Our Diablo 3 expert Flux is over at BlizzCon at the moment and he’s had some hands-on time with the new Necromancer class which is coming next year.
Flux locked himself in the press room to see if the new class lives up to the original Diablo Necromancer. In his lengthy report, he covers the demo scenario setup by Blizzard for the purposes of testing, strategy, skills and more.
The initial impressions appear to be good and you can read Flux’ full report over on Diabloii.Net right now. Here’s a quick snip:
The overall gameplay feel in the demo was fun and fairly simple. With the generic gear the killing speed was way below what we’re used to with good equipment, which made the battles more tactical and clicky. (Which made it feel more like Diablo 2, ironically.) I don’t think this is some long term trend; a Necro in a six-piece set will surely evaporate everything on GR50 in a blink, just like all the other classes in D3.
The play style was pretty simple as well, with the tactics obvious to anyone with experience at Diablo 3. I got a lot faster as I played more, when I got used to the hotkeys, positioned myself properly to get my Bone Spears hitting multiple enemies in a line, remembered to hit the whole bunch with Decrepify as the battle began, paid attention to when something died so I could Corpse Explosion it immediately, targeted the Elites with the Skeleton Swarm skill, etc.
The key to fast killing was to engage only a few enemies at once, since then my skeletons would be spread out and my magical attacks would not hit multiple enemies at once. The Skeleton Swarm skill was useful to refocus my pets when they got scattered or disorganized, and it was always better to target all my pets and attacks on one or a few enemies, kill them off, and then move to the next targets.
