Nerf Trilogy, Echo’s 18 hour Day, Rasz Phase 2: Vault of the Incarnates RWF, Day 8

 

Another very weird and slightly frustrating day, as a third massive nerf arrived to the Storm Eater, and most of the day was spent, well, waiting for it. However, once it did arrive things picked up and we saw some very significant progress (finally).

Echo had a long, LONG day today with all the splits, starting at 5AM and ending at… 11PM?? Their raid lasted a little over 18 hours, but some players continued doing some Mythic+ after that even, despite an 8:30 AM raid time today. During all this time they gathered all (well, most) of their reset gear, and then, at 8PM went into Mythic Raszageth. They quickly got in the groove of things and managed to get into the intermission regularly, even getting out of it into phase 2 a few times, and even got close to bringing down that pesky (and gigantic) shield of hers:

Their pulls on the boss started very late in the day, however, so after only 3 hours of progress on her, they went to bed, after a nice and compact 18-hour raid day. The following many, MANY hours were pretty uneventful, as Liquid continued pushing and trying to get to see more of that phase 2, but that shield just would not budge… until Blizzard budged it, that is.

With another (eventually public) hotfix, they brought down the problematic shield by a massive 50% AND the bosses overall health by 5%, in addition to a smaller nerf as well. Just for context, the shield went down from 118 to only 59 million HP, and the boss lost about 30 million HP as well.

Liquid ran into these changes before anyone (at least outside the top guilds) knew about it, getting this best try as that bubble burst for the first time ever. Let’s take a look starting at the phase 1 intermission:

Very quickly after that we saw the first big HP movement from the boss in a LONG time, as Liquid got her down a whole 10+% from the 65ish we’ve been stuck at for a couple of days now:

The progression pulls didn’t end there either, as they recently had their best pull at 48%, getting into and staying in phase 2, where the 200% Thaddius-like + – buffs allowed them to pop the shield, get the boss even lower but, in case you didn’t know, there’s more than 1 shield in this particular phase…

Now imagine those shields with 50% extra HP.

And that’s where we are right now, with a 47.8% best, as Liquid are still raiding and getting quite a few phase 2 pulls! So all it took is 50% less health on a shield that repeats throughout a phase and 5% less boss health to make this fight… still very hard for the very best WoW players.

Will we see a 4th round of nerfs today? There’s a whole other intermission and a whole other phase after this one, and we are 2 days away from Christmas Eve, so it’s going to be very interesting to see what Blizzard decide to do – or more importantly WHEN they decide to do it. The recent nerfs came in around 3AM CET, which seems the standard time they put these in, so perhaps Echo will need to adjust their sleep schedule once again to adapt to that.

Just a short while ago Echo also came back and went at Raszageth, starting on their pulls as well.

Moving away from the top 2 and the big storm-winged one, Method and BDGG were still fighting for that World 3rd on Broodkeeper, and with the EU guild spending a lot of time on gear farming and re-clears today, they only managed to get to the boss they are progressing on before going to bed. BDGG, having done most of their gearing the day before, had many progress pulls on the keeper of the brood, and even managed to snag a heartbreaking™ wipe while they were at it:

Not to be outdone, Method also had an even closer call of their own, only on the Kurog re-clear, but boy, they don’t get any closer than this:

The heartbreak didn’t last long, however, as they did manage to snag the World 3rd on Diurna a little later, after a grueling (and very exact) 101 pulls!

 

So, we may be heading into the last day of the race for first place, although that seems to be more in Blizzard’s hands than the players’ – but we might see these amazing players actually pull out all the stops and manage to deal with what we have right now without any further nerfs. What do you think will happen?