Start with the possibility
For soloing, I ask whether each boss in every raid can be defeated by a character locked to that expansion's level on the highest difficulty.
WoW theorycrafting / tested raid strategies
How I theorycraft World of Warcraft encounters.
My theorycrafting starts with one question: can this raid problem be solved in a way nobody has proved yet? I question the normal answer, strip the problem back and verify it again from A to Z.
I record and log the work so the answer can be reviewed instead of remembered.
No ego / always learning
Anyone can show me a move I missed.
A new player, a veteran or somebody solving a completely different problem can all see something I did not. I go into conversations ready to learn, because protecting an image of being right would only slow me down.
I often work alone because I think best with space, patience and no pressure to perform for a room. Working solo lets me be honest about bad ideas, but it never means I stop listening.
The method
How a WoW theory becomes a tested strategy.
The question changes between soloing and group play, but the work still moves from possibility to evidence.
Reverse-engineer the wall
When a normal group strategy fails for Legacy Thirty, I spend hours across days or weeks breaking the encounter down and looking for a route that works for us.
Record and log the tests
I record and log the work so I can review the data and footage instead of relying on how a pull felt.
Look for another perspective
When it is useful, I compare older strategies or approaches from WoW's Classic remakes to see whether they expose a different answer.
Example from group play / Halion 25 Heroic
I built the strategy for a level‑30 raid, not a normal one.
Halion is one example of how I theorycraft for a group. At 50%, most raids split between the Material and Twilight realms and balance Corporeality near the middle. I devised the opposite plan for Legacy Thirty.
Split the raid and balance both realms.
Keep both copies moving together and hold Corporeality near the safer middle.
Keep everybody in Twilight and push the mechanic to its limit.
We let Halion reach 400% more damage taken in the dark realm, accepting that he would also deal 200% more damage.
- Halion took
- +400%
- Halion dealt
- +200%
- Raid level
- 30
Defensives into the main tank. Bloodlust. End the fight.
Once the multiplier was ready, we funnelled our defensives into the tank, used Bloodlust and burned Halion before the danger caught us. That plan secured the world-first level-30 kill on 25-player Heroic.
Example from solo play / Mythic Tindral
I chose the version of danger I could control.
The flaming trees were the real wall. Instead of treating enrage as an automatic failure, I rebuilt the entire route around surviving it.
- Leave the normal route
Stay on the platform Tindral just left.
While I stayed on a flying mount he could not teleport me across, so I never had to enter the next platform's flaming trees. Staying behind removed the mechanic I could not outlast, and forced the boss into enrage.
- Build for enrage
Push block chance as close to 100% as possible.
Against a lower-level target, each block removes a larger percentage of the hit. That made surviving the enrage more manageable than dealing with the flaming trees.
- Hold the line
Wait ten minutes for every tree to disappear.
The enrage locked Tindral into a permanent Supernova cast, so the rest was waiting the trees out, reaching him and out-healing damage that would otherwise kill me.
Example of changing the question / Mythic Fyrakk
Sometimes the answer is to skip the problem.
Phase two asks for something one player cannot give: heal the Spirits of the Kaldorei and clear the line of adds, inside five seconds. I spent a year building plans to meet that demand.
Find a way through the five seconds.
Every plan I built tried to answer the window on its own terms: more healing, faster clears, better cooldowns.
End the fight before it is asked.
A Hunter levelled to 90 did enough damage to burn Fyrakk down in the first thirty seconds of phase two, before he flies off. The five seconds never arrived.
- The window
- 5s
- Burn time
- 30s
- Hunter levelled to
- 90
A year of plans, beaten by a different question.
I had been asking how to survive the window. The kill came from asking whether I needed to reach it at all.
Watch the full Fyrakk soloThe bigger idea
WoW rewards the player who can still be surprised.
Theorycrafting is how I express creativity and intelligence in a game. I take the same board everyone else is looking at, drop the assumptions around it and find a path that did not exist before.