After getting his hands on the Butcher, a Diablo 4 player realized the boss wasn’t as difficult as it thought. The latest game in the long-running and hugely popular Diablo series is once again filled with fearsome enemies for players to defeat. Continuing the series trend, Diablo 4 also appears to have no shortage of unique enemies and bosses to defeat, including newly added world bosses such as the deadly Ashava.
One of the scariest secret bosses in Diablo 4 is the Butcher, a classic enemy that’s now in almost every game in the series outside of Diablo 2. While Diablo 3 turned it into a full-fledged Act Boss, the Butcher’s role has been relegated in Diablo 4, although enemies have become deadlier as a result. The Butcher isn’t farmable, but a rare roaming spawn in the dungeon, though one player encountered a bug that removed the terrifying aspect of this iconic boss.
On the Diablo 4 subReddit, a user named JasperSnail posted a video of a Boss vs. Butcher fight in the Lamentations of the Ancients dungeon. While encountering the Butcher can give players some tough moments, in this case JasperSnail seems to be getting a pacifist version. Instead of directly attacking the player, the Butcher seems more interested in surviving after its health drops by 10%, as it constantly tries to stay away from the player, choosing to run instead of attacking.
Naturally, this behavior greatly slows down combat, as JasperSnail can only pursue with their Ursine Druids. Comments have been a bit funny about the encounter, with many saying the Butcher’s AI seems to be replaced by the Diablo 4 Treasure Goblin, an NPC who would rather run away from the player than engage them. Others believe that the Butcher is an NPC exploring the dungeon when the player attacks them. Another player noticed the same behavior, but after their health bar reached a certain point, the AI seemed to wake up and fight back.
Obviously, the player may have been lucky enough to find a butcher who had no intention of fighting back. While hard to find while playing the game, the Butcher has proven to be a thorn in the side of many players, responsible for nearly 2% of all deaths in Diablo 4, which equates to nearly 6 million player deaths at the time. Part of what makes The Butcher so difficult is the randomness of the generation, which can occur when the player is weaker and unprepared than when going to a more traditional boss room in a dungeon or campaign quest.
Diablo 4 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.