User:Leord/Witch Doctor

The Witch Doctor, abbreviated WB, is a pure spellcaster, dealing with elemental magic, nature magic, necromancy and alchemy. The class has taken some inspiration from the Necromancer of Diablo II.

Background

Diablo III Class [e]
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Witch Doctor
Role:	Caster, Summoner
Primary Attributes:	Willpower Mana
Class Skills
Skills and Traits
Background
Origin:	Teganze, Torajan jungles
Affiliation:	Tribe of the Five Hills
Friends:	None Known
Foes:	Clan of the Seven Stones, Tribe of the Clouded Valley

The Witch Doctor class comes from the jungles of Torajan, an area just southwest of Kurast, where Act Three took place in Diablo II. You can see it located on the World map close to Kurast. Their society and culture is detailed in the 13th entry of Abd al-Hazir, from which the following excerpt was taken:

Upon further discussions with my hosts, I discovered that these tribes define themselves by their belief in the Mbwiru Eikura, which roughly translates to "The Unformed Land" (this is an imprecise translation, as this concept is completely foreign to our culture and language). This belief holds that the true, sacred reality is veiled behind the physical one we normally experience. Their vitally important public ceremonies are centered upon sacrifices to the life force that flows from their gods, who inhabit the Unformed Land, into this lesser physical realm.

The witch doctors are finely attuned to this Unformed Land and are able to train their minds to perceive this reality through a combination of rituals and the use of selected roots and herbs found in the jungles. They call the state in which they interact with this other world the Ghost Trance.

Alongside the primacy of the belief in the life force and the Unformed Land, the second most sacred belief of the tribes is their philosophy of self-sacrifice and non-individuality, of suppressing one's self-interest for the good of the tribe. This idea, so foreign to our culture, struck me as something I wished to delve into much more deeply.

Character Design

The Witch Doctor, abbreviated WD, is a new character class in Diablo III. Hailing from the Torajan Jungles, southwest of Kurast in the region called Teganze, the Witch Doctor looks a bit like the top half of one of Diablo II's Flayer Shaman, especially when outfitted in one of his oversized, colourful tribal masks. Judging by the skills thus far demonstrated, the WD fights a lot like a Necromancer, using cunning and guile, rather than direct physical attacks. Witch Doctors possess a number of mind control spells, the ability to summon and control undead servants, and a variety of direct damage elemental attacks.

The D3 Team has described the Witch Doctor as old and grizzled and fanatical. His magic is not clean and easy, like the fire or lightning a Sorceress can produce with a snap of her fingers. Witch Doctors get dirty. They summon walls of zombies that rip apart attacking enemies, they call forth undead demon hounds called Mongrels that they can detonate to deal heavy damage to their enemies, and they fashion the skulls of the dead into explosive grenades. The D3 team discussed the Witch Doctor's design concepts in the Denizens of Diablo panel at the WWI 2008.

For the Witch Doctor, we wanted to get a rich, voodoo vibe. We wanted to avoid straight up master-caster feel. He's not just conjuring things out of thin air. WDs don't just channel magic. They take real world objects and infuse them with voodoo magic. Our spell descriptions for the WD were like, "He's going to throw a shrunken head filled with a chemical concoction." Or "He's going to create insect swarms by blowing voodoo dust from his palms." Or "He's going to sprinkle dust in the air and cause illusions and frighten monsters away."

Of course you're not a real witch doctor unless you're doing zombies. WD and zombies go together naturally. We didn't want normal slow wandering zombies either, so we took the typical zombie concept and smashed them up with other skill ideas. Like firewall, we smashed that with zombies and came up with zombie wall.

Leonard Boyarsky describes the Witch Doctor:

The Witch Doctor is angry, someone who's been broken by a life that's dealt a few too many hard knocks and not enough joy. This is someone tired of being smacked in the head, so he uses his mystical powers to get into the heads of others (and if that doesn't work, a swarm of locusts will get under their skin).

Necromancer Replacement?

The WD is clearly Necromancer-like, in his mixture of summonings, mind control curses, and sub-mage quality magical attacks, but the D3 team does not view the character as a replacement for the Necromancer.

Q: Is the witch doctor a replacement or spiritual successor to the Necro? They seem to have rather similar skills.

A: We don't view the Witch Doctor as a replacement. The Necromancer is a very cool char. We thought about him as a class and tried to see if we could improve on him, which is something we did with every class, and that led us to create the Witch Doctor. If we ever decided to make a Necromancer, the Witch Doctor wouldn't prevent us from doing so.

Jay Wilson commented further on this and detailed what makes the Witch Doctor different than the Necromancer in an interview with 1up.com in December 2008.

Jay: For the Witch Doctor, we wanted to create a class whose pets were not his primary source of damage output. Sure, you can build a Necromancer that's not reliant on pets, but most Necromancer builds are very pet heavy. The pets do a lot of the damage, and a lot of mechanics are built around debuffing the enemy so your pets can be better against them or taking advantage of the bodies your pets create by blowing them up with corpse explosion.

The Witch Doctor's pets are more of a distraction -- they're his form of crowd control. They're very transient, they don't matter as much to him, and they aren't really a primary source of damage. We wanted to have this general notion of a character who controlled all things slimy and gross, like zombies, bats, snakes, and spiders, but he didn't rely on them -- he just throws them out there. One of his most permanent pets is his Zombie Dogs, and we have a spell to blow them up because they're just not that important to him. We consider Zombie Wall to almost be a pet as well; it's a short-term pet, but it's a pet nonetheless. Each element is like that, where it's another distraction while the source of primary damage is the Witch Doctor himself. This makes him play very differently than the Necromancer, which was intentional.

Attributes and Skills

Witch Doctor Skills

The Witch Doctor skills are arranged into to three distinctive skill tree categories:

All three trees have a combination of active and passive skills. Active skills are used in combat, while the passive skills boost or change the behaviour of the active skills.

Plague Skills

Locust Swarm

The Plague tree skills are focused on spells that spread plague-related effects such as a Locust Swarm, toads and diseases. No passive skills have yet been revealed for the Witch Doctor Plague skill tree.

Spirit Skills

Soul Harvest

The Spirit tree skills will affect gameplay more direct than the Plague Skills. The Witch Doctor summons bats he turns to fire and sends on his enemies, sucking foes life energy out or makes them lose their minds. No passive skills have yet been revealed for the Witch Doctor Spirit skill tree.

Voodoo Skills

Wall of Zombies

The Voodoo tree skills all focus more on the darker spectrum of the Witch Doctor. Bringing dead animals back from the grave to fight, or a terrifying wall of Zombies. No passive skills have yet been revealed for the Witch Doctor Voodoo skill tree.

Development

The Witch Doctor class was unveiled at WWI 2008, together with the Barbarian. Besides a few name changes for spells, not much had changed for the Witch Doctor by mid June 2009.