And the necromancer doesn’t just excel at blowing up corpses. A wide range of skills allow for varied playstyles; you can also let summoned skeletons and spirits do the heavy lifting while you use the Siphon Blood talents to leech enemy health and restore your own. You can wade right into melee combat or take a step back and fire off the ranged Bone Spikes or swing the mystical Grim Scythe. The Necromancer also offers some frills that allow you to sport big skeletal wings, don a custom portrait, have ghoulish pets scampering at your heels, and use over 30 new legendary items.
In short, this is a great character pack. The necromancer comes with a lot of depth and seems well thought-out. The one lingering concern is that the new class might be a little overpowered, but that’s a minor worry, given that most players will be using the goth-and-guts spellcaster for a runthrough of what’s likely a very familiar campaign in a game they know extremely well. Challenge probably isn’t as big a concern as novelty and the sheer fun factor the new character brings. The visual presentation is also extremely well done, offering a perfect balance between cartoon showers of blood and the dark grotesqueries of playing as a guy who revels in death.
But it’s still just a character pack. Despite the title, Rise of the Necromancer doesn’t offer any new quests, campaigns, or storylines. The name is more than a bit misleading, since it leads you to expect that there’s a little more (rotting) meat on this (animated and coming right at you) bone. And for $15, you’re right to expect more. The one slight saving grace when it comes to value is that the DLC arrives at the same time as the free 2.6.0 patch, which adds features to the core game like Challenge Rifts, new zones, and new bounties.
If not for the price, Rise of the Necromancer would be easy to instantly recommend to fans of Diablo III or anyone with even a passing interest in trying out a classic hack-and-slash RPG. Still, this is a fantastic character pack that adds one of the best, most enjoyable classes to the existing game roster.