World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Previews

New previews of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack continue to trickle in following the Worldwide Invitational event in Paris. The first is at GameSpy:

The Death Knight’s sword has space for up to six runes ( two each of the “Blood,” “Frost” and “Unholy” runes are the default loadout) and every ability is powered by some combination of the user-configurable runes on the blade. That makes managing cooldowns and knowing what’s available when just a bit more complicated than classes that operate off basic mana. Depending on which runes a player has on the blade, there will be abilities that can only used rarely while others will become the Death Knight’s bread-and-butter attacks. This rune combination will also need to be coordinated with a player’s talent built as a player specced heavily in the “Unholy” tree will find themselves as a significant disadvantage with more than one “blood rune.”

Next up is Eurogamer:

A quick scan of the Death Knight’s talent trees gave a glimpse of the class’ future: summonable runic weapons that repeat your attacks, unleashing blood worms, lots of spell deflection and minor self-healing, frost-based crowd control, turning yourself into a controllable Ghoul for 45 seconds when you die, exploding enemy corpses and swarms of unholy insects. We already know that later skills include the ability to summon Ghoul minions and even resurrect players as Ghouls they can control, with Ghoul abilties.

And, finally, IGN:

Consuming runes by using skills also charges up your runic power meter, which lets you fire off different kinds of skills. Right now the only skill for the Death Knight that uses runic power is his death coil ability, a damage spell that can also heal a friendly undead target. Also in his repertoire was death grip, which pulls a target toward the knight and forces it to attack, a damage spell that also reduces attack speed, a damaging melee strike that inflicts more over time, and a special strike that becomes more powerful if disease effects are active on the target.