Electrified

Sparks galore, as seen in the beta test.

Electrified is a Boss Modifier that spawns randomly on Champions and Bosses in Diablo III.

This property adds lightning damage to the monster's attacks, grants it higher lightning resistance, and most noticeably, causes the Boss or Champions to constantly emit sparks which skitter across the ground much like the Wizard's Shock Pulse skill. These charges are cast out constantly, in all directions, but are also triggered when the monster is hit by attacks, making them more dangerous when they are taking the most damage.

Only the Champions or the Boss itself is electrified by this modifier; the minions are not granted the sparking effect, though they do share lightning resistance bonus.

Electrified

• Monster Level Minimum: 20
• Available to: Champions and Bosses, but not boss minions.
• Damage Type: Lightning.
• Additional Resistances: 'None. (Bonus Lightning resistance was removed in Patch 1.0.3.)

Strategy

Little special strategy is needed, as the charges are more visual than damaging. Even characters with minimal lightning resistance have reported few troubles dealing with these bosses.

Note that the sparks count as hits and can trigger other Boss Modifiers. For instance, enemies that are also Vampirific may heal when their sparks hit a target.

Development Changes

Early version was massive.

The sparking property of this modifier was first seen at Blizzcon 2009 and 2010, when the spark output was truly massive. You can see an example from those days in the screenshot to the right, and it looks more like a huge lightning ball than a series of smaller, discrete charges. The entire monster was engulfed in an orb of lightning, from which thousands of charges were emitted.

This graphic was toned down during development, perhaps because the visual was simply too much and largely obscured the monster itself.

Beta Changes

During the Beta test the function was modified again, with more spread given to the sparks, and the sparks now coming from a sort of electrical core within the boss or champion. This becomes quite obvious when the monster is killed, and the "core" remains behind for several seconds, continuing to pump out sparks just as quickly as when the boss was still alive.

In addition, the sparks now spread out much more widely, making no spot particularly deadly from lots of sparks, but not leaving many totally safe spots either.

Electrical cores linger after their Champion hosts are destroyed.

Stacking with Multishot?

The most dangerous boss modifier for much of Diablo 2's history was an MSLE, a boss with both the Multishot and Lightning Enchanted modifiers. These enemies pumped out huge stacks of charges, making each bolt a larger, glowing spot of instant-death for most characters.

Eventually, it was discovered that this huge damage was a bug, and that while Multishot was supposed to increase the number of bolts, it wasn't supposed to increase it by that nuch. Once the bug was fixed, in D2 v1.10 and later, MSLEs became no more dangerous than regular LE bosses. This change was fair, but did take a lot of the challenge/fear out of the game.

With that history, fans were curious to see how the MSLE combo would play out in Diablo III. Multishot was a Boss Modifier during development, confirmed last in August 2010.[1]

It's not really new information. The BC'09 demo had champions and rares and a bunch of affixes. But yes, a rare can roll an Electrified and Multi-shot affix already, as well as a third... maybe Teleport! The most annoying of all affixes! At least as a lower level barbarian...

That referred to the earlier version of Teleport, when it caused monsters to randomly bamf to a new location every few seconds. As for MSLE, not in Diablo III. At some point between August 2010 and May 2012, Multishot was removed from the game. No official explanation has ever been given for its absence.

Media

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  Electrified Grotesque boss.