Gul’dan is a pivotal figure in Warcraft lore, a powerful warlock and founder of the whole dang Orcish Horde. When he finally became a raid boss in World of Warcraft earlier this year, it was a Big Deal. Even now, he’s no cakewalk to fight. That’s why it’s basically astounding that one player, Mionee, has managed to beat him all by herself.
After a bunch of trial and error (and math), Mionee’s first successful run ended up taking an hour and nine minutes. It was more of a multi-stage marathon than a sprint.
In the video’s description, Mionee explains that this encounter was a puzzle even for a solo-er as experienced as herself. The big issue is that, early on, good ol’ Guldie is immune to damage. After that he becomes enraged, boosting his damage to a point where you really don’t want to mess with him unless you’ve got, you know, a whole raid in your back pocket.
Mionee realized, however, that Gul’dan’s enrage times out after 30 minutes, and he’s mostly passive during the fight’s first phase, which sees you battle three demonic minibosses while Gul’dan chills out and acts evil. On top of that, one of the minibosses, Inquisitor Vethriz, doesn’t even move, making it possible to just avoid his and Gul’dan’s attacks for half an hour. Of course, you have to do it pretty much flawlessly, because 900 percent damage-boosted bursts of liquid hellfire are bad news.
Unfortunately, Gul’dan also summons evil eyes that get the enrage effect as well, and the eye spawns only get trickier in the second and third phases of the fight. On Reddit, Mionee explained that she had to meticulously gear up for this specific aspect of the fight. “I did math on whether it was possible to do [the eyes] or not and what kind of optimization I needed for them,” she wrote. “A few weeks ago I remembered the Moroes ring existed, for example, so I used item restoration to recover an old one I had vendored.”
Despite all that, Mionee says that “the fight truly begins at the 42:30ish mark, so that’s more of a 27 minute fight” than a pitched hour-long warlock battle—for her, anyway, because keep in mind that she is also ludicrously good at WoW.