Palworld tactical genius melts through the 294,000 HP of its new raid boss in seconds by spamming a frame rate-destroying platoon of dragons

Bellanoir, a new Pal featured in an upcoming update for Palworld, floats regally while swarms of meteors crash into the landscape behind her.

(Image credit: Pocketpair)

Pocketpair added a new goth girl raid boss last week, and people have already found ways to clown on her. Although the Poké-like gives players 10 full minutes to deal with Bellanoir, at least one enterprising Reddit user has found a way to whittle that down to a brisk 36 seconds. How? Overwhelming and spectacular firepower.

Raid boss 36 second speedrun from r/Palworld

As you can see above, a player named notqp has conceived a tactic called 'What if I just launched like a hundred dragons at this thing?' The strat, in which you just launch like a hundred dragons at the thing, is devastatingly effective, and consists of spamming her with upwards of 20 Jetdragons at a time, melting through her 294,000 HP in a matter of seconds. At that point, the true raid boss is your frame rate.

Onlookers are torn between congratulating notgp on their feat (and lack of battlefield honour) and encouraging them to up their game. "Bro fought like a Touhou boss goddamn," says an impressed user named RashPatch, while iTrolledall just wants to see them try it with Bellanoir's much tougher "ultra" variant, which might even give a battalion of Jetdragons a run for their money.

Notgp seems to think that's a losing proposition, though. "100% for Ultra this is not the way to go," they say, "but for regular and Libero it's definitely doable. For Ultra I'd recommend a player attack build over this any day."

Our hero also thinks they could tighten the strat up a bit: "If my jets were all fully condensed and upgraded at the statue along with just faster hand movement at the Palbox then the timer could be much lower," they reckon, offering a pre-emptive "Hats off to whoever does that in the future."

It might be a while before someone does, mind you. I wasn't kidding about the framerate tanking, and notgp says they've experienced crashes before "just swapping Pals in and out." So a strategy that revolves around moving 20 dragons around at speed meant "fingers were crossed the whole time."

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.