Changes

|foes= [[Clan of the Seven Stones]], [[Tribe of the Clouded Valley]]

}}

The team felt that it wouldn't be a real Witch Doctor without [[zombies]]. They go together naturally, but they didn't want normal slow wandering zombies. They mashed the idea of Zombies with the Firewall of previous games and came up with [[Wall of Zombies|zombie wall]].

::''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).''

::'''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.

::We wanted to create a class whose pets were not his primary source of damage output. [...] Most Necromancer builds are very pet heavy. The pets do a lot of the damage, and a lot of mechanics are built around [[debuff]]ing 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.

===Build Variety?===

::'''''Diii.net: '''The Witch Doctor build seems fairly narrow in concept. He’ll always have mongrels for tanking, some mini-mage support, and some minion attacks and a bit of mind control. Looking at his skill tree now, there doesn’t seem to be that many potential Witch Doctor builds, which isn’t true of the [[Wizard]] or [[Barbarian]]. Can you comment on that? Is it just that we don’t know enough about the Witch Doctor yet?

===ZooKeeper Build===

::Fetish army is really the only mass-summon spell the witch doctor has. The fetish army spell effects are coming along too, it's looking pretty amazing.

The Witch Doctor is the only class in Diablo 3 who uses [[mana]] as a character resource. In this the WD is very conventional and familiar to people who played Diablo and Diablo 2. The character casts spells that cost X amount of mana, which regenerates over time, at a rate determined by various factors including total mana pool, item modifiers, and relevant skills. (Details are as of yet far from complete.)

::'''''Diii.net: '''Do you envision the health globes will boost [non-mana resources] in the way that the Wizard and Witch Doctor gained mana from them at Blizzcon?

But the key is that we don’t necessarily want to... we don’t want to cannibalize an existing gameplay mechanic. So when you take health globes that are already important, and you make them even more important, then that doesn’t really create gameplay. For the WD, the health globes weren’t that important a lot of times, since he very rarely took damage with his pets, so for him by enhancing his desire for health globes, we’re really putting gameplay where it wasn’t. So whatever we’re designing a class that’s what we look at.

==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.

==References==

* [[Writings of Abd al-Hazir: Entry no. 0013|Writings of Abd al-Hazir: Entry no. 0013: The Witch Doctor]]

* [[Media Coverage|Diablo III Media Coverage Archive]] for all interviews, previews, pictures and more.

{{Class navbox|WD}}

[[Category:Classes]]

[[Category:Umbaru]]

[[Category:Basics]]

[[Category:Lore]]