NA day has come and gone, with the EU guilds now in the fray as well. It was a particularly uneventful day as we didn’t get any Mythic kills whatsoever, and the raid is looking to be pretty hard on Heroic already! We did see a nerf already, some lag and bug issues, with Liquid pretty unhappy with the state of things.
No Heroic Week Means Splits!
As expected, the top guilds went straight for splits, from Normal to Heroic. Liquid dove into 6 at a time, focusing on Normals and only doing a few Heroic ones to start. They spent most of the day on 5/8 Heroic in their splits, clearing the first boss and the four “choice”. Here’s a handy look at the raid structure to make it clearer, courtesy of Raider.IO:
Instant Dollars were the only ones going deep into the raid in one of their few Heroic splits. They managed to get to the penultimate boss, Coiled Altar, but after quite a few pulls decided to call it and just move on to their next split. Mind you, Instant Dollars are the World 5th guild and have been in the top for quite a while, so this difficulty spike is quite notable. But, it wasn’t to last.
Nerfs Already, and Lag
With the difficulty of the Coiled Altar, Blizzard have already put in hotfixes to lower it. You can check out the details on Wowhead, but Zul’jan and Malacrass’ health bonuses have been dramatically lowered on all difficulties, dropping around 100% (so from 180% HP bonus down to 87% on Heroic for Zul’Jan for example.
NA guilds were also facing some lag issues, having to go out and reset the raid to alleviate them.
That wasn’t all for the issues either, as a particularly problematic bug on Coiled Altar meant groups were just stuck and unable to continue, which was especially tricky for Liquid’s Normal splits.
At the end of the day Liquid did grab the next two Heroic bosses as well, after the bug fixes and nerfs went in, ending on 7/8 Heroic.
Mythic
When it comes to Mythic, only a few guilds did any proper pulls at all, with no kills. Reigned In and Big Blue House took one or two stabs at Nek’Zali the Soulcaller, the first Venomous Abyss boss. The slightly more serious pulls were on the Lair boss, Nymrissa Wavecaller in the Tidebound Grotto. Lair bosses are going to be an interesting addition to the races going forward, as they may be “just” World Bosses, but they drop Mythic loot which makes them very much a part of things. We’re definitely seeing a whole lot of Mythic splits on Nymrissa this time around as well.
The EU guilds are just starting out so it’s going to be a whole lot of Normals, and the Asia guilds are still a day away from their raids opening. It’ll be a couple/few more days until we get some serious Mythic action from the top guilds, but hopefully we get at least some early Mythic kills from the others soon!
As always, you can check the live 24/7 coverage over at Raider.IO as things heat up.
