BlizzCon: Hands on With the Diablo III Witch Doctor

If you don’t know already, Diablo 3 is playable at BlizzCon this year. Everyone is probably dying to know about the new classes. Earlier this season, the Witch Doctor and Barbarian were announced as new classes. At BlizzCon, they also announced a third class, the Wizard. We’ll cover that more in a later article. I, however, had the pleasure of trying out the Witch Doctor first hand. Now you might be wondering, “Allen, you’re a tough, burly man, why didn’t you play the Barbarian?” Well, although that statement may be true, I am not that interested into just running into things and hitting really hard. Where’s the fun in that? I wanted to try the elegant class of Witch Doctor. I would have taken some sweet videos or taken some pictures, but Blizzard wouldn’t allow any of that.

The basis of the Witch Doctor, as you can probably guess, is power of Voodoo. She starts out with some crazy abilities. Some of which include: sending suicide plague frogs to explode on your enemies, sucking the soul out of them, and throwing a flaming skull that explodes in a blaze. On top of that, Witch Doctor has the ability to summon a few minions. I started out with two regular looking undead dogs. They automatically attacked the closest bad guy they saw. During a fight, however, they were caught in the fray in which I threw an exploding skull. Now, I thought they would suffer the same amount of damage, but instead, turned into fiery dogs of doom. Not only did they have an orange glow, but also they seemed to do more damage.

Flaming Dogs? Hell yes.

Once I hit level 2, I got access to a new ability: Bats on fire. Yes, you heard right, bats on fire. Well, that’s not actually what they ability is called, but for this ability, you channel bats that appear from behind you, and as they pass your hands, they catch fire. This results in a wall of fiery-winged creatures, suiciding on the baddie in question. This ability has no time limit, and is only dependent on mana. Now if new abilities weren’t cool enough, you can adjust your abilities with “runes.” I only got one rune during my run, and that was the rune of minor multi-strike. I attached it to my fiery skulls and now it bounced once after it exploded for two skill-exploding action.

I would have loved to spend all day playing Diablo 3, but alas, I had to let other people play. One of the other reporters covered the Wizard, so stay tuned for that!