Confirmed: Necromancer is cut out! Hint of his Return? - blizzardguru.com

MTV Blog has another article up with Diablo 3’s lead designer, Jay Wilson (as pointed out by Adsci), which this time talks about the new classes in the game. The main thing to take out of the article is the fact that the Necromancer will not be included in the game, as the developers found him to be so good, that they had no way to update him.

They do however hint at a possibility that he will be put into the game in later expansions.


“The problem was, we looked at the class and didn’t think that we could really make him a lot better,” he explained. “We could add some new stuff to him but for the most part — curses, corpse explosion, skeleton pets — done. That’s the class. We wanted to create new gameplay, so we chose to do the Witch Doctor as a different kind of class.”

Though the Witch Doctor will have similar abilities to the Necromancer, Wilson didn’t want to “have to live by any Necromancer rules.” One of the big differences between the two classes is how damage is actually dealt.

“If [the Necromancer] dealt damage, it was through corpses laying around or through his pets,” he said. “The Witch Doctor, his pets are a little more transient. If you watch the gameplay video, you really notice his pets come and go like crazy. There’s a wall of zombies that go away fairly quickly or pets that just kind of blow up willy-nilly. That was intentional — to try and make him different than the Necromancer.”

However, for those who are really passionate about the Necromancer, there’s still hope to see the class in a “Diablo III” expansion. In fact, Wilson thought that expansions might be a great place to bring back any of the old classes not included, particularly since the team itself had passionate debates on the topic — almost as much as the game’s art direction.

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Wilson added, “It’s one of those things where, unless we put like 30 classes in the game, people are going to be unhappy. But if we put 30 classes in the game, we’d hurt the game. I think that of the classes that we’ve chosen, there will be something for everyone. I’m not worried that people won’t be able to find a class that they like to play.”

Enjoy