Siegebreaker Assault Beast

The Siegebreaker Assault Beast is a large and powerful boss monster in Diablo III. He was revealed in the WWI 2008 gameplay movie.

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Diablo III Monster

Diablo III Monster [e]
Siegebreaker Assault Beast           Boss
Classification:	Demons
Monster Family:	Bosses
Role:	Boss
Monster Stats Norm/Night/Hell/Inferno
Life:	Unknown
Mana:	N/A
Armor:	Unknown
Resistance:	Unknown
Offence Norm/Night/Hell/Inferno
Armament:	Three-Blade Gauntlet
DPS:	Unknown
Low Damage:	Unknown
High Damage:	Unknown
Range:	Melee
Speed:	Slow
Movement:	Slow
Monster Modifiers
None
Spells/Abilities
Swipe Charge Trample
Found In
Leoric Highlands

The Siegebreaker Assault Beast is the first large boss monster revealed in Diablo III and he blows away all of Diablo IIs Act Bosses and Uber Monsters added together, by sheer mass and power. He's so large that the concept of a single character fighting him is kind of laughable. It's like a mouse taking on a large dog, except that this dog has six legs with metal spikes on the front two. (On the other hand, the mouse has magical spells, armor, and weapons, so maybe it's not such a mismatch after all?)

Siegebreaker is purely a melee fighter, with an avalanche of a charging attack and a three-hit, punching attack that deals horrifying damage with the huge blades on the back of his hands. He has some sort of stomp or trample attack as well, one that tears up the earth and creates clouds of smoke from the earth in front of him.

He appears well before the player gets to fight him in Act III, below the looming towers of Bastion's Keep, in the battlefields below. When the player begins to approach the Arreat Crater, there is a gargantuan corpse of a siegebreaker lying in repose in The Battlefields.

Boss Abilities

The siegebreaker is a mindless living weapon of rage and fury, and his abilities represent that very well.

• Three Hit Mini-Charge - The breaker will do a slight dash forward and then striking three times, slowly, but for fairly large damage. This attack, like all of his, is very well broadcasted and easy to avoid, although the radius is very large.

• Charge - The Siegebreaker will stomp, snort, and kick up dust before charging the player for large damage and knocking them back. The pillars in the room will stop his charge if he hits them.

• Leg Stomp - The Siegebreaker will roar, rear up, and then smash the ground with his legs for a large amount of damage.

• Grab and Throw - The breaker's most dangerous attack, he will grab the player, lifting them up and roaring in their face, before smashing them into the ground. Originally this ability would be a killing blow on the player, where the breaker would snap their body in half with his mouth and throw the lifeless corpse onto the ground. That has since been removed.

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  Siegebreaker in-game.

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  Charging a Barbarian.

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  Leg stomp.

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  The three-hit mini charge attack.

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  The crowd-pleasing grab and throw attack.

Development

The following sections have been saved for posterity, tracking the progress of the Siegebreaker over Diablo III's (very) long development. They are obviously out of date, but still interesting to a fan of the series.

Fatalities

Siegebreaker biting off a Barbarian's head. A spectacular death.

Besides his gargantuan size and speed, the most talked about feature of Siegebreaker's appearance in the WWI 2008 gameplay movie were the fatalities he delivered to two of the four characters fighting him. The most memorable was the death of a Barbarian when Siegebreaker picked up the hero and outright bit his head off, then threw down the decapitated corpse with a howl of rage. In result of this action, Siegebreaker's jaw was covered with blood and body parts until the end of the battle. A Witch Doctor was similarly destroyed, not by a bite, but by a spike to the ground, after being picked up and howled at.

Quizzed by a member of the community in January 2012, if death by decapitation was still in the game Blizzard relayed they were not.

Unfortunately we never managed to get these implemented. They were a really cool idea, but a pretty huge amount of work. The one we showed of the Siegebreaker was a scripted sequence we set up specifically for that video. It was never implemented, and never actually worked without someone sitting there typing in a bunch of commands to get it all to fire off properly. It's still something we'd like to do, though.

Death Spawn

Life fire dies out.

Another interesting trick of Siegebreaker's is his death animation. He crumbles down to pieces in a very pretty way, like a decaying, hollowed volcano, but then sends out five jets of red light, which swirl around the screen for a moment before crashing to earth. Where the lights land, in the cemetery where the battle took place, great numbers of skeletons spawn. It's not clear why a giant centaur-dog beast like Siegebreaker would spawn human skeletons when he dies, but it is certainly a cool effect.

Spells and Abilities

• Swipe
• Charge
• Trample

The array of abilities of the Siegebreaker is mainly for physical melee combat, and he(she?) does not have any magical abilities or spells. The swipe of his clawed hand will do significant damage to anyone caught in it, as will his charge and trample. You might get to experience some cool death animation sooner than you'd imagined...

Related Monsters

• Skeleton - Seems to spawn in great numbers when the Siegebreaker dies.

Background

Nothing is known of the backstory behind the Siegebreaker just yet. It seems like a special-breed demon for use in actual sieges, far more efficient than constructions steered towards a wall. In either way, it's obvious that the beast is meant to turn the tides during sieges, or very important battles.

Diablo I & II Monster

No monster even resembles the Siegebreaker in Diablo I or Diablo II. He's bigger than the Act Bosses of Diablo II.

WWI Demo

Siegebreaker lurking in the distance.

Siegebreaker was the star monster in the WWI (June 2008) gameplay movie, and while Siegebreaker will be found in the final version of Diablo III, it's unlikely that the plot build up to his appearance, or the cemetery location for the final battle, will be present in the final game. The dungeon and other locations seen in the June 2008 WWI gameplay movie were created specially for that demo as part of Diablo III's debut, and are not necessarily indicative of the quests and events in the final game.

Prior to his charging battle appearance at the end of the demo, Siegebreaker is seen inside the dungeon that the Barbarian explores. During that opening segment of the demo, an NPC soldier is yanked through a wall by Siegebreaker's hand, and there are several moments when the ground shakes and rocks crumble and fall when Siegebreaker stomps past, just seen in the distance. These quest elements excited fans, but as with the other demo content, it should be remembered that these elements were created just for the demo, and may not be seen in the final game.

Behind the Scenes

Now he's a big one.

Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok commented on the creation of the video demo in a forum post in April 2009.

It is indeed the siegebreaker's giant hand that grabs him. It was an extremely difficult and trying shot to create and capture. The way the interior and exterior sections were set up and shot it made it necessary to capture them uncut.

The hand shot just wasn't working that well, so we'd tweak it, hope that the physics would move the debris properly. Shoot, it didn't work right. Tweak it again, reshoot the entire interior run, something else might go wrong, etc. Over and over. In the end we had to settle with what would appear to most as a wall collapse simply because we didn't have time before the announcement to keep tweaking it and reshooting everything to make it more clear that it was a hand busting through the wall and grabbing him. Especially when the one we went with had some very perfect moments in it (zombie corpse landing on railing).

I'm glad that someone caught it though, a lot of work went into those animations, and unfortunately we just ran out of time to showcase them.

See a sequence of shots showing this scripted event on the Siegebreaker snatch page.

Media

You can find pictures in the Diablo 3 screenshot and picture gallery:

• Diablo 3 screenshots and pictures
• Siegebreaker search in the gallery

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  Goatmen surround a Siegebreaker.

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  Siegebreaker, dying.

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  Death of Siegebreaker, closeup.

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  Large scale living War Machine.

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  Slafs!

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  Pummelling a Barbarian.