[Battle] The Butcher, The Flesh Ripper

The Flesh Ripper 

Boss: The Butcher 

Scenario: Tristram Cathedral with a dark filter looks really nice, and creating a closed arena with this appearance would be perfect. As well, adding some crippled corpses and blood would create a better feel of what the Butcher was.

Speaking of things looking really nice, the Butcher's memory would be a really good place to channel a lot of Diablo 1, with a hellish, closed area that you are trapped in filled with torture devices (complete with bodies, as per D1) and piles of corpses. The player finds themselves in a large room full of these contraptions, with another room in the center of this one, with one door leading in. Along the outer walls are some cell doors, some open and some closed, that are open to the environment through body-blocking bars but still enable you to shoot out of them.

When the player opens the door, we get the nostalgic "FRESH MEAT" battlecry and the butcher slashes the player, dealing a constant 20% of their life or so (just enough to scare them) and they are knocked back with a streak of blood tracing their trail, and they get a Bleeding debuff.

>Bleeding. While bleeding, you lose 1% of your life over every 15 seconds. Stacks up to 10 times.

(numbers to be adjusted for taste)

Each time the butcher attacks you, you have a chance to be afflicted by another stack of Bleeding (and visually lose a lot of blood to the ground, in addition to a small, constant stream that scales up with each stack you get). Basically you're painting the battleground with blood that represents where you have been, where you have been hit, and can _see_ the environment change. Of course, have the contraptions be destructible as well, and have the corpses fling more blood (because we _loved_ blood in D1, right?) when they are "destroyed", too.

However, to even out the playing field when it comes to Bleeding between ranged (who can just keep kiting and hitting) and melee (who are constantly in attack range), the Butcher has an attack animation similar to the slow-attacking-but-hard-hitting guys in Act 4, which provides melee characters the chance to kite/dodge attacks as well.

Right now I've described this memory primarily to appeal to nostalgic D1 players (fighting their Butcher on the D3 engine, basically), but I don't think that's quite enough for proper replayability, per se. It need some more interesting mechanics, but I don't know what they would be.

If the blood on the ground could _do_ something, that'd be pretty cool, but I don't think it makes sense for your blood to deal damage to you. Maybe over time concentrated pools of blood disappear and become health globes, or something?

For deliciousness sake as well, the Butcher should have a very small pick-up radius, but also be able to pick up your health globes (especially if they are created from your blood) to be healed from drinking blood. Perhaps the blood-health-globes should heal you less (because they aren't standard health globes), but you still want to make sure you get them before the butcher gets them.

Eventually the butcher dies, and you are treated to look at a room caked in blood for a moment before returning from the memory to the real world and are scored on how much blood you lost.