The player Venn from World of Warcraft is back and has hunted the bosses in the anniversary raid of the Blackrock Depths. To deal over 500 million damage with just one hit, however, a lot of preparation was necessary.
How did Venn achieve this? With his monk, the ability Touch of Death, the trinket Miasmic Bite of the Blighted Behemoth, and a lot of dedication. Each potentially successful attempt takes a full six hours. Venn had to endure more than 40 failures in the process. First, let’s look at what the two key effects do:
- Touch of Death: Can only be used against creatures that have less health than you and kills them instantly.
- Miasmic Bite of the Blighted Behemoth: Injects a digestion poison into an opponent and deals nature damage over 20 seconds. As long as it is active, your attacks and abilities against the target restore health. Overhealing from this effect permanently increases your maximum health by the same amount. The effect transforms into an absorption shield after leaving combat.
Venn’s strategy was to amass so much health with his monk that he could take down raid bosses with one or two powerful hits.
The Blackrock Depths as a raid? The 20th anniversary of WoW makes it possible:
No kill strategy to imitate
How is this possible? Venn visited the dummies in Stormwind with his monk and two priests in tow (for Spirit Guardian and Guardian Angel) to painstakingly raise his health points using Miasmic Bite of the Blighted Behemoth.
Although the effect scales with versatility and critical strike rating, it still took about six hours to accumulate 700 million health points (and only if you used class buffs like Inspiring Shout from the warrior).
- Why 700 million? Because the bosses from the anniversary raid in the Blackrock Depths have less than 700 million health points.
- Why the Blackrock Depths? Because BRD is still marked as a normal dungeon instance, allowing you to teleport there without leaving combat. This is not possible with normal raids.
- Why can you not leave combat? Because the effect of the trinket can only stack infinitely as long as your character is in combat.
The last point also presents Venn’s greatest challenge: A disconnection or lag at the wrong moment results in the effect wearing off. The same applies if the loading screen when entering the Blackrock Depths lasts a tick too long. In that case, the past 6 hours were for nothing.
You can watch Venn’s strategy in the video on YouTube:
Venn also couldn’t rely on auto attacks while beating up the dummies (and simply disappear from the PC temporarily), as characters in capitals like Stormwind are sometimes sent into different phases, causing them to stop their attacks.
If that happens, there is a window of about two seconds to manually resume combat and thus prevent the accumulated health points from becoming a strong but useless absorption shield.
With the accumulated health points, it then goes into the dungeon, where, of course, one must also never leave combat until reaching the intended victim. By the way, Venn then noticed that there seemed to be a maximum cap for the damage from Touch of Death.
Despite having almost 750 million health points, the powerful hit dealt just over 536 million damage. Therefore, two triggers were always necessary to successfully take down the bosses. Nevertheless, we are already looking at the second exclamation mark from Venn in The War Within: Player from WoW achieves something that hasn’t happened in years, takes down current raid boss solo on heroic
