Siegebreaker Assault Beast

Now he's a big one.

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 spikes on the front two. Of course 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 a 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.

Fatalities

Siegebreaker biting off a Barbarian's head.

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.

There's no confirmation from Blizzard, but the consensus amongst players is that these interesting moves were not special one-hit kills, but were simply coded as interesting alternative graphics. The Barbarian and Witch Doctor must have been very low on hit points, to the point that the next hit was going to kill them. So, rather than them just falling over dead, Blizzard included some special code on Siegebreaker that enables him to show off a special fatality move when one of his attacks does enough damage to cause a player death.

That conclusion just begs another question, though. How many such special animations are there? Do all the bosses have some special fatality move they only show when they kill a character in a special way? Do any regular monsters have such talents? Do players die in as wide a variety of ways as monsters? Shattering when frozen, falling down and burning to a cinder from flame, charring to a skeleton from lightning, etc?

These questions were answered, in part, during BlizzCast Episode 6 when Jay Wilson said this, "Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they’re about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he’d actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It’s a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that’s primarily where. We might do some other things, we’ve talked about physics based deaths we’ve talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven’t decided at this point if that’s exactly what we’re going to do."

Hardcore players might want to try out some softcore, just to run around and die in interesting ways.

Death Spawn

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.

Media

See screenshots and concept art of Siegebreaker in the Image Gallery.

Siegebreaker's death spawns hordes of skeletons.