Diablo III Necromancer Update

I have to admit, I've always viewed Diablo III's Witch Doctor as the Nu-Necromancer, but this has proven to be not the case, considering Blizzard Entertainment's work on bringing the fan-favorite Diablo II class to their current game. Their progress report is now available on the official Blizzard blog, where you can preview the animations for a number of Necromancer skills. Here's their text description:

Skill: Grim Scythe
Grim Scythe summons a huge scythe in a wide arc, dealing damage and restoring Essence. As a generator ability, this will be your bread and butter ability for building up to your more powerful damage dealing spells.

Skill Rune: Death Nova (Blood Nova)
Blood Nova is one of the five skill runes for the base Death Nova skill. Blood Nova does impressive damage, but this comes at a cost—using this rune requires spending both Essence and some of your Health.

Skill Rune: Devour (Cannibalize)
Devour is a resource-regeneration skill, allowing you to regain Essence by consuming the corpses of your slain foes. As one of the runes for Devour, Cannibalize also allows you to regain Health, which is handy for fueling costly spells like Blood Nova!

Skill Rune: Raise Golem (Blood Golem)
We showed a sneak peek of the Blood Golem at BlizzCon, but now he’s outfitted with animations, skills, and clever tricks! The Blood Golem is a burly companion who can sacrifice himself to heal you. Don’t worry—he’ll reconstruct himself right away, and deal sizeable amounts of damage to surrounding foes in the process!

Skill: Leech
Joining Decrepify in the Necromancer’s repertoire of curses, Leech is a dastardly spell that allows you to transfer some of the health of attacked enemies to yourself and your allies. It’s great not only for keeping yourself healthy, but offering support to your party members as well!

This update also has a short FAQ, from which we can glean that the current plan is to introduce the Necromancer class alongside a content update somewhere in the second half of 2017.