Venn is on a roll in this holiday season! Another current raid boss falls to the prolific solo artist, and this time it’s the sixth of eight bosses in the Manaforge that falls on Normal difficulty.
No Walls, Minimal Damage, 6+ Hours
As with a great number of solos, this one involved quite a lot of creativity. Fractillus would normally be impossible to solo due to the ice walls stacking up and the eventual enrage. However, Venn found a spot in the encounter where he could hide, so the walls don’t spawn at all. The issue with that is that he cannot attack the boss from there and needs to stay there the entire fight. Enter 
Ceaseless Swarmgland and 
Siphoning Lightbrand. These two trinkets can damage the boss from outside line of sight. However, even with them, the fight would take over 9 hours, so Venn sped it up a little.
That’s where 
Gallywix’s Iron Thumb comes in to speed things up to an ever-so-short 6 and a half hour encounter, which you have to heal yourself through the entire time as a Brewmaster! To get the full stacks for the item, Venn had to stay inside the encounter area and get some east walls up, but still outrange the tank buster attack. This took the first two minutes of the fight, which was the hardest part, taking 50+ tries. After that, it’s just chilling in that one very specific location and letting the three auto-damage effects do the work!
Exploit?
This could definitely be considered an exploit, but considering it’s of extremely little use (and was reported to Blizzard by Venn), there’s no harm done. Solo kills often need to use these types of workarounds to be possible at all, and if they do have applications that are useful to regular play, Blizzard swiftly remove them.
You can also check out the full kill video, which clocks in at over 2 hours, even when sped up.
Congratulations to Venn on another awesome solo kill, showing just how far the game can be pushed!
