Spooncraft

This is for all the number crunchers out there and as well to answer some emails and comments posed about how Death Knight’s “energy” system works.

Death Knights are unique in that while they deal a good amount of damage with spell effects, they have no reliance on +spell damage armor and weapons. Instead their damage is derived from the bas damage + some fraction of their attack power in the following form:

 NetDamage = BaseDMG + AttackPower * APC

Where APC equals the Attack Power Coefficient. This value is unique to the individual spell, and the estimated value is listed for each ability below.

The second Death Knight mechanic, Runic Power (RP) functions in much the same way, where the duration and/or damage of an ability requiring RP to activate is given as follows:

 Duration = RP/100 * MaxDuration
 NetDamage = RP/100 * BaseDMG + AttackPower * APC

Death Knights receive 2 Attack Power per 1 Strength, and none from Agility, similar to Warriors, Bearform Druids, and Shaman. So safe to say that as is now the prime target stats Death Knights are looking for would be very similar to those of a fury warrior in STR/+hit/+crit/+haste and possibly much later down the line +expertise. Stamina obviously is demanded by all classes but I’ve always been the type of player that while leveling (and obviously for PVP server hijynx) stacking a little bit of stamina is a safe bet.

Runes

Runes are the Death Knight’s “power,” their version of mana/rage/energy. Runes come in three different “flavors” and most Death Knight abilities requires some combination of runes to use. You may have up to six runes “engraved” into your weapon; it has not yet been revealed how runes will be added and/or modified by the player.

Currently, runes have a recharge time of 10 seconds from the time of activation. This can be talented down to 5 seconds on a percentage based proc with the “XXX Rune Mastery” talents found in each talent tree.

Runic Power

Runic power, gauged by a blue crescent bar adorning the character’s portrait, is the Death Knight’s hybrid of rage and combo points. It is generated by all single-target abilities that do not drain it. Thus far, all abilities using it drain it completely. Unless the ability description says otherwise, 100 runic power is required for the ability to have its tooltip potency. Using it with less runic power will result in less damage/healing, or a shorter duration, hence the “up to …” wording of the description. While out of combat, runic power decays at the same rate as rage.

Additionally Ghouls are going to be part of any good Death Knight’s DPS and functionality. We’re by no means a full pet class like hunters and warlocks can be, but with the ability to summon up 2 ghouls and possibly a gargoyle, as well as raising dead mobs to fight for you and the army of dead channeled spell; you’re looking at some really decent minion tactics that can overwhelm the enemy. Think snake traps on acid.

You can choose to target a friendly player who died and summon a ghoul from his/her corpse, that player would then get the option to play as the ghoul instead of it mindlessly fighting for you. When you die (through unholy talent) you can also resurrect (like the priest spirit of redemption thing) as a ghoul and fight for a short while. Ghouls use energy as their basic power system like a rogue or cat druid.