The Diablo series has been a huge success, so much so that they’ve very recently had their 20th anniversary! Diablo 3 has had its ups and downs since its release, but it is still going strong to this day. One announcement at Blizzcon 2016 got the hype train going hard once again – the Necromancer. As a new DLC, people can’t wait for this, and now Blizzard has released a a new Q&A video to answer some of those questions you’ve had about the Diablo 3 Necromancer class.

While they don’t have any details to give about release date or cost, Julian Love (Lead FX Artist), Brandy Camel (Community Manager), and Travis Day (Sr. Game Designer) went through and answered a heap of questions for us all to enjoy. Below are some of the highlights of the Q&A video answering questions that fans have had since the big announcement.

How much of the Diablo 2 Necromancer will there be in the new Diablo 3 Necromancer?

• We really used the Diablo 2 Necromancer as a jump off point, and sort of have tried to adapt a lot of the skills that people will be familiar with, and the themes and bring them into D3 in a way that makes sense. So you see a lot of familiar themes from D2 like Corpse Explosion, Curses, Golems, Skeleton, Skeletal Mages, things like that.

Is the Revive ability going to be returning for the Necromancer.

• Absolutely. The Necromancers revive was one of my favourite abilities from Diablo 2. It’s a massive undertaking, but it is really cool and it’s shaping up really well, so we definitely plan on bringing Revive forward to the Diablo 3 Necromancer.

How will you make sure the Necro is different than the WD? Both have curses (hex) and minions. What is the direction the Necro will take?

• One way is thematically, we have some different themes on the Diablo 3 Necromancer than the Witch Doctor – blood and bone are magic themes that have not appeared on any other class. It’s a much darker themed character overall – if you think about the Witch Doctor there are a lot of darkly themed things, but there is also a whimsical side to the Witch Doctor, and there will not be any whimsical takes on the Necro, it’s going to be very serious and very gritty. From a gameplay standpoint, we’re doing some very different things with the pets. All of them are controllable to some degree, that you have to tell them either what to attack, what to focus on, where to be, move them around a little bit. That just feels very different comparatively to the Witch Doctor pets that are very fire and forget. Recently we started getting into the idea of using different resource models, looking at the corpses for instance, we have abilities that require corpses in order to function, and that’s something that’s VERY different than the Witch Doctor who just uses mana. Essence functions in a slightly different way, and then we even have some skills that have a blood cost associated with them now. So all that adds up to a very different play experience.

How is it going with the work on the female version?

• The truth is we started right away making the female version of the character, but in order to feel good about what we were showing at Blizzcon, we sort of had to settle on just one. But we’ve been working on it all along, and she’s coming along really well. Just stay tuned over the next few months and we’ll have something to show you.

How many active summons can a Necro have?

• We get into performance issues on the engine, your own computer, and more so on the server – think about 4 Necromancers on screen if they all had 50 summons, there’s going to be problems with that. Right now we don’t have a defined number as to what we think they’ll end up with, and as we mess with the skills, the numbers will go up and down as we try things.

So just curious, will the Necromancer’s minions be temporary or will they last like the Witch Doctor’s dogs and gargantuan? Also will we bet getting Skeletal archers and mages?

• Both. We are going to have a variety of pets for you to choose from that will operate in different ways. Some of them will be permanent, and some of them will be very temporary, and in through runes we’ll probably have some options to play around with some of those options.

Also will we bet getting Skeletal archers and mages?

• Yes absolutely. We’ve actually been toying around with the composition of your army and what sort of things you could have, and mages and archers have come up a lot and it is very likely they’ll make a showing.

It certainly seems like this is something to look forward to and the Necromancer is sounding like a fan favourite already. Are you looking forward to seeing the newest Diablo 3 content in action? Is there anything specific you’re hoping to see? Let us know in the comments below and tell us your thoughts on this upcoming character.