The lead producer of World of Warcraft, J. Allen Brack, was recently interviewed regarding the role of Death Knights in Wrath of the Lich King. He gave out more details about the role of the new hero class, its talent trees, as well as the character's racial abilities.

Brack confirmed that the Death Knight will be filling multiple roles in a party such as a raid tank which specializes in magic damage-dealing bosses but can also function as a main tank for other raids. In addition, the hero class can also act as a DPS character and summoner, sort of like a Warlock in plate mail:

There's a disease damage over time effect, there's physical abilities, a lot of summon-type creature abilities where you have creatures brought in to deal additional physical damage.

Like most experienced players would expect, the roles a Death Knight will be able fill in the game depends heavily on its spec. This has also been confirmed by Brack who discussed the different runes the class will be able to use to customize their character:

We think of Blood runes as being the more tanking-type runes. We'll have Frost as more of a crowd-control type rune.

We haven't really gotten into what the ideal specs are going to be for the blade configuration, in terms of whether you're going to have Unholy, Frost, Blood and how many of each. You'll have six slots, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of theory-crafting as to what the best options will be.

Finally, he discussed the character's racial abilities. When Arthas became a Death Knight, he became a member of the Scourge which turned him undead. This poses the question on how they will be handling this transformation, including the base racial abilities that a race has:

We're not going to let you have double racials. The way we'll handle that is with spells and abilities. Death Coil is a great example. Death Coil is a Death Knight ability that either deals damage to an enemy, or heals a friend. Part of allowing all the races to be Death Knights is so that players can choose whatever racials make the most sense for them.

He discussed other aspects of the Death Knight including blade respeccing and talent choices for the class. To read more on this, feel free to follow our source link which will take you to the three page Gamespy interview.