Necromancer Q&A Summary

Preface: Many answers have been condensed, shortened and paraphrased. If you want the full context of everything, please go watch the video:



No talk of launch date or pricing.

How much of the D2 necro in the new necro?
Travis played a lot of necro in D2 and was used as a jumping off point, adapting a lot of skills and themes into the D3 design of the class

Is Revive returning?
“Absolutely!” A massive undertaking but shaping up well.

How will you make sure the Necro is different from the WD?
One way is thematically, darker overall with the themes of bone and blood. Doing some very different things with pets, all are controllable to some degree with where to attack, what to focus on etc. Recently been messing around with different resource models i.e. with corpses and other abilities having blood costs.

How will all the corpse based skills work since crits destroy corpses?
Different than how things work in D2. A corpse mechanic had to be invented for the necro to use.

Will there be aspects of the Poison skill tree from D2 integrated into the D3 necro?
Not right now, encroaches on the WD. Not that many cool Poison skills so it isn’t going to be brought forward.

Any love for melee-mancers? Would like to fight along pets.
A lot of skills are up close and personal, and want to deliver on a close-range fighter style.

Will Iron Maiden be brought forward as a skill?
No plans to bring it forward, was decided that it wasn’t a fun gameplay style and that other skills could be used to fill that space.

How many summons can a Necro have?
“As many as Julian and the tech team will let me have” More server performance concerns than client concerns, but no defined number as of yet and no plan to set a number.

What are the weapon types that necro can weild?
Anything not class specific or bow or crossbow, will have their own class-weapon; scythes.

Will Necro have Golems?
“Yep, it sure will” Been working on them to see which ones they liked and which ones worked. Working on new golem types.

How many types can be used?
There are currently 3 worked out with room for 1 or 2 more, so 4 or 5.

Will the Necro do damage itself or is most of the damage from pets?
It can go both ways with pets doing most of the work or the necro itself doing the bulk of the damage. Many different avenues being developed.

Two-handed scythe?
Yes, there will be two-handed scythes.

Will the Necro minions be temporary or will they be “permament”?
There will be a variety of pets, some temp and some perm. Skeletal archers and mages will be making an appearance.

Build a necro based solely on blood abilities or will pets have to be involved?
They’ve started fleshing out something like that as it is a strong theme.

Will the Necro start with four sets?
Yes, that is exactly the plan. Not entirely sure what they will all do yet.

Does the Necro have things that will do self-damage to deal damage?
Yes, it’s turning into quite the thing and is becoming its own playstyle.

Will the Necro have burst or will it be all dot based?
Necro has nothing that is dot based right now, no dot spells. Everything is nukes, pets and cool utilities. It’s a way to separate the WD and the Necro since the WD is heavy dot based.

Will there be further updates posted?
Short answer is yes to keep everyone up to date. No cadence for updates right now but plans to show how things are going.

Decrepify?
Totally will. Was part of the Blizzcon demo. Massive snare and debuffs damage dealt by enemies.

Special form for the Necro?
No plans to do anything like that. Army of the Dead was a much cooler form of a longer cooldown ability rather than just matching the other classes. Not a mandatory requirement for classes.

Damage only or decent support options?
Don’t design explicit support options, but the Necro does have powerful curses and other things that can help groups out.

Necro same release time for PC as console?
Yes, goal to ship all platforms at same time.

Will there be curses?
YES, LOTS OF CURSES

In the lore is this the same Necro from D2?
Short answer, no. (The people on the stream are not the lore folks by any means.)

Comprehensive pet command interface?
No, nothing different than the standard UI. However, a lot of the pet skills are very active in the way that they are used, and passively give you the pets.

Necro part of RoS or as separate DLC?The Necro is a separate standalone pack, but as far as they know will require RoS to have. There is an FAQ on the battle.net site that has more information.

Will necro be part of the group meta for GR?
Absolutely hope so due to the unique mechanics that it has. Curses can fit into that role. Hoping that they will be able to fluctuate roles and use a variety of playstyles.

Will Necro have its own set dungeon?
Yes, with four sets there will be one for each.

*Will there be life steal skills? * Yes, a lot of the blood skills will cost health along with essence so there are a lot of recoup health mechanics built in and can be used to benefit your group.

Will Lidless Wall become a necro item?
Maybe? Haven’t thought about it yet. Itemization usually comes later in the process.

Anything else out there that look like they would be perfect for the Necro?
All of the new stuff that they are developing, but not sure how much of the existing stuff will be converted to become a “Necro item.” Still finishing off skills and runes.

Any challenges that have been faced so far?
Julian – Revive: The game has over 1000 unique monsters and for Revive to work each of those could have 6 different varieties, so it’s going to be the most lavishly expensive skill to make bar none. The reason to do it is because it’s awesome!
Travis – Corpses has taken a lot of time in figuring out how they work. Lot of challenges at the start of development and how to handle with the flow of gameplay and how the interaction works with corpses?
Julian – There was a lot that went into how the corpses actually look and how they are identified on the battle field. They decided that the corpses should look all the same and behave the same to prevent issues with “saving” certain corpse types and making them easily identifiable.

How do you handle the situation of no corpses at something like the rift guardian?
There will be ways to make this work.

Has there been anything that has come across with the Necro that has made you say “I can’t wait to finish this.”
Travis – Really excited when it was announced that we were doing the Necro. Been a joy taking the thematic elements from D2 and adapting them to D3. Excited to have it in the hands of players.
Julian – It was the day before I go on vacation when it was announced internally that they were going to work on the Necro and I wanted to make it absolutely clear that I WANTED TO WORK ON THE NECRO. I was sending emails while on vacation to make sure I got the point across that I wanted to work on the Necro. I’m really excited about the golems since we have sort of double-downed on them and spending a lot of resources on them to make them cool.

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