Siegebreaker Assault Beast

The Siegebreaker Assault Beast is a Unique quest boss. He is a gigantic monster, the largest seen in Diablo III, and is formed a bit like a giant reptilian centaur, with four legs and also a humanoid torso with two long arms. Siegebreaker is not merely an animal though, and is covered in heavy armor that appears to be bolted directly to his body, including a helm and two huge bladed gauntlets that he uses to punch down at enemies on the ground.

Siegebreaker is first seen in the first levels of Act Three, when he can be glimpsed down below on the battlefield around the outside of the Bastion's Keep. Siegebreaker is not battled at that point though, and players don't fight him until midway through Act Three, after all of the surface level and bridge exploration, in the Edge of the Abyss level, where he must be defeated to advance down into the Arreat Crater in their pursuit of Azmodan.

Siegebreaker was the first massive boss monster revealed in Diablo III, in his starring role as the ultimate boss in the WWI 2008 gameplay movie. Though Siegebreaker's appearance in the final game closely matches his look in that early promotional video, the location of the battle and his death animation are very different, and the fatalities Siegebreaker demonstrates are not a feature in the final game.

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The Siegebreaker

The monster's stats as of Patch v1.05.

Diablo III Monster [e]
Siegebreaker Assault Beast           Boss
Classification:	Demons
Monster Family:	Bosses
Role:	Quest Boss
Monster Stats Norm/Night/Hell/Inferno
Life:	High
Mana:	N/A
Armor:	High
Resistance:	N/A
Offence Norm/Night/Hell/Inferno
Armament:	Three-Blade Gauntlet
DPS:	Unknown
Low Damage:	Unknown
High Damage:	Unknown
Range:	Melee
Speed:	Fast
Movement:	Medium
Monster Modifiers
Life Drain (Inferno only)
Spells/Abilities
Swipe Charge Trample
Found In
Edge of the Abyss, Act Three

Special Abilities

The Siegebreaker is a mindless living weapon of rage and fury, and his abilities represent that very well.

• Three Hit Mini-Charge - The Siegebreaker strikes three times in rapid succession, dealing large damage and knocking back the target. He telegraphs the attack before launching it, giving an aware player time to get out of the way.

• Charge - The Siegebreaker will stomp, snort, and kick up dust before charging the player for large damage and knocking them back. The pillars in the area will stop his charge if he hits them, though they crumble with the impact and clear the space for his unimpeded movement thereafter.

• Leg Stomp - The Siegebreaker will roar, rear up, and then smash the ground with his legs for a large amount of damage.

• Grab and Throw - The breaker's most dangerous attack, he will grab the player, lifting them up and roaring in their face, before smashing them into the ground. This ability serves as a fatality in the WWI 2008 demo movie, but it only a damaging attack in the final game.

Inferno Abilities

On Inferno Difficulty the Siegebreaker gains the Reflects Damage boss modifier.

• Prior to v1.04 he also possessed an Enrage effect which increased his speed and damage and placed a steady life drain on the player.

Lore

Like The Butcher in Diablo III, the Siegebreaker is not a single monster, but one of a class of demons raised and trained for a specific purpose. Thankfully for player survival, only one of these hulking brutes is encountered at one time.

The siegebreaker is a monster of legends, of nightmares, and thin whispers in the dark. It is the most prized champion of the demon lords because its massive size and strength could turn any battle in its favor. I wish I knew more, but alas... all who have seen it have perished.

Associated Achievements

Siegebreaker Assault Beast is in some way involved in the following achievement(s).

Name	Points	Description	Banner

<achievement type="single">Death From Afar</achievement>

Image Gallery

Images and movies of Siegebreaker as seen in the Act Three battle.

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  Siegebreaker in-game.

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  Charging a Barbarian.

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  Leg stomp.

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  The three-hit mini charge attack.

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  The crowd-pleasing grab and throw attack.

A Demon Hunter on Normal difficulty.

A Witch Doctor on Inferno difficulty.

Uber Siegebreaker

A special version of Siegebreaker named The Savage Behemoth is encountered in the Realm of Turmoil, a special bonus dungeon level encountered as part of the Infernal Machine event in the end game. This monster looks exactly like Siegebreaker but has some slightly different abilities.

Siegebreaker's Development

Siegebreaker lurking in the distance.

The Siegebreaker Assault Beast was the first large boss monster revealed in Diablo III, when he debuted in the 2008 WWI gameplay movie. After initially appearing in the background during the Barbarian's dungeon exploration, four players face the Siegebreaker in a pitched battle in the end of the movie. Fans were very excited by the demon's appearance, since Siegebreaker is so much larger and more intimidating than any enemy in Diablo 2.

Fatality

Siegebreaker biting off a Barbarian's head. A spectacular death.

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.

Sadly, these features did not make it into the game, as Bashiok admitted in early 2012.

Unfortunately we never managed to get these implemented. They were a really cool idea, but a pretty huge amount of work. The one we showed of the Siegebreaker was a scripted sequence we set up specifically for that video. It was never implemented, and never actually worked without someone sitting there typing in a bunch of commands to get it all to fire off properly. It's still something we'd like to do, though.

Siegebreaker's Skeleton Death Spawn

Life fire dies out.

Another interesting trick of Siegebreaker's as seen in the WWI 2008 movie was his amazing death animation. In that video when he died he crumbled to pieces like a decaying, hollowed volcano, before sending out five jets of red light. These swirled around briefly before falling to the ground and spawning vast numbers of skeletons at each point.

Very cool, but like other things in the WWI 2008 movies... purely for that movie. No monsters have a multi-stage death animation like this in the final game, and Siegebreaker, when faced in Act Three, does not spawn any other monsters of any kind.

Trivia

Interestingly, there is code in the game files for the Siegebreaker Skeleton Spawner with a level appropriate to Act One. It is not active in the game though, but does seem to correspond to what's seen in the WWI 2008 movie.

WWI 2008 Gameplay: Behind the Scenes

Now he's a big one.

Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok commented on the creation of the video demo in a forum post in April 2009.

It is indeed the siegebreaker's giant hand that grabs him. It was an extremely difficult and trying shot to create and capture. The way the interior and exterior sections were set up and shot it made it necessary to capture them uncut.

The hand shot just wasn't working that well, so we'd tweak it, hope that the physics would move the debris properly. Shoot, it didn't work right. Tweak it again, reshoot the entire interior run, something else might go wrong, etc. Over and over. In the end we had to settle with what would appear to most as a wall collapse simply because we didn't have time before the announcement to keep tweaking it and reshooting everything to make it more clear that it was a hand busting through the wall and grabbing him. Especially when the one we went with had some very perfect moments in it (zombie corpse landing on railing).

I'm glad that someone caught it though, a lot of work went into those animations, and unfortunately we just ran out of time to showcase them.

• See a sequence of shots showing this scripted event on the Siegebreaker snatch page.

WWI 2008 Movie Media

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  Goatmen surround a Siegebreaker.

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  Siegebreaker, dying.

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  Death of Siegebreaker, closeup.

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  Large scale living War Machine.

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  Slafs!

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  Pummelling a Barbarian.

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  Siegebreaker eating some poor young man in the background of Stonefort.

The full Siegebreaker encounter from the WWI gameplay movie can be seen at the end of this video.

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