By three they may come, but by five they slay: the quintuple of Diablo 4 classes has been hand-picked by Blizzard for a variety of reasons, but game director Joe Shely hints that some familiar faces may join the roster later in the RPG game‘s lifecycle.
As most seasoned Diablo veterans know, the game launches with five unique classes that, more often than not, are topped up to seven with different DLC packs.
Diablo 4 isn’t much different. There are five classes; Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Rogue, and Sorcerer, a number which associate game director Joeseph Piepiora describes as one Blizzard “really likes. It’s a nice design number,” he jokes, but goes on to clarify “five is a good enough number as it allows us to hit a lot of core fantasies across the board, because we’re looking for different ways to play.”
When I posed the question of which classes were included to Joe Shely, he responded “when you think about which classes we’ve featured for [Diablo 4’s] launch, there are a couple of aspects.
“We know that many players have characters that they love, so there are many players who remember playing a Barbarian, or remember playing a Necromancer and they want to have that experience, so we’ve tried to choose characters that players have loved from previous games.
“We also consider the styles of gameplay that those characters represent,” he continues. “With the Necromancer for example, players who love to summon a lot of characters or enjoy that dark caster fantasy [will want to play them]. The Sorcerer represents that strong, powerful magic user, and with the Barbarian there’s that up-close fighter. Then you’ve got the Rogue who has got that ranged, physical archer kind of fantasy, and you can also play them as a close-up knife-wielding assassin. That’s really exciting.”
One of my all-time favourite classes, however, is the Witch Doctor, a Diablo 3 class who vanished into obscurity relatively early, and was replaced almost entirely by the creepy yet somewhat alluring Necromancer when the Rise of the Necromancer DLC launched.
When I asked (and half pleaded) for Shely to add my mysterious magical misfit into the fray, he chuckled and replied “we’ll be excited to talk about things that are coming in our live service and expansions in the future.”
He does add, however, that “it has been a tradition in Diablo games for new classes to be added,” dropping a little hint that we can likely expect some new characters to be added in future updates. I’ll cross my fingers and hope for a Witch Doctor, but Shely did take pity on me and give me a little apology for them not being included so far, so y’know what, I’ll take that.
As the Diablo 4 release date draws ever closer, you can check out our Diablo 4 Rogue build and Diablo 4 Necromancer build guides to help you become the strongest warrior Sanctuary has ever seen.