“There’s a certain appeal for a lot of people in playing the anti-hero,” says Diablo III Lead VFX Artist Julian Love. “And that’s what the Necromancer represents, the darkest of the classes in that world, but one that is also doing good everywhere they go. There’s a kind of juxtaposition between good and evil, and from there a grey line where the Necromancer lives.” The Necromancer is a Diablo II icon, and now, five years after initial release and three years since the excellent Reaper of Souls expansion, it’s coming to Diablo III.

“ It was during a game jam that someone on the Diablo III team decided to recreate the Necromancer; to bring back the popular class from Diablo II and just see if they could make it work...

Oh yeah, this needed to be a thing.

Quite the explosion.

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Why now? Why not. After all, Blizzard is still supporting Diablo III with new content and regular updates. Even so, a new character class is a big deal. It requires not only the creation of a new and deep subset of skill and items, but also game design that plays nicely with everything else already in the game. Years of wonderful, and inventive stuff. The Necromancer actually comes to us from the same creative and experimental side of the Diablo team that also brought us some of the crazier things in the game, like the set bonus that activates a high powered meteor shower spell every eight seconds for each and every type of elemental skill you use.This was also around the time that the team was actively looking towards Diablo’s 20th anniversary, and thinking about how best to celebrate it. It wasn’t long before bringing the Necromancer back simply felt like the right thing to do. From its beginnings as a simple experiment in nostalgia and creativity, the team then had to shift towards taking a more serious approach to the design of the Diablo III version of the character. This process obviously involved closely studying the look and feel of the Diablo II Necromancer, and the team has worked hard to try and ensure everything they do remains true to the spirit of the character. Now that the new version is closing in on its final state, that authenticity can certainly be felt, right down to the look and feel of individual skills.Take the Revive skill, which as the name suggests, gives you the ability to temporarily raise a recently slain monster to fight alongside you. Here, making the jump from Diablo II to III was not as simple as copying a mechanic from one game into another. The differences between the two games in terms of pace and the sheer number of monsters on-screen meant a slightly different approach had to be taken. To make it work, the team had to go through the difficult process of adding corpses to the game. This then informed a number of other Necromancer skills, like the ever-popular Corpse Explosion.“It took a lot of effort but we were able to push it to a place where you could kill monsters, revive and get them back, and still have it feel a lot like the Diablo II skill,” Senior Game Designer Joe Shely explains. Indeed, in discussing the Necromancer as a class, he’s quick to stress the importance of nailing the essence of the Necromancer as a character. This not only informs the return of popular skills and abilities, like the raising an army of skeletons to fight for you, but also the discovery of what it means to be a necromancer in the world of Sanctuary.“With the Diablo III Necromancer we also spent a great deal of time really looking at areas of Diablo II where we thought that the themes of the character were probably not as fleshed out as they could have been,” Shely explains. “This made us think a lot about blood, and how the Necromancer in Diablo II had very little blood interaction. But to us, felt like a very strong necromancy theme. So, after some careful thought on how that would work, we found an interesting direction to take it in.” That direction led to a skill called Blood Nova, where a huge explosion of blood not only damages anyone and anything surrounding the Necromancer, but also comes at the expense of some of his or her life. This can then be paired with another blood-based skill called Leech, that allows you to suck the life from monsters to heal, providing one of many ways in which the Diablo III Necromancer can be played.

Eight minutes of the Necromancer, showcasing a bunch of melee skills, plus the Blood Golem.

The Blood Golem in action.

Leeching health during combat.

“I think one of the most interesting revelations in creating the Necromancer has been how much larger a class in Diablo III really is,” Shely continues. “In Diablo III a class is very broad, with many different playstyles supported. And so, we need to design a wide range of skills to support all those different ways to play.” In execution, skills like Blood Nova coupled with melee attacks feel right at home in the world of Diablo III. And they also sit comfortably alongside the very different playstyle that involves commanding a skeletal army and creating huge golems from corpses to fight for you.In fact, from what I’ve played so far, the team has nailed what Diablo III players find so appealing about the game with the addition of the Necromancer. That is, being able to use abilities and skills that not only make you feel powerful, but also exceed any textual description of what they do in a flurry of visual effects, impeccable sound design, and great animation. The build I played at Blizzard HQ recently was geared around showcasing the melee side of the character – getting up close and personal, wildly swinging an enormous scythe to slay monsters… or damaging them just enough for a very literal explosion of blood to easily finish them off.Still on track for release sometime in the second half of this year, the current state of the Necromancer is one where all the skills, runes, and passive abilities have been fine-tuned and played with to ensure they all look good and play as expected. The next step, however, is to break them. “When it comes to items and sets, their role is to sort of break everything we’ve created so far,” Julian Love tells me. “We’ve certainly had discussions on how they might work, but before that happens you need everything else firmed up and working, and balanced.”In playing this melee version of the Necromancer and trying out all the various skills, I could immediately see how easily it could be broken for the better. Or more accurately, for the sake of fun. And so I pitched a speedy version of the Necromancer to the team. One that could teleport around a map, exploding in blood pretty much non-stop, never staying in one place for more than a second, and only revisiting the corpses of slain monsters to heal up. “Without promising exactly what you’ve asked for,” Julian Love responds, “You’ll find the equipment to get you down that road, possibly even further.”Excellent. And it’s this mix of the old and new, where the old-school sensibilities and charm of a master of black magic as seen in Diablo II, is coupled with the ability to play a class how you’d imagine it could be played, and then switch it up from moment to moment, that makes the Necromancer so exciting. This class can’t come soon enough.

Kosta Andreadis is an Australian musician and freelancer who has written about a ridiculous assortment of classic adventure games for IGN Check out his tunes and follow him on Twitter.