Summary
There are some pretty tough bosses players will have to face inDiablo 4, but none are as terrifying as the Butcher. This enemy has been an icon of the series since its very first entry, and his presence inDiablo 4is made all the more menacing by his random spawns and tendency to hunt down the player relentlessly once encountered. As a result, many players have been trying to find ways to cheese the Butcher and make fighting him much easier, leading to the emergence of one strategy that has been a timeless gaming tactic for dealing with tough enemies.
Given his aggressive attack patterns, players have found a way tocheese the Butcher inDiablo 4using a locked door to keep the boss from being able to reach them while still hitting him through it. For nearly as long as video games have existed, players have been using door physics to subvert developer intentions and make tough parts of games easier. This Butcher door cheese technique is just the latest example of one of gaming’s most iconic strategies for overcoming annoying sequences and challenging bosses.
RELATED:The Argument For a Matchmaking Feature in Diablo 4
Diablo 4’s Butcher Continues Gaming’s Long Tradition of Using Doors in Unintended Ways
Doors in games are a classic way for developers to section off parts of the world that they don’t want players to access. However, this practice can often lead to exploitable situations where players are able to manipulate the physics of a door to their advantage. Entrance point glitches are acommon speedrun strategythat allows runners to walk through walls near a door without ever having to open it, and even more common is the method of abusing an enemy’s pathfinding around a door to get them stuck on one side while the player can still attack from the other.
FromSoftware gamesare notorious for this type of door abuse when it comes to fighting some of their toughest bosses. As games likeDark Souls,Bloodborne, andElden Ringare notorious for their difficulty, many players have sought out ways to manipulate their environment to make the game a bit easier. These games tend to utilize fog walls as doors to section off boss arenas from the rest of the world, which can often work to the player’s advantage if they can get the boss to aggro them on one side of the fog wall while they can safely attack it from the other side without fear of getting hit.
Doors are often also used as trigger points for initiating boss encounters, and players can sometimes use this knowledge to access the boss from outside a door without triggering the boss battle itself. One ofStar Wars Jedi: Survivor’s toughest bosses, Spawn of Oggdo, can be cheesed using this strategy by baiting nearby enemies into triggering the trap door leading to this boss' chamber. Once open, players can use ranged attacks to pick away at the boss' health without ever having to trigger the fight and put themselves in harm’s way.
Of course, these methods can be somewhat controversial with some players happily embracing any help they can get, while others claim these are unfair ways to beat games as they didn’t defeat a boss the way the developers intended. Given how difficultDiablo 4’s Butcheris to fight in the intended way, it’s hard to fault players for looking for any way they can exploit his aggressive behavior to their advantage. With such a long history of gamers killing enemies through doors and manipulating them to help overcome tough obstacles, cheesy door strategies have almost become a gaming institution that players come to expect in the games they play.
Diablo 4is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
MORE:Diablo 4 Shot Itself in the Foot by Changing One Key Launch Feature
