After 2.5 hours, Rextroy has soloed Dathea, the Ascended in Vault of the Incarnates.

This is Rextroy’s third solo in the current raid tier. He previously soloed the Primal Council and Eranogg through +900% Berserk damage.

According to Rextroy, this boss strategy required the most tricks to solo.

Background:

This solo is probably the one that required the most “bugs” or clever tricks used at once, to get through different obstacles that would normally prevent a solo… Let us talk about them!

First is that being outside of melee range will make the boss ignore casting her main tank debuff “Zephyr Slam” This ability does more and more damage as well as a knockback! It seems like her range ability Aerial Buffet will take priority on her cast sequence.

The adds that spawn every 1.5 minutes proved challenging, but with the right gear and talent setup I was able to destroy them before new ones spawned! Also really happy to be a prot pala right now with enough interrupts to stop them from channeling their damage boost to the boss.

The biggest obstacle came down to her Berserk, the “Final Gale”. This is a perma channel that pushes you further and further away, as well as dealing damage. Even with a trinket that reduces pushback effects by 30%, aswell as a speed set, I wasn’t able to outrun it.

It was only this patch 10.1, that gave us the item “Conch Whistle” that enabled this solo. The whistle makes us mount an NPC called Big Slick in the City. It works both in combat and inside raids!

Thanks to it being an NPC, it is completely immune to the pushback of Final Gale! So we could use it to get through the berserk phase…. sadly there are still a lot of issues left to solve.

One issue is that mounting Slick will normally make the boss reset. After some deep theory-crafting and testing, I realized that keeping one raid member inside the raid itself (even while going offline), will prevent the boss from resetting!

Another issue I had to solve was the add spawns that happen 30 seconds before berserk. It would be difficult to have the DPS required to finish them in time. And I can’t keep them alive during berserk since they will boost the Final Gale damage… that means I would die while mounted on slick since I wouldn’t be able to heal myself.

The solution to this was to use one of the adds, and let them knock me to the side platform. Here I am safe from the knockback caused by Final Gale, and I could stay up here while beating the rest of the adds (placed closely to the edge)

 A final issue is that the whirlwinds spread around the encounter area WILL interrupt your snail summoning. So we would have to use immunity to remount slick… That means we have to survive all the damage taken between divine shield or spellwarding cooldowns!

Funny enough, we were blessed by the spaghetti code. It seems like Divine Shield will remove the damage component of “Final Gale”. Allowing us to survive for 2.5 minutes if we mount slick while at full health.

It would be annoying having to wait minutes before doing a tiny bit of damage to the boss… But that’s when our snail showed what a powerful fighter it was!

Our big pink snail will auto-hit the boss, and do fierce 5-7k auto hits, slowly beating the boss to death!

Thanks to our snail’s damage, the fight took about 2.5 hours, down from an estimated 5!

Also, I would have changed some things if I had to retry it (I actually managed to beat the boss first try after reaching the “snail combat” stage).

I would have gone for passive sustain trinkets, allowing me to remain mounted on Slick at all times, as well as changing talents to “Blessing of Spellwarding”.

I would also have done some tests to see if damage prevented by absorbs, could still interrupt my Conch Whistle!

Here’s Rextroy’s latest solo video of Dathea!