Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly weekend look at the first hero class, the Death Knight. Daniel Whitcomb is back after dealing with some light administrative work back at the Ebon Hold.

Inscription seems to be coming on to the beta server in bits and pieces, especially when it comes to the much looked for glyphs. One or two classes seem to trickle in each build, and in the latest build, it is the Death Knight's turn. Today, we'll take a quick look at the new Death Knight glyphs, and figure out how useful they'll be to the various playstyles and specs of the Death Knight. As always, it's worth noting that these are beta numbers, so things could change by the time Inscription and Death Knights see the light of day on live servers.

Typically, every week, Lichborne has Daniel pontificating about the important aspects of the upcoming Death Knight class. This week, however, Zach takes over as Daniel is stuck in Ebon Hold on official Death Knight business.

This week on Lichborne, we'll set aside looking at talents and abilities which seem very much in flux but instead focus on the potential problem of having to catch up with other classes. While the World of Warcraft's first Heroic class gets the advantage of jump-starting at Level 55, the reality is that a vast portion of the playing community will be trudging their way to Northrend while your Death Knight is just about to set foot in Hellfire Peninsula.

The trouble with this is that Outland and all its instances will no longer be the endgame. For the Death Knight, Outland is merely transitionary to the new endgame and there are no real upgrades worth pursuing -- even in the Level 70 instances. Most blues and even the epics from Heroics will be quickly replaced within a few hours of questing in Northrend. Similar to how The Burning Crusade effectively killed instances like Stratholme, Scholomance, and Upper Blackrock Spire, most Death Knights will skip the high level instances in Outland. Lichborne regular columnist Daniel put up a great guide for Outlands gear, and those be... serviceable until you hit the new continent.

So here's yet another example of how mutable Death Knights are at the moment: This week, I decided to spec Blood all week and make a genuine effort to learn all the ins and outs I could so that I could bring you a good solid overview of Blood for this weekend's column.

Then build 8820 came along, and Blood, while having the same basic mechanics, got a rather big hit to its health regeneration and DPS abilities, and I'm left trying to figure out the extent of the damages. In the end, I don't think Blood was horribly nerfed in this build, but it might have been slightly overnerfed.

Every week, Daniel Whitcomb brings you analysis, opinions, and advice on the world of the Death Knight in Lichborne.

The Death Knight, as is expected, is still very much a class in flux. This sometimes makes it difficult to pontificate too much about certain aspects of the Death Knight class, because they may be completely different in the next Beta build.

That said, a lot of aspects of the Death Knight class are solidifying nicely at this point. Itemization, or at least the way Death Knights use stats, is pretty solid, and worth discussing so that you have an idea of what gear upgrades to look for you as you exit the Ebon Hold and head out into the wider world.

Every weekend in Lichborne, Daniel Whitcomb will take you through the ever-changing (Beta) world of World of Warcraft's first hero class, the Death Knight.

With a new Beta Build on the test servers, Death Knights have received a massive amount of talent changes. Many of them have been hinted at on the test servers for eons, and I've covered much of them in last week's Lichborne. The new disease changes are in, as is the changing of Chains of Ice's Snare component to an undispellable physical effect. You can check out the full list of changes here.

Among the new changes is a very extensive revamp of the Unholy tree, which features quite a bit of talent consolidation and quite a few new and interesting mechanics and abilities. In fact, I'd have to say that the current build may very well mark the rise of the Unholy Tree, with the changes making it an amazing tree for grinding and PvP.

As a disclaimer, there's still lot of bugs in this build. Many abilities don't seem to be working quite right, especially Blood Caked Blade (which only hits for 1-4 damage based on the number of diseases instead of 60% weapon damage per disease), Raise Dead, and Night of the Dead. Because of that, it's often hard to say how or if an ability would be better or worse if it actually worked. Therefore, I'll be discussing the abilities based on if they actually did work, backed with some feel for them from Death Knight play on the Beta Servers.

It's Wrath of the Lich King Beta time, and finally time to meet the new Death Knight class. Unfortunately, we can't really guarantee you'll be meeting the same class that you'll see in the live game, per se. It's not that the class isn't shaping up well or isn't quite distinctive, it's more that there's just so much that's changing.

The next build that's scheduled to hit the Beta servers is a perfect example. Not only will talent trees be changing extensively, with some talents becoming baseline and some baseline abilities becoming talents, some talents switching tiers, and others even switching trees, but the very way we inflict and stack diseases will be getting some tweaking as well. In addition, many of the Death Knight's baseline abilities, especially related to disease and damage rotations, are changing as well.

So with all these changes, what can you say about a class that's changing drastically on a weekly basis, and may look completely different from how it does now by the time Wrath goes live? Is it really possible to speak about an overarching unifying theory of Death Knights?

Well, let's try. Welcome to the first annual State of the Death Knight address.