wow Sepulcher of the First Ones Mythic RWF Summary, Day 15: Week 3, Double Legendaries and the Jailer

[Starym 3,779]

 

Day 15 was a really big day in the race, as it kicked off the third week of Mythic and brought with it a huge DPS and general gear increase, with the advent of double legendaries. Echo avoided doing more Jailer Mythic pulls as they did chores before their reset, while Liquid went at the last boss hard and got a whole lot of progress done.

With the Sepulcher race now being in week 3, it has joined Hellfire Citadel and the Tomb of Sargeras in the longest-running races in recent memory (with many more from the Cataclysm and pre-Cata era), and while it won't be moving past the Tomb any time soon, since the Jailer would have to live to Sunday to outlast Kil'jaeden, he will almost certainly be beating Archimonde if he simply lives through today.

But let's get to the recap itself: it wasn't all Jailer all the time, as we also got a World 3rd and 4th today, with SK Pieces and Skyline taking down the Lords of Dread and climbing to 9/11, with only Rygelon left to catch up with the top 2. But before that we also got a brand new crazy low % pull, courtesy of SK Pieces and their 0.1% on the dread ones:

Back to the top two guilds, however, as Echo either didn't pull the Jailer at all during the day (or did some off-stream pulls to test things out), as they called it an early day and are starting bright and early today (they are actually already playing as I write this). Since they knew they wouldn't be getting as much progress done as with double legendaries after the reset, they just decided it wasn't worth it to potentially give their opponents more information, while having a much harder time of it. Liquid came in and did a whole lot more splits before their re-clear... and then after their re-clear... but luckily for us and everyone else watching, once they started on Mythic Jailer pulls, they didn't stop until the end. The re-clear itself went very smoothly, with only Anduin taking a bit of time, since he got his stars mechanic fixed, or rather un-"fix" fixed, as they are now working properly and actually do damage, as opposed to last week when Blizzard went to "fix" them and made them do nothing instead.

When it comes to the Jailer, we saw some massive progress on the boss, mostly related to his HP, as they got him down much lower than Echo, but only got a little bit deeper into the fight, seeing a solid number of phase 3 attempts, but only a few which didn't see Azeroth get immediately killed. Here's a quick overview of the Mythic Jailer by Seliathan, from the Raider.IO live progress coverage page:

Throughout the entire fight, the Jailer will occasionally damage Azeroth and spawn 4 puddles of Azerite around the room. Running into these triggers a surge of Azerite that bounces from one player to another, dealing damage to them and increasing their damage and healing done. This needs to be chained towards Azeroth in the center of the room to heal her, as the Jailer will continuously damage Azeroth and wipe the raid if she ever has below 10% HP. You can see this in action in this clips, both in the middle of the room and the left edge of the screen. While the damage and healing increase stack, so does the damage, and players will take more damage for each of the 3 ticks. Combined with the already very high raid damage and high frequency of abilities of the boss, there is little time to play out this mechanic in Phase 1 already. Surging Azerite gets augmented in different ways the deeper you get into the fight. Once the Jailer has dominated all the pillar in Phase 1 and moves into Phase 2 of the encounter, things become even more hectic. Whenever one of these surges is triggered, every player that is part of the chain will radiate 4 orbs of Azerite energy outwards that deal damage to any player they hit. The goal here is to connect each puddle to Azeroth to heal it back up, while keeping the amount of people needed to a minimum. By itself this is not a difficult task, but doing it with all the other Phase 2 mechanics is still proving to be a struggle. Here is a clip of Liquid chaining one pool through the entire raid. It did not end well. In Phase 3, these 4 orbs will no longer spawn, and instead Azeroth will expel corruption from its blood. We aren't exactly sure what this means just yet, but it sounds like the pools themselves will shoot out a variation of the Phase 2 mechanic that deals high damage and silences any player it hits. There is a lot of area denial going on, especially in Phase 3. The combination of cave-ins, defiles, and having to trigger the Surging Azerite to keep Azeroth healthy enough will require constant movement, good baiting of the defiles, and will slowly cut off parts of the room. It will most likely be a race against time before Azeroth has lost too much health, or the raid runs out of room, somewhat reminiscent of the final few minutes of fighting N'zoth in Nya'lotha. Maybe after dealing with all of this, there might still be a secret mythic Phase as well. We will certainly keep you guys updated over the course of the progress on this final fight of the Sepulcher of the First Ones and the Shadowlands!

Now that we have that all cleared up, let's take a look at one of the early good tries from Liquid, as they were doing many pulls with long breaks in-between to talk strategy, which isn't their usual style as they normally prefer to just do a LOT of pulls and then have breaks after them.

Their pulls became more and more consistent after that, edging lower and lower, a couple of percent at a time, but mostly focusing on just seeing more of the fight, as the Jailer is pretty specific in that his phase transitions are time-based, not health percentage based. But despite that, as they got phases 1 and 2 down better and better, we suddenly saw a huge leap in boss health progression, as he was taken down to 56.8%:

That wasn't the best we've seen so far, however, as the sub 60% pulls became a constant occurrence, and we saw many of them in the last few hours, culminating in the current lower Jailer HP at 53.52%:

 

It's getting really exciting in the Race to World First, as we'll be seeing both top guilds progressing on the final boss today, both on even terms in resets and double legendaries. The boss doesn't seem to be set to go down today, but you never know with these guilds and their incredible talents, skills, and strategic planning. It's going to be particularly interesting to see whether the two guilds use the same tactics and raid compositions on the boss, so today is going to be a big one, so make sure to follow the race live over on Raider.IO or one of the event streams!

[Prophet001 545]

You know in hindsight, this silhouette looks absolutely nothing like the jailer lol.

I thought he was some kind of crab or Urgot type thing.