Diablo III Boss Overview- Big D

Diablo itself (Himself?  Herself?  I can’t even tell now.) is perhaps the most prolonged fight in the game, and it’s one of the most dangerous, fittingly.  Nasty enough just for being the incarnation of terror itself, Diablo packs more than a few abilities- some of the nastiest old ones and a few horrifying new ones to boot.

In melee, Diablo isn’t anything too special- just harmful.  The big red one has a strong charge attack that forces a stagger, and can knock out a few good hits in melee.  The final boss also borrows a page from the Siegebreaker Assault Beast, occasionally picking you up and howling death into your face for pretty respectable damage.

The four-armed boss also retains the old bone cages that most players will be familiar with, preceded by faint shadows on the ground.  Unlike before, though, someone in a bone cage cannot break out of it- you’re just stuck there unable to inflict any hits at all and have to wait for Diablo to come over and grab you and scream in your face.

Diablo also launches magmaballs reminiscent of Azmodan’s- but these are smaller, faster, and don’t track quite as well.  What’s worse, they drop an AoE on the field where they land that will quickly incinerate you if you’re daft enough to hold still in the fire.  The Big D packs the expected stomping attack that unleashes a burst of damage around it, and of course Big Red retains the ability to launch a spread of fireballs in all directions.

Fighting Diablo is generally either a contest of agility or durability depending on how you play it, until you get the big bad down to about 2/3 health.  Then things get interesting.

Once you’ve sufficiently injured the Lord of Terror, you’ll find yourself dumped into the Realm of Terror, a tiny segment of the battlefield surrounded by a wall of shadow.  A copy of Diablo appears here, though equipped only with the bone cages, faceshattering howl, and stomp attack, as well as a teleport ability.

What makes this more interesting is that Diablo will periodically vanish, to be replaced by a shadow doppelganger of you.  This copy has a semi-random set of spells and runes from the options available to you (and possibly a few runes a little more advanced than yours), but strangely doesn’t always have the same skills prepared as you do, so a Disintegrate mage may discover that their copy is hitting them with an Arcane Barrage.  These copies are also notably more durable than you, but they don’t play defense very well.  This means that your best bet there is to just smack them in the face until they dissipate so you can go back to beating up Diablo’s doppelganger.

Once Shadow Diablo has been destroyed, you will be returned to the area you were fighting Diablo in before- only, the Lord of Terror is upset and even more ready to kill you.  Not only is Diablo’s health refilled, but the Big Red One also picks up a few more attacks to destroy you with.  The abilities you were contesting with previously now deal out even more damage, and they are added to by periodic Meteor spells smashing down hither thither and yon.

While the meteors are a bit random and not as dangerous as they could be, Diablo also revives an ability from the second game of the series- the terrifying stream of lightning.  The only way to deal with this attack is to run rings around the Prime Evil, because standing there and trying to soak it will kill you.  No, it doesn’t matter what you’ve got.  It will kill you.  Run.

While Diablo’s defenses aren’t the best, the sheer might behind the offenses brought to bear on you makes the third stage of this fight about your ability to avoid getting roasted while still throwing some damage yourself.  The lightning stream and increased damage mean that you simply cannot stand toe to toe with the Lord of Terror- you have to try and evade as much damage as you can, or you’re going to go down.  The presence of Health Wells and the fact that Diablo occasionally drops a Health Orb can help in this fight, but in the end it’s about keeping mobile and still managing to swing anyways.