Next Hero Class: Lessons Learned

We didn't make DKs intentionally OP. While we want people to purchase Wrath of the Lich King, there are lot of logical flaws with making one class purposely overpowered (such as angering all the players who play the other nine classes).

We made a few mistakes though, which I don't mind being up front about.

1) We have learned a lot about making classes. With the DK, we avoided some of the limitations other classes have. In the absence of a lot of tradition, we gave the early DK an answer to almost everything. While we definitely don't want to keep some of the crud that has built up on the older classes, it turns out when you make a new class without any of that junk before you scrub away the older stuff, you get a class that is too powerful. Who would have thought? The DK talent trees in particular had a lot of polish to make sure there weren't too many just terrible talents (a few haven't withstood the last year as well as others though).

To use just two examples, DKs can tank or PvP with any tree (though not necessarily with the same talent allocation per tree), and DKs have runes, a resource that is limited over short periods of time instead of long periods of time, yet they also have runic power that is quite useful in those periods where they may not have runes available. In some ways, the DK benefited from having two resources. (To be fair, there are weaknesses inherent in the rune model as well which players who have never played a DK seriously tend to overlook.)

2) As we started to work on the DK, we talked to PvP and PvE players who were comfortable with the BC status quo. What I mean is that raid leaders told us they didn't have room for DKs and Arena teams told us they didn't see the need to replace anyone on their team (especially a melee class without MS). Partially to counter this attitude, we gave the DKs a lot of different tools to handle different situations. They became a little too versatile. (Later, part of the big buff / debuff overhaul was designed to fix the same situation.)

3) I think this was one of those cases where we listened to the community, especially the beta participants, a little too much. Players had totally legit concerns about say the DK being too kiteable or the DK tank not having an answer for physical damage or whatever. Since we didn't have a ton of history or personal experience to fall back on and couldn't analyze a lot of data from live servers, we probably gave players the benefit of the doubt too often and added or buffed abilities when we didn't need to. More hardcore PvP and raid testing on the beta or PTR might help as well, since a lot of those concerns were born of solo experiences or pure speculation.

4) I think the fact that we showered the DK in blue items and mounts (to help them level up to the Northrend content quickly) and all of the effort we put into the start zone helped lead to the perception of favoritism. It feels weird to suggest we should have made the starting experience less epic to just to tone it down. On the other hand, maybe there was a way to communicate our goals better. A lot of players took the "hero class" thing (which really only meant that we modeled them after the Warcraft III heroes) to mean they should be overpowered, which was never our intent.

5) I think we just had bad luck with at least two of the DK systems. Their plate + spell damage combo just happened to be quite lethal in the early Arena seasons where 2s were predominant and burst damage was too high. Their cooldown-based tanking just ended up being really effective against a lot of the boss encounters. We didn't set out for either of those situations to be too uber. If the DK had been a caster, I don't think casters would have dominated the earlier seasons. If health pools had grown more (as they did going into BC) and we had been harsher about mana regen, then perhaps tanking wouldn't have been so overshadowed by giant boss hits that could only be survived by chaining say IBF and Bone Shield.

Ultimately, I wouldn't view the introduction of the new class as a failure by any stretch. There are a lot of players who love their DK even when she isn't overpowered. Adding a new class is a challenge, which we knew going in, and the DK didn't disappoint in that regards. It has taken a lot of iteration to kind of catch the death knight up all of the years of iteration on the existing classes, and I'm sure they're not done yet. It's also a good reason not to introduce a new class every expansion. :)

Q u o t e:
You didn't forsee that giving a class zero weaknesses was going to be overpowered?

It's not that simple. We designed around a lot of complaints that players have had over the years, which have often focused on their class's weakness. To use just one example, rage-based classes always suffered from lack of rage when in tank gear and spec but not being targeted. DKs don't have that problem. It's not that "rage starvation" was an interesting weakness designed into the warrior and druid class. It's just the way the mechanic worked.

But an even bigger factor is that, the DK is efficient in that nearly all of their spells or talents do something meaningful. Even the tanking talents tend to offer a dps boost as well. I don't even think the DK is without weaknesses. They were always very vulnerable to dispels in PvP for instance (unless they were literally just spamming Icy Touch), it's just that shamans weren't that prevalent early on.

That's a big difference from saying "Hey, let's make an overpowered class," but I suspect you knew that and were just going for the good sound bite. :)

Q u o t e:
What I always thought was odd about DKs is one of the original blurbs about it was 'anti-caster,' and yet it never really managed that function with any noteworthy effectiveness. (And of course, I was thankful, since we were already struggling.)

We were really carving off a niche for DK tanks as anti-caster, maybe the kind of thing you'd use against Hydross. We later decided that was too narrow a niche and that having major tanking niches at all wasn't a smart design.

Q u o t e:
A lot of players (including me) just wanted a sarcastic way to remark that the class was overpowered. "Hero class, bro" did nicely for that.

I don't think that many players were dumb enough to actually think that you purposefully overpowered DK's simply because it was a hero class.

I think a lot of players did that. Sadly, I don't think they all got the joke. :(

Q u o t e:
As I said uptopic: it's much easier to paint a masterpiece from a blank canvass after years of practice than to go back to an old picture and polish it up.

Yeah, good summary. That doesn't mean we won't go back though.

Q u o t e:
I'm currently more peeved that DKs still remain very polished while certain classes (cough warrior) seem to be holding on to the "crud" that Dks are free of. Yes, jealousy, my class is designed like a turd and this new class is designed like a god. The fact that devs seem fine with it like this is what peeves me. They claim the "crud" is just part of class mechanics and flavor.

It would be trivial to produce DKs who are just as unhappy with real or perceived “crud” about their class. I saw a couple of posts like that above this one. Every class has players who think theirs doesn’t get enough attention.

Q u o t e:
GC, if you can comment, since the thread's title is pretty generic: do we need another "hero" class? Or another class at all? I understand from a business standpoint that it really gave the game something fresh for old and new players alike to sink their teeth into, but was the fallout worth it to have another tank, another dps, more gear, more homogenization, more PvP frustration, etc.

WoW doesn’t need new classes. It doesn’t need new races either or even new spells for current classes. You could just keep playing the game over and over, leveling different alts and seeing how they do in Arena or Icecrown. But for a lot of players who have stuck with the game for several years, seeing something completely new can breathe new life into the game for them. There is a ton of anti-DK sentiment in this thread, but I have spoken with plenty of players who just love the way the class plays. The DK saved WoW for them in a sense.

Q u o t e:
Except that it's not profitable to alienate your existing playerbase who likes their old classes by making a new one so much better. DKs have been an incredible headache to balance. It's taken a good year to get the job done, if it is done.

I agree with the first part, but most of the devs here would probably say paladins (all 3 kinds) have been a bigger headache to balance this expansion, usually in the favor of the paladin. You don’t need an answer to everything to be overpowered.

Q u o t e:
This. When I was looking over DKs at the beginning of WotLK, my first thoughts were: "man, these guys have gotten better at designing claasses". DKs were so....streamlinedcompared to everything else. It made me want my class to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up to bring it into line with what seemed to be Bliz's new design philosophies and their planned direction for the game.

Streamlined is a good way to put it, and why I tried to distinguish “better at designing classes” from “overpowered and without weakness.” Yes, that is what we want to do with all classes. Some are closer than others.

Q u o t e:
Rotation for unholy DK's single target dps best cast sequence
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=nocombat Icy Touch(Rank 5), Plague Strike(Rank 6), Blood Strike(Rank 6), Blood Strike(Rank 6), Scourge Strike(Rank 4), Unholy Blight(Rank 4),


was a staple DK macro and provided reasonable PVE DPS with 1 button. Of course a better player is going to get better DPS with a proper rotation, but to say the class is to difficult is, well, obtuse at best.

That macro caused a big sensation, but the reason it worked is because it almost always defaulted to Icy Touch when stuff was out of range, and Icy Touch did way too much damage early on. You would have gotten a very similar effect with: /castsequence reset=nocombat Icy Touch(Rank 5)