The third and final raid of World of Warcraft: Midnight’s first season is set to go live March 31, but that didn’t stop a group of clever players from trying and technically succeeding to kill its ultimate boss early. Spoilers for Midnight’s story ahead.
The March on Quel’Danas raid sees players looking to take down the corrupted dark nauru L’ura, who after the events of the Voidspire raid, has been used by Xal’atath to transform the Sunwell into the ominous sounding Darkwell.
Since the isle of Quel’Danas and the new Darkwell aren’t exclusively instanced (they are simply part of the map), players who go to investigate the big shadowy laser beam in the sky can, in theory, see L’ura hovering above the corrupted Sunwell. I say in theory, because a debuff called Overwhelming Oblivion surrounding the Darkwell is intended to make sure players don’t ever get close, dealing 45% of a player’s total HP per second.
But where there’s a will there’s a way, and famous WoW YouTuber Rextroy, well-known for one-shotting bosses and soloing content using creative loopholes and wacky interactions between mechanics, was on the case. The first step was figuring out how to mitigate the health-deleting debuff.
The answer was to die. Upon doing some investigating, Rextroy and crew discovered the game considers the damage from the Overwhelming Oblivion to actually be coming from players themselves. By dying outside the Darkwell and accepting resurrection sickness, and subsequently reducing the damage players do by 75%, Rextroy essentially negated the amount of damage the debuff caused. Later, they would utilize a toy that reduced their damage by 99% to further trivialize the incoming damage.
Next was to actually figure out how to deal enough damage to defeat the 149 million-health boss. Whittling L’ura’s health down wouldn’t work, as she gradually recovers health faster than players can reasonably do damage. Eventually Rextroy settled on returning to an old strategy used to one-shot bosses: a unique interaction between a bugged Monk ability, summonable rats, and the way the game calculates damage between high-level and low-level characters that translates to over 100 million damage in one go.
This did technically work. In two hits, Rextroy and company dealt an overwhelming amount of damage that should have been enough to take down the dark nauru. Instead, they discovered Blizzard had made L’ura invincible, incapable of being reduced below her final hit point.
It’s a little anticlimactic but not exactly surprising. Blizzard obviously had no intention of letting players take down Midnight Season 1’s ultimate boss outside of the raid, where L’ura’s mechanics and abilities will work much differently. However, it’s still cool that L’ura and the effect she is having on Silvermoon and the surrounding areas can be seen and experienced by players who don’t ever intend to step foot in the March on Quel’Danas.
WoW: Midnight’s March on Quel’Danas raid goes live today. In other WoW news, Blizzard’s MMO is finally getting an official Pride month event, while an unexpected collab between WoW and a popular cookware brand comes with an in-game pet.
