The return of Necromancers as NPCs was confirmed by Jay Wilson in April 2011. There appears to be a level of PR in this reply - the D3 Team has never ruled out any character from appearing in an expansion - but it's impossible to know how much this is a serious consideration and how much it's just saying something consoling to keep Necromancer fans on board.ĭ3 Necromancer NPC? We're looking out ahead of time at what our expansions are going to be, so we've got to keep room open for some of those other classes down the road." We are trying to design class so that if we did bring back the Necromancer, there's room for him. "But after we've established 'Diablo III' as its own game with its own type of gameplay and experiences, I wouldn't be opposed to looking at old classes. Though the Necromancer will not be one of the five characters in Diablo 3, the developers have left the door open for the class to potentially return in the game's planned expansions: "There's a lot of people on our team who aren't happy with our class choices,” he admitted. Feedback from the community is always a focus for us whenever we make decisions.Īs An Expansion Character? When we created all the classes for D3, we did most of those decisions essentially in secret before the project was actually announced, but we really want to see how the game plays and how people respond to it and what they miss, what they wish was there and we will make our decisions. As far as a group in the universe, I’m sure we are going to continue to use them.Īs a playable class, it kind of depends on what the community wants and what the team wants. We have some NPCs who are necromancers who appear in the game. Well, Necromancers actually already appear in D3 to some capacity. The appearance of NPC Necromancers was confirmed by Jay Wilson in an April 2011 interview with. We focused with the witch doctor on having him play differently enough from the necromancer so that, say if someday in the future we want to add some of the old classes back to Diablo III, I don’t like those doors to be closed. So we decided to go with a new pet class. We felt the job was so well done that we didn’t know that we could do a lot to improve him, and that choosing to make that class was more or less like putting handcuffs on ourselves and wouldn’t allow us to create new and original gameplay. If we were going to bring him back, curses, skeletons, corpse explosion-you’re done. Jay elaborated on this in September 2008: One of the reasons we didn’t do the same treatment with the necromancer that we did with the barbarian is that the necromancer was more fully realized as a class in Diablo II. We wanted to create new gameplay, so we chose to do the Witch Doctor as a different kind of class." "We could add some new stuff to him but for the most part - curses, corpse explosion, skeleton pets - done. We're not just making a 'Diablo II' with updated 3D graphics." "The problem was, we looked at the class and didn't think that we could really make him a lot better," he explained.
"The goal is to try and give people new gameplay and not just re-hash old gameplay. "Our approach for classes in 'Diablo III' is that we don't have a strong desire to bring back classes from the previous game," Wilson told me. Here's D3 Game Designer Jay Wilson explaining this in an August 2008 interview.
This contrasts to the Barbarian, who they thought they could update and reinvent in interesting ways. Their main argument was that the Necromancer was done so well in D2 that they didn't see much to improve upon in D3, and didn't want to just repeat the same character in the new game. The non-inclusion of the Necromancer in Diablo III was greeted with a great deal of protest by loyal fans, and as a result Blizzard has repeatedly had to explain why they made the decision.
The Diablo 3 Necromancer beta started on 12 April 2017.ĭiablo 3 Necromancer Skills Ī full list of Necormancer skill can be found in the Necromancer Skills Section Necromancer Cinematic Trailer - Blizzcon 2016 Primary weapon on the Diablo 3 Necromancer is the Scythe. The first gameplay was shown at BlizzCon 2017 and the character is based on the Diablo 2 Necromancer.
The Necromancer released on 27 July along with patch 2.6.0 and was announced at BlizzCon 2017, the Necromancer is being added to the game via character pack DLC called the Necromancer Pack which cost $14.99. 2 Diablo 3 and Reaper of Souls original release.1.4 Necromancer Male Introduction Trailer.1.3 Necromancer Female Introduction Trailer.1.2 Necromancer Cinematic Trailer - Blizzcon 2016.