Witch Doctor

Male Witch Doctor.

The Witch Doctor is a new character type 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.

Witch Doctor skills

Character Design

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.

Story

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 on the Blizzard WD page, 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.

Resources

Witch Doctor skills.
Blizzard's Witch Doctor page has plenty of plot information, and short videos of some skills in action.
Diablo III Media Coverage Archive for all interview,s previews, pictures and more.

Media