Rune (game resource)

Runes are the primary resource system used by death knights.

Most death knight abilities cost runes. Spending runes will in turn generate Runic Power as a secondary resource to power certain other abilities. Runes will slowly regenerate over time, while Runic Power will quickly decay outside of combat.

Before using any abilities, the death knight has six runes. Different abilities and spells consume different amounts of runes and, when used, will place one of the used runes on cooldown. Some abilities are able to refresh certain runes; Empower Rune Weapon will refresh all of them simultaneously; Blood Tap will refresh a single random fully depleted Rune; Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption gives a chance to refresh a rune when using runic power.

Runes have a base cooldown of 10 seconds, which is then reduced by haste (for example, 25% haste would give your runes an 8 second cooldown).

• Blood Boil
• Death's Caress
• Heart Strike
• Howling Blast
• Rune Tap
• Scourge Strike
• Soul Reaper

• Army of the Dead
• Festering Strike
• Marrowrend
• Obliterate

Developers stated 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. In early design, the Death Knight was intended to be able to customize how many runes of each type they wished to have in their 6 rune slots. This was eventually removed and replaced with the two-of-each-type system due to concerns about balance and complexity.

This is how the original icons looked:

During the 2008 Worldwide Invitational, 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:

• TCG cards
• Unholy Rune (Scourgewar)
• Blood Rune (Wrathgate)
• Frost Rune (Icecrown)

Sistema de runas