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PAX East Diablo Press Event Summary: Necromancer Updates

Hey everyone,

This past weekend, I was invited to a Diablo 3 Press Event in Boston, to see the new developments on the Necromancer class.

I'll try to keep it concise and concentrate on everything new I learned. If you'd like to see other coverage, I'll link to some other sites below.

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• The female Necromancer was shown off. She's got a very similar vibe to the D3 male Necromancer, as an 80's rockstar and commander of the dead.

• The demo was very similar to the BlizzCon demo, in that you started in a Rift on Hard difficulty, and were teleported to the Temple of the Firstborn area for the Rift boss. This was just for the demo, and not an intended change for the live game.

• The animations for everything look super crisp and polished. I think it's one of Diablo 3's biggest strengths, and the Necromancer skills will just push that bar even higher.

• New Skills:

  • Grim Scythe: Swing a huge spectral scythe in a 180° arc, generating Essence per enemy hit. It felt like a bit like the Barbarian's Cleave, but had a very distinct Necro feel to it. Almost like Leoric's swing from Heroes of the Storm.
  • Blood Nova: Spend a portion of your health to hit enemies in an AoE around you. Think Wave of Force, but blood themed. The animation is amazing. You can definitely spam this ability very quickly to lose a ton of your health.
  • Devour: Corpse skill. Consumes nearby corpses to restore Essence (and Health, with the rune we had). The animation is also very clear, and grabs the corpses from the entire screen, so I was constantly "overhealing" on Hard difficulty.
  • Golem (Blood Golem): Passive is to summon a Blood Golem. Active restores 25% of your health, and resummons the Blood Golem at the targetted area, dealing damage. It didn't feel particularly strong, so it's mostly a way to refocus your golem and regain health.
  • Leech: Curse enemies in an area, granting 1% life per enemy per hit. Similar to the curse from BlizzCon.

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Some additional notes:

• Curses can stack on monsters. So you can create a Necro that almost exclusively casts curses. Not so helpful in solo play, but...

• All players can benefit from Curses. So the new Curse can give everyone the ability to regenerate life. It will be very likely that a Support Necro will be viable in group play, depending on the balance.

• Corpses are not going to be single targetable, a la Corpse Explosion from D2. As far as I can tell, D3's Corpse Explosion is going to be the most precise skill that uses corpses, and it works in a small AoE. The new skill (Devour) essentially uses up all the corpses on screen, and I believe the other Corpse skills will be somewhere in the middle.

• Corpse builds are definitely going to suffer a bit in Greater Rifts, because they will have difficulty with many of the Rifts Guardians that don't spawn minions. I think it's likely that one of the Necro sets or legendaries will spawn corpses every few seconds, as a way to help with this issue.

• It'll be interesting to see how else Health is used as a resource for the Necromancer.

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No price was announced, and the release is still slated for second half of 2017. The Necromancer will be on the PTR for a while, so keep your eyes out for that.

I'll try to answer all the questions to the best of my ability!

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