Heroes of the Storm gets Diablo's Necromancer and Wizard

We were looking around and we had this idea for a hero that was going to reset their cooldowns after they participated in an assist or a kill. Then Wizard came up as an option.

So one was motivated specifically by players asking for the character, and one was we had an idea for some gameplay we wanted to do, and asking who could make that work for us.

Xul the Necromancer is the first Diablo II-exclusive player character you are adding to the game. Was it difficult to recreate this character from a much older game to make it look like he fit in with the aesthetic of Heroes of the Storm?

I don't think art was as big a concern. We did Lost Vikings before, who don't fit in at all. Even our older games like Warcraft 3, if you go back and look, the art doesn't really directly translate from then to today. I think art is less of a concern, we're really going for something that reminds you of that character. What made Necromancer especially challenging for us was more on the creative side. Because most people remember the Necromancer as a billion skeletons. There's only so many skeletons our game can handle before it becomes very noisy, difficult to read, and he becomes invulnerable to all kinds of skillshots because of all the skeletons in the way. So he was more challenging to get something that was close to the Necromancer fantasy, to make it playable within the context of our game.

Did you work closely with the Diablo team to do that?

Some. A lot of the teams give us a lot of latitude when it comes to these heroes. They know that we're going to be using these characters, they know that we're going to treat them with as much love as respect as we can while shoving them violently into our game. They've been very supportive of the work that we've done. We give them a heads-up when we're doing stuff, but they're generally very supportive of our efforts.

How are the names for these normally nameless heroes chosen?

Sometimes the team can find someone obscure in some of the fiction that's been written or in a comic book somewhere. Sometimes even those become too specific and they simply use the types of names this character has had in the past to inspire a new name.

Do you look at any statistics from how players use these classes in Diablo III when introducing them to Heroes of the Storm?

Not generally. Generally it's challenging enough to make the core fantasy of the hero even function within the game than to worry about which build is optimal this month in Diablo III for example. We all have impressions from how we've played our Wizards in Diablo III, and that certainly influences the direction the hero goes. We've had popular builds made us consider how we make this character. Often though, just making the hero work within the context of the genre is pretty challenging and if we can hit that, we're going to call it a win.

There are times that we go away from that though. For example, I would argue that for Witch Doctor, Zombie Dogs is one of the most powerful iconic abilities for that character in Diablo III. But when we made that character we didn't think we could handle the span, we didn't feel like we wanted another pet class in the game at the time, our pet controls weren't that great when we put that in the game in the first place, so we went away from that. We feel like our Witch Doctor in Heroes of the Storm certainly feels like a Witch Doctor in Diablo, but the specific abilities definitely don't always translate back and forth.

Though to be fair, I think the Diablo team liked our circular zombie wall so much that they actually made a circular zombie wall in Diablo, which was nice to see our ideas inspire them. But generally, we try to get the feel for the character as best we can, but the specific powers we may not always be able to hit. But when we can, we're happy to.

Will these characters have quips that point to relationships with other characters outside of the Diablo franchise?

I know we often do the best we can in that area. Honestly, I'm not sure which ones the writing staff did for this.

With characters like the Necromancer, there's a huge pool of skills in Diablo II to choose from. How many iterations did you have to go through to tweak this character to be suitable for HOTS?

Wizard was fairly quick, as far as things go. Once we tested Magic Missile, we really liked that. Arcane Orb really worked the way we wanted it to. Disintegrate went in early and stayed there for quite some time. Necromancer went through quite a battle. Necromancer was back and forth many, many times. We had versions of the Necromancer that was all about skeletons. We had a sufficiently frustrated Necromancer who was named "I have no skeletons at all! Where my skeletons be at?!" at one point. So Necromancer had a lot more iteration time to get there.

I think that was also difficult because so many people had different ideas of what [the hero] should be. People remember different skills. Corpse explosion was something a lot of people remembered. It really depends on how you played it, and people became very passionate about which version of the Necromancer should ultimately go into the game. That was months and months. And I don't mean months to build, all characters take months to build. But I think there were... if we're supposed to be in a concept phase for a hero for six to eight weeks, he was easily twelve or more.