Not sure where to begin with this but I guess I’ll start with that Necromancer was the class I was anticipating playing the most and something I love thematically but I’ve been really disappointed now that I’ve gotten to play it.
I played in the early access beta last weekend too and I picked Barbarian which isn’t something I’d expected to play but I chose it because the other two people I was playing with decided on Rogue and Sorcerer. Normally I would’ve played Sorcerer but I chose Barbarian anyway.
Surprisingly, I had an absolute blast playing my Barbarian and I ended up really falling in love with the game last weekend during that time as well. I became really excited about getting to play again next weekend, and even more excited about the full release in June.
So, after that positive experience, I was really looking forward to getting to try out Necromancer with the next beta. Despite my frustrations and disappointment with the extremely limited character creator, I was able to make a Necromancer that I liked the appearance of quite a bit more than I expected to. I’d still like to see a much deeper character creation tool with more faces, face sliders, more hairstyles, and so on, but that’s another topic entirely. I also wanted to mention that I really love the Necromancer armor sets that I’ve seen and gotten to play around with.
To get to the point, my issues with Necromancer itself are quite numerous and significant. Right from the start, you already lose an entire skill slot to an ability that you’ll rarely be pressing. This is a huge issue in my opinion because we’re already suffering from a lack of skill slots that don’t even allow us to have one skill from each tree plus an ultimate. Probably thanks to consoles which is very frustrating as someone who plays games exclusively on PC. This issue is actually expanded upon even further at level 25 when you get the golem and lose another skill slot for that.
Despite how strong the skeletons can be, without any way to actually command them outside of the golem’s taunt, it takes agency away from the player and results in the game partially playing itself. The skeletons functioning like this is somewhat understandable since it’s become rarer in games like these for the players to get to manually control summoned creatures but it’s still a disappointment, especially when paired with an already extremely limited hotbar.
My next issue would be that the skill tree options and spell effects mostly feel super underwhelming compared to how many options I felt Barbarian had. I really liked that there were so many skills to choose from and that at the very least, the ones I chose felt very satisfying to press. This hasn’t been the case with Necromancer. The only button that’s felt good to press to me is Corpse Explosion and despite centering my build around that skill, plus generating additional corpses and buffed minions, it still feels unsatisfying to play with. This can be made even more brainless if you choose to mimic the popular build that makes Blood Mist automatically cast Corpse Explosion while generating additional corpses and lowering it’s cooldown each time one is detonated. I personally don’t understand how anyone can find satisfaction in such mindless and unengaging gameplay.
My next issue would be that there seems to be some trace of initial plans to implement melee spell options for Necromancer when you look at Reap and Sever, plus the option to sacrifice minions for personal buffs, and that they can use melee weapons like swords, two-handed swords, scythes, and two-handed scythes. This is all really half-baked though. Like they just decided to stop focusing any development on it but left the remnants in the skill tree because Necromancer’s skill tree already feels extremely barren compared to what was there for Barbarian. I don’t know why Necromancer even uses melee weapons like swords and scythes when they only have one actual attack that partially uses them.
I’ve tried out a lot of other skills but only Bone Spear and Bone Spirit seem to have any sort of promise to them other than the ones that I mentioned earlier in my post. For the most part though, I’d say that the spell effects for Necromancer leave a lot to be desired for me, and for the most part none of them feel good to press despite how strong they can be.
Another issue I had, especially after fighting Ashava on this, was the complete lack of any sort of movement skills. Fighting Ashava on Barbarian with Lunging Strike, Charge, and Leap plus the base dodge was so much fun. Alternatively, fighting Ashava on Necromancer was completely miserable. Most of my contribution was left to my skeletons just playing the game for me while Ashava jumped around all over the screen making the corpses I generated completely pointless most of the time, and doing attacks that I seldom had the ability to actually evade because of the cooldown on it. So I had to spend most of my time positioning around the boss and even then there were just moments where there was nothing I could really do to actually interact with the boss or it’s mechanics.
Anyhow, I didn’t really want to spend my time typing up a post like this, especially with how limited my time has felt lately with real life obligations. I also don’t really like being negative or critical about things. There’s more issues I have with Necromancer too but I feel like I already spent more time typing this out than I wanted to. I just felt like I needed to say at least some of these things, especially because my experience with this beta has had me feeling the complete opposite of how I felt last beta. As I said near the beginning of my post, I had a fantastic time with Diablo 4 last weekend and really feel in love with the game, so for this weekend to be so disappointing, especially with the class I was actually looking forward to playing… it just feels like I’ve lost that same level of excitement I had for the full release as I did previously. I miss feeling like my only issue with the game was that the character creation was lacking and disappointing.
I guess I’m not entirely sure what I expect to come about from making a post like this. I don’t really expect any sort of significant changes before the full release. I’ll just post my thoughts anyway because it’s all I can do I suppose.