The Death Knight - WOW's first Hero Class

World of WarCraft's first new class is also its first ever Hero Class -- though the implementation may not be exactly what you were expecting. "One of the ideas we had for the Death Knight was that you'd convert your character into a Death Knight," says lead game designer Tom Chilton. "That you would stop being a level 80 Mage or whatever and become a Death Knight. But when we were running that around the team, it was too common a sentiment to feel like, well, I don't want to lose my existing character. What I'm going to actually do is create a level 1 Hunter that I intend to turn into a Death Knight, and power him to level 80...and this would become a weird hoop you were going to have to jump through."

So instead, you unlock the ability to create a Death Knight by finishing a quest chain -- comparable in difficulty to the Warlock's epic mount quest -- with any of your existing level 80 characters, at which point you can make an entirely new, wholly separate Hero Class character starting somewhere close to level 60 (the exact number hasn't been decided). "Some ideas that are still under consideration are that you'd start in Stratholme and have to break your way out of there," says Chilton. "Maybe you've come to your senses and said, 'Wait, I don't want to serve the Lich King.'"