It had to be tremendously disappointing for YouTuber Wudijo when he came within a hair's breadth of soloing Diablo 4 world boss Ashava the Pestilent during the March beta, but fell short at the last minute. He's probably feeling better now, though, because he managed to get the job done during the Server Slam playtest that ran this past weekend.
There wasn't any real question that Wudijo could do the job: He missed the solo kill in March not because he got his ass kicked, but because someone jumped in at the last minute to steal the kill. (Not just once, but twice, if you can believe it.)
But the lower level cap in the Server Slam beta—the maximum achievable character level was 20 rather than 25, as it had been in the earlier betas—and reduced legendary item drop rates meant he came into this fight at a considerable disadvantage compared to the previous rounds. He also took on the fight at the higher difficulty level of World Tier 2.
It didn't seem to matter much. Wudijo doesn't appear to be in any real danger throughout the fight, and while the time limit looked like it might present a problem—Ashava sticks around for just 15 minutes after appearing in the game, and if you haven't killed it when the timer hits zero, you lose—in the end, he was able to do the job with almost a full minute remaining.
"That was a nice fight," Wudijo said when the battle was over.
In a clip embedded at the beginning of Wudijo's video, game director Joe Shely says Blizzard tested the Ashava fight prior to the Server Slam to ensure it could be done at level 20.
"It is quite challenging," Shely said. "If you are having a lot of trouble with it, you can always go down to a [lower] difficultly level."
"And Wudijo, we expect you to solo it," community development director Adam Fletcher added.
After Wudijo accomplished the kill, Fletcher offered his congratulations for making it happen.
Congrats to @wudijo on his Hardcore solo kill of Ashava on World Tier 2!<3May 14, 2023
I only took on Ashaha once, during the March open beta, and it did not go well: It was clear that most people in the party (myself included) had no idea what the hell we were doing, and after the timer wound down Ashava took off with more than half herits health remaining. Figuring out balance issues is as much a part of beta testing as squashing bugs, but given Wudijo's accomplishment I don't think Blizzard will be looking to dial back the difficulty to any great extent. In fact, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra suggested that developers might now be looking to go the other way:
