03-17-2003, 12:30 AM
I could be wrong, but Baal as he is now is really toned down from the way I remember him in the LoD beta.
I imported a CD2 bowazon for the beta (she was around lvl 75 when she got to Baal on hell diff) and had an incredibly hard time killing Baal (I found him harder to kill than the ancients). The worst part of it for me on hell difficulty was the festering appendages: it seemed like they were everywhere in Baal's dungeon (except the edges) all of the time. Either they did a lot more damage in the beta, or my zon's 400-odd life was too low (she was an old-style high dex build), but the appendages stunlocked my zon continually, so there was no way to get an attack off. Add to that the fact that Baal's orange breath was a one hit kill (I think it did a lot more damage in the beta), and that he would often teleport right next to you to breath it on you...
I must have tried 30 times to kill him, with ga's, melee with javelins, with everything I could think of. In the end, I was only able to do it by using multishot from an extreme edge of the dungeon to penetrate through the appendages. Now maybe some of this is the exaggeration of memory, and some is that I just didn't know the right tactics then; but in other ways it's too bad if they really did tone down Baal a lot, because now he's clearly much more of a wimp than either Diablo or the Ancients.
Difficulty is also very class dependent: with a high-lvl bowazon, easier though he seems, I still find Baal more annoying than any of his minions, and many builds may face more difficulties with Baal than bowazons; though I'm sure it's the other way round for many other classes.
I imported a CD2 bowazon for the beta (she was around lvl 75 when she got to Baal on hell diff) and had an incredibly hard time killing Baal (I found him harder to kill than the ancients). The worst part of it for me on hell difficulty was the festering appendages: it seemed like they were everywhere in Baal's dungeon (except the edges) all of the time. Either they did a lot more damage in the beta, or my zon's 400-odd life was too low (she was an old-style high dex build), but the appendages stunlocked my zon continually, so there was no way to get an attack off. Add to that the fact that Baal's orange breath was a one hit kill (I think it did a lot more damage in the beta), and that he would often teleport right next to you to breath it on you...
I must have tried 30 times to kill him, with ga's, melee with javelins, with everything I could think of. In the end, I was only able to do it by using multishot from an extreme edge of the dungeon to penetrate through the appendages. Now maybe some of this is the exaggeration of memory, and some is that I just didn't know the right tactics then; but in other ways it's too bad if they really did tone down Baal a lot, because now he's clearly much more of a wimp than either Diablo or the Ancients.
Difficulty is also very class dependent: with a high-lvl bowazon, easier though he seems, I still find Baal more annoying than any of his minions, and many builds may face more difficulties with Baal than bowazons; though I'm sure it's the other way round for many other classes.