Rune system

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For rune lore, see rune magic.

The Death Knight character portrait, displaying his six runes. Shows empty runic power bar located below the health bar.

An outdated Death Knight character portrait, displaying a combination of six runes and the currently accumulated Runic Power.

The rune system is the resource system that is used by death knights, as opposed to mana, energy or rage.

Runes

The three different (now obsolete) rune types as revealed at BlizzCon 2007.

The death knight gains access to three different types of runes.

These are:

• Blood
• Frost
• Unholy

which also are the names of the death knight's three respective talent trees.

Each rune comes in a pair, resulting in a total of six runes. Different abilities and spells consume different types and amounts of runes - and, when used, will place the corresponding rune on a 10 second cooldown. Some abilities are able to refresh certain runes.

Even if ten seconds sounds like a lot, it actually isn't. If you only use abilities that require only 1 rune, you will have approx. 2 seconds left when using up all runes, sometimes even less if you've acquired death runes, and after that you also have a good amount of runic power accumulated.

There is also a fourth type of rune, which acts as any of the main rune types:

• Death

The death rune can be created by using the skill Blood Tap or through the following talent upgrades:

• Within the Blood tree, the talent Death Rune Mastery will give you a 33% chance per talent point (3 points max) to convert a Frost or Unholy Rune into a Death Rune after landing a hit with Death Stike or Obliterate.
• The Frost tree talent Blood of the North gives you a 20% chance per talent point (5 points max) after hitting with Blood Strike or Pestilence that a Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates.
• And the Unholy tree talent Reaping provides a 33% chance per talent point (3 points max) to convert a Blood Rune into a Death Rune after hitting with Blood Strike or Blood Boil.

Note that you only have six runes. A death rune will temporarily replace your frost, blood or unholy runes depending on what skill you use.

Runic power

Runic power is an extra resource that builds up as the death knight uses his or her abilities, displayed as an empty bar that fills up with a light sky blue color similar to rage under the Death Knight's health bar. Each ability used generates 10 runic power (can be improved with talents). Death knights start with maximum 100 runic power but that can be increased up to 130 through talenting. As with rage, runic power gradually diminishes when not being consumed or accumulated. Similar to combo points and finishing moves, death knights have abilities which will completely unleash all stored power.

Idea

Developers said at BlizzCon 2007 that they didn't want the new class to use the traditional resource systems because they wanted the death knight to have a different style of play. They stated their intention was for the death knight to use a mixture of spells and melee in close combat. Because of this, a system that didn't specifically rely on either mana or rage was more appropriate.

This is how the original icons looked:

During the 2008 WWI, it was noted that the original runes were replaced because they were too complex to show them refreshing inside the character's portrait bar.

This is how the replacement icons looked:

External links

Wrathblog.com Discussions of Wrath of the Lich King Information