It brings me great pleasure to report that Uber-Lilith has fallen: The first recorded Hardcore mode kill of the Diablo 4 pinnacle boss, the game's toughest single fight, has been accomplished by Ben, a Twitch streamer and self-described "gamer just trying to game."
The end of the Diablo 4 campaign is not the end of the game. Once Lilith has been properly dealt with, you can continue on the live-service grind to take your character all the way to the maximum level of 100, if that's what you're into. But there's more than just a three-digit character level waiting at the end: There is also the Echo of Lilith.
Echo of Lilith—aka Uber-Lilith—is a very, very powerful version of the base boss, designed to give the game's most accomplished and overpowered players something to worry about. To even meet Echo of Lilith, you need to have defeated the campaign and reached World Tier 4, Diablo 4's highest difficulty level. In a pre-release interview with GamesRadar, associate game director Joe Piepiora said the fight is meant to be "extraordinarily, extraordinarily challenging."
"Players that reach level 100 are going to have an extremely difficult time on this boss encounter," Piepiora said. "And the expectation is that you take your class, you understand your build, you've maximized everything that you possibly can about it, and you really have learned encounters very well. And that's going to be the way that you can maybe take it down."
Lest there be any doubt about Piepiora's seriousness, Uber-Lilith brought Wudijo's solo Hardcore 100 character to an end just yesterday.
But that's not to say Uber-Lilith cannot be beaten, and now, beaten she has been: By Ben, who brought the mighty demon low with his vicious, powerful barbarian, Spinnywinny.
As you can see in the clip, Ben puts up staggering amounts of damage in his attacks against Lilith, which Wowhead says he likely accomplished by taking advantage of an oddity in the barbarian's Whirlwind skill.
"Based on a weird mechanic that was repeatedly reported during Beta, Whirlwind apparently snapshots a damage-increasing buff from Wrath of the Berserker's second upgrade, Supreme Wrath of the Berserker," the site explained. "By endlessly channeling Whirlwind right after activating Wrath of the Berserker, the buff never seems to fall off and increases damage endlessly based on Fury spent instead."
Wowhead added that it's possible that something else could be happening to cause the damage boost, like a different bug or exploit, "but that's what it sure looks like."
Whatever the explanation, the job was done, and Ben apparently had a really good time doing it. "The @diablo pinnacle boss is insanely fun," he tweeted. "So far the game has exceeded my expectations, hopefully the future bosses they create are similar. I feel like D4 actually has some big potential if they fix a few things like DC rips/NM dungeon density + tone down monster CC."
(For the record, that's deaths caused by disconnections, the density of monsters in Nightmare Dungeons (generally, players want more), and reducing Crowd Control skills, which enable players to slow or halt enemy movement.)
And for followers looking to duplicate the feat, he also offered a little insight into how he pulled it off:
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