It’s time for the next stage of WoW’s biggest esports event! The Race to World First begins today as Mythic difficulty opens up with the reset, and it’s a very special one this time around.
Three Raids, 9 Bosses, Limited Addons, 1 Winner
Midnight’s race is going to be a strange one for many reasons. First off, there’s the fact we have three separate raids the guilds can head to, and one of them isn’t even open in the first Mythic week! The first two raids, The Voidspire and The Dreamrift open up their maximum difficulties today on NA servers, while the March on Quel’Danas arrives next week. This means that even if the bosses are easy and go down before the reset, the race will have to wait for the final two bosses, Belo’ren and Midnight Falls.
And with the dramatic changes made to addons and WeakAuras, the actual difficulty of the raids could be all over the place. It’s tough to say which side Blizzard decided to err on, as we may be seeing a really fast race or a really slow one, depending on how much the guilds manage to work around the addon limitations, and how hard Blizzard make the maximum difficulty at first. It could really go either way this time around, but it does seem likely that at least the final boss, Midnight Falls, will be overtuned in the start, just to make sure we don’t get another Gallywix situation.
A Comeback or Further Domination?
On the guild side of things, The War Within was very much a 1-guild show. Liquid dominated every single raid and took home all the prizes. Echo held on to number two and are looking to show they’re still in the game, and this is the perfect opportunity for them. Meanwhile, Method aren’t that far behind either, and are also looking to move up in the world, whether it’s just to take down Echo, or perhaps even more than that. Then there’s the Chinese guilds, which still suffer from double the wait the EU guilds do when it comes to the raid reset, as their race starts on Thursday. But, if Midnight Falls turns out to be a truly hard endboss, they might just catch up in time to make it a bug skirmish at the finish line.
The Shows and Coverage
To find out what happens we have the usual suspects hosting their RWF streams! The guilds have already been farming the Normal and Heroic raids during this past week, so there should be… less farming happening when Mythic opens. There’s no avoiding some level of split raids for those final pieces of gear, but we’ll get to the action faster than the last few raids, where there wasn’t a “Heroic week” ahead of Mythic.
From champions Liquid to Echo and Method, the big three each have their own shows running 24/7 once the raid opens.
And then of course there’s the news coverage. For live and up-to-date 24/7 updates, there’s Raider.IO’s global coverage page, with non-stop posts on what’s going on, clips, tweets, and everything that’s happening relating to the race. We’ll also be covering all the major events of the race right here with news posts, of course.
So, do you think this will be a long or short race? How will the three raid structure and the addon limitations affect the race? One thing’s for certain, it’ll be an interesting one to see either way!
