Weapons play an important part for the Death Knight as he is able to turn them into powerful rune weapons with his rune forging skill. Death Knights begin the game with weapon skills for one- and two-handed swords and axes. When visiting a weapon's master in one of the capital cities they can also learn the one- and two-handed maces skill. The weapon choice does play a minor role, although orcs get an expertise bonus for axes, which will make those preferred. Humans get a similar bonus for maces and swords so they tend to chose these as their weapon. Regardless of weapon type every weapon can be imbued with rune enchants. While these rune enchants prevent any ordinary enchants like "mongoose" or "berserk" from being applied to the selected weapons, they are much stronger and increase in power with the Death Knight. The "Rune of the fallen Crusader", for example, increases the Death Knight's strength by 30% for 15 seconds, which means the enchantment will get better with increasing strength values.

It will make a huge difference whether you decide to fight with a two-handed weapon or with two one-handed weapons. The Death Knight is intended to fight with a single two-handed weapon, although dual wielding remains a possibility. Dual-wield tanking is not advisable as the increased miss chance and the high frequency of attacks can have a negative impact. It should be noted that Death Knights do not use shields like the other plate wearing tanks, but they rather tank with their two-handed rune weapon, which is a very uncommon sight. This leads to the Death Knight dealing out a good amount of damage while tanking though.