GuyThatDies Wins ExileCon 2026 Qualifier Race 2
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GuyThatDies Wins ExileCon 2026 Qualifier Race 2
Six racers, one fixed-seed map, and a ticket to Auckland on the line. On August 13, Path of Exile 2's second ExileCon 2026 Qualifier Race came down to GuyThatDies and Angormus as the only two finishers to kill Tavakai — separated by a narrow margin on the clock, with a runner-up who by most accounts played a near-flawless run. The winner also happens to be one of the more polarizing names in the PoE2 community right now, which turned a straightforward race recap into something people are still arguing about days later.
How the Qualifier Race Worked
The format hasn't changed from the first qualifier: Solo Self-Found, a fixed map seed (Ruins of Aldur), and one objective — be the first to kill Tavakai in Act 4. It's not hardcore, but dying isn't free either. Every death freezes your character in place for 2.5 minutes, which is brutal when the field is this close. Racers had to stream their full run on a linked Twitch account to be eligible, and the winner takes home a flight to Auckland, an Ultra VIP ExileCon ticket, accommodation, the Demigod's Virtue unique helmet, and a slot in the PoE2 Race Finale.
Final Standings
| Place | Player | Class / Build | Level | Furthest Boss | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GuyThatDies | Huntress (Twisters) | 27 | Tavakai | 2:00:36 |
| 2 | Angormus | Mercenary (grenades) | 31 | Tavakai | 2:02:17 (+1:41) |
| 3 | Lidonglin511 | Huntress (Twisters) | 27 | Heart of the Tribe | +4:28 |
| 4 | Kiom | Mercenary (grenades) | 31 | Heart of the Tribe | +5:53 |
| 5 | Imexile_racer | Mercenary (grenades) | 31 | Heart of the Tribe | +6:11 |
| 6 | Wudisch | Mercenary (grenades) | 31 | Heart of the Tribe | +6:00+ |
Worth pausing on that table for a second: only the top two racers actually killed Tavakai, the boss the entire event is built around. Everyone else got stopped at Heart of the Tribe, an earlier checkpoint, and was ranked by how far past that point their clock ran. Imexile_racer went in as one of the pre-race favorites and didn't make it out of that checkpoint gap — a reminder that on a fixed seed with this little margin for error, favorite status means very little once the timer starts.
A Huntress Beat the Grenade Meta
Four of the six racers leaned on Mercenary grenade builds, which have been the assumed fast-clear pick for this kind of speedrun since 0.3.0 dropped. GuyThatDies and Lidonglin511 went the other way with a level 27 Huntress running Twisters — notably, GuyThatDies's own build, one he's published guides for. It didn't just keep pace with the grenade Mercenaries; it won, and came second.
One race isn't a controlled experiment — six players, one seed, no build diversity within each archetype. It's not proof that Huntress Twisters is objectively faster than Mercenary grenades in every scenario. But when two Huntresses take first and third against four Mercenaries, and the Huntress build belongs to the guy who won, that's a signal worth watching if PoE2's race meta shifts again before Race 3.
The Margin That Almost Wasn't There
Angormus's run is the one people are talking about almost as much as the winner. By most viewer accounts his RNG through the map was about as clean as it gets on this seed — good drops, clean pulls, no wasted time backtracking. He still reached Tavakai in second place, barely a minute off GuyThatDies on a class that wasn't supposed to be the fast pick.
Somewhere in that run, though, he died. Under these rules that's not a reset — it's a 2.5-minute freeze, and against a margin this thin, it was enough to hand the win away. It's the kind of detail that makes a race worth rewatching: with one clean run, sub-two-hour finish, favorite-to-win math flips entirely.
Who Is GuyThatDies, and What's the Fubgun Situation About
GuyThatDies is a known name in PoE2 racing and build content — he publishes Huntress guides on Mobalytics and had been floated as a pre-race favorite going into the qualifier series. He's also, by his own community's account, someone with a fair amount of friction with other creators, and the clearest example right now involves fubgun.
The public version of it, pieced together from posts on X: fubgun accused mirror crafters in general of running predatory pricing on trades, then pointed more directly at GuyThatDies, alleging he'd received a mirror-tier spear for free in week one of the league from a specific crafting team, promoted it on stream, stayed active in that team's Discord, and retweeted their posts — while publicly maintaining he wasn't affiliated with them. Fubgun also referenced an earlier incident involving a $1,000 loss tied to the same team, though the full details of that weren't confirmed in what's publicly available. GuyThatDies denied ever accusing fubgun of RMT or botting, which is the specific claim he pushed back on hardest. A member of the crafting team in question later posted that both sides had spoken and agreed a "drama-free Wraeclast" was the goal going forward.
None of this touched the qualifier itself — GGG's rules ban unsportsmanlike conduct during races specifically, and there's been no indication this dispute falls under that. It's a separate community argument that happens to be attached to the same name as this week's race winner, which is exactly why it's worth knowing about if you're following the ExileCon qualifier storyline rather than just the leaderboard.
What's Next
Race 3 runs August 20, with Race 4 closing out the series on August 27 — both broadcast live on twitch.tv/pathofexile with commentary from ZiggyD and RaizQT. The top four across all four qualifiers punch their ticket to the PoE2 Race Finale at ExileCon in Auckland. With GuyThatDies and Angormus both banking near-two-hour finishes and a Huntress build proving it can hang with the grenade Mercenary crowd, the next two races are shaping up to be a genuine build fight, not just a repeat of whoever nails the seed best.
Whichever build ends up dominating these qualifiers, races like this are usually the fastest way to see what's actually strong in the current patch before it shows up everywhere. If you'd rather skip the grind and jump straight into a proven PoE2 build, that's exactly what we help with at rank1gear.
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