Belial Class Guide

General Tips For All Classes

- Honestly I love DPS. But DPS is not everything here. I noticed in this fight I had low health and I was under leveled by 2 levels. SO VITALITY Is a huge factor in this fight! I suggest getting beefy. (At least 1500Health). If you can mange to get your vitality up really high, then this fight becomes SO MUCH EASIER!

-When he puts his Arms into the ground start running around and avoid the green spots (Dodge all the green circle whirlpool things.)

- Bring plenty of Health Potions and pick up the health orbs he drops when your heath is low. (Make sure your at full health before he begins K.O Move.. Green Whirlpool things.)
- Use health pots strategically - try to keep life above 80% at all times (or whatever won't get you one/two shotted by the whirlpools if you do get hit).

-Enable Elective Mode (Options>Gameplay>Elective Mode) I think it cripples your potential, and less customization with your skills if disabled.

-A lot of players have reported that a high latency can affect the fight with Belial, so try to get your latency down as much as you can. I recommend below 300 for an easier battle.

- Items that give + to movement speed really helps with this fight to help you avoid the green circles.

-One critical thing that helped me out a lot, was to bind the middle mouse button to "move". So when the green swirls started coming, I could use that button to move out of the way without accidentally clicking on part of Belial instead.
 

General playing strategies:
Stay near the right side of the platform. dodge the green circles, run back to the right side.  You're guaranteed to dodge his poison spray attack, which hits you anywhere else (except the far left side, but you can't really see anything and end up misclicking on belial all the time). I've also found that less green circles appear at the far edge, making those easier to dodge.

The whirlpool avoidance is really the only hard part about this boss on normal. I think a good tip on avoiding them is to watch/plot/time your movement to coincide with the whirlpool/nuke finishing. There are 3 stages to each whirlpool. Stage 1 is appearing and you don't have much time if any to get out of the pool before it starts ticking on you, which is stage two. Stage 3 is the nuke explosion. All together, I think the pools last for 2-3 seconds before they disappear. What I do is I'll try and plot a path through the whirlpools and keep running a safe direction and double back on those pools that are now disappearing. You can time it and cross back over the pools that have disappeared for safety. The other stuff he does require just small movements to avoid. Except for the breath sweep which hits like a little schoolgirl much of the time.

Barbarian specific tips:

- I basically focused on survivability through skills like revenge for additional heals, nerves of steel, ignore etc and fairly vitality focused and ran around the room dodging all the whirlpools, was not that difficult.
- I also used the 3 barbarians - this move itself took out about 1/3 of his life (I saved it for near the end as a finishing move to decrease the time he's in his crazy whirlpool stage). I'd be interested to see if anyone used earthquake and whether this was comparable to the barbarians
- Frenzy seemed like the choice for single-target damage here.
- I also used threatening shout (not even sure if this works with the whirlpool damage - think Battle Cry might've been better for additional damage, but mainly used this with inspiring presence for the heals).

Stage one:
Belial summons bunch of lizards at you - easy job, save your cool downs this stage ends quickly.

Stage two:
Belial teleports down and is fairly easy to beat at this stage, throws a few poison shots at you, a few lizard buddies to back him up - shouldn't be any trouble. At around 10 or 20% life, he goes into stage 3 - his real form.

Stage three:
Belial becomes a gigantic demon at this stage. Here are his moves (if memory serves correct).

1) Breath of poison sweeping across the screen - this did not seem like it hit very hard, most of the time I just took the hit. There's an animation that preludes this move so I'm guessing in nightmare+ if this starts hitting hard, if you see this coming, you basically have to run ASAP to the other side of the room from where he starts breathing it

2) Poison gas whirlpools - first 50% of his life or so, this move is not THAT bad. You can still hit him a few times as there's still plenty of space on the ground (you do need to move initially as he almost always puts a whirlpool where you are standing at the start of the move). You have about half a second from when the initial graphics appear to get off which shouldn't be a problem. Once he hits around 50% or lower life, he goes hardcore iwth this, and there is literally 2-3 spaces you can stand without getting horribly murdered.

3) Fist smash - for some reason these never hit me (lucky?) but it seems like the whirlpool move comes right after this, so maybe it's just a graphic to show the whirlpool move is coming. could someone verify?

Wizard Specific Tips

Took him down on first try, solo, wizard 24.

My skill setup were:

-Diamond skin with crystal shell rune
-Force push (I should've change that one but forgot)
-Magic weapon for the damage boost
-Magic missile with split rune
-Arcane torrent with disruption rune
-Teleport

On phase 3, hit him with magic missile until he is about to smash you, when he does, teleport out of the way, spam arcane torrent, couple of hits with magic missile.

Another Wizard Build:
All shorter range attacks are dangerous for Wizards so use frozen ray or arcane orb. Hydras barely cost any archon power so it is a good choice and chain lightning for primary attack works well.

The first phase is easy. Dodge the spells he throws at you and kill his summons.

This is the skills to use for the second phase.

Use a Templar companion to help heal you.

Fairly easy fight: keep hydras up while dodging his various attacks and throwing an arcane orb or two if you have the chance to stop for a second. The hydras keep constant damage on him while you're constantly moving. And the Templar never seemed to take too much damage and was smacking his feet the entire fight. Went down pretty quick.

Another Wizard Build:
This is another good alternative Wizard build to use on Belial!

Another Wizard Build for Nightmare:
I'm playing a wizard (lvl 45), so I specced dps. After dying like 10 times, I decided to optimize towards vitality by changing out rings, pants, and boots that I was using for intelligence boosts and attack speed. I just checked the 'fence' vendor for the act and found a decent selection. This put me from about 1600 dps with all buffs and approx. 4500 hp to 10500 hp and about 950 dps.

This was my build, used Galvanizing Ward for hp regen. I actually apparently forgot to use a rune for Energy Barrier 'cause I'm eyeing Energy Tap, but I'd go with Pinpoint Barrier, Diamond Skin + Prism and Astral Presence basically regens Arcane Power faster than Disintegrate can consume it. Keep Hydra active as much as possible, particularly while you're dodging and unable to deal damage. Using Diamond Skin you can also shrug off any two blows of Belial's Left, Right, Center smash attack, giving a good opportunity to pour on the damage. Make sure not to get caught with it on cooldown.

The trick to dodging this attack entirely is to go right to dodge the left fist, then run left to dodge the right fist then KEEP GOING LEFT. The center smash will leave him open to attack. The poison nova field (poison meteor if you prefer) attack is what was killing me, really. It has two parts, the explosion, and then the spread. The spread animation is harmless, the explosion hurts. So the thing is to be where they WERE, not where they're GOING to be. Obviously, be where there's none also works. His breath attack never really posed a problem for me, just stay on the extreme left and right edges of the arena and it generally misses. For this battle, I found it simplest to run between the center and lower/right edge of the arena. Remember to get the health orbs, too.

As I said, the thing that was killing me was the poison nova field, now that I've figured out that pattern I think I could probably take Belial down with my dps gear on. That being the case, I would probably change out Galvanizing Ward and Energy Armor, to Cold Blooded and Blizzard, or maybe Ice Armor. I'm not sure if Belial is particularly freeze resistant though.

Demon Hunter Specific Tips

Belial is one of those bosses which is extremely easy with a DH because he doesn't chase you down or stun you. I was able to beat him at just lvl 21 as well with my DH because all I had to do with kite him (very easy with all the DH speed buffs) then spam DPS on him.

The later on bosses (particularly in Nightmare and Hell) are way harder because they will stun. And a DH that isn't running away is as good as dead...
But since this is an online game, just jump into a game with some tanks and let them get hit for you :P

Monk Specific Tips

Solo'd it about an hour ago and it was Super easy with a monk, beat him first try using Mantra of Evasion, it helps you dodge for 7 minutes, and then using breath of heaven + rune and Serenity + rune you can heal yourself and your follower. I use seven sided strike + rune and way of hundred fists + rune and lashing tail kick + tune as attacks.

The key is watching your health and making sure you heal yourself as needed.

Witch Doctor Specific Tips

To all struggling witchdoctors (on this fight of course) - I died twice before realizing the key to this was Spirit Walking. Just activate the skill the moment he goes into berserk mode and blows the floor up with green explosives, and stick to the edges. Let your gargantuan and templar pummel away as you do this. Once back to normal form, hit him with firebombs and spirit barrage.

Hope that helps!

For more in-depth tips and tricks on how to beat the bosses in Diablo 3, I would definitely check out Diablo 3 Gold Secrets By Peng Joon, there's a small fee for it, but worth it.