Diablo III Boss Overviews: The Siege Beast

As you make your way about the ramparts during the fortress wall segments of Act III, you can often get a glimpse of the battlefields below.  If you pay a bit of attention to that, you can see a few especially large demons wandering around wreaking havoc.  One of the most noteworthy is an apparently eyeless thing with malformed hands for feet, looking like a strange mockery of a centaur with giant steel spikes mounted to its arms.

This is a siegebreaker demon, and is exactly what you’re going to fight when you start your descent into Arreat Crater.  While Ghom unquestionably takes the cake as the most outright disgusting boss yet found in a Diablo game, the siegebreaker beast is challenged only by the Butcher and Azmodan himself in Diablo III, and by Duriel and Coldworm the Burrower in Diablo II for the crown of largest boss.  While simple to face, the sheer size and force that the Siegebreaker Assault Beast brings to bear make it a challenge and an interesting boss in and of itself.

While most of the attacks the siegebreaker brings to the combat consist of ‘swing really hard’, that means a lot when you take into account its size.  The creature’s standard melee attacks not only affect sweeping arcs in front of it, they occasionally knock back anyone hit by them, and even when not knocked back, many characters will suffer through lengthy staggers from the heavy blows.

Melee combatants need to be especially careful- occasionally, the beast will pick up such characters and roar in their faces.  This doesn’t seem like such a terrible prospect at first, but apparently the size of the thing and its lungs counts for something, as the howl is so loud as to cause pretty heavy damage.  What’s more, while picked up, a character is helpless, and cannot do anything to fight back against the immense creature.

Despite- or rather because of - its size, the Siegebreaker Assault Beast is a fairly quick enemy, and while it doesn’t charge like the Butcher does, it moves more than quickly enough to catch up to a kiting player anyways- and simply fleeing it isn’t going to let you kill the blasted thing.

The Siegebreaker can’t bring the raw constant damage that Ghom does to the field, but the regular surges make defensive and healing skills, as well as a modest supply of high-grade healing potions, a must for this fight.  Of note is the fact that Tyrael will help you in the fight, but unfortunately the ex-angel simply isn’t powerful enough to really turn things around.  Often the Siegebreaker will actually ignore him in favor of mauling the player, and it will even sometimes ignore the Templar if he’s not swinging around his aggro-grabbing attack. 

As with Ghom, the Siegebreaker is more about raw power than complex tactics, which only makes sense as Azmodan is a being of war and might.  Still, it’s a tough fight and can wear down your defenses, so keep on your toes.