After grinding for a week, Diablo 4 player achieves world first clear of its hardest dungeon while wearing the wrong pants

(Image credit: Blizzard)

In Diablo 4's hardest dungeon, you have 10 minutes and one life to kill the hardest enemies in the game. A little over a week after its launch, a Chinese player named Xingluoah was able to conquer the final and most brutal tier of the Abattoir of Zir using a newly discovered exploit, a perfected build, and the wrong pair of pants.

When Diablo 4 influencer Wudijo playtested a near-final version of the Abattoir of Zir last month, he said, "As far as I'm aware, you're not really supposed to finish the last tier." Blizzard designed the dungeon to be a test for the most powerful builds, so each tier significantly increases the health of the monsters. Tier 25 monsters, for example, have almost four times the amount of health as those in tier 24.

Xingluoah spent the last seven days grinding lower tiers to raise a new damage-boosting Tears of Blood Glyph to level 140—an impressive achievement on its own. They "fished" for the perfect randomized dungeon layout and monsters to save as much time as possible and went into it with the strongest barbarian build possible. But the best gear and build in the game isn't enough to chunk through monsters with billions of health points in less than 10 minutes.

At the start of Xingluoah's run (and before the bosses), they swap their gear around to benefit from a bug with how Legendary aspects work in Diablo 4. Legendary items come with powerful buffs that define your build, like a 50% increase to Overpower damage on a weapon. Normally, equipping a duplicate aspect disables a weaker one. But players recently discovered that if you equip an item with a stronger version of an aspect and then unequip it, the weaker one triggers the better effect. Using the 100% boost to aspects on two-handed weapons, you can "snapshot" a stronger version of an aspect for a free boost to your damage.

As Rob2628 points out in his video explaining the run, Xingluoah screwed up the swap and put on the wrong pants. Typically, barbarians use pants with a crucial defensive aspect or a Unique item with a massive offensive boost. Xingluoah had neither as their pants had a duplicate aspect that was disabled, granting them only a portion of the power they could've had.

You might think that because they survived a dungeon without an entire Legendary aspect on their gear that it's possible for the rest of us, but the amount of luck it took for everything to go right, despite the pants mishap, says otherwise. "This run is just crazy, man," Rob said. "And don't get this the wrong way guys, this is still extremely hard."

Sadly, there isn't a reward for completing tier 25 other than some normal loot and the pride of finishing something before anyone else in the world, at least as far as we know.

"For the other classes there's not really any hope," Wudijo said in his video about Xingluoah's run. "I think barbs are going to remain the only class that can do this."

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Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.