Just because Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is over with the League of Legends team these days doesn’t mean that he has stopped talking about World of Warcraft. The former Blizzard developer was asked by a fan to shed some light on the origins of the Death Knight class design in Wrath of the Lich King, and he responded by sharing seven or so design goals that he and the team had at the time.
The full list is too large to quote verbatim, but it is quite interesting to read and learn about some of the difficult choices that the team had to make and how it was experimenting with various skills and mechanics that either didn’t make the live game or no longer exist.
“There was a point where you could build a DK with something like 16 different diseases, which were all just generic, though there were abilities that scaled with disease count,” Street wrote. “Somewhere along the way we had the idea to just compress those down to two (Frost Fever and Blood Plague) and try and theme them more strongly. ”
It’s a great read, but it doesn’t let him off the hook: Ghostcrawler still owes us a pony.
