Necromancer Influencer Summit
Diablo Fans attended the first ever Diablo 3 Global Influencer Summit hosted by Blizzard last month. Attendees were able to demo the Necromancer's "Meleemancer" build, discuss the Necromancer with Diablo 3 developers, and discover new information about the upcoming class.
Some of the information included in this post has already been revealed, but we did learn new details about specific skills, set designs, and more.
Necromancer Overview
- The Necromancer will be released with Patch 2.6.
- The Necromancer wasn't designed for the group meta or with a support role in mind. Instead, it was designed around sets and playstyles.
- However, the Necromancer does seem viable in a support role thanks to pets and curses.
- Playstyles will be extremely varied for the class.
Skills, Runes, and Resources
- The Necromancer will have three resources: essence, health, and corpses.
- There is currently no passive essence regeneration.
- Necromancers will have three Elemental damage types: Physical, Cold, and Poison.
- This makes the Convention of Elements ring quite worthwhile for the class.
- Command Skeletons (seen at BlizzCon last year) now only summons melee skeletons.
- Skeletal Mages will still be a part of the Necromancer somehow - just not with Command Skeletons.
- Revive is a corpse skill, and it took the most development time by far since different skins had to be created for each creature type.
- There is a limit to the number of monsters you can have revived at one time.
- Revived monsters are visibly different from their normal counterparts and last a short amount of time.
- When elite monsters are revived, you'll get a normal version. Additionally, you can't revive bosses.
- You can, however, revive Mallet Lords.
- Don't expect the cooldown on Blood Rush to be removed without Legendaries.
Blood Rush in action.
- Devour allows you to consume corpses to regenerate essence.
- The skill's Cannibalize rune makes the skill regenerate both health and essence.
- When you use the skill, you consume all the corpses on screen. (The skill's range is basically the entire screen.)
- Though it can feel wasteful, the decision to consume all the corpses is intentional, so Devour isn't used mindlessly.
- In the demo, the Blood Golem wasn't easily controlled. (The pet often chased after enemies the Necromancer wasn't targeting.)
- The level of control varies based on the Golem's rune, so other runes will grant you much more control.
- Sacrificing health to benefit pets isn't currently being considered, as it's often unexpected. (Pets are sometimes dumb and stand in fire.)
- There is currently no cooldown on Leech, a curse that restores health to you and your allies when cursed enemies are damaged.
- This is intentional, as the lack of a cooldown is justified from a cost/benefit perspective.
- Existing fading technology in the game can be used to differentiate pets between Necromancers in a group.
- The developers practiced "DoT avoidance" - meaning they wanted to focus on more hard-hitting, visceral skills.
- Travis Day wanted to avoid runes that were straightforward, obvious choices. (For example, simply dealing more damage for that particular skill.)
- Instead, Necromancer runes will be more focused on trade offs, such as lowering a skill's radius for increased damage.
- Because many Necromancer skills are focused on corpses being available, you should anticipate swapping skills based on your current situation.
- The developers learned a lot about cheat death passives with the Crusader, and they realized all of the passives should be on the Crusader's level.
Armor Set Concepts revealed last November.
Themes and Items
- The four Necromancer sets will be: a ranged caster set, a pet-focused set, a blood-focused set, and a melee set.
- The aesthetics for these sets are currently a "Plague Doctor"-esque set, a bone-themed set, a Dracula-esque set, and an Aztec-inspired set with over-the-top gold elements.
- The sets are still being finalized, but the Aztec-inspired set will be the melee set.
- The Necromancer was designed with three themes: Blood and Bone, Frost, and Blight.
- Blood skills are more powerful, but cost health.
- Frost isn't about blizzards or frostbolts, but more about the cold and isolation surrounding graves and death.
- Blight, similar to a death and decay theme, will encompasses debuffs, snares, and the idea of things withering away.
- Some obvious Necromancer themes are better represented in items, sets, or animations rather than skills.
- For instance, Priest of Rathma themes will be present in items.
- The developers tried to avoid too many class-specific items for the Necromancer.
- The Necromancer will avoid the slapstick humor of the Witch Doctor; this class is not meant to be funny.
Dealing with Corpses
- For group play, each Necromancer will see their own corpses.
- For same screen co-op on consoles, corpses may have two charges.
- Corpses will eventually despawn when off screen.
Yes, We Asked About Poison Nova
- Poison Nova is an iconic part of the Diablo 2 Necromancer, but it's not being used for the Necromancer in Diablo 3.
- Julian Love discussed the controversy around dropping Poison Nova. Did people really love the poison aspect - or did they just love the ability?
- Blood Nova fills the void for the Poison Nova nostalgia.
- Other Poison skills from Diablo 2, such as Poison Dagger and Poison Explosion, weren't worth bringing over.
- The Witch Doctor covers a lot of the potential Poison skills that could be used in the Diablo 3 Necromancer.
- The developers didn't want to force Poison skills if they weren't viable.
- Poison will be represented in the "Blight" theme.
Patch 2.6
- Effect locality will be added in Patch 2.6, greatly reducing the clutter you see from other players' abilities.
- You'll still see important skill animations (like curses), but around 75% of animations from friendly players will be removed.
- Patch 2.6 will start effect locality with the Necromancer before the development team moves on to other "big offenders."
Influencer Content
You can view additional content covering the event from Bluddshed and the Westmark Workshop podcast.
Necromancer Closed Beta
The upcoming Closed Beta is just around the corner. Make sure you're eligible for the beta here.
Brianna is a Senior Content Manager at Curse, helping to manage content for a variety of properties including Diablo Fans, Gamepedia, HearthPwn, MMO-Champion, GwentDB, and more.
I had a great time playing the Necromancer! Can't wait to try it out again soon. Blood Nova is the beeeeeeeeest
Yawn, more class design around sets. Blizzard continues to fail this franchise miserably.
So ya...you'll get four builds that the devs layout for you that involve a sequence of skills to get damage, damage reduction and some added effect rinse repeat. LoN might have have one more build annnnd endless rifts and endless gen leveling. That's it. Not a single core problem with this game has been fixed but badly needs to be for going on a good six months now this game is drowning, straight drowning.
you guys should just wait for the next installment of the diablo franchise tbh (if there even WILL be one) this game is beyond repair at this point.
They're saying all the right things with regards to the Necro...
It's no longer a case of "Will I play Necro?" or even "HOW will I play Necro?" It's not a question of "Which set do I want to try out first?"
Pet set, Blood Set and Melee set all sound appealing, hope they live up to the hype!
i asked that before: why do you want to restrict the site to yes-men? everyone has an opinion and that this game is beyond repair, that the micropaymancer won't change anything for the game AFTER a hefty paywall and the anguish one gets when a new season begins isn't something a dev should ignore. nor a fan site.
When was Poison Nova ever as popular as some make it seem? It was a dumpster-tier skill which no one used outside of meme builds like Throwing Barbarians.
"yawn" and "too late" may not be prime examples for constructive criticism, but saying that one should wait for the next installment may have some truth in it since d3 is in the state it is currently in. and being misunderstood by the devs which don't seem to grasp what many people want and therefore being sour with the way they don't change the endgame at all is something which diverts criticism towards the goal the misunderstood person wants the game to go to.
we are not developers. we say we don't like the endless number grind in rifts/grifts/crifts, we don't like the paragon system (it was designed until 100 and you can still see that!) and we generally don't like what the devs and their communication (or lack thereof) do to this franchise. do we have to come up with better ways to change that? no. but the community still does it and most recently got nothing in return for providing days of feedback on the ptr regarding primal ancients.
so, what do we have? we strike a generally negative tone, since the game went downhill after some point in RoS and the devs didn't really communicate since vanilla. ah, and we have a great toilet booth on blizzcon this year. being done with the 20 year nonsense and all.
2.6 is Season 11, so for me, it's which Necro set are they going to show off first. What are they going to make as the easy grab? Also depends on what other sets are for show. I failed before, but now I'm using the seasons to get a 70 of each class and the set that looks the most fun to me.
Hopefully the right people get into the beta as well, so we get some very nice, detailed guides about the sets and skills.
As a fan of Diablo franchise since 1996 let me just say I am shocked by myself that first time for the past 20 years I am no hyped even slightly. And when I think about D3 you know what I remember as the best times? The Vanilla one. With AH (not the real money one - the gold one), ultra low drop rates, buying potions, gold VALUE! yes... yes people... there was a time where gold was a thing... and Inferno.
Play to progress!!! Yes... PROGRESS through the game. You had to grind to get thorugh inferno, farm gold, if you can't find it, maybe buy it from AH... I mean... there was a POINT of playing this. Now? Eee... Well I can do 90+ rift and... now what.... grind for that perfect roll so I can do 91? For what end? For what reason?
Furthermore I switched to a lot more games and... damn everwy single one has a great end game. You can do SO MUCH SH*T in them... every and any mmo, looter etc. You literally can't make your mind what to do. Now Diablo 3... ok... so I do a bounty or a rift... wow... the diversity is killing me.
So all in all will I buy Necro? Sure. I'm a fanboy - and maybe that's the problem. If people like me will buy stuff regardless why bother right? So I will buy it, play a week in which time I will get all gear (70 in 2-3 hours > some rifts and bounties for a day or two > greater rifts for 5 more days up to 70 > T13 and GG) and that's it... so yeah... D3... is it dead? No... but it's certainly done, at lest for me.
"Because many Necromancer skills are focused on corpses being available,
you should anticipate swapping skills based on your current situation."
Kinda, you cannot swap skills in GRs
First ever DLC given by Blizzard. So.. What is the price?
I had a fully gg geared poison nova NEC. It could solo Baal runs and uber Tristam, remove immunities and it's really strong in PVP due to fcr, Tele and being able to hit everything on screen while avoiding everything else. -300% to res with A2 merc and 50k+ nova damage... You sir don't know what you're talking about.
The reason it wasn't hugely popular was because unlike hammers you needed more than just enigma to make the build godly. Not that is was a bad build or skill.