The Necromancer is a playable class in Diablo IV. Necromancers have four high-level playstyles: Bone, Darkness, Blood, and the Army. Among their spells are debuff skills called Curses, with Decrepify and Iron Maiden returning. Scythes are the class-specific items of Necromancers, and Swords, Daggers, Wands, Focuses, and Shields can also be equipped.
Class Archetype: Caster, Summoner, Close-Quarters Combat
Class Resource: Essence
Damage Types: Physical
Class Skill Examples: Skeleton Warrior, Corpse Explosion, Bone Spear, Iron Maiden, Decrepify U
nique Class Mechanic: Book of the Dead: Deep customization for your undead army!
Usable Weapons and Armor: One-Handed Swords, Daggers, Wands, Focuses, Shields, One-/Two-Handed Scythes
The Necromancer utilizes two resources: Essence, a slow regenerating resource that is also gained by using basic skills; and Corpses, which come from fallen enemies or can be generated from certain effects.
A classic direct offense and enemy detaining skills, the new iteration of Bone skills are supplemented by effects such as Critical Strike and benefit from a large Essence pool.
The battlefield can be divided with Bone Prison, to either restrict enemies into certain areas or enclose them in a narrow space to facilitate area of effect skills. Bone Spirit is a foe-seeking missile that explodes on impact, but has a cooldown and consumes all Essence though with the benefit of its firepower increased per point of Essence spent.
Darkness skills are a new addition to the Necromancer, seemingly a reinterpretation of poison, decay, and curses, consolidated into the Shadow magic category. Offensively, they either deal damage over time or attack multiple times in a short window. Also, these skills tend to induce debuffs and crowd control effects.
Decompose is a basic channeled Darkness skill that deals damage over time on a single while channeled, grants Essence in the process, and periodically summons corpses that can be used to summon skeletons.
Blood skills are expressed differently from their predecessors, but they retain the ability to heal. These skills benefit from a large Life pool and their usage proficiency is dependent on targeting multiple enemies, thus character positioning is critical to maximize these skills’ effect. For example Blood Surge’s explosion increases based on the number of enemies from which blood was siphoned.
Blood Mist is a survival-oriented movement skill, that makes the caster immune to damage, drains life of enemies around the Necromancer, and grants mobility for retreat or a better vantage point.
The Army skills deal with reanimated foes and golems. Skeletal Warriors and Mages are summoned by the Raise Skeleton skill, an extra skill on the skill bar, though each require a corpse to be summoned.
By design, the Army playstyle attempts to address the problem of past games where minion builds require heavy minion investment or maintenance, often making certain skills mandatory and excluding most from use. This new system averts this problem, and enables and encourages skill flexibility between minion and non-minion skills. Therefore a player can pursue a Bone, Darkness, or Blood playstyle and integrate this with the Army skills, which act as a separate layer that doesn’t override and may synergize with the chosen playstyle.
Unique Class Mechanics in Diablo IV are class-exclusive systems that offer additional ways to customize your class further. These systems are also deeply entwined with class fantasy and try to provide an immersive gameplay experience.
The Book of the Dead is a unique Necromancer-specific skill mechanic that allows the player to customize the Necromancer’s minions, how minions are deployed, which minions the player can have, and how they behave. The Necromancer’s Unique Class Mechanic is the Book of the Dead. An all-new ability allowing them to dominate the battlefield with deeper customization of their undead army than ever before:
The core skills center on three summons: skeleton warriors and mages, and a golem. Each summon has three variants to choose from. And each variant has three modifications: two Upgrades (only one may be active at atime) and Sacrifice, which disables summoning that minion in exchange for conferring a permanent buff to the Necromancer.
The player may choose a minion-less playstyle by setting Skeletal Warriors, Skeletal Mages, and Golems to Sacrifice, buffing the Necromancer directly. Which buff the class receives depends on which summon variant is sacrificed. For example, a sacrificed Blood Golem grants a 10% increase to the character’s maximum Life while a sacrificed Iron Golem grants ×30% Critical Strike Damage.
Each class comes with a unique Dismount Ability which the player can activate. Players who get hit by an enemy will be dismounted automatically and will not be able to activate their Dismount Ability.
When Necromancers activate their Dismount Ability they will jump off the mount and slam the ground, unleashing a damaging cone of Bone magic.
When leveling up, Core Stats give the following bonuses to all Classes:
The Necromancer is a caster summoner class that has close quarter combat options, and specializes in the dark arts. Necromancers have 3 Skill Trees, called: Bone, Blood, and Darkness and their unique Class Mechanic is Book of the Dead, which allows Necromancers to personalize and customize their undead army further.
Main Resource: Necromancers have two important resources, their main resource is Essence, which is used to cast powerful Skills. Necromancers can build up their Essence level by Their second resource are corpses, which are used to build the army of the undead that follow the Necromancer.
Class Mechanic: Book of the Dead. This Class mechanic lets Necromancers further customize their undead armies. For example, players can turn their Skeleton Warriors into a more damage dealing version, but at the expense of maintaining a lower health pool. Or, in the other hand, create a more defensive-minded defender that are better at tanking, but deal significantly less damage to enemies.
The Necromancer was chosen as the fifth class because it focuses on the theme of “return to darkness” that Diablo IV represents, particularly through the class’ working with the occult, dark magic, and summoning the undead.
The goal for the class’ system was that players are able to play with the full army, part of the army, or even forgo their army completely and play solo. The Book of the Dead feature remains beneficial to builds without any minions.
The Army playstyle had undergone many iterations of how the experience of summoning the undead would feel for the player, and how much of the skill bar should be dedicated to the Necromancer. The playstyle that was chosen was where the players would have as much customization as possible over not only their army itself, but also in which other skills they want to use to support their own unique playstyle.
As might be expected, the devotees of Magic are a segregated lot. They are as leery of students of rival disciplines as a layperson is of all arcane practitioners. None, however, are so widely maligned and misunderstood as the Priests of Rathma.
As with most users of Magic, the priests of the cult of Rathma hail from the far Eastern Jungles. They reside in a vast underground city located deep within those jungles. Their specific geographical locale is particularly secluded, however, preventing their assimilation into a formal mage clan. But it is this same isolation that has allowed them to pursue their distinct kind of arcane science.
For it is through the teachings of Rathma, as well as through years of research and physical experimentation, that these men have come to understand and hold sacred the delicate balance of life and death and are able to twist the line that borders the two. For although the minions of Hell have long possessed this power, among mortals the knowledge to reanimate and control the dead belongs to these priests alone. It is this practice that has led outsiders to refer to them as Necromancers. They truly comprehend the balance of all things,and understand and accept their place in what they refer to as the Great Cycle of Being.
Their culture has subsisted in the shadow of the great mage clans from the earliest days, and in most ways their practice reaches back to a time before Magic was formalized into strict disciplines. Although their art is considered “dark”, and the people of the outside world shun the priests who practice these arts, these mysterious cultists never suffered the epidemic of corruption that plagued the ancient mage clans.
Pragmatists in the truest sense, they are above temptation. They see death merely as a natural part of life and do not seek to deny its arrival. Their singular knowledge of the unknown allows them to face death without fear. These ideals, coupled with an understanding of the natural balance between Order and Chaos, explain why they have not fallen prey to the influences of evil.
Their desire to uphold this balance has brought the Necromancers forth from the isolation of their remote, dank homeland to destroy Diablo and his brethren. The mere presence of these Prime Evils on the mortal realm upsets the natural symmetry of not only the mortal realm, but also the Great Cycle of Being itself. The followers of Rathma seek to right the balance by ridding the mortal realms of nonmortal intervention altogether. They resent any force that would treat humans as pawns in a cosmic game, though they apparently are willing to ally with the forces of Order, but only until such time as the balance is restored.
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