The Diablo 4 Ashava world boss was the blackened yet beating heart of the Diablo 4 Server Slam beta, and trust me when I say she was quite the challenge. If your first instinct is to blame your teammates for your lack of success in the RPG game, though, I have some news for you: your Diablo 4 Ashava squad isn’t the problem.
Discovered by streamer ‘Wudijo’, the man who soloed Ashava on hardcore mode twice, the tyrannical terror doesn’t actually scale with party size. This means that whether you’re playing solo or in a huge group, the boss doesn’t get any stronger.
There’s a lot of chatter on the internet claiming that poor teamplay was the reason players couldn’t defeat the boss, with some players claiming they’re going to refund the game because the instance was just too difficult. Wudijo is quick to counter this though, stating “after reviewing some of my footage it doesn’t really seem [that Ashava’s difficult scales with party size], or if it does, it’s very slightly.”
While there’s no health counter on the boss, Wudjio looked at the health bar itself and compared it across different runs. Assuming that, by his calculations, for the first 65% of the boss your character does the same damage on each attempt, he checks how long it takes to get to the four different phases.
“On my own I can do roughly 20% of the boss’ HP every three minutes,” he states. “And it took us roughly two minutes to get the HP down 20% at the start of the fight, before everyone left or died.”
From here, he shows another clip where he’s joined by a Necromancer and Sorcerer mid-run. With three characters present, he notes “we’re doing quite a bit more than this 20% per three minutes now – it’s maybe 25% or so. You can see here, for example, that the last 20% of the fight only took two minutes instead of three.”
From this, it looks like Ashava doesn’t actually scale massively with group size, if she scales at all. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Diablo games aren’t easy, but that’s easy to forget given Diablo 3, when compared to Diablo 2, is much more straightforward – at least in my experience, and I played the D-tier Witch Doctor. Boss fights are designed to be hard, and Ashava is no different.
If you struggled to take her down but are excited to enact some sweet vengeance on the Diablo 4 release date, be sure to check out our rundown of the best Diablo 4 Rogue build to follow in Wudjio’s footsteps.