How Long Would The Characters Of Diablo III Last Working In The Real World?

When it comes to saving reality from the unspeakable horrors of a Hell, whose unbound fury would consume mortal minds and bodies with the ease and enthusiasm of a malevolent black hole, the heroes of Diablo III make the perfect team. If those heroes—the Barbarian, the Demon Hunter, the Monk, the Witch Doctor, and the Wizard—were thrust into the real world and forced to join the working, withering masses, not so much.

Imagine a world in which your daily commute is punctuated by the mad babbling of these five otherworldly beings, who would surely be driven irreversibly insane by the monotony of everyday life that the majority of us face with stoic resignation. Snakes burst forth from the underground when the Witch Doctor’s train is late again. Civilians are accidentally massacred as the Barbarian and Demon Hunter are told for what seems like the hundredth time that there’s simply no room in the budget for their desperately desired promotions. The Monk finds no solace in meditation when he’s denied his quarterly bonus for the twelfth consecutive period. The Wizard’s paychecks are sent to the wrong address, and his meager tenement burns mysteriously to the ground after a night of heavy drinking.

And let’s face it: they wouldn’t be very good at their jobs to begin with.

The Barbarian is a simple man. Yes, he saved the realms of Heaven and humanity from the ineffable hordes of Hell. But that experience, however integral in reinforcing the warrior’s indomitable strength and iron-clad sense of duty, is hardly relevant to the type of pencil-pushing employment he's relegated to in today’s world.

He’s wholly lacking in any of the skills that help the white collar workforce trudge for decades through their daily routines. He learned the arts of combat while others learned how to write in cursive. He’s never heard of Quicken.

The Barbarian’s co-workers are nervously aware of the battle axe he keeps in his desk drawer. They pain themselves to circumvent his isolated cubicle whenever possible, conjuring excuses to cease conversing and dissipate like cockroaches in sudden, blinding light when he approaches the water cooler for a tepid draught.

That suits the Barbarian just fine; he lived a lonely life before, and he finds the meek inhabitants of this office, this city, this world contemptible. It doesn’t exactly make him a team player, though, and he spends more time browsing reddit (he likes the pictures) than doing any actual work. We do envy his job security, since his bosses are too terrified to fire him.

Frankly, the Demon Hunter would probably be happier with a blue collar life as an exterminator, but the woman’s pride won’t let her stoop to extinguishing the pathetic existences of the lower beasts. Don’t believe for a second that her hunting days are over—but in this mundane world’s absence of Hellish and demonic monstrosities, she's forced to stalk other prey.

The name of that prey? Sales.

At first she takes to the profession as enthusiastically as she once picked up her crossbows in pursuit of the demons that tortured, murdered, and devoured the inhabitants of her village. But her hard and unforgiving essence, forged in grief and rage, was not designed for the altogether different perils of the sales floor.

Customers flee in terror from the past horrors they glimpse in her steely and frigid gaze. The hint of violence behind her counterfeit smile and stiff, insincere handshake—the cornerstone of any solid business transaction—earn her no praise from peers or superiors.

Yet her coworkers keep her around for one purpose: there’s no one they’d rather have with them during those mandatory emergency fire drills.

Through decades of training the Monk hardened himself into a spiritual fighter without fear, a force of power and will before which Hell itself trembled. But no amount of training could have prepared him for the simultaneous assault of soul-crushing tedium and dreadful decomposition he now faces everyday as he navigates the interminable mental maze of working in retail.

Forced to trade in his ceremonial vestments for each new season’s fashions, with meager fifteen-minute smoke breaks replacing the hours of meditation required to hone his mind and body to its former glories, the Monk has all but forsaken his beloved way of life.

Hours spent folding the garments hastily discarded by uncaring mall shoppers have transformed his chiseled-marble muscles into flabby pancakes of flesh clutching to his once splendid countenance. He now finds himself more often humming the latest Miley Cyrus dreck than the solemn and sacred chants that passed his lips for decades before. He has forgotten what it means to embody the will of Ivgorod’s thousand and one gods of order and chaos.

On the plus side, his fashion sense has improved and he doesn't have to spend nearly as much time praying. Overall he calls it an improvement.

How the exotic and powerful Witch Doctor found himself employed as an accountant on Wall Street we may never know, but his impropriety in the position knows no bounds. The Doctor’s perverse and unsettling powers to summon vermin, pestilence, and death itself to his service are ill-suited to a life spent watching tickers and counting coins. Before, he harvested the souls of his enemies; now it’s his career that's sucking the soul out of him.

Out of practice in his nefarious arts, his dark powers manifest themselves beyond his control; his frightening menageries of beasts appears at his side at the most inopportune times, ruining important transactions and leaving trails of refuse and feces in the lobbies and halls of respected banks. And tigers and zombies make poor administrative assistants.

The Witch Doctor lacks the scruples to participate in the sinister business of financial trading—and that's saying something. On the other hand, his mastery over the arts of poison and plague are put to good use now and then when a competitor gains the upper hand or an association becomes unprofitable. No wonder he's so successful.

The powerful and fearsome Wizard’s education in the arcane academy at Caldeum prepared her not for her transition into white collar life, though her subsequent self-teaching of the more portentous astral arts lent her some skills that she finds useful as an unenthusiastic and ineffectual safety manager: the skills of illusion and deceit.

Though her heart was once pure, raw ambition and sheer boredom with the modern world have sent her plummeting over the precipice of sanity. Her line of work depends wholly on one's caution and overall esteem for other human life, qualities lacking in one who so wantonly meddles with such formidable arts. She easily disregards her own wellbeing; how can she possibly be depended on to oversee the health and safety of others? Reckless, she forges on in her own forbidden studies while those for whose very lives she is responsible fall like flies around her.

Regulations under her unwatchful eye have grown dangerously lax, and workers perish by the week. Those who remain have given up the depressing task of resetting the clichéd “days since last accident” sign; too many were injured or killed simply climbing the ladder to reset those accusatory numbers back to zero.

At least she’s happy; it’s shockingly easy for one so skilled in sorcerous arts to cover up her own negligence, and with no one to oppose her the Wizard has total freedom.