Diablo III Boss Overview: Rakanoth

Rakanoth is the epitome of the Barbarian, a horrifying melee opponent that dishes out ridiculous amounts of damage and possesses more than his share of toughness.

Rakanoth bears three special abilities, two of which are attacks.

His ability that is not an attack instead powers up his attacks; Barbarian players may be familiar with Frenzy, which constantly boosts your attack speed the more you hit.  Rakanoth abuses this mightily with his dual-wielding, and anyone standing in melee with him, even the toughest of Barbarians, will quickly find their health dwindling and their potions on cooldown.  The only good way to break this chain is with stuns and knockback, as backing off only lets him advance on you as he continues to hack you into smaller and smaller pieces.

His first attack makes him even more terrifying in melee- he bears a copy not of the Barbarian’s Whirlwind attack, but the Monk’s Vortex, which lets him continue with his building Frenzy slashing as he deals out constant damage in an area around him at the same time.  Again, a stun or knockback is the only real way to interrupt the Lord of Despair’s offense.

Finally, Rakanoth bears the bane of all ranged opponents- a teleport attack.  If you try to keep your distance and actually start succeeding despite Rakanoth’s more-than-decent movement speed, he will teleport to you, and gouge you with one of his sword-arms at the same time for fairly hefty damage.  This attack is virtually impossible to dodge by choice, and invariably leads to a Vortex-Frenzy beating of disturbing magnitude.  It doesn’t even appear to have much of a cooldown, often used moments after his last teleport.

Fortunately, Rakanoth doesn’t actually have any ranged attacks.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to need them, handing out damage like it was going out of style.  No ranged character wants to try sitting still, and even having the Templar with you will only go so far to protect you.  Having some way to boost your durability- Diamond Skin, for instance- goes a long way to solving the problem, but without stuns or knockback, even a melee character will spend a distressingly large amount of the fight running away from the storm of blades that is the Lord of Despair.

Keep your health up, keep moving, and whatever you do, don’t go toe-to-toe with him when you’re at less than half health- it’s amazing how quickly that globe will empty when Rakanoth decides it’s stabbity time.