Diablo 4's world boss is a nightmare I couldn't wait to walk away from

I did not beat the Diablo 4 world boss. My playtime of the beta may have teetered into intervention territory, but Ashava The Pestilent proved too much of a challenge – one of those nightmares that you just can't seem to shake. Truth be told, as much as I enjoyed the Diablo 4 beta, this limited-time event was one of the only things I didn't entirely love. The composition of the conflict too chaotic to feel as if I were having any impact against its five-tiered health bar.

That's a problem in a game like Diablo 4, where a quickening progression of power shifts the experience from mundane to magical in a matter of hours. I've never seen Diablo as a game about gradually rising to meet challenges, but rather an experience focused around scaling equipment and fine-tuning skills to be the most efficient demon hunter possible. Whether you're traveling alone or partying up with other guardians of the light in the Diablo 4 open beta, extinguishing the hordes of evil flooding forth from Sanctuary's darkest corners is proving to be a very good time indeed.

And then there's the Ashava of it all. The world boss concept is new to Diablo 4, which sees one of the Burning Hells' most heinous creations spawn within the shared-world, requiring multiple players to work in concert to conquer it. Blizzard has experience in this area; world bosses found their way into World of Warcraft expansions like Wrath of the Lich King and Mists of Pandaria, which would spawn raid-strength bosses in phased versions of the overworld. They were always exciting challenges; rewarding battles without the messy-interpersonal drama that came hand-in-hand with trying to get a 25-player raiding party through an instance without major wah-wahs.

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I think part of the problem with the way Diablo 4 presents its world boss in the open beta concerns how Blizzard groups players together. Ashava may crawl out of a hellish maw at level 25, swinging her two massive forearm blades, but there's nothing to stop a group of underleveled players assembling around it – making it functionally impossible to beat in the 15-minute timeframe allotted. I know this from experience, as the first time I faced the whirlwind of pestilence I was also severely unprepared to survive its attacks.