Siegebreaker Assault Beast
From Diablo Wiki
The Siegebreaker Assault Beast is the first large boss monster revealed in Diablo III and it blows away all of Diablo II's Act Bosses and Uber Monsters added together, by sheer mass and power.
He is so large that the concept of a single character fighting him is kind of laughable. It is 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 is not such a mismatch after all.
Siegebreaker is purely a melee fighter, with an avalanche of charging and three-hit, punching attacks 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.
Contents |
[edit] Fatalities
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 the male Barbarian, when Siegebreaker picked up the hero and outright bit his head off, then threw down the decapitated corpse with a grunt.
The female Witch Doctor was similarly destroyed earlier in the video, not by a bite, but by being thrown on the ground, after being picked up and howled at. It also seems that the Beast spreads the flames that were present on it, due to an earlier Firebomb attack, on the Witch Doctor, setting her aflame.
Such moves were, as fans rightly guessed, special kill animations and not powerful one-hit-kill moves. It means that the two characters were on very low hit points that the next hit would have killed them. It appears that when the final hit came, the special code of the Siegebreaker made him perform such actions to make the game more lively and realistic, in addition to adding to the gruesome feeling to the game.
This confirmation, along with the fact that other bosses will also boast such kill animations and even near-kill moves, brings a question: do other non-boss monsters also have such talents? That is, will the players witness a variety of death animations when their characters are killed? For example, shattering to iced pieces when frozen, burning to the ground when burnt, being charred to bones from lightnings and so on? As of this, there has been no confirmation.
After her death, the Witch Doctor's body lies in the small pool of water, before the temple from which the Beast emerged. Her body is later struck by another attack from the Siegebreaker, flying away, never to be seen again in the video. The Barbarian's corpse was thrown to somewhere far away and is never seen again either.
[edit] 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. It is sometimes speculated that those were the remains of the victims that the Siegebreaker had devoured.
[edit] Siege Engine?
- CAUTION: The following section contains content that has not been confirmed. At this point, it is pure speculation.
The title of the Siegebreaker, the Living Siege Engine of Hell, raises further questions. It may be presumed that the Siegebreaker Assault Beast is not a one-of-a-kind unique monster, but one of many such huge, hulking, six-legged beasts. This conclusion seems apparent when it can be seen that given its monstrous size and ferocity, it does not have much of an attack, even finding it difficult to kill the Witch Doctor's Mongrels.
A recently released concept art that can be seen below shows the Siegebreaker being reined in. But a tiny humanoid figure seems to lurk on its head, holding the reins. It seems that this tiny figurehead is the driving force behind the Siegebreaker's Siege capabilities. As the Beast seen in the gameplay video surely does not have such a figure on top of it, it can be said that it was uncontrolled and could not focus its attacks without its controller. Who or what this controller is, remains to be seen, but the picture of Demon Imps mounted on Siege Beasts immediately comes to the mind. The Siegebreaker and its controller may share a similar relationship.
[edit] Concept art and screenshots
 Siegebreaker artwork. Notice the humanoid figure on top, that seemingly controls the beast by holding reins |
 Goatmen surround a Siegebreaker |
