Diablo III has seen extensive post-launch support, beginning with a profound restructuring of its loot table and endgame. A real-money auction house was put to rest. An expansion added a new act, class and an entire new way to remix and re-experience the game’s content. Since then it’s seen the addition of leaderboard play and countless small tweaks, but the last major content for the game was some time ago. Rise of the Necromancer stands out as the first substantial update for the game in four years.
Even with that wait, this DLC can feel like a bit of a dubious value from the outside looking in, especially when Diablo III already has an undead pet class of a kind: the witch doctor, who launched with the base game. That’s true to a point. If you’ve recently picked up Diablo III or have otherwise yet to plumb your way through all of its classes and content, there’s no reason to plunk down for this new class, at least not as a given. If you’re like me and have played hundreds of hours of Diablo III already, the necromancer is a fine addition that goes beyond a callback to a fan favorite class from the second game, even if the thrill of taking a new class through very well-trodden content is a little fleeting.
Playing a necromancer feels plain gross and adds a unique flavor to Diablo III’s gameplay. It’s all about corpses for the new class, and many enemies will leave behind a meaty torso when they die while playing as them. These chunky heaps look identical regardless of what you kill and look a little silly as they pile up on screen, but the gameplay hook is there: several of your core abilities need corpses to be used, a new and more visual type of resource to be accounted for.
Your corpse skills can make bodies explode in chain reactions. It can suck blood or essence out of them to fill your gauges. You can rip bones from them to create a shield or shoot out bone spears. These skills look and sound disgusting, a perfect fit for a necromancer.
That’s to say nothing of the pet aspect of the class. You can keep a small skeleton army and sizeable golem permanently raised, each with poppable skills that vary with runes (I prefered the ones that let the skeletons focus fire on a target, and a bone golem that could dash and clump foes together in a bone tornado). Several skills bring in temporary minions that despawn after a few seconds, like skeleton mages. One particularly cool one lets you cast on an area and raise shadow versions of the enemies who died there to fight for you.
Both branches of the skillset feel powerful on their own or mixed together as you see fit. It does feel a little like the witch doctor at times, but the necromancer mostly manages to feel like a solid and uniquely bloody addition to an exceptional game. Playing through the campaign and messing around in the endgame content with a fresh class gave me a whole new appreciation for how great Diablo III has become over the years, even after so many trips through it.
With how speedy levelling is in the game’s current state, maxing out the new class and rounding up some decent endgame gear is faster than it’s ever been. Although the name makes itself pretty clear, it’s a shame there’s not more new areas or quest content in Rise of the Necromancer to enjoy with the other classes. It’s sound DLC, though it does feel a little brief and anticlimactic for what (I assume?) will be Diablo III’s final major content.