Diablo 4 players are being slaughtered in droves by tuned-up World Bosses - because they're all turning up to "leech"

(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Diablo 4 Season 2 is upon us, and among numerous other changes we've gotten much tougher World Bosses - so tough, in fact, that they're turning servers into slaughtering grounds once again.

The new Diablo 4 patch makes World Bosses more frequent, more rewarding, and more dangerous. The full patch notes explain that the World Boss spawn timer has been "reduced from 6 hours to 3.5 hours" and the quality of rewards you get for beating one of these baddies has been "significantly" boosted. Then, ominously, there's also the note that "World Boss health and damage has been increased."

Players are having some good fun with the more destructive World Bosses - particularly now that they're absolutely destroying the low-level "leech" players who cannot contribute to clearing the content but still hang around in hopes of grabbing a share of the rewards. In the image below, captioned "World Tier 2 World Boss starter pack" on Reddit, we get a pretty decent sense of how fights against the Diablo 4 Avarice World Boss are going post-patch, as you'll see a chat log populated by nonstop "[playername] was slain by Avarice!" messages, alongside a capture of the boss's health bar with barely a tick of life taken out.

World tier 2 world boss starter pack from r/diablo4

"Every time we fight it's a slaughterfest," as Reddit user Question_Few puts it. "But there are benefits to it. Now you actually get to learn about the different bosses' habits since they aren't being melted in seconds. I didn't even know the one boss with the treasure chest on his back summons a bunch of treasure goblins to distract everyone when his health is low. It's a bit harder for low levels to freeload a few kills though. If the people there are too low I'd rather just reload the zone rather than die and have to repair my gear for nothing."

It's a far cry from the days when Diablo 4 players were slaying World Bosses in the span of seconds, and broadly it seems fans are pretty happy with the state of the game post-patch, since discussion forums are now filled with a fair bit of praise for the new season. Given how dismal the community has sounded over the past few months, that's already a marked improvement.

Praise for Season 2 hasn't been enough to mitigate the mixed reviews Diablo 4 has received on Steam.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.