by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

With BlizzCon 2016 sadly in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to take a look back at everything we were able to learn about the future of Diablo III to get a sense of where we’re headed. Key to that future is the reveal of the Necromancer as the next playable class for Diablo III. The Rise of the Necromancer character pack will be arriving some time in the second half of 2017, so we’ve got a bit of a wait before balance is restored to Sanctuary. In the meantime, I’m sure we’ll be receiving updates on new skills and items for the class as they’re developed and we may just be able to have a hand in shaping that development to make sure the best Necromancer experience is delivered on opening day.

In order to do my part and help, I want to discuss my feelings on the Necromancer after I’ve now allowed myself to ruminate on the many, many playthroughs of the demo available at BlizzCon. I tried the Necromancer on both the console and PC, and, at least for now, I feel like the PC is the superior platform for the Necromancer. This mostly boiled down to greater control over which corpses were exploded and pinpoint precision for Blood Rush distances. Granted, PC is also the main way that I play at home, so my expertise with the keyboard and mouse may have simply made the class easier to get a feel for and control on PC.

Skills

The demo offered us 6 skills that we could not change. In fact, we could not view the character’s Skill selection page, Inventory page, or Paragon selections. We were locked into what was offered and all of the following skills were the base versions with no runes. It was hard to get a sense of the major impact of the skills damage-wise without being able to see the quality of gear driving them, nor did we have a sense of the difficulty, as we were in what seemed to be a Greater Rift 2, but things were taking a bit long to kill for the difficulty that would be equivalent to on the live server. I was told by one of the developers that the demo was about on par with how you might feel after getting a fresh Necromancer to level 70.

With all of the above in mind, let’s discuss in particular the operation of the skills and how meaningful they might be for the rest of the Necromancer’s kit.

Clicking on each skill will pop up a gif of the skill in action.

Blood Rush – a low cooldown movement skill that allows you to move up to 50 yards from your starting point unhindered. This is by far my favorite skill of the demo, mostly because it just felt satisfying to control. The camera movement with the skill was very smooth, you had great tactical control of just how far you wanted to travel, and it felt like it transpired quickly. One of the developers I spoke with said that he believes this is the best/strongest movement skill they’ve put into the game and I find it hard to disagree. I can already imagine some speedfarm builds where this skill will be enabled to do damage or have its cooldown removed.

Blood Siphon – a channeled generator attack that both restores your Essence (the Necromancer’s main resource) and your health during the duration of the channel. There wasn’t anything particularly flashy about this skill, but such is the life of a generator. It felt like it did a good job of restoring Essence (which does not regenerate naturally, by the way) in a timely fashion. I can imagine future runes of this allowing you to Blood Siphon multiple targets or converting the heal into a buff for your next Essence spender. I could even imagine a Legendary effect where your pets gain more offense and/or defense while you channel Blood Siphon.

Bone Spear – an Essence spender that shoots a piercing projectile at and through your target enemy. This is the first of many classic Necromancer skills reintroduced in Diablo III. It works as you may remember – throw out a Bone Spear, watch it hit all enemies in its line of flight. This is another skill where I could see the potential for runes that create multiple spears from one cast or runes that increase the size of the spear. In the demo, this was a good skill to throw out when, after a Corpse Explosion, you had one or two enemies remaining or for when you were fighting the Rift Guardian.

Command Skeletons – a pet skill that has both an active and passive component to it. Passively, this skill will summon your skeletons to the battlefield. The base skill provides for 5 ranged-attack skeletons and five melee skeletons. The active portion of this skill defines the reason why this is called Command Skeletons and not Raise Skeletons. Upon activation of the skill, your skeletons will all instantly move to the monster that you are targeting and start dealing damage to it, with a temporary buff to their offensive capabilities. This feeds into the aesthetic of the Necromancer being a true commander of the dead and helps to differentiate his pet abilities from the obvious comparison in the Witch Doctor. I’m sure we will see plenty of ways to modify the skeletons like a Tall Man’s Finger equivalent, but I can even imagine runes that convert your five ranged-skeletons to become melee as well or maybe a change to the activation where instead of rushing off to fight, they run back towards you to protect you and provide defensive bonuses.

Corpse Explosion – the return of another iconic Necromancer skill. There is a lot of great potential for this skill, even in the way that it had to be worked into the game. Diablo III currently doesn’t do much with corpses besides throw them all over the environment in awesome displays of destruction and then eventually fade them out. As such, they had to create what you might call a “corpse item” that appears every time a Necromancer kills an enemy (or when a character assists a Necromancer in a kill) and then from there, the Necromancer can manipulate the corpse.

Corpse Explosion works differently in Diablo III compared to its classic cousin in that one cast of the skill can actually net you multiple explosions of corpses, based on the proximity of what’s available to explode. The damage is also based on weapon damage and not the monster type or its health. It’s also not yet determined whether you’ll be able to blow up other Necromancers’ corpses or not. In the demo, this skill didn’t feel too powerful, but it was the clear choice for area-of-effect (AoE) situations and should see some tweaking before the Necromancer goes live. The developers noted that they tuned it down a little bit so that people wouldn’t feel compelled to only use Corpse Explosion during the demo and they also noted that they have more plans for corpses going forward.

With this skill essentially turning “off” during single-target encounters (think Rift Guardians that produce no adds), you might likely see a Legendary effect that produces a corpse every so often or maybe the ability to sacrifice one of your pets for a corpse.

Decrepify – an AoE curse that slows monsters and reduces the amount of damage they can do for a brief period of time. See the picture above this section for a glance at what it looks like. A Necromancer has to have their curses, right? During the demo, this skill wasn’t super useful as the imminent threat level was relatively low, but this should be an effective curse in higher difficulties and curses in general might make the Necromancer particularly useful in group play, based on how strong they turn out to be. The sky is the limit when it comes to runes and Legendary powers for curses like Decrepify, but I can imagine runes that allow Decrepify to do damage-over-time to affected enemies or even a Legendary power that simultaneously casts a second Decrepify every time you cast it to stack the ability.

In general, I feel like the developers did a good job of showing their appreciation for the Necromancers of Diablo II in bringing back classic skills, while also showcasing how they can redefine the class a bit for Diablo III with new skills like Blood Rush. I’ll be curious to see how this balance plays out. We already saw a preview of both a classic skill in Blood Golem as well as a new skill in Army of the Dead, of which the latter looks very satisfying to use.

Playability

Despite the developers reiterating to us time and again that this is an early build of the Necromancer, it exhibited some of that Blizzard magic they have become famous for. Most of Blizzard’s alpha material could easily pass for other companies’ final product and this playthrough of the Necromancer reinforced that. Again, I harken back to how smooth it felt to use Blood Rush or the snappiness of the skeletons to the target when commanded.

There were two moments that felt a bit awkward, though. With Blood Siphon, the animations to get into the skill and out of the skill seemed a little sluggish. Maybe it will just take some getting used to since it’s a channeling generator. There were also times where Corpse Explosion felt like it failed to pop and I’m not sure if that’s because it wasn’t a critical hit or if there weren’t enough additional explosions, but there was definitely a disparity between uses of the skill. Perhaps a more controlled and nuanced testing of the skill will prove otherwise.

I did enjoy the overall gameplay experience. As I went through multiple sessions of the demo, I felt my routine becoming crisper. I would Blood Rush around the map to find enemies and elites, Decrepify them to control their advance, let my skeletons beat up on things and cast Bone Spear at some of the most dangerous threats, wait for the mobs to form a nice pack and then hit Corpse Explosion when my skeletons or Bone Spears had killed off enough enemies. Then I would Blood Siphon whenever I was running low on Essence and command the skeletons to kill off any remaining targets after the explosions. With this method, every skill found its place and my clear times went down with each run. It made me very hungry to dig into more complex setups of the Necromancer.

Aesthetics

Early indications point to the team having their finger on the pulse of what it should mean to be and play a Necromancer. The armor in the demo captured the iconic look while introducing some new elements like the class-specific scythe weapon. The animations of the Necromancer as he pulled the blood and life essence out of enemies with Blood Siphon or nearly hadouken-ed each Bone Spear into the battle felt just right. Stuff we weren’t exposed to in the demo, like the concepted armor sets (especially that Blood one) seem really macabre and right in line with what fans should be expecting to utilize.

I will levy some criticism though, as, currently, the Necromancer has a weapon, but actually doesn’t incorporate it into any of the attacks available in the demo. He even puts his shield on his back for some abilities, which maybe speaks to his devil-may-care attitude, but seemed a bit odd or off-putting at times. Something other playtesters imagined was that maybe you might see the Necromancer point with the scythe and then from the tip of the weapon a skill like Blood Siphon would emanate so that it looked like he was drawing the blood in through the weapon. This would, at the very least, give the weapon a reason to exist.

Overall, this feels like a very good beginning. As the class becomes further fleshed out, I look forward to contributing more feedback on skills, playstyles, and items. I think the fun will truly begin when numbers start to get locked down and we can begin theorycrafting builds. Maybe we’ll even get further chances to playtest advancements with the class on the PTR. Either way, I’m satisfied with what I’ve seen so far and I patiently look forward to more. Let me know what you think in the comments if you had a chance to test the Necromancer for yourself at BlizzCon 2016 or if you have ideas based on what you’ve seen so far.