Most players prefer to do healing, shapeshifting, stealthing, ranged shots, totems, or any number of other abilities that death knights will never have, and they will stay with their favorite classes and play styles. Some players, like myself, probably just won’t like their armor decorated with skulls all the time.” “Blizzard sees the Death Knight as a kind of multipurpose tank. He can’t use a shield, instead picking between dual-wield and two-hander setups. The Death Knight will get something called presences, which work somewhat similarly to Paladin auras in that once activated they’ll stay on until you switch them off. Unlike auras they’ll only apply to the Death Knight. Those that Blizzard showed off included a blood presence, which augments damage per second (DPS), and an unholy presence, which apparently is best used for PvP as it increases attack speed and the speed of your global cooldowns. Along with the presences comes an entirely new resource system. The Death Knight won’t use energy or mana or rage to activate abilities, but instead use a system of runes and runic power. As lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan explained to us, the Death Knight will be able to equip combinations of runes (blood, unholy, or frost types) onto himself and consume those runes to pull off his special abilities. Once used, the rune will then enter a cooldown phase, set right now at 10 seconds. Kaplan explained it won’t be that much of a pain to switch around your rune setups, but you won’t be swapping them in and out after every fight. As runes are consumed you’ll build a runic power meter which can be used to fire off different types of skills. And it sounds like the Death Knight will have plenty of weird skills and abilities to use. No word yet on the specifics of his talent lines, but we did get to see abilities like plague strike (bonus weapon damage and damage-over-time effect), death coil (spell that does damage or heals undead friendly targets), and cage of ice (freezes target in place).