It’s time for one of THE greatest head-to-heads (to heads) in Race to World First history! Not since Castle Nathria have we had this close a race! And not since… well, a LONG time have we had a potentially three-horse race! Before we get into all the details, if you’re even remotely interested in the race, you should get in there NOW, as tonight will be one of the most exciting days in any race ever! You can head on over to one of the three top guild streams, or Raider.IO’s live coverage, with all the action in one place:
The Race
Update: Liquid are now in the lead! They move ahead by less than 1%, with the boss down to 3.31%!
It’s been quite a race so far, and while it’s not one of the longest yet, it’s getting there! The guilds are already over 300 pulls in on Dimensius, and around 5% away from a kill. Echo is in the lead at the moment, but this has shifted over the past couple of days. Each time a region is up and awake while the other sleeps, the guild moves into the lead. Liquid were sitting on a 17% best until about an hour ago, when Echo pulled this off:
The standings at the moment are Echo on 5.56%, Liquid on 5.33%, and Method on 33%. Speaking of Method, they have been much, much more present in the actual World First conversation on this boss. They’ve been as close as 9% to the top two guilds and have been doing some amazing work closing the gap. They’re a little ways off at the moment, but for the first time in a long time, it is entirely possible we could see a giant upset and a non-Liquid/Echo guild taking the crown.
Dimensius Himself
The final boss of the raid and expansion is no joke. With three phases, two intermissions and some really tough sub-bosses, it’s one of the more complex ones in WoW history. First off, here’s a very quick and basic overview of the fight.
The fight starts with an intense first phase where players fight to gain enough gravity from the adds around the platform to survive the boss pulling them into himself via Devour, which means instant death. Then there’s the players basically turning into balloons and floating to their doom inside Dimensius. Others with extra gravity then have to pull them down. And that’s on top of all the usual pools that keep filling up the play space, big black holes that need to be absorbed, and more. Then we have a brief rest in the Skyriding intermission. And even that is actually pretty important on Mythic! Players need to pick up all the dark orbs floating and hidden around behind asteroids, so they can throw them at the mini-bosses later.
Then there’s the second phase. There are two extremely crowded platforms with players literally acting out the “let me in” meme with some void creature walls while avoiding chunks of planets being thrown at them. Beat the Voidlord add while dodging Dimensius trying to push you off the platform, throwing chunks of planets at you, new adds slowing you down as you frantically run through the tiny destroyed gap in the cross-wall, and you’re rewarded with… A SECOND platform with another Voidlord!
The Final Phase
But then there’s the third phase. This is the last part of the fight, and it’s where the guilds are currently at. The boss has a brand new health bar, coming in at around 17 billion HP. Luckily, the phase starts with him being stunned and taking double damage for a while. That’s where a lot of the damage comes from. It’s also where some of the very recent difficulty came from. Guilds had to move their Bloodlust buff from the first phase, where they really needed it to consistently even get past P1, to this point to maximize boss damage.
After that brief reprieve at the start, it’s back to big gravity. Players have to use the mass of the orbiting planets to keep from being sucked into Dimensius during one of three Devour casts. Each time a planet is used this way, it turns into those black holes, and is no longer usable. The raid can do this only twice, so the third Devour cast is the hard enrage of the fight. Everyone just gets pulled into the boss and dies! There’s more to it than that, of course, with tanks pulling everyone to them across the room, positioning circles for Inverse and Crushing Gravity, and many overlapping mechanics.
Let’s take a look at a full pull with some caster analysis:
Split Bloodlust?!
Echo are taking it one step further as they are actually splitting their all-important Bloodlust buff. How would that even work you might be asking. Well, it’s explained better below, but basically healers use Bloodlust before pull while DPS don’t. This is to get the 10-minute debuff on them. They do this so when the “real” Bloodlust, the DPS one, is used on the start of Phase 3 when Dimensius is vulnerable, the healers can’t get it because they already have the debuff. It then comes off during Phase 3, so that the healers can then benefit from a new Bloodlust later in the phase when they really need it! Liquid very quickly adopted the strat as well, immediately getting a new 13% best!
Best Pulls
Here’s a look at the best pull from each guild, and the full 5% one from Echo since we already saw that clip.
Echo full 5% pull:
Liquid 3% best:
Method 33% best:
The End?
That’s some pretty intense stuff to manage, and yet the guilds are doing it, and getting very close to a kill. Liquid started their raid very recently, with Echo and Method having around 3-4 hours left in their regular raid day. But with percentages like these, it’s unlikely they go to bed that early (and by that early, we mean after 16 hours of raiding) as they might just wake up to a dead boss.
So we have at least 4 crazy hours of three guilds competing over the highest accolade in WoW. The final boss of The War Within is almost dead, and there is no really clear leader at the moment! WIll you be there when the kill happens?
