Another huge day in the race, this time with two World Firsts, a face-off, and a lot of progress on the 6th boss! It’s going to be a big one!
The EU Side: A Faceoff
We finally got some proper progress from Echo and Method today. Forgeweaver was the name of the game at the end of the EU day, as the guilds progressed on the boss quite a bit. Even with the big nerfs available from the start, he boss was no pushover. After about 50 pulls, Echo had the manifestation spawning, pillar aiming fourth boss down to around 20%, with Method behind them at around 34.
As they approached the last few hours of their raid day, things got kicked into high gear, with Echo getting some huge progress down to 2.5%, almost clinching the World First. This is where things got interesting as Liquid returned to start their day, and immediately came out with a 3.8% pull to warm up, remaining at their 1.5% best from the day before. The two top guilds were incredibly close and we already saw a face-to-face live confrontation!
However, Liquid did make good use of their significantly more pulls on the boss and clinched the win on pull 93:
The full pull:
Not even 20 minutes later, the World 2nd came, as Echo got past the Forgeweaver as well, after 73 pulls. Only 20 pulls apart is pretty good in terms of how even the guilds are, considering the solid amount of time Liquid progresses on the un-nerfed boss, especially with the size of the nerf. This really bodes well for the final confrontation at Dimensius!
End of EU Day
Echo didn’t hang around too long after that, taking a pot shot at both Fractillus and The Soul Hunters and then calling it a night around 10 pm CEST. Method stayed up another 2 hours, as they usually do, and kept pushing hard on Forgeweaver. They entered tragic wipe territory, ending their night with a few 1-3% pulls, culminating in a 0.99% peak tragedy pull.
nd here’s a look at all three guilds pulls over time:
The Liquid Show
As the EU guilds called it around midnight, it was all Liquid all the time. We saw Instant Dollar do some work on Fractillus during the EU night, but didn’t manage to catch up to Method, coming up with a 25% best. Liquid was pushing hard on Soul Hunters, trying out quite a few very different starts. They settled in on a 5-healer setup, which was working very well for progression, but once they found out the much shorter enrage timer, it came into question. The nerf came in at pull 19, reducing the boss HP by 7%. Here’s Liquid’s best at the time, coming in at 13%, before their big strategy shift:
A New Strategy
The final part of the Soul Hunters fight isn’t a hard “kill everything instantly” enrage, but rather just an insane overlap of all three bosses’ intermission “ultimate” abilities. Normally, you really don’t want to kill one of the bosses before the other, as a heavy raid-wide AoE constantly ticks, increased if another boss dies.
However, after learning about the enrage timer and experiencing it a few times, Liquid settled on a different strat. They were going to kill off one of the bosses before the enrage, as the chaos of their ultimates overlapped with the other two was worse than the constant damage to everyone from a dead boss. They would lower the boss to only a few % and keep it like that until they just popped it when they no longer wanted to deal with its mechanics. The Void DH was the prime target. This brought them to a 4% best, and you can see just how clean the fight looks with just the two fel bosses alive.
This strategy was later expanded, as they would kill off two bosses, one quite a bit before the enrage, as they could now handle the permanent damage better with the players doing the fight mechanics almost perfectly, and then the second boss, right (Void) before the enrage. This was exactly what was needed, and we soon had the 5th World First of the raid, and Liquid’s second:
And the full pull:
In the end Liquid needed a total of pretty long 26 pulls, only 7 post-nerf.
Fractillus
Only one boss remained to choose this time, as the big ice wall stood between Liquid and the final two bosses. Things started off VERY quickly when it comes to boss % here, as Liquid were already down to 56% by pull 4, 47% by pull 10, and 30% by 19. Keep in mind those pulls were MUCH faster than The Soul Hunters ones, coming in only a few hours. They had some really good pulls already, after popping full Vantus (minus one player) back at the 47% best mark. Here’s a recent 25% pull:
But the best of the day came late, as usual, with the guild smelling a possible kill, which would be huge as they could get an early peek into Nexus-King before bed, leaving their analysts to work away as the raids sleep! 14% is the current lowest they managed to get the boss down to. The full pull, No.40 already.
EU Morning
Echo were already up and running before 8 am CEST, and started pushing on The Soul Hunters fast. After only 6 pulls they managed to get The Soul Hunters down to 6%! Method did snag that World 3rd after all, managing that final 1% hurdle on Forgeweaver.
Update: and Echo got the Soulhunters kill! It took them 14 pulls compared to Liquid’s 26:
And that was it for day 6 of the race! Only one more day in the NA reset, and it remains to be seen if the last two bosses will be, well, seen! Echo and Method have two more days before their reset, so we’ll see if they move out ahead on Tuesday while Liquid re-clear and, let’s face it, do more splits.
