Thousand Pounder

The Thousand Pounder is a special monster of a mini-boss variety. He is slow, but deals massive damage with his two huge maces. He appears to be a Demon.

Diablo III Monster

Diablo III Monster [e]
Thousand Pounder           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:	2x Mace
DPS:	High
Low Damage:	Unknown
High Damage:	Unknown
Range:	Melee
Speed:	Slow
Movement:	Slow
Monster Modifiers
None
Spells/Abilities
Enrage
Found In
Forgotten Tombs

Concept art of the Thousand Pounder(s).

Thousand Pounder is a special boss monster, seen in the WWI 2008 gameplay movie and a few related screenshots. It's not known if he's one particular individual out of a whole class of big, fat, dual-wielding, tattooed Demons, or if he's a special, one-of-a-kind demon. He's not an Act Boss or a major Quest boss though, that much was made clear in the panels at the WWI event.

The Demon is summoned (as is described below), and sets to attack the player. Once he's ready to rumble, Thousand Pounder moves slowly, but with tremendous power, and deals heavy damage with his two large maces. When he smacks his two maces together, you don't want to be standing in the impact zone. In the gameplay movie, a Barbarian avoids damage by jumping around the beast with Leap Attack and uses Furious Charge to smash through the fatty monster. Other classes will likely be able to have some sort of similar mobility skills, like the Wizard skill Teleport.

When his life drops below about 50%, he kicks into an enraged mode. At that point his tattoos begin to glow red and he moves much more quickly. He retains this rage until he is killed.

The Thousand Pounder doesn't have any additional minions or other monsters to help him out, so if the player uses an avoidance tactic and tries to damage him with ranged attacks, or forces him to use his strong but slow attacks, dodges them, and counter attacks before the Pounder retaliates, he can be taken down easily. Just remember not to get hit by the maces, and you'll be fine.

Summoning Ritual

Thousand Pounder is summoned up in a scripted event. The Barbarian in the Gameplay movie from WWI 2008 is running through the Forgotten Tombs when he comes upon a circle of five Dark Cultists channelling their energy to call up the Demon. At first there are three pale-skinned youths dancing in the circle. They explode one by one, and then from their blood and flesh the demon is made incarnate.

Youths dance, then are sacrificed to call forth Thousand Pounder.

While the Barbarian watches, lights began to glow and the Thousand Pounder takes form. First his bones appear, then muscles, then skin over the top, until with a final explosion that sends the Cultists flying, Thousand Pounder bursts into life.

The brainstorming and work that went into creating this sequence was discussed between Bashiok, Julian Love and Mike Nicholson during Blizzcast #8, in March 2009. [1]

Bashiok: At WWI we unveiled the Thousand Pounder and it had this really grand entrance where it was assembled out of the pieces of these sacrificed uh... I guess virgins, if you will. It was such a grand entrance for that monster, how did that come about?

Julian: Well yeah, I recognize that it probably looks like it was really planned out and something that we worked on for a very long time. It was one of those things where we originally wanted it to come busting through the wall there, because breakables being what they are they’re kind of the hot thing in the game, but I think there was some recognition that when you have a monster of that shape busting through a wall it’s starts to look like a Kool-Aid commercial...

Mike:" Oh yeah!"

Julian: [laughs] Which really undoes what we’re trying to say with the thousand pounder. And it kind of stole some of the thunder of the siege breaker who does that later on. I think, very late in the game, not three weeks before we were scheduled to be done with that we got some concept that looked like he was being beamed in Star Trek style. My department did an emergency powwow and we weren’t really happy with that, and so we asked ourselves so what do we really want to see here? And the hardest thing we could think to do was what we ended up doing, and we’re all scared, could we get it done? It was an enormous amount of work and we were going to have to convince other teams to help us. We needed help from modeling, we needed help from animation. But there was just this really cool commitment from everybody that this was the best thing to do, and we were going to put a lot of overtime in. We just crammed on it in two weeks, and that’s what popped out.

Bashiok: Very cool, and is that something we’ll see in the final game you think?

Julian: Oh yeah, in fact I think there’s been a lot of off-shoot ideas. Like every other monster in the game, where applicable, we ended building a skeletal structure into him, and even a muscular set and things like that, that you see. And those things are functional, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you see skeletal and muscular thousand pounders running around, maybe half-summoned, and that sort of thing. There’s a lot of leeway with it.

Bones form, then are covered by muscle.

Death Animation

When he is defeated his death animation is basically the summoning animation in reverse; his skin sloughs off, then his muscles, before his bones clatter to the ground.

Thousand Pounder 'Title'

The title 'Gluttony Incarnate' is a mystery. Comparing this big fella with the Siegebreaker Assault Beast, he seems to have a 'title' that would work very much like Diablo 2 Monster Modifiers. Still, 'Gluttony Incarnate' could be his title just like the Siegebreaker's 'Living Siege Engine of Hell' obviously must be. The Thousand Pounder could also very well be an equivalent of a Diablo II Superunique, with a different name than other units that look the same (as the Thousand Pounder has been depicted to come in packs in concept art).

Other players have speculated that perhaps we'll see mini-bosses with names inspired by all seven deadly sins. It's purely speculation at this point, but it's as good a guess as any.

1. Lust
2. Gluttony
3. Greed
4. Sloth
5. Wrath
6. Envy
7. Pride

Spells and Abilities

• 

  Rage mode activated.
  Enrage - The Thousand Pounder enrages when he reaches 50% health, making his tattoos glow ominously, and increasing his speed and damage.

Related Monsters

• Dark Cultist - These creatures summon the Thousand Pounder.

Background

Nothing is specifically known about the background of the Thousand Pounder. Is he a "Superunique" of this "Fat Demon" kind, or is it a type of monster all together? The concept art seems to indicate that it's not a unique entity, showing a Barbarian with several of these creatures, but the matter in which he is summoned could suggest he is a little bit of a personality anyway. He is in either way powerful enough to require a quite advanced summoning to enter the physical realm.

Diablo I & II Monster

No monster like the Thousand Pounder is seen in Diablo I or Diablo II.

Development

The D3 Team on Thousand Pounder

Thousand Pounder was discussed in the WWI Denizens of Diablo panel.

The other way we emphasize monster character and personality is to look at the monster on whole. How do they get on screen and die? He's going to be on screen in a cool way, so we went to the the Thousand Pounder here. He's all bout hell. He's summoned from it literally piece by piece. When he gets on screen we figured he should be made and big. Express anger. Part of his gameplay is that he gets really mad when he's almost dead. Throws a huge temper tantrum and this changes how he plays and how the player has to play against him. When he's enraged we changed how he looked; made his tattoos glow, gave him new attack animations and special effects. When he dies the animation is somewhat a reverse of how he came on screen. We did this to show of the whole idea that he's from hell.

Trivia

The Metric System

Speculative (and humorous), are suggestions for what this monster could be called in non-US/UK versions of the game, where the people don't, in the words of Vincent, "know what the f**k a quarter pounder is." Somehow, calling this boss the, "Four hundred and fifty four kilo'er" doesn't have quite the same ring to it...

A thread was started with this topic in the Unofficial Diablo 3 Forums as well.[2]

Stay-Puft-Marshmallow-Pounder

On the 30th of January, 2009[3], Bashiok responded to a Battle.net thread[4] about the similarities with Stay Puft from the Ghostbusters film. His response was the image to the right here:

Similarities?

Media

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

• Diablo 3 screenshots and pictures
• Thousand-Pounder-specific gallery contents

• 

  Summoning, part 1.

• 

  Summoning, part 2.

• 

  Thousand Pounder swingin'.

• 

  Enraging.

• 

  Concept art: 5 fat-blobs visible.

• 

  Looking like Stay Puft?

• 

  3D render by Delowyn

References

• WWI 2008: Denizens of Diablo Panel