All Act bosses are overhauled in Brotherhood, with an eye on making them feel more “Dark Souls” – ie. instead of tanking their damage and making their red go down faster than yours, you are expected to largely avoid damage until the boss dies.
Going along with this is a scale increase: Act bosses now tower over everything else and make characters feel like ants.
Here’s a short overview of what the bosses do now:
Andariel
Andariel is a very different fight, she is much more mobile than in vanilla and has much bigger skills that are however all avoidable.
- At close range, casts two lines of lurker spines that erupt after 1 second to deal major damage but can be dodged.
- At a distance, throws an electrified skull that explodes on the ground and teleports anyone hit by it directly in front of her. This deals low damage, but sets up the other two skills.
- Periodically casts a poison flare at your location, which detonates after 3 seconds to create deadly poison clouds in line of sight. This is basically “hide behind a wall or get owned”, but she only casts it at 20 second intervals.
Duriel
The dumb instant kill is gone, but he is (even) bigger and tougher. Holy Freeze is also gone, so he can be kited now, but he won’t make it easy.
- At the start of the fight, scatters exploding traps in random spots around the map that stun and deal major damage.
- Enrages at 25% health.
Mephisto
Now has an evasive “necromancer” approach, trying to keep players away with minions and corpses and teleporting away to safety. He is less threatening at close range, but doesn’t stay there for long.
- Flies, making him much harder to cheese.
- Comes with an army of Bone Fetish (which now chuck their exploding head at you when they die).
- Casts a scatter of gore that rains down to deal damage.
- Casts bone pieces that create corpses, doing no damage, but…
- Explodes corpses, both its own and those of its Bone Fetish minions.
- Teleports in a random direction when threatened.
Diablo
Diablo no longer dumps large amounts of unavoidable damage on the player. Instead, his skills are zone control themed, creating places where you don’t want to be, and running away from him is now impossible thanks to his new gap closer teleport.
- Casts a frost attack, as in vanilla.
- Casts snaking fire, as in vanilla, but it erupts after a 1 second delay, making it actually dodgeable.
- Casts a homing field of pink lightning that slowly chases its target around, dealing major damage to anything in its path, but has issues tracking a target that changes direction a lot.
- Teleports on top of his target if the distance gets too big.
Baal
Again a very different fight, as vanilla Baal is a sitting duck from range but has a lot of unavoidable damage for melee characters.
Brotherhood Baal is a combo player. He relies heavily on his tentacles, which now deal significant damage and can easily kill players who are trapped in a tentacle field by his other disabling attacks. The counter is to keep his attacks separate: eat the stun away from the tentacles, and don’t get frozen in the middle of a tentacle field or in front of a stun ball.
- Casts tentacles, which now deal random elemental damage in addition to a large amount of physical damage.
- Casts a slow homing flare that deals moderate magic damage and stuns on impact.
- Casts a frost trap that detonates with a frost nova after 2 seconds.
- Casts a random curse and runs away when threatened.
Mods by Laz 