During the Fanguard dinner in San Diego, the Safehouse had the good fortune to be joined by Darrin McPherson, aka Talisker, the man behind designing Vanguard's classes. On a whim, I asked him “So how about the Necromancer?â€, and got far more than I bargained for. It's one thing to have a dev write a reply to an interview saying “I'm excited about [suchandsuch]â€. It's a different story when you see their eyes light up, and a smile creep across their features involuntarily, as they talk about it.
The Vanguard Necromancer will offer players a unique style of play that will truly set them apart from their fellow casters of Telon. Traditionally Necromancers have been “wizards†essentially, that have a dark flavor of magic. They often drain life, summon dead things from no where, cast spells like "Dark Painful Wanna-bee Fireball" and make their foes miserable by making them decay or suffer horrible disadvantages. Darrin wanted to take it a step further than most other MMO games have. The Vanguard Necromancer not only casts magic of a dark nature, their magic is death magic.
When it works, run with it
The Vanguard Necromancer is not wholly unique. The style of the class' spells and some of the things they can do have been done before in gaming. For those of you that played Diablo 2, the Vanguard Necromancer will be very familiar in some ways. Darrin freely admitted that his inspiration had come from Diablo 2 when he thought about the class, because he loved the style of their abilities and how the class really nailed the essence of what a Necromancer does.
Master of Death
The Necromancer's magics focus on the manipulation and control of death, the utilization of death to further their own ends. In Vanguard, the presence of corpses will allow the Necromancer to cast spells using them. In a salute to Diablo 2, the Necromancer can, for example, cause a near by corpse to EXPLODE in a destructive hail of concussive power and bone shrapnel. (Corpse Explosion was one of my favorite spells in Diablo 2, and so too with Darrin). Or the Necromancer might cause of sickening cloud of gas to vent from the corpse, that remains over it during the combat. Still further, the Necromancer might cause their slain foes to rise up to assist them and their group.
A Mockery of Life
But perhaps the most interesting thing about the Necromancer is that they don't just create undead pets from the fallen (although they can). Necromancers build their pets. The Necromancer can construct a persistent pet that stays with them through their whole life. But this is not merely some shambling mound that the Necromancer summons and then keeps with them. Far from it.
Bring out your dead....please?
Most players think about corpses for what they have on them, not what they are made of. Not so for the Necromancer. Necromancer pets are built from the body parts of their fallen enemies. Much like a that character equips themselves with gear, so the Necromancer will equip their pet with new body parts stolen from their enemies, that are then grafted to the pet's body. For those who have dreamed of the day when they could own a persistent pet that they could mold and adjust as they played, the wait is over.
Hey, that's MY severed tentacle!
So are we going to see a proliferation of black market body parts in Telon? Nay. Necromancers alone will have the ability to loot these body parts. Darrin mentioned something to the effect that there is a separate looting system for Necromancers, which could be as simple as only they see the body-part-items, OR, some more complicated and involved way of determining loot when the Necromancer loots the corpse. I would have liked to talk about this one more, but we were already gabbing during the official speech and thought it was a good time to wrap it up.
I walk in Shadows
While this comes second hand from what some of the other fansites reported from Fanguard, it has been said that Necromancers, when they die, might transform themselves into Liches until they loot their corpse again. Whether this has a game play element, or whether it's just for pure cool factor, I am unable to say for sure.
Sign me up
Some things really test your class loyalty. The Necromancer is one of those things. I've never been one for casters really, but the Necromancer to me sounds like it's going to be a great class with it's own special feel and style of play. In some ways it hearkens back to the EQ Necromancer in terms of their solo capacity, while adding a new twist that will make Necromancers more than just twitch bots. When I'm not on my Rogue stealing everything that isn't nailed down, you can bet you'll find me on my Necromancer, stealing souls.
Thanks for reading.
Nenjin Darkeyes
Safehouse Staff Writer
Necromancer
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