An extremely patient World of Warcraft player has managed to solo a current-tier raid boss during the Dragonflight pre-patch. It took the Brewmaster monk Vennbrew over five hours to down Rygelon, the penultimate boss from the Fated Sepulcher of the First Ones raid.
The "world first pre-patch solo kill" happened this past weekend and was made possible partly due to the introduction of Dragonflight's class talents and their overlap with existing Shadowlands powers. Some of the new class talents are themselves versions of covenant abilities or legendary powers and several classes can benefit from having combinations that were never meant to be used together, making them pretty overpowered in the final weeks of the expansion.
It took Vennbrew around 90 attempts to get it right with the actual kill taking just over five hours. That's not five hours' worth of tries—the actual encounter took that long. Basically, once the mechanic happens which should enrage the boss and wipe the raid, Vennbrew had to auto-attack for the rest of the fight.
"Once I knew it was possible, I just had to do it," Vennbrew told Raider.io. "I've watched people like Rextroy for a long time, and I've always been interested in trying to solo bosses. After three months of brainstorming on how this boss might be soloable, the excitement of actually doing it kept me going."
It's not unusual to go back and solo raid bosses if you're after a specific mount or want to add to your transmog collection, but raids generally aren't soloable until they're an expansion or two old, thanks to the way power scaling works for legacy content. Raid bosses are meant to be taken down by a minimum of ten players, so to see Rygelon defeated legitimately while the raid is part of the current tier is really quite a feat.
All I can say is that if you've got any pressing plans to solo a raid boss, you'd better get it done before Dragonflight launches on November 28 and those extra powers go away for good.
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