Why the WD is better than the Necro.

[Dark Ritual]

Hey!

Before someone goes nuts and flames me for their loving Necro_babe183 on USWest Ladder, let me explain!

I love the Necro. He's my favourite character in Diablo 2. Why? He's a dark magical creature with a mystical background. He can summon undead stuff including reviving monsters.
But the thing that I never really liked about the Necro was that he was to reliant on his skeletons, summons or curses.
I mean. I loved putting Iron Maiden on monsters while watching them die.

Necro aside. I was freaking salvated when I heard about the WD and saw the gameplay video. Here is a magician who uses dark magic, has summons but who still has the main focus on magic and killing himself. This is freaking über. I don't want to play sorceress, I want to play WD!
Enough sending skeletons. I'll send 3 dogs and just blow them up and solo the rest.
I'm so happy the WD came. It doesn't matter what the remaining 3 classes are, I'm rolling WD!!

[quintal]

The Necro has a poison and bones skill tree, you know.
There are necro builds that don't put any point in skeletons.

[Infiltrator]

Yeah. I play bone mancers that focus exclusively on bone skills (pvp) and just dump a poing in clay/golem mastery..

The sad thing is that I don't see the WD having that nuking potential. It appears the class concept was doing indirect and damage over time damage, which is fine and all but coincidentally it was an aspect of the necromancer I avoided completely.

[Daft]

The WD looks like he can still nuke, just not as effectively at long range.

[Dark Ritual]

Yeah I know there are soloing necro builds in D2, but it still feels like there's more focus on the soloing for the WD which I've always wanted. I started a summoning necro myself recently which I love but WD seems like the ultimate class. Sure, the Sorceress is pure magic and solos everything, but I don't want that. I want an evil cool dark magical character. Didn't work for Warlock in WoW because he had his stupid pets or whatever but it's gonna work ****in' awesomely for the WD. I feel like jumping in the air looking at the WD owning up the gameplay vid.

[stillman]

But...that last part, the "looking at the WD" is the problem.
He's hard to look at. His head is on his stomach. His mask is bigger than the rest of him. He's playing basketball. He is purple.

I don't know if I can explain this right. I used to be an artist, and your first look at something is very important. Get your mother or someone not too familiar with games and ask her to look at the WD standing there and ask her what she sees. I'll bet she won't say "withcdoctor". She won't know what the heck that purple-green wacky thing is wobbling around. Look carefully at her squnity face as she takes a long time to figgure out what the WD is.

Then get her to look at the barb. I'll bet she'll say "Barbarian" or "fighter" or w/e right away. We'll be looking at these chrs for hours, so a contorted, inhuman looking chr (the WD) doesn't appeal much too me since we have to do a bunch of "putting together" in our minds just to figgure out what he is, where his neck is supposed to be, etc.

I can't complain too much about the op though, since I'm equally enthusiastic about the archer class. Different dagger strokes for different dagger folks.

[ScionOfStorm]

^ haha, nice post man, really! :)

prefer the necro, still. WD is kinda spectacular, yeah, but no one can replace my nova + CE /boney spirit + spear necro ^^

[Dimmu]

Yeah. I play bone mancers that focus exclusively on bone skills (pvp) and just dump a poing in clay/golem mastery..

The sad thing is that I don't see the WD having that nuking potential. It appears the class concept was doing indirect and damage over time damage, which is fine and all but coincidentally it was an aspect of the necromancer I avoided completely.

We've only seen like, what 8 skills? from the WD so far. I don't think they wanted to show off his nuking power in the original gameplay video, because they had just shown a barb ripping **** apart. There's a good chance that there will be a mage character shown at blizzcon, based on the hints, so I think that'll be their time to present us with a heavy nuking spellcaster. They want to show us the variety of different ways to deal damage at the start, so I don't think we'll see every character's full potential until a few months before realease when we know what all the characters are.

[Smash]

I wonder why people doesn't see that WD is like druid not like necro.
Massive damage in close range + summons for distracting and help not for main killing purpose (this part about summons Blizzard said himself) just look how long few mongrels took to kill one buffalo. Thinks about mongrels as wolves from d2x.

[Inexhaustible]

You sir, make babies want to cry and adults want to die.

[LaZeR]

I agree. The WD is really cool. Only problem is he doesn't have the dark feeling the Necro had and he should have.
As stated in this forum his skills should be much more mind blasting and his whole atmosphere should be darker as it should be for a WD of deserted jungles.

And yeah, he looks real bad. Dunno what Blizz was thinking.

[Generic]

If we whine loud enough do you think there is a chance the Witch Doctor can get a character model that isn't so butt-ugly?
I love the character concept but hate the look.

[LaZeR]

lol. No.
Although whining loud enough about corpses disappering got some results, so who knows.

[Naja]

I think he looks fine. I'm just worried about the appearance and damage of his spells.

Damage will probably be fixed by release (or at the latest, in a patch), and the appearance of his spells will probably be augmented by runes.

If you're gonna whine about something, whine for cooler looking spells than frogs and more highly-damaging spells!

[LaZeR]

I don't know about you, but that Swarm skill looks life the most powerfull skill ever.

But yeah, other than SE all of his skills are disappointing both in apperance and creativity.

[Naja]

I wouldn't necessarily say all of them.

I just think that Blizzard should pay a little more attention from now on. Frogs needs to have a more interesting animation (it is rather cool that the skill plasters poison all over the place - the monsters just need a more grizzly death, like skin melting off, and the spell needs a better sound effect). Firebats needs more damage, although it looks really cool.

So in other words, the Witch Doctor just needs some tweaks. Blizzard needs to make sure that his spells reflect the darkness and power of his character.