Another big day in the race, as we just got significantly closer to the end of the raid! While Echo and Method very much caught up, Liquid pulled ahead once again but decided to keep some things to themselves.
The Catch-Up and World 2nd
Before we get into anything else, here’s a special shoutout to the Chinese guild End Myth. We’ve been mentioning their astronomical pull counts on Broodtwister Ovi’nax, but today they had a series of truly heartbreaking wipes, with more than one at 0.2%! They did manage to take the 5th boss down eventually, ending with a pull count of 320.
Meanwhile, Echo and Method were indeed catching up, adjusting to their newly assumed 1-tank strategy. Method were actually a little faster to acclimate and got the boss lower than Echo at 7%. That lead didn’t last long, as Echo quickly grabbed a 3% best, only 0.7% off of Liquid’s best from the previous day.
UPDATE: And Echo had a very nice start to their day, with a new 2.68% best !
UPDATE 2: And the World 2nd has arrived! Echo grab the Ky’veza kill after 255 pulls!
We also saw another Chinese guild, HuoGuo Hero, perform really well on Ky’veza, securing themselves a spot right behind the two European guilds at a 24% best, with an insane item level of 264! There’s also Instant Dollars, FatSharkYes, Zbox, End Myth and JiTianHong on the Nexus-Princess, so we could be seeing more than just Echo and Method taking the boss down today.
The Inexorable Fall of Royalty
Liquid wasted no time and immediately got some great pulls in, very quickly blasting past their previous 3% best, with an almost-heartbreaking 0.64% wipe!
This was an indication that we would be seeing a kill soon, while Echo decided to call it an early night. Method actually stayed until their usual stopping time of midnight CET and managed to get a few more percent off the boss, almost catching up with Echo.
It didn’t take long for Liquid to close the deal, as they had one more 2% wipe before the final one. The kill itself was pretty smooth – well – as smooth as it can be with the enrage spam, so let’s take a look!
That’s 304 pulls to be exact! Let’s also check out the nerdscreams (yes, 300+ pulls warrant this despite it not being an endboss):
And the full kill pull:
Here’s an item level comparison for (almost) all the guilds progressing on Ky’veza, courtesy of Raider.IO:
The Silken Court
Then we came to the two bug-looking elephants in the room. The hardest boss ever tested on the beta/PTR according to the top guilds, the duo is expected to be quite something. Liquid gave it about 5 pulls to check things out, and we got this 4-minute pull pretty quickly, as half the raid dying is actually a good thing here. Well, it is when you’re just testing things out and trying to get deeper into the fight for some timers!
And here’s a more detailed explanation of the fight by the Liquid event’s casters:
As you can already see, the fight is very complex with some serious Thaddius + – vibes (have I dated myself with that particular boss reference?). But apparently, the blue half of the raid dying allows the fight to continue, which Liquid used after their dinner break.
Dark Mode
Liquid decided to go dark and not stream their progress after those first few pulls. But we do know they went into the raid with only 10 players, meaning they basically replicated what happened on that pull above from the start, so they could see longer into the fight. Before they went into more pulls they made sure to do all their chores for the week, meaning anything that can get them an item level or other gear improvement. Once that was done and with 6ish hours left in their raid day, they couldn’t just call it early.
We don’t know how long they’ve been pulling or with what composition. “Dark mode” isn’t anything new nor is it that uncommon in recent Races to World First, and this is definitely the spot where you want to use it to conceal any new information on a boss that your competitors won’t be seeing for a while. Liquid will almost certainly stream their progress on the boss when they start tomorrow, but this way they saved a lot of info for themselves for some 12+ hours.
And that’s about it! As usual, to see what happens in real-time, you can always check the coverage streams (Liquid, Echo, Method), or head on over to Raider.IO for live text coverage, clips, analysis and more.
