Diablo 3 brought the Necromancer back from the dead — here’s how

The Necromancer was a childhood favorite of mine. Childhood might not be a fair term; I wasn’t a child when I first played Diablo II, but I wasn’t exactly an adult either. I remember my brother and I installed Diablo II and we both picked the Necromancer, and we both ran around exploding corpses and reviving monsters for hours. That was some of the most fun I’ve ever had gaming. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Diablo franchise as a player and now a designer, years at this point, and the D2 Necromancer is definitely one of the most memorable parts of that. So when we finally got together and decided we were officially going to make the Necromancer for Diablo III, I was like: “Hell yeah, let’s do it!” It was a big honor. But it was also a big challenge to bring this character back for a new generation by adding him to what is a completely different game.

The first and most obvious task we had before us was differentiating the Necromancer from the Witch Doctor. Witch Doctor had been the de facto “pet class” of Diablo III since the game’s original launch. Any character that relies on summons is going to exist in the same gameplay space, so it was very easy to think that the only thing different about the Necromancer and the Witch Doctor was the packaging: the latter being a voodoo jungle doctor guy instead of a commander of the dead, summoning hyperactive little fetishes instead of skeletons and a gargantuan zombie instead of the Necromancer’s trademark golems. But clearly they’re different, so we had to ask ourselves: “How do we make them feel different?”