Oi, an Aviela thread actually asking a question. Fine, I’ll go with it.
DK’s are more appropriately labeled as reanimated. There’s a book in Acherus which details this. They’re brought back with some of their bodily functions in tact - those being the desire to breathe, eat, sleep, and drink. And then they’re denied them for the sake of ensuring the wracking pains are brought forth in the proper manner.
Must a DK breathe? No. So why does it drown? Most appropriately, we can blame phantom limb syndrome for this. The DK’s lungs work due to the reanimation process, thus when he feels himself drowning, the brain dies because it’s convinced it’s losing air and needs it to survive.
Just talking about the wrath knights of the ebon hold and the lvl 55-58~ quests here ok.
Maybe, there is some allusion to free win something a reanimated zombie would lack.
We can see:
*that human dks don’t regress to horde characters by becoming forsaken.
*they can get drunk, and gain food buffs which might mean something good.
*They are counted as humanoid and not undead by default.
*they had some free will which they recovered when sent to light’s hope.
*they are bleeding as they can suffer from rend, and deep wounds. Similarly they can recover from bandages.
Overall while mindless zombies or fully mind controlled truely undead dk would have the same effect it might be more likely that since AAARRRRRRRRTHAASSSSSSSSS made them specifically to take over light hope and would have removed them afterward or fully controlled them as undead that he sent them as living but with the skills of a dk and under his control as they wouldn’t have the same vulnerability to the light as a full undead, which we can see in the final dk class quest where the light is 1-shotting the fully undead minions, while the dks are left with the control servered.
They are undead the same way the "upgraded " Nathanos was, the Lich King used Valkyr to raise us, it wasn’t a plague like the regular undead. Apparently the Valkyr are able to do a more complete reanimation.
Yes. Just because we retain our sentience and intelligence doesn’t make us any more or less “undead” than other undead things.
Lichborne too is a bad example and likely is just flavor text to say we are tapping more into our undead nature to rebuild our bodies from wounds and to make PvP more interesting by changing how CC’s can work against DK’s in that state (it should give us immunity to fear but make us able to be priest shackled).