How pro WoW team Mandatory broke the record for fastest dungeon ever during MDI 2023

Mandatory, the runners-up at the WoW Dragonflight 2023 Mythic Dungeon International, pulled off one of the most unfathomable runs of the tournament when they broke the all-time record for the fastest dungeon ever. Their run of the Ruby Life Pools in the lower bracket finals was completed in just eight minutes and 54 seconds, making it the fastest dungeon ever run in MDI history. Here’s how they pulled it off. 

Mandatory came into their run with a time to beat of nine minutes and 16 seconds, which was set by another team, Perplexed, earlier in the weekend. Although the record was an aspiration, winning the match at hand against Legendary was a front-of-mind goal for Mandatory. The two teams came into the dungeon with identical team compositions: Protection Warrior, Discipline Priest, Feral Druid, Fire Mage, and Unholy Death Knight. The affixes for the run were Fortified, Spiteful, Grievous and Thundering, while the keystone level was set to +20. 

While Ruby Life Pools had been hovering around the sub-10-minute mark throughout most of the MDI, Mandatory’s sub-nine-minute run was the fastest that the dungeon (or the tournament) had ever seen. 

Ruby Life Pools is a relatively straightforward and linear dungeon, making it optimal for blazing fast runs. With three cut-and-dry sections of trash mobs that can even be overlapped into those respective sections’ boss fights, the ability to take out huge chunks of the dungeon at once is relatively easy. In total, it took Mandatory just seven pulls to complete the dungeon. 

Mandatory’s run began by taking nearly every mob from the dungeon’s first corridor into Mellidrussa Chillworn’s boss room. This pull included both Defiler Draghar and a Primal Juggernaut alongside the first boss. The team used Bloodlust on that big pull, and Melidrussa was defeated before even Defiler Draghar went down. 

After clearing out the Infusion Chambers, Mandatory was onto the second area of the dungeon at just two minutes and seven seconds. Once they were up there, they skipped both of the massive drakes who inhabit the Ruby Overlook—Thunderhead and Flamegullet—while pulling the standard amount of mobs in the area. During this section of the run, Mandatory’s pull strategy looked relatively similar to what you might see in your everyday Mythic+ groups, although a notable difference included a pull of the remaining mobs who accompany the gauntlet’s final Blazebound Destroyer into the boss encounter. Heading into the final section of the dungeon, their Enemy Forces count stood just over 76 percent.

With the second boss dead at 6:24, Mandatory had just under three minutes to break Perplexed’s record on the dungeon, which sat at 9:16. They quickly used their invisibility potions to bypass the Tempest Channeler and two Storm Warriors that sit on the bridge just prior to the final boss area before big-pulling all enemies in that area alongside the mini-boss, High Channeler Ryvati.

After defeating Ryvati and allowing the final boss encounter to begin, Mandatory went back and grabbed the two Storm Warriors that they skipped earlier in the dungeon to finish off their percentage count, pulling them into the boss fight. The two adds were cleaved down alongside Erkhart and Kyrakka, who went down in just one minute and 14 seconds.  

By the time Mandatory closed the door on the dungeon, Legendary were only halfway through the final boss fight. Mandatory went on to lose their following series, the MDI Grand Finals, against Echo. Ruby Life Pools was scheduled to serve as the map for a potential fifth game in that series, but Echo wound up winning it by a score of three games to one.