second part (trial), i think it can be like hunter or priest epic quest (without instance part). You can face scripted encounter where you have to use different abilities of DK, good use of rune system, and so.

I'm pretty sure that you will be able to unlock your Dk with your level 70 toon within the first day of play WOTLK. I doubt it will be very "epic". And by Epic I mean in terms of what the population of this board deems epic.

While I don't think there will be a lore check either, I doubt it's because the answers can be looked up, because frankly, you can look everything up.

Forums still light up once in awhile with people complaining that they can't use their Thunderfuries for all of eternity; I wouldn't be surprised to see forums explode in a cry of "but for all the work I did, my Death Knight *should* be overpowered!" if they make the quest require significant time or financial investment.

I haven't seen anyone bring this up, and I haven't heard anything about this being discussed at blizzcon, but has Blizzard ever said anything about their intentions for the Hyjal zone in Kalimdor? It has had the green raid portal for well over a year now. (If not since launch, I'm not sure)

Since Beta, IIRC. Hyjal was one of the first zones mentioned as a 'raid' instance.

The portal has been there since launch for all practical purposes. They just kept gradually adding in barriers - the construction signs, the gate with teeth, the invisible walls, etc.

At this point its location is in a pretty bad spot, as is places like Grim Batol or the zone near Silverpine. Too far away for most players to "commute" to for a single instance.

Yeah, you could have portals out from IF/Org/Shattrah but having dozens of portals is really messy from a game design POV. It'll be interesting already to see how they handle Sunwell and ZA, there is an obvious reason why both are near each other (1 portal instead of 2).

Realistically you will probably never see those zones open up where they are, or instead turn into leveling curve smoothing quest hubs for 1-60.

I don't agree. When an instance opens, there's usually a quest/NPC hub associated. Look at the expansion of Silithus before AQ40 opened, the expansion of LHC when Naxx opened, and so on. If they open Grim Batol, there'll be an associated FP close by, and probably at least a few outdoor mobs / quests of appropriate level. Same for Hyjal, Gilneas etc.

Sure, opening instances in the outdoor zones as they are would be silly. Outdoor zones are mutable too.

Nah, there's other ways you could do it.

For example, let's say that everyone, no questions asked, no quests necessary, gets the chance to start a DK at level 60. DKs start in an instanced area out-of-contact with the main game world. You need to complete a complex series of difficult quests (think Shartuul event) in order to graduate from "Death Knight Academy" and get out to the main game world. Effect is that everyone can roll a DK, but that a really tough questline is necessary in order to get a DK character out in the "real world".