Cannot Kill General Gravicious in ACT 3

Yeah fire resist is key here. I normally wear a topaz ring and sapphire ring and neither have fire resist on them. So what I did was wear my normal rings up until Gravicious and had a fire ring in my inventory, and switched it out and had around 55 fire resist. Needless to say I never ran out of life pots (I use 2) and killed him in about 30 seconds.

Note my stats are similar to yours other than I had 750 armor and good fire resist.

I also had problem with him,probably because I had too low fire resistance,level 36 marauder ,life 1100
,dps heavy strike 300,his fire shield is main problem/leaves me with 4oo hp,just running ,taking pots,if you run out of them open portal to city,refil and get back,patience is key

I'm a level 35 Templar summoner with leap strike/sweep/minions as my main DPS. I have 62% fire resist and Gravicius is still kicking my ass.

Just go with max resist and keep Viper Strike on him or Poison Arrow, both bypasses his Energy Shield and Molten Shell so the last never explodes. With Summoners you can just spam skeletons and kill with Minion Instability.

Or if nothing works, just go into a public party and try look like youre doing something, the rest of your party will kill him eventualy.

This is the difference between melee and ranged balance in this game.

I'm playing a claw leeching shadow, my AoE is whirling blades, single target dual strike. My DS was doing about 470 dps at level 37. I could not touch him without instantly dying. Tried many tactical adjustments and watched his patterns . . . still, anytime I approached him, boom dead.

Mkay, after a good 30 minutes I finally went to my stash equipped a lower level bow and socketed a poison arrow gem. Took all my mana flasks off my belt and went with just health flasks. Using a lame bow with a little above 60ish dps (yeah 60 dps) I killed gravicious by dodging his ranged fire spells and popping him once or twice. It took a while but it was pretty easy.

That's stupid design. I love this game and one of its biggest draws is the huge skill tree which appears to promise variety of builds. But Melee is heavily punished in almost every aspect.

@Chancellor

Funny, my shadow is the exact same build as yours, and I had zero issues killing Gravicius. 75% fire resist and two full health flasks is all you need to facetank him to death.

It's great design is what it is. Ranged classes have to kite and dodge for a long time to kill hard stuff, and that's interesting play. What isn't interesting is certain ARPGs where melee classes can just facetank everything in the game without having to put any thought into it, and I'm glad you can't do that in this game unless you specifically tailor your gear for that encounter.

Gravicious is just flat out a toughness spike to begin with.
I haven't beaten Act 3 yet, but when I first got to Gravicious it felt like he took five times as long to kill as any other boss prior. Like, just getting through his energy shield took twice as long as any other boss fight I'd had.

It's a "sustain" battle. Best endurance wins. Do you have a Ruby Flask OP? Couple Ruby Rings redone with Transmu Orbs from Clarissa could decide things in your favour too.

I had trouble with him on my 33 Blood magic axe marauder. I THOUGHT it was because every time I hit him for a ton of physical damage his Molten shield went off and took me down to almost nothing. It was not that(not really). It was also not because I have blood magic on, I'm not using enough for that to really effect me.

The problem, as stated multiple times here was that General Gravicius puts out a ton of fire damage and my Fire resist was only 42%. I threw on a couple of 30% fire resist rings to bump me to 75% and that made it a face-roll.

The general is one of the toughest enemys in the game in my opinion. But its ok because hes optional and you can skip him until you are ready.

Using kite tactics works pretty good if you want to beat him early. I think the difference between melee and ranged is not that high (hes tough enyways).The example of poison arrow just showed that poison arrow is pretty good against him... if you just stand there shooting fire arrows his Firestorm kills you equaly as fast as his molten shell in melee range. Best way to beat him is to group up so he has to spread his firestorm to different targets. Chaos damage is pretty good too because he has a really high ES but not so much life.

Make sure your defense is top notch, high fire res, high hp. Maybe even use a ruby flask. If youre melee and your defense is not that low use totems and DOT skills (viper strike, fire trap) or hit and run with groundslam if you are pure STR and dont have access to these tools.

If you are a melee Dex char you can use the following combo. Flicker strike, tag him with viper strike, whirling blade away. Never do that when his molten shell is up, proc that thing with traps first.

All in all he is purely gearcheck if you dont want to kite him. But you need good defense for the last boss anyway. If you dont have that, the general will rub that fact into your face.

To the gear debate: Support gems are pretty rare at the beginning of the game because most of them have a pretty high itemlevel. The game doesnt want to confront new players with too many options when they need to figure out the basics. Good linked items are rare at that stage of the game anyway so all these gems wouldnt help that much eighter.

Hope that helped

On a strictly melee character I chose to skip this fight and come back after being leveled. There's nothing you can really do against his molten shell spam.