Diablo III’s Necromancer update adds the highly anticipated class to Blizzard’s dark and dusty dungeon crawler. Wielding a bone scythe and a phylactery, you can play through the game with blood and bone. If you haven’t played Diablo III in a minute, it might just be worth the purchase.
Like most people too young to PC game in the 90s, Diablo III was my first dungeon crawler. I spent my formative years inside MMOs and Nintendo panoramas, away from the mindless button-mashers popularized by Blizzard. When Diablo III was first released almost a decade ago, I had no interest in even playing. It took friends, coworkers and a pushy roommate to finally bunker down and spend some time in New Tristram.
Diablo III immediately had me hooked. I spent hours with my Witch Doctor in the trenches of Acts one through five, murdering thousands of beasts, demons and teddy bears in my need to be the strongest Nephalem to ever exist. After about a week, I had beat the main story and leveled two characters to level 70. I loved the game, but there wasn’t enough to keep me going, collecting every Legendary item and artifact by grinding the same dungeons over and over again just didn’t seem like a good use of my time.
Then, Blizzard announces the Necromancer is coming to Diablo III and I’m back at it again. After spending hours with the undead dude, summoning thousands of skeletons and bone golems in my need to be the strongest, I can say one thing: the game’s still fun. New voice lines were recorded for the Necromancer in male or female for the story, but there was no way I was going to listen to all that whiny dialogue again. To level up my blood buddy, I decided to take the quicker route and head into the Nephalem Rift. It took a few weeks, but I finally got Spice the blood gorger to level 70.
When playing as a Necromancer, corpses fall at the feet of your slain enemies. These bags of rotting flesh become your main source of damage on the battlefield. You can have them explode, reanimate them, or my personal favorite, send out a volley of bone spikes at a nearby enemy. As I progressed, I got a Legendary item that had my Bone Giant drop a new corpse every second. You really start to notice how squishy and gross the corpse dropping noise is when you hear it on a continuous farting loop.
I love controlling pets, it’s why I love Torbjorn in Overwatch , Masterminds in City Of Heroes and Yorick in League of Legends . The less actual work I have to do to achieve success, the better. The Necromancer was a perfect fit for me, since clearing mobs with seven skeletal knights, a bone giant that can transform into a tornado and an army of undead mages slinging arcane bolts. When you have that much going on on-screen, it gets a little hard trying to figure out what’s actually happening. Still, as long as demons are dying, does it really matter that you can’t see which grunt your golem has aggro of?
The 15-dollar update doesn’t give you a hell of a lot for your purchase, just a few cosmetics, a border and the Necromancer. If all you want is to play a fun class and remember the glory days of Diablo III , then it’s worth getting. If you played the dungeon crawler when it first came out, but got bored of slaying demons pretty quickly, I’d skip over the Necromancer DLC.
How are you liking the Diablo III Necromancer? Tell us in the comments.
