→ what COUNTS as an act of violence to sate a death knight's addiction? Does property damage count? Do they have to harm a living thing? Does said living thing have to be sentient? Does there need to be bruising, blood? Or does it vary, and some DKs can get away with punching a pillow or something?
From what I’ve read, you have to actually HARM a living being. They have to inflict “suffering and/or death,” neither of which are sensations that inanimate objects are capable of feeling.
Now here, I start doing a bit of headcanoning.
Personally, I feel like while you could get away with just going the vampire cop-out of harming creatures of only animal intelligence or so, that wouldn’t be as… nutritional, for lack of a better term. That’s a bread-and-water diet right there. It’ll get the job done, you’ll keep your sanity, but you’re still going to suffer some major Hunger pangs all the bloody time. Plus, you might have to hurt more for the same effect as harming a person, like having to eviscerate a hundred bunnies to get the same base satisfaction as eviscerating a single person.
(But seriously, man, this is Azeroth, there’re people out there who deserve evisceration more than those poor bunnies. Unless it’s that Darkmoon asshole rabbit.)
So harming people is likely the more satisfying, healthier option. You get fed better from it, you feel better from it. And as long as there’s pain, actual pain, you should be good. (Most likely, that pain must be physical, but maybe emotional or mental would be like… cherries on top? I dunno, might depend upon the individual knight.) The severity of their pain might directly correlate with how much of the Hunger you satisfy; a broken arm is a better “meal” than a bruised cheek, for example.
Actual killing is probably the most satisfying act of all, akin to… a gourmet meal, maybe, or a feast if you start massacring people. The Scourge’s ultimate goal wasn’t to make people suffer, it was to make them dead (and then not dead). It makes logical sense to me at least that they would twist the death knights up in such a way that the closest they ever get to feeling relief is when someone is gurgling their last breaths out beneath them.
Noting here because there was nowhere better up above: Masochists probably irritate the fuck out of death knights. It’s not suffering if you like the pain, after all. They’re like the celery of mortality or something.