'Diablo 3' Necromancer Review: New class brings corpse-flinging fun, but is it worth the price?
After five years, Diablo 3 just keeps trucking with this week’s release of “Rise of the Necromancer.” The $15 downloadable content expansion gets you access to, well, the Necromancer class, which makes its grand return from Diablo 2 with a host of wacky new corpse-based abilities. Is the new class fun enough to justify the price though? Let’s dive in.
Diablo 3’s Necromancer is fun as hell, but $15 might be a bit steep
“Rise of the Necromancer” is, for all intents and purposes, a character class that costs $15. It’s out on PS4, Xbox One and PC now. Buying the DLC also gets you a couple more character slots and some cosmetic items, but at the end of the day, you’re paying for a new way to play Diablo 3.
Luckily, that new way to play is pretty rad. The Necromancer is a goth boy or girl who commands the armies of the dead to do their bidding. It’s a spell-casting class with a great variety of close- and long-ranged attacks for any situation. After just a couple hours of play, I was having a blast, even though I was doing quests I’ve done several times already in Diablo 3.
As a Necromancer, your enemies will leave behind corpses when they die that you can use for a variety of abilities. For example, you can aim at a group of corpses and make them all explode to kill any remaining enemies in the group. Another ability I saw turned leftover corpses into devastatingly fast single-target projectiles with impressive range.
It’s nice to have something else to level up in a game that’s been around for half a decade.
Interestingly, based on the couple hours I’ve played, you don’t actually use those corpses to build your undead army. Early on, you unlock an ability that automatically summons several skeletons that follow you around. At first, they can be commanded to swarm a single target with the press of a button. You’ll eventually unlock other abilities for those skeletons, of course.
In terms of long-ranged attacks, you start with a sort of bone missile attack that can pass through enemies. After a while, you can summon an army of ghost wizards that act as mobile turrets and (this is the fun part) they can work alongside your skeleton army. Combat encounters quickly become a matter of dozens of your minions cluttering up the screen at once and it’s fun as hell.
The Necromancer is a great time, but you need to ask yourself if a single new class is worth $15. I can’t tell you how to spend your money, but if you love Diablo 3, you might as well get it. It’s nice to have something else to level up in a game that’s been around for half a decade.
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