World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic Interview

The editors over at VentureBeat appear to have Blizzard’s World of Warcraft developers on speed dial, as hot on the heels of their recent interview dedicated to the game’s upcoming Dragonflight expansion, we get this one that’s all about the Classic version of Wrath of the Lich King.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

GamesBeat: One of the major talking points in the original Wrath of the Lich King was death knight balance. They were overpowered for a large portion of the expansion. What’s the balance approach to that class for Classic?

Kevin Vigue: That was definitely a thing, especially at the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. Similar to what we did for Classic and Burning Crusade Classic, we’ll base our class design on the last patch of Wrath of the Lich King, which was 3.3.5. We’re going to be launching with those versions of the classes. There’s still a lot of awesome things about the death knight class, even if they’re not the kings and queens of PvP. They can still tank and DPS with any spec. We’re bringing back the old rune system. There’s all those flavorful abilities like rune carving. All that good stuff is still there.

But we’re not planning on bringing back the launch versions of death knights in particular. We think the versions of the classes from the last patch are, overall, the best designed, best balanced, and most fully thought out versions we can offer while still being true to Wrath. That’s where our starting point will be.