The first day of the race came and went as most recent ones do: deep in splitsville. We did get to see Dimensius finally, on Normal, but the guilds decided to stop at the Nexus-King, the penultimate boss, on Heroic.
Another Day in Hell Doing Splits
Blizzard are sticking to the no Heroic-only week policy for non-expansion starting raids. And that means the first 3-4 days of the Race to World First doesn’t really have much racing at all. All the top guilds are very deep into all sorts of split runs, dungeons, Delves, crafting, basically anything to get those RNG-chosen characters some gear. The raid split groups with hundreds of helpers are the bulk of the farming, as they start of in Normal mode to see which of the guild players’ many, many characters get the right gear. Then those chosen few get to go to Heroic to a second round of loot lottery. This process is repeated until they have all their bases covered, aka all the specs they think they might need for all the Mythic bosses all geared up as best they can.
And that’s how it went today as well. Liquid, Instant Dollars, Melee Mechanics, xD, and relative newcomer Gachi Squad all went for a large amount of splits, with Echo and Method joining them once their servers went up.
The Nexus-King
Most of the guilds either splitting or regularly progressing got to the penultimate boss of the raid and said nah, maybe later. The 6/8 bosses killed spot is held by no fewer than 44 guilds, with only two actually getting the boss down. Liquid was the first to pass on more pulls as they managed to get the boss down to 14%. They decided it wasn’t quite worth the time with the gear they (and, much more importantly, their helpers) had available. The boss will die much faster if they simply get back to him after more splits. Here’s the wipe, with a really visually impressive enrage as well:
An the full pull:
The other guilds took note of that decision, and the vast majority just stopped at the boss as well. We did see a few of them try at the end of the NA day, and even managed to get the boss down to 20ish%. However, the boss has a potentially massive heal when going into his last phase, Dark Souls 3 Nameless King style, as he just eats his mount! So some of those pulls may have been a long way away from the kill.
At the end of the raid day one guild did manage to push through, however. Instant Dollars came back after their many splits and 1-shot the boss after the huge gear upgrade. They grabbed the World First Heroic kill on the Nexus-King, so let’s take a look!
Nurfed were very close to a kill as well, with a devastating 5% wipe less than a minute after the WF. At the end of their raid day, Liquid returned to the king and managed to get him down after one pull.
The Final Boss Revealed (In Part)
We did get to see the Dimensius fight for the first time, however, and it’s very impressive. We can’t tell what the difficulty will be like, even on Heroic fully, let alone Mythic, but the visuals are very impressive. Instant Dollars did quite literally poke the boss once on Heroic, but, uh…
When it comes to famous last words, “We have no clue how this boss works, no clue” ranks pretty high! Although technically these are post-death words, so do they really count?
We did get a proper look at the fight, however, as Liquid DID know how the boss worked! We get to see the Skyriding part in the first intermission as well and the adds after it, with added wind push from Heroic! They basically killed the boss already, getting it down to 4% after 3 pulls and then suiciding off the platforms, so they can bring more helpers and split more efficiently and try out some things for Mythic.
Mythic? Nope!
A few guilds poked at the first boss on Mythic, but didn’t really get close to a kill. Melee Mechanics went in early and got Plexus Sentinel down to 62%, and a few others did a few pulls at around 85%. This is slightly unusual as we do tend to get at least one Mythic kill on day 1, but either the Sentinel is really doing its job well, or even the guilds that usually go for a kill decided they’d rather do splits first and not waste too much time.
And so day 1 ended at 6/8 Heroic with no Mythic kills whatsoever, making the Manaforge one of the slowest raid starts yet! We’ll probably have to wait a few more days for the race proper to start, but hopefully we’ll see some Mythic kills tomorrow at least!
As usual, for the full live coverage of the race, head on over to Raider.IO!
