Follower

Followers are NPCs who assist your hero in his or her battle against the demons overrunning Sanctuary. There are three Followers in Diablo III, each of whom has a unique story, look, and combat style. They are: the Eirena the Enchantress, Kormac the Templar, and Lyndon the Scoundrel.

Followers are only usable in single player games; they return to town and will not assist you when playing with other players. While the initial plan was for Followers to only be usable through Normal difficulty, fan feedback influenced the developers to revise the system to make Followers viable companions throughout Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty.

The design theory is that Followers are helpful when playing alone, but not so powerful as to make them mandatory, and not so complicated that players need to constantly attend to their survival. (There is no way to feed them potions, though they do share in the benefit of health globes. As they do not die there are no resurrection costs.)

Follower Types

The three followers take on different roles in combat, though they should be roughly equivalent in usefulness, with their style of combat determining which one your character will find most useful.

Each follower has eight unique skills, four of which can be enabled at a time, with two new ones coming online every five levels. Players can retrain their follower at any time afterwards, to use different abilities. See the various followers pages for full details on their skills.

• The Enchantress Eirena is a mage with numerous powerful ranged magical attacks and a variety of helpful buffs.

• The Scoundrel Lyndon is an ex-thief and archer who wields a crossbow. He has numerous bow attacks and can debuff monsters, slowing and poisoning them.

• The Templar Kormac is a heavily-armored tank, ready to act as a meat shield for your ranged attacker. He can take on large groups of melee fighters and draw enemy attention in the toughest scrap.

Followers Availability

Followers can only be utilized in single player playing in a game on Battle.net. If another player joins your game, your follower will return to town. Jay Wilson contributes insight to this design philosophy in an interview with Now Gamer.

Followers aren’t in [[PvP]] at all, and in cooperative Followers return to town. We found that having four players and four Followers on-screen all at once was pretty chaotic and hard to tell what’s going on. We logic’d out that a player is better than a Follower, they’re better companionship and they’re certainly more effective than a Follower. We figured any player would prefer to have another player, so at that point we decided to have the Follower return to town. You can always get him back later – if the other player leaves the Follower will return.

If the other people in your game leave you will be asked if you'd like your follower to rejoin you and if you select yes they will instantly appear where you are.

In Adventure mode in Reaper of Souls followers are available instantly, there is no requirement to discover each of them again.

Grimiku: You’ll still need to complete the campaign mode at least once in order to unlock Adventure Mode, but once it’s unlocked all of your characters of that game type (Normal or Hardcore) will be able to access it, even brand new ones.

Follower Skills

Upon reaching level five, the player can choose one of two spells or skills for the Templar and Scoundrel and again choose between another two spells at level 10, 15 and finally 20. Skills for the Enchantress can be chosen first at level 15 then again at 20, 25 and finally character level 30.

Each different type of follower offers a customizable skillset to either boost the player's effectiveness in a certain area, or cover a weakness in another. Details of those in this skill section of the Templar, Scoundrel and Enchantress pages.

Once the skills or spells are assigned, that is the end of it, unless the players choose to respec them, which will be small in cost. There are no extra ranks of abilities for followers, nor do they benefit from traits of their own. Follower abilities may not be affected by runes.

Experience, Items and Buffs

Any gear or gems you equip on your follower that adds Gold Find, Magic Find or Experience will add 20% to the player's total bonus for those. For example a Hellfire Ring that adds +35% experience bonus worn by a follower will be worth 7% bonus to the player. Note that Followers can only equip weapons, rings, and amulets (shields as well on the Templar).

The 20% bonus can not take the player beyond the 300% cap for GF/MF however.

Much like the player, followers gain experience, and also benefit from plus experience items. Followers level up along with the player, in a manner of speaking. However, a follower will never be more than one level behind the hero. Followers also benefit from bonuses such as the Massacre boost.

Follower Death

There is no mechanism to feed health potions to your Follower, though they do share in the benefit of health globes, Nephalem Globes. The Followers also possess various buffs and healing spells, which they can use to help your character, as well as themselves.

Followers never die, they simply have a rest for a short while and will automatically return to your side once their health is restored.

References

Template:Skill navbox Necromancer primary

Template:Skill navbox Necromancer secondary

Template:Skill navbox Necromancer corpses

Template:Skill navbox Necromancer bloodandbone

Template:Skill navbox Necromancer reanimation

Template:Skill navbox Necromancer curses