Electrified

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

Sparks galore, as seen in the beta test.

This causes Champions and the boss (but not the minions) to emit sparks when struck. These sparkle out and deal lightning damage to nearby players and pets, and can be dangerous to melee attackers with high attack rate and/or low resistances.

Only the Champions or the Boss itself is electrified by this modifier; minions do not spark. (They did gain the lighting resistance, before that feature was removed in v1.03.)

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

These monsters were fearsome during development and into beta test when they emitted vast fields of damaging sparks. The property was toned down in the final release, sending out fwer sparks and creating less graphic load, and the function was reduced as well, with the sparks changed to no longer triffer other Elite Affixes such as Vampirific.

As of v1.08 these enemies are of little notice to ranged attackers, though they can be painful for melee fighters as the sparks work much like Reflects Damage. It's even possible for the same boss to gain both of those modifiers, making them very painful at melee range.

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.