Diablo III Boss Overview: Iskatu

While not a genuine boss, Iskatu presents as though he were one, and to those who are not prepared, he may as well be one.

Iskatu is the first encounter you have on opening Act IV of Diablo III, and while he himself is only an example of an enemy you will fight with some regularity throughout the act, his fight can still give you quite a bit of difficulty for two big reasons.

First of all, you’re not familiar with Shadow Demons yet.  You will have fought some of the smaller shadowthings during Act II when you were retrieving Zoltan Kulle’s body from the Shadow Realm, and these are what you will need to recall- as they are what will make this opening battle the most difficult.

Iskatu’s minions actually show up a good eight to ten seconds before the demon himself, and they show up in absolute droves.  If you are unprepared, you will quickly be overrun by dozens, if not scores, of attacks from the shadows that dive into and erupt from the ground itself, making single-target attacks next to useless against their overwhelming numbers.

Iskatu himself appears some distance away from you.  Thankfully, Shadow Demons are melee combatants, so he is forced to close with you to fight you.  Unthankfully, this in no way stems the flow of minions, which constantly spawn at a rate well over a dozen per second and continually charge towards you to strike.  This makes fighting Iskatu himself far more dangerous, as focusing on him can easily leave you and any hireling you’ve got overwhelmed by the raw number of incoming attacks.

As if this weren’t enough, Iskatu himself periodically dives back into the floor and vanishes into murky shadow, retreating for a time only to come at you from a distance again.  If you have some good ranged attacks that don’t care what’s between you and him this is a liability for him- but otherwise you’re going to have to fend off his constant wave of minions while awaiting his approach.

The best way to handle Iskatu is to treat it as though all you were fighting were his minions, and pull out your best area attack.  Especially good are options like the Barbarian’s Cleave with Rupture rune, which not only smashes multiple opponents, but those who it kills then explode, potentially killing more of them.  Since Iskatu will have to close to melee with you, this leaves him right in the middle not only of such area attacks, but the subsequent explosions and damage as well.

Using this to your advantage makes this fight very short; otherwise, you could easily find yourself taking a startling level of damage from this purple-name and his multitude of murky minions.