Follower

Followers are NPCs who assist your hero in his or her battle against the demons overrunning Sanctuary. There are three Followers in Diablo III, each of whom has a unique story, look, and combat style. They are: Eirena the Enchantress, Kormac the Templar, and Lyndon the Scoundrel. There are no additional followers in Reaper of Souls.

Followers are only usable in single player games; they return to town and will not assist you when playing with other players. While the initial plan was for Followers to only be usable through Normal difficulty, fan feedback influenced the developers to revise the system to make Followers viable companions throughout Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty.

The design theory is that Followers are helpful when playing alone, but not so powerful as to make them mandatory, and not so complicated that players need to constantly attend to their survival. (There is no way to feed them potions, though they do share in the benefit of health globes. As they do not die there are no resurrection costs.)

Follower Types

The three followers take on different roles in combat, though they should be roughly equivalent in usefulness, with their style of combat determining which one your character will find most useful.

Each follower has eight unique skills, four of which can be enabled at a time, with two new ones coming online every five levels. Players can retrain their follower at any time afterwards, to use different abilities. See the various followers pages for full details on their skills.

• The Enchantress Eirena is a mage with numerous powerful ranged magical attacks and a variety of helpful buffs.

• The Scoundrel Lyndon is an ex-thief and archer who wields a crossbow. He has numerous bow attacks and can debuff monsters, slowing and poisoning them.

• The Templar Kormac is a heavily-armored tank, ready to act as a meat shield for your ranged attacker. He can take on large groups of melee fighters and draw enemy attention in the toughest scrap.

Followers Availability

Followers can only be utilized in single player playing in a game on Battle.net. If another player joins your game, your follower will return to town. Jay Wilson contributes insight to this design philosophy in an interview with Now Gamer.

Followers aren’t in [[PvP]] at all, and in cooperative Followers return to town. We found that having four players and four Followers on-screen all at once was pretty chaotic and hard to tell what’s going on. We logic’d out that a player is better than a Follower, they’re better companionship and they’re certainly more effective than a Follower. We figured any player would prefer to have another player, so at that point we decided to have the Follower return to town. You can always get him back later – if the other player leaves the Follower will return.

If the other people in your game leave you will be asked if you'd like your follower to rejoin you and if you select yes they will instantly appear where you are.

In Adventure mode in Reaper of Souls followers are available instantly, there is no requirement to discover each of them again.

Grimiku: You’ll still need to complete the campaign mode at least once in order to unlock Adventure Mode, but once it’s unlocked all of your characters of that game type (Normal or Hardcore) will be able to access it, even brand new ones.

Follower Skills

Upon reaching level five, the player can choose one of two spells or skills for the Templar and Scoundrel and again choose between another two spells at level 10, 15 and finally 20. Skills for the Enchantress can be chosen first at level 15 then again at 20, 25 and finally character level 30.

Each different type of follower offers a customizable skillset to either boost the player's effectiveness in a certain area, or cover a weakness in another. Details of those in the skill sections of the Templar, Scoundrel and Enchantress pages.

Followers' skills can be changed at any time by simply left clicking on the new skill you want, the other skill is automatically deselected.

Experience

Much like the player, followers gain experience, and also benefit from plus to experience items. Followers level up along with the player, in a manner of speaking. However, a follower will never be more than one level behind the hero. Followers also benefit from bonuses such as the Massacre boost which gives bonus experience.

Benefiting from a Scoundrel's items.

Gear

Any gear or gems you equip on your follower that adds Gold Find, Magic Find or Experience will add 20% to the player's total bonus for those. For example, a Hellfire Ring that adds +35% experience bonus, if worn by a follower, will be worth 7% bonus to the player. The 20% bonus can not take the player beyond the 300% cap for GF/MF however.

Followers can only equip weapons, rings, and amulets (shields as well on the Templar). In addition all three have their own special class-specific item slot too which allows the Templar to wear Templar Relics, the Scoundrel to equip Scoundrel Tokens and the Enchantress Enchantress Focuses. As different attributes increase the damage they deal many of those items will increase that stat in particular:

• Strength for the Templar
• Dexterity for the Scoundrel
• Intelligence for the Enchantress

Set item bonuses for wearing multiple items from a set do not apply when they are equipped by a follower. As a Blizzard CM clarifies:

Vaeflare: As it stands currently, in order to receive the benefits of set bonuses, the set items need to be equipped on your main character. Set items equipped on Followers will not contribute to set bonuses.

We’re aware that this isn’t ideal, and we’re looking into some possibilities that would make using set items on Followers a more appealing choice in the future.

Calling all Followers

There is an interesting set, Asheara's Vestments which, when all four items are equipped by a player, has a chance to summon all your followers, fully equipped. They will disappear after a period until the bonus chance spawns them again.

The specifics of what followers add to the player's stats is listed under 'Adventure' in their 'Details' tab, see the image on the right.

Buffs

There is no mechanism to feed health potions to your Follower, though they do share in the benefit of health globes, Nephalem Globes. The Followers also possess various buffs and healing spells, which they can use to help your character, as well as themselves.

Any buffs that a player can apply to party members in a multiplayer game will apply to your follower when playing with them in a single player game.

Follower Death

Followers never die, they simply have a rest for a short while and will automatically return to your side once their health is restored.

Follower Quests an Lore

The followers, much like the Artisans, are recruited through quests that the player must complete in order to gain their trust and companionship. Once this is done, the Followers can always be found in the town area, where a player may choose one of them to accompany him into battle. Followers have their own individual quests, which shed more light on their back story as well as the overall game plot. A player will need to work through the entire game with each of the followers, individually, to experience their full game plot and all of the quests.

References

Media

Gallery

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  Calling all Followers

Video

This is the reveal video for the Followers released on the 12th May 2011 by the official Korean site before, it seems, Blizzard Irvine was ready to do so.

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