06-25-2012, 09:50 PM
Bone cages are avoidable although Diablo has a very annoying habit of knocking characters back into the cages. Cages will not deal fatal damage however, so spamming health potion coming out of a cage is generally good enough to save yourself unless you get caged on top of his fire circle.
I assume by the gap you mean the ability to run around in circles from the breath and not get hit? If that is the case then yes. Perhaps I misinterpreted but either way lightning breath does hardly any damage to melee with appropriate levels of resist. On my barb I generally don't bother to move unless I happen to be low health at the time. A shield trivializes his breath even further as the individual ticks can be blocked.
As a melee, Diablo is a pretty standard "Don't stand in the fire" type fight. The most potentially dangerous aspect of the fight is when he puts his DoT on your character, then drops his fire circle on top of you, and immediately follows up with the ranged fireball (which has some pretty silly hit detection). I died on quite a few 10 minute+ long attempts due to simply not respecting his random gib potential.
As far as tactics go, my group used the Method tactic of letting the more dangerous party members die before phase 2 before that was hotfixed. Post nerf the images don't seem nearly as bad. I generally focus shadow clones in the following order: Demon Hunter->Witch Doctor->Wizard->Monk->Barb. Sometimes my group opts to run from the clones entirely and wait for the despawn if the gear levels just aren't there.
As a general note about gearing, I would suggest getting some adequate combination of Life on Hit combined with passive Life Regeneration. A decent amount of both stats will trivialize the second phase as well as reduce the potential for random gibs on the home stretch.
I assume by the gap you mean the ability to run around in circles from the breath and not get hit? If that is the case then yes. Perhaps I misinterpreted but either way lightning breath does hardly any damage to melee with appropriate levels of resist. On my barb I generally don't bother to move unless I happen to be low health at the time. A shield trivializes his breath even further as the individual ticks can be blocked.
As a melee, Diablo is a pretty standard "Don't stand in the fire" type fight. The most potentially dangerous aspect of the fight is when he puts his DoT on your character, then drops his fire circle on top of you, and immediately follows up with the ranged fireball (which has some pretty silly hit detection). I died on quite a few 10 minute+ long attempts due to simply not respecting his random gib potential.
As far as tactics go, my group used the Method tactic of letting the more dangerous party members die before phase 2 before that was hotfixed. Post nerf the images don't seem nearly as bad. I generally focus shadow clones in the following order: Demon Hunter->Witch Doctor->Wizard->Monk->Barb. Sometimes my group opts to run from the clones entirely and wait for the despawn if the gear levels just aren't there.
As a general note about gearing, I would suggest getting some adequate combination of Life on Hit combined with passive Life Regeneration. A decent amount of both stats will trivialize the second phase as well as reduce the potential for random gibs on the home stretch.
MaxPower#1485 60 SC Barb/32 HC Witch Doctor/22 HC Wizard/17 HC Demon Hunter