For many, the arrival of the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion represented brand new content, mobs, areas and endless possibilities for those that had been sitting at level 70 for some time. It also presented a brand new class of characters for those to try their hand at and change up the pace, the new Death Knight. The Death Knight is a hybrid character that can best be described as an undead warrior that post WoTLK can now be started at level 55 and be leveled fairly quickly.

I decided to try my hand at this new class of characters and was pleasantly surprised at the change of pace from my main character, a hunter, but I quickly realized a few things:

First off, it is nice to start at level 55 since this gets all that early grinding out of the way and makes you eligible for end game stuff very quickly and also allows you to learn talents very quickly. One problem is that the first area that is instanced does not last very long and learning to use the new Death Knight ends in about three levels. Once you are done with the initial quests, you are set out into the world of Outland. Being in Outland again is not that fun for me personally as I just leveled my Hunter after resting him for a year, so this is a bit repetitive and I also could have used some more time to figure out using this new character a bit more.

The second and biggest problem is that there are too many Death Knights out in the world right now. If you are rolling a Death Knight, it is very hard to find a group to run instances with since there are about twice as many Death Knights on the servers than any other class right now. Aside from problems grouping for instances, there are also some quests where you need a group and these are also hard to find other classes to help with, especially healers. With such a high abundance of Death Knights in the realms, it will be interesting to see how many are carried out to level 80 and used for end game runs or are they just a novelty for those that have grown bored of their main toons? Right now it is not uncommon to run around a town and see twice as many Death Knights as any other class in the game, this goes for both Horde and Allliance.

Also, some people I have spoken to do not think kindly about the new class of characters and refer to them as a Noob class. I guess the reasoning for this is because you start out at level 55 and some players don’t really learn how to use them correctly. I think that all these players are using the Death Knight now because it is new, same as a lot of people that were using Horde characters made a Paladin and Alliance made a Shaman after Burning Crusade was released. I think labeling the whole class as a Noob class is foolish and people need to relax and have fun with this game.