Hey Everyone,

Well, I’m working my way through Nightmare difficulty in Diablo 3.  I’ve gotten one Legendary to drop which was exciting and I’ve started playing without a follower!  My latest video is about Belial and the Cut Above achievement.

To get the cut above achievement you have to finish the Butcher, Belial, and Azmodan with Spectral Blades.  I got the Butcher and Azmodan during my normal play through, but I didn’t get Belial, so I wanted to make sure I got it this time through.

The Belial fight is really tough simply because so many of the mechanics can either one shot you or take you very low.  There are quite a few health globes sitting around throughout the encounter so it isn’t necessarily a problem of not having enough healing options.  It actually becomes more about managing the incoming damage and getting to the health globes.

In phase 1 you’ll deal with 4 or 5 waves of 4-5 snake men.  This phase is pretty straight forward.  I like to try to stay towards the middle so I give myself as much room to maneuver as possible.  At the beginning of the phase I drop the Hydra right in the middle, then I pop diamond skin right as the snakes close in around me.  Spectral blades works great here, but there are lots of AoE abilities that would be great.  As the first wave goes down, try not to waste the health globes that drop as you’ll want those for the next wave.

I use the cooldown reduction passive so my Diamond Skin comes back up pretty quickly, but the timing of the waves basically means I end up without diamond skin on every other wave.  But with all the health globes I left on the ground, it isn’t much of a concern.

In phase 2, we get to fight Belial in his weaker state.  He’ll start out one on one and trying to chase you down and punch you.  Then he’ll teleport away and start shooting frontal spread of three large green fire balls.  For this part it works well to be at range so you can avoid the fire balls and still do some dps.  I like to start this phase with my hydra, then Diamond skin, and after diamond skin goes down I use Archon.  I tried several different methods of using archon and this way seemed to give me the best results.

Using archon early on in phase 2 lets me focus on doing damage to Belial before he starts summoning snakes.  Once the snakes come out it becomes more difficult to avoid all of Belials attacks and the snakes.  If you get cornered without diamond skin available you’re gonna be in bad shape.  So if he is already low when he hits the snake summoning window, you have far less time to get overwhelmed.  It also means the archon will be back up fairly early in phase 3 and depending on, it might even be up again near the end of phase 3.

So once Belial gets to around 20% (I’m guessing based on what his health bar looked like) all the snakes die and he teleports away starting phase 3.

I suppose I could have switched my build from melee defense and AoE to more single target stuff during the phase transition, but I didn’t think about it at the time and it wasn’t really an issue.

Phase 3 has four abilities.  First, a single heavy right handed slam.  A green marker will appear on the ground indicating the area that Belial will slam with his fist (err, flipper? whatever it is).  You have a short window to react and vacate the area.  There is also a three swing attack, once with the right arm on the right side of Belial, then with the right arm on the left side of Belial, and finally with both arms in the middle (all based on where he is facing).  The biggest danger here is that second swing.  Sometimes the placement of the second swing forces you to turn back and run back in the direction of Belial’s right side.  If you do this stay well back from Belial because the crossing arm coming down covers a very wide swath of ground in front of him and it will do very severe damage to you.  Also a nice tip is, once you’ve moved out of the way of the third strike you can do some nice ranged damage because the swing and recovery time is pretty long (relatively).

The really serious mechanic for this phase is the green puddles.  Belial will stick both flippers into the ground and lots of green puddles will begin to appear on the ground.  These puddles quickly grow in size and then explode.  You do not want to be anywhere near them when they blow.  This section of the fight is also somewhat suspectible to lag because the server has to register that you moved before the explosion happened and if you’re just a bit too slow, it might look to you like you made it, but the server disagrees.  You can do some damage during this mechanic, but the most important thing is to focus on staying alive.

The last and probably least concerning mechanic in this phase is the breathe attack.  He will make one pass starting on either the right or left with a breathe attack that does damage, but isn’t unbearable.  Because the breathe path is so long, if you do take damage from it, you can be pretty safe running up to grab a health globe or two.

If you are going for cut above, make sure you don’t recast your hydra as Belial gets into the sub 5% health range.  Then work on him until he is very close to zero.  Once you are ready for the killing blow, pop diamond skin and run in to finish him off.  I think this works great because I can get in close without worrying if I’ll get creamed by a nasty attack.

Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet or just wanna watch it again 😛

Stay Safe Out There
~Aten