Today wasn’t the slowest day of the race, but it was sure close! We had the EU guilds push Sprocketmonger and Echo get a World First, aaaand… that’s it. After a massive day of Liquid extending their raiding hours and all three guilds progressing on the 5th boss at the same time, we had less than half a day of big progress and then a kill.
Echo Vs. Sprocketmonger
With all the data from their own 17% best from the previous day and Liquid’s many pulls and 5% best, Echo were ready to get the fifth boss done with. The day started off pretty well for them, as they had the boss down to 6% within a few hours, but it would take quite a bit longer to get it all the way down. Their final big move was to return the Blood DK they had swapped out for a Prot Warrior, and it paid off, with a very quick new best after that.
And they did see a few 2-3%ers as well, But just before the kill there was this crazy 0.32% wipe as well!
Finally, after 9 hours of progress in the day and 113 pulls overall (eerily similar to Liquid’s 114 for Stix), Sprocketmonger Lockenstock went down and Echo claimed the World First!
And the full kill VoD:
And the raid composition:
Raider.IO even caught the damage meters!
And here’s Gingi’s reaction to the kill:
That was at 4PM CET and we didn’t see anything from Echo for the rest of the day. They announced they’d be doing pulls on the next boss, One-Armed Bandit, off-stream, it’s just a question of how many. They had 6-7 hours left in their raid day, but also probably had some pre-reset chores to finish. We’ll see how low they managed to get the boss once they decide to share that information.
Method and the Chinese Guilds
Method continues pushing Sprocket monger until the end of their raid day, getting the boss down to 8.9%.
The Chinese guilds use some very different play patterns during the race, as they just slam an insane amount of pulls into the bosses. We’ve seen this over and over, most notoriously with Skyline’s 1000+ pulls on their Tindral Sageswift kill. It’s no different here, as Huoguo Hero are sitting at over 300 pulls on Stix Bunjkunker with a 6% best and JTH are over 200.
Liquid’s Day and Late Reclear + World 2nd
Liquid just did a full amount of splits, with some Normals and 14 Mug’Zee and Gallywix Heroics. This took them very close to the end of their raid day. They started their reclear an hour and a half before their regular end time. Everything went pretty smoothy, except for a pretty hilarious bug on Rik Reverb which saw the raid just die while standing there as the slow nova came at them, not getting knocked up by the pillar:
They called it a night after the Stix 3-pull kill, as it was getting pretty late.
And if you were curious about item levels, here’s a look at Liquid’s raid roster numbers for the 2nd boss re-kill, after the week’s splits. That’s a 658 average, and that’s also a 660 Prot Warrior! They also have quite a few upgrades left to use that they’re saving for later bosses.
Echo and Method will be spending their day pretty much the same way Liquid did, as they will be going for the second reset’s worth of massive splits. Oh Heroic week, how we miss you.
