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Diablo III The Necromancer Preview
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Diablo III’s Necromancer: BlizzCon 2016 preview

Diablo III’s new character class, The Necromancer, seems to be part of an emerging trend in Blizzard’s dungeon crawler; new character classes are walking slaughterhouses.

Remember The Crusader class? Remember how it felt ridiculously overpowered to begin with? Remember how the more you levelled it up, the more it felt less like an embattled hero and more like an invulnerable deity?

Well, The Necromancer makes The Crusader looks like a wimp.

Yes, the demo I played at BlizzCon 2016 was with a maxed out character and yes, the point of the demo was to show off what the players can expect from the class at its highest level. Still, even by these standards The Necromancer is the most empowering class I’ve played with in the game so far. If I wasn’t pitted against the AI, it would almost feel unfair.

The guy’s powers are off the charts. There’s Corpse Explosion, which targets a patch of ground with dead bodies on it and makes them explode. The bigger the corpse pile, the bigger the explosion. In short players can turn felled enemies into clumps of landmines, which, when triggered, send live enemies flying in an animation that looks like a drone strike on a ketchup factory.

Then you have Decrepify, a spell that slows down enemies in its catchment area by 75% and then dishes out damage to boot. If players were ever to feel cornered – and they won’t – Blood Rush allows them to teleport to 50 yards away.

The reason this ability may seem like surplus requirements is because The Necromancer has a power called Command Skeletons. Passively, it raises skeletons from the ground and recruits them as allies every second that passes until The Necromancer is surrounded by eight of the grinning buggers. Activate the power by tapping a key and the damage this bunch can dish out increases by 100%.

The Necromancer boasts a ranged attack in the form of a Bone Spear and that’s mapped to the right mouse button. Sounds pretty pedestrian until you realise that at this high level this kicks 450% damage to every target it hits.

Now, in order to use all of these nasty attacks, The Necromancer requires Essence, and admittedly using the powers in tandem drains Essence pretty quickly. Oh wait, hang on a second; he also has Siphon Blood, a power that’s mapped to the left mouse button that replenishes Essence at a furious rate, dishes 300% damage to every target and partially heals The Necromancer while it’s active.

Uh-huh. If I was Diablo, I might just pack up and go home.

Incidentally, I’m not knocking Blizzard’s new badass. He’s absolutely awesome to play with and at this stage, there’s no telling how players will fare in a game that’s cranked to the nth difficulty. It could be that The Necromancer could just be tailor made for any of those who have been too scared to tackle the game’s Inferno mode in which death means perma-death and you start all over again.

It’s also worth pointing out that I don’t know what the class’s lower-levelled experience plays like. Who knows? Maybe The Necromancer starts the game with a wifflebat and a pillow for a shield.

But if this character’s progression matches that of The Crusader, anyone who plays this game on Normal difficulty with him should feel bloody ashamed of themselves.

 

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