Crota's End Insane Mode: Heroic Solo (lvl 32)

Skip to 16:30 if you absolutely insist on only watching the Crota fight - I strongly recommend against that, the entire run (abyss debatable) is worth the 16 minutes unless you're just passing time as you're being rushed to the emergency room, but I'm not gonna stop you. Skip the abyss if anything.

I play as my hunter until Crota, where I switch to a friend's warlock since I don't have one and it is the best class to use for the run. I could do it all as a warlock, but it would be virtually identical and I didn't think it was worth recording twice for that reason.

Long read incoming:

This run was insanely difficult. At the moment I don't know if it could be completed with a character anything short of level 32 Sunsinger Warlock with Starfire Protocol, Gjallarhorn, Ice Breaker, Red Death, Black Hammer, and a weapon with surplus. Other perks and items help (high discipline is very helpful, Apotheosis Veil, shoot to loot, Fatebringer, etc.) but they are only marginal advantages. Even with all this gear and the heavy ammo glitch, this run is absolutely insane level difficulty, and anybody who has tried it will certainly be able to attest to that. I doubt many who watch this will fully appreciate the difficulty of this challenge, but I strongly encourage you to try. From my knowledge, the only other character setup that could have the vaguest chance of making this run possible would be a Titan with the Armamentium and max discipline using magnetic grenades (Ghorn MG Ghorn MG on Crota's shield). I don't know if that is possible, but I believe it is the only other potential possibility.

There was much less "luck" in this run than it may seem. First of all, this took dozens of hours to perfect and accomplish. Secondly, most of the seemingly random aspects of the Crota fight can be influenced in some way by careful gameplay. There isn't a single thing I do in the Crota fight that isn't deliberate in some way, and oftentimes the right move had to be made within a matter of seconds. I believe that with perfect gameplay this could be recreated at least once an hour - the fight is relatively consistent, just extremely hard.

Finally, Warlocks suck and I hate them. I had to play on my friend's account (The Arpacan) in order to do this because I don't have any filthy Warlocks on my own tag, and I like it that way. While they are uniquely capable of soloing Heroic Crota as far as I can tell, I do not like anything about their abilities. I genuinely believe they are OP in both PvE and PvP, though much moreso in PvE. Maybe I'll make a video explaining why sometime. At any rate, the video is sc Slayerage playing on someone else's account. I didn't do the first sections on a Warlock because I didn't have to, and I believe they would have been easier by far (again, abyss aside) as a Warlock anyway.

But seriously, I don't like playing as or against warlocks. They don't need a nerf or anything, I just don't like them.

I owe this run to The Arpacan and just to be completely clear, he is awesome. Big thanks to him for letting me borrow his account pretty much any moment I wanted for the past week. He didn't have to do that or trust me with his account, so thanks very much to him.

I also want to thank a few people for encouraging me:

WhatIsARyan (  / orevz  , for proving to me that the Crota encounter relies on much less RNG than I first concluded. He is an amazing player and I'm sure he will pull off any crazy Destiny stunt he wants. Without his persistence and skill, I could not have beat this. A little ironic, I know.

The HM05 (  / thehm05  , for having an insane level of dedication and ambition, and being very inspiring and encouraging. HM is considering becoming a dedicated streamer, so definitely check out his channel if you have the time. He's a cool guy and I'm sure he will appreciate it if you stop by - as far as I know, he is the only Destiny streamer on Twitch who would put forward a serious effort to something awesome like this live. I think he deserves the support.

Chad Thornburg (  / textbook_1987  , for carefully doing the math proving that Crota was theoretically killable within 4.5 swings over four swords, and for contributing regularly to discussions for improving strategy while I was in HM's twitch stream. Convincing numbers made it a lot easier to keep trying for a perfect run. He's a cool guy.

Turos Regime (  / turosregime  ) also raided my once in a lifetime stream channel shortly after the victory. I don't stream often or with decent quality, and the viewer count was only around 70 when I beat Crota. He bumped the viewer count up by a hundred at least. Another cool guy and active streamer!

Reddit user 3nippledman participated in discussion of strategy too, and I definitely think he deserves a mention. We didn't correspond much, but he certainly helped kept the hope alive.

Thanks for the support everyone!