More Reasons to Dislike Level 58 DKs

So my last post was a rant about the PVE reasons DKs are evil.

Now for a different approach.

As you probably know, I'm an avid Roleplayer. It's interactive storytelling, basically, and it's intensely fun - when you do it right.

It is incredibly rare for Death Knights (especially level 58 Death Knights) to be doing it right.

I have a theory about that. It goes like this: in lore, Death Knights are incredibly powerful, and this is reflected by the class's starting level and array of skills. They are also the most triumphant anti-heroes of the piece. As a faction, they were more instrumental in defeating the Lich King than either the Horde or the Alliance, second only to the Argent Crusade for sheer, brutal effectiveness. Death Knights are damned - and also damned cool.

This combination of factors attracts young people with God complexes to the class. The high level is a cheat toward perceived power, even in roleplay. It's actually rather telling that even RP guilds often have a minimum level set for DKs well above their level 58 introduction into the wider World of Warcraft. The level also grants them access to a variety of clothing options. The cooler you look, the more powerful you are perceived to be, the theory goes, and since Death Knights are so fascinating and overpowered to begin with, as well as actually looking cool, Death Knight player characters generally end up not being cool after all.

To put it bluntly, ever level 58 DK I have seen roleplaying (with few notable exceptions) have done so poorly, and fall into one of three categories: the Death Knight godmoder, the Death Knight eRPer, and the "not-a-Death Knight" godmoder/eRPer.

And, since the death of the Lich King, Death Knights have stopped being particularly lore-relevant! The only thing we get about Death Knights post-Cataclysm is a little blurb about Thassarian and Koltira in WPL, which tells us that since their grand mission is up, most of them have pretty much just joined whatever faction they started out as ... maybe.

TL;DR: The Death Knight class tends to be just plain bad for RP, and bad roleplayers flock to it.