Clever WoW players exploited bugs and some poor little rats to try and kill a Midnight raid boss early, but Blizzard was one step ahead

Nothing is more of a tease than dangling an upcoming raid boss in front of players a week early. MMO players thrive when there's nothing to do but wait for the next patch, so if a boss is just sitting there, they're going to look for a way to kill it against Blizzard's wishes.

And they almost would've if it wasn't for Blizzard ruining the fun by implementing a safeguard to prevent anyone from actually pulling it off.

World of Warcraft: Midnight's March of Quel'Danas raid opens up on Tuesday, but one of its bosses, L'ura, is hanging out in the game right now. The floating cluster of energy may be almost godlike in the Warcraft lore, but the health bar above her head says she has 149M health—and to crafty players like YouTuber Rextroy, that means she can bleed.

The first major obstacle in the journey to kill L'ura was staying alive long enough to actually hit her. Although she can't attack players directly, anyone who enters her domain near the freshly-voided Sunwell will take massive periodic ticks of damage. No character can survive more than a few seconds in there because it deals 40% of your health a second.

But Rextroy wasn't going to be stopped by a big scary DoT and decided to look into how it worked. Basically, the game considers the player as the one doing the damage, which happens to leave open a very clever loophole: By dying outside the chamber and accepting the resurrection sickness debuff that reduces your damage done by 75%, the DoT becomes trivial enough to survive for a few minutes.

This trick let Rextroy and their friends start to test some theories. Over the course of a few days, they figured out the boss could be hurt by hunter pets, but not enough that it actually made a dent in her health. In fact, the pets effectively didn't deal any damage at all because the boss gradually heals itself. The only way to get the job done was to hit it for a whole lot of damage all at once.

The solution Rextroy and the crew landed on (based on a previous feat) was to bring in a sacrificial rat and a bugged monk attack that let them deal around 100M damage. This is due to the way high-level characters deal bonus damage to low-level enemies, and the way the monk attack transfers that damage over to L'ura.

After gathering up as many rats as they could on Saturday, the group shrunk themselves down using a toy that reduces their damage by 99% (to solve the DoT problem), and the item that spawns the rat. The first rat knocked L'ura's health down to half, but when Rextroy sacrificed the second rat, the boss didn't die.

Desperate for the kill, the third player in the group gave their rat a smack, hoping L'ura only had a sliver of health left. When it didn't work either, everyone realized what was happening and sighed. "Blizzard… that's so boring," Rextroy said once they realized L'ura was simply programmed to be unkillable.

Blizzard's little cheat dashed the group's hope of achieving a world first before the raid was even out. The combat log even showed that they dealt more damage than the health she had left, but apparently no fun is allowed.

Well, some fun is allowed. Rextroy went out to find other ways they could use what they'd just learned. They took out a mythic+ boss in one hit and then surprised some players in PvP. Neither were as satisfying as it would've been to kill the boss though. At the very least, Blizzard can't take away the fact that Rextroy and their friends are certainly the world's first—and probably last—players to defeat L'ura as a group made up of monks and rats.