Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred has a special gift for necromancers who want to be surrounded by 28 skeletons and druids who hate being bears

When I first opened the warlock skill tree while reviewing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred last week, I spent a good 20 minutes just reading through all the different skills and upgrades Blizzard stuffed in there. And that was just one of the new classes in the expansion; the other six have been reworked too.

I glanced at the sorceress skill tree and saw all kinds of transformative options in there, like being able to turn your burning meteors into icy comets. However, I should’ve taken a peek at druids and necromancers—two classes I don’t normally play—because they got bigger upgrades than the rest of them.

Druids skills are no longer tied to specific shapeshifting forms. Instead, you select which form you want the skill to transform you into. You can finally decide to live out your fantasy as a purely human druid for storm and earth skills, for example, and all you have to do is select which form you want in the skill tree (for free). This is a big deal for creating builds around items that give you bonuses for sticking to one form, and for anyone, like me, who really isn’t a fan of playing as a bear the entire time.

Necromancers might be the biggest winners of the expansion: Blizzard has promoted them to undead generals who can command more minions than ever before. Not only can they finally direct their skeletons to attack targets, they can gather up to what looks like 28 of them, all at once, with the right items.

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All their minions now live in the skill tree and work slightly different from before. Skeletal mages are summoned with the necromancer’s version of mana, essence, and skeletal warriors show up passively when there are monster corpses nearby. Golems are in the tree, too, if you want one big brute to smash everything apart.

Spoilers for the Lord of Hatred campaign in the video below!

The first thing I thought of when seeing these changes is how much less spamming you have to do to keep your minions summoned during boss fights where they get repeatedly squished. But I’m sure necromancer players will see this and get excited about what the skill tree will let them do to their little bone buddies.

The Book of the Dead, the necromancer’s unique, minion-focused class mechanic, will still let you sacrifice your minions for powerful stat bonuses, but won’t stop you from still summoning weaker versions of them in combat. This allows you to use them purely as tanks instead of damage-dealers or to activate specific effects on your gear.

All the other classes have lots of new skill variants in their trees as well, but they don’t have unique mechanics like druids and necromancers that would need to dramatically change to fit this new era of customization. I’m glad Blizzard put in the extra effort to make sure druids and necromancers can fully take advantage of all the updates to loot, crafting, and skills in Lord of Hatred.

The expansion is launching on April 27 (April 28 for some regions), and will have all of this available from the moment you start the new campaign. Don’t listen to the NPCs yelling at you to stay after Mephisto and his army of brainwashed devotees: Saving Sanctuary can wait while you poke around your skill tree and imagine the most creative ways you can take the demon lord down.

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