Ghostcrawler on the Creation of WoW's Death Knight

by on Nov 17, 2016

Greg Street reflects on the creation of WoW's iconic hero class.

League of Legends Design Director Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street still has a lot of curious fans from his days at Blizzard. One asked him about the design process of the Death Knight, a wholly unique hero class based on the legendary character of Arthas that took center stage during 2008's Wrath of the Lich King expansion. He discusses how the two arrived at frost and blood specs, the key to the DK's success, and much more.

Because I didn’t know the WoW spell system very well from a technical perspective, I came up with a lot of new ideas. The upside of this was that they were new idea that pushed the team a little to implement new things. The downside was that it caused a lot of bugs (particularly with Shadow of Death, or whatever the talent that let you come back to life).

Even with the “hero class” concept, we know we had to present an argument to players over why they should pick the DK as their new main. We knew we had to do something different. Death Grip (which was mostly Xelnath) was key in this regard.

Read the full post at Ghostcrawler's blog: The Cave of 10,000 Crabs.


Last Updated: Nov 17, 2016