As you journey around Diablo IV’s world, quelling Lilith’s Armies of Hell, you’ll encounter a bevy of bosses salivating to put you into a fiery grave. However, while many bosses will stand in your way whether you like it or not, you may actually miss out on confrontations with certain monstrosities you really want to fight. That’s because there are some enemies, known as World Bosses, who have rather sporadic spawn times, making your odds of just bumping into them while you play fairly low. Thankfully, a Twitter account is here to help, alerting folks as to precisely when and where they can face these formidable foes.
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World Bosses are hulking monsters you engage in massive, multi-stage battles in Sanctuary’s open world. However, they’re easy to miss, with the game only indicating their spawns on the world map to players who have finished the campaign, and in places like Reddit, some players are lamenting that the game doesn’t do a better job of alerting you as to when and where they’ll appear. As of now, there are only three such World Bosses you can kill or be killed by—Ashava, the Pestilent; Avarice, the Gold Cursed; and Wandering Death, Death Given Life—with one spawning about every six hours (which one seems to be random). This means that if you miss a World Boss fight, you’ll have to wait a whole six hours before you can participate in the next battle. Talk about FOMO.
Or that’s what I would say if not for the Diablo IV World Boss Spawn Alert Twitter Account. Run by the tips and guides wiki site Game8, the account provides details on World Boss spawn times and locations. Per the pinned tweet, the game won’t indicate when and where a World Boss will spawn if you haven’t beaten the campaign, but you can still fight them if you’re in the right place at the right time, and the Twitter account will tell you just that.
While the account already appeared genuine, I was able to confirm the veracity of its posts thanks to a June 8 tweet on Ashava’s location. The poison-puking dragon spawned at 1:05 p.m. ET in the westernmost part of Fractured Peaks, so I booked it to the frigid location to find four or five other players ganging up on her. Despite having half health, she still bodied me three times during the fight.
Regardless, though, we put Ashava back into the dirt where she belongs. I collected my loot—all of which was weaker than what I’m currently using—cheered and thanked the other players, and teleported back to Kyovashad. I’d say that my revenge has been enacted. Mission accomplished.
In Twitter DMs with Kotaku, the person behind the account (who goes by Mr. Game8) said that between the real people tracking the encounters, the data calculations the team runs, and the overall World Boss patterns, he’s able to pin down the exact time when a boss will spawn and which one it’ll be.
“The game makes it extremely difficult to predict when a world boss is going to appear,” Mr. Game8 said. “There’s no clear indication of when one will come up, and even though there is a pattern, the spawn times are highly randomized. The only notification in-game for when a world boss will appear comes less than 30 minutes before the actual world boss appears. Most players are doing other things between playing the game and can’t stay at the computer 24 hours a day to wait for a world boss, but they still want to participate in them as there’s valuable rewards for them.”
“This creates a tough situation where dedicated players feel like they need to be playing all the time to hit as many world bosses as possible. We want to make it just a little bit easier for people to enjoy the game without having to deal with the stress of not knowing when a world boss will show up, and that they might miss it if they’re out of the game for a while.”
Still, he was quick to point out that, because the Twitter account is run by actual humans, human error is an inevitability.
“There was a case where one of our members who wasn’t living in the EST time zone made a mistake when converting the time,” Mr. Game8 said. “That’s the kind of thing that can happen when you have humans trying to get the information out as fast as possible, and while I was sad that it happened, I was surprised by how many positive comments we got in response to that, which thanked us for doing the work and doing our best. I think the fact that it happened showed people that our account is run by humans and in a way, it made them feel closer to the account and want to encourage our hard work.”
Diablo IV – Avarice, The Gold Cursed World Boss in Diablo IV
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Running a Twitter account that follows the trail of erratic World Bosses is a challenge in and of itself, something Mr. Game8 spoke at length about. However, while gathering the info is hard, there’s another aspect of Diablo IV that Mr. Game8 said very much impacts the work the team’s doing.
“The hardest part, other than the obvious fact that we have to manually handle World Bosses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is that you can’t pause the game,” Mr. Game8 said. “One of our members was trying to beat the capstone dungeon boss (the challenge dungeon needed to go to the next world tier) when a World Boss popped up and they had to update the Twitter account as soon as possible. Obviously, they didn’t win that run. The easiest part, though, is that you don’t actually have to fight the World Boss to get its time and location, so thankfully we don’t have to yeet out of the capstone dungeon at the very end just to make one tweet.”
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Diablo IV is a huge game, filled with copious side quests to pursue and lots of settings to adjust. With so much the game doesn’t tell you, it’s nice knowing there’s a handy-dandy notebook—I mean, Twitter account—tracking something so pertinent and worthwhile to know as you slash your way across Sanctuary.
