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→Necromancer Replacement?
The WD is clearly {{wl|[http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Necromancer Necromancer]}}-like, in his mixture of summonings, mind control curses, and sub-mage quality magical attacks, but the D3 team [[WWI_2008:_D3_Design_Fundamentals_Panel|does not view the character as a replacement]] for the Necromancer.
::'''Q: ''' Is the witch doctor a replacement or spiritual successor to the {{wl|[http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Necromancer 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 [http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=1&cId=3172030&p=1 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.
==Story==