Pretty much everyone who's played Diablo 4 for any length of time has heard terrifying stories of The Butcher randomly showing up and wreaking havoc on players, but you might be surprised to find out just how rare it is that you encounter this boss.
There's still no official spawn rate for The Butcher, but a player experiment involved running through a whopping 1,270 Cellars across three days and documenting the frequency of loot and certain encounters. In that time, the player was interrupted by The Butcher just three times.
Of course, there's no real way to gauge The Butcher's spawn rate using this statistic, as it could be affected by any number of factors only Blizzard's privy to. That said, according to Maxroll's math, The Butcher's spawn rate in Cellars is around 1 in 200, while your chances of being butchered in Dungeons is reportedly somewhere around 1 in 50 - significantly more likely but still quite rare.
Again, we still don't know exactly how often The Butcher is supposed to show up, but these stats are nonetheless striking when you consider that, around launch, it was revealed that about 2% of all player deaths were due to this exact boss. He doesn't show up often, but when he does it's typically a bloodbath - unless you're this player who managed to cheese him using a door frame.
Personally, I've played for around 40 hours and have only encountered The Butcher once, in a dungeon, while my friends who've played for about the same amount of time claim to have run into him a few times. Whatever the math is, it seems you're most likely safe from The Butcher... until you aren't.
Elsewhere in Sanctuary, Diablo 4 players are following rats around dungeons in hopes of finding the game's rarest loot.
