Raszageth’s Inter Mission: Impossible(?): Vault of the Incarnates RWF, Day 7

 

Well well well well… Raszageth Mythic was upon us today and… yeeeea. Echo had a lot of progress on the boss and Liquid had even more, we got into the 150+ pull territory, both guilds got somewhat into the fight and reached some… difficulties – even with some nerfs that arrived. Let’s take a look!

The very first phase of this 3-phase fight proved to be no joke as the boss just constantly pushed players off the platform and to their death, so most of Echo’s day was figuring out how to get the damage in to transition into the intermission at 65% before the knockback breath, which is longer and longer every time it happens, yeets them off the stage. There were many tricks pulled to survive that by both Echo and Liquid, including some pretty cool chains of abilities like Evokers Rescue-ing Priests who would then Leap of Faith Paladins, so the less mobile classes could live!

This also spawned a pretty great meme:

And the raid compositions even got a response out of the official Warcraft twitter:

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— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) December 19, 2022

Eventually, after a solid amount of hours they figured it out and managed to get by the first barrier of the fight, which also ended up being the final barrier of the day as well: the intermission. After barely making it on a huge 5-second lasting knockback breath, players need to go to two platforms where elemental adds are channeling and have to stop them. There’s 2 platforms aaand, well, Echo didn’t manage to clear even 1 platform with everyone heading over there (when the intention most likely is to split the raid between the two):

Here’s their best attempt of the day, as they managed to get into the intermission pretty frequently in the last hour or so of their raid.

After that pull, they very quickly decided to call it a very early night, both because the fight was looking like it was definitely getting nerfed, and possibly because the EU reset was moved to 5AM CET on Wednesday, so if they wanted to raid then they’d have to start adjusting their sleep schedule now, and drastically (as they were raiding until 2 AM the day before).

Liquid started their raid shortly after that, and they seemed to be having quite a bit more trouble getting to the intermission, as they only had a few tries there over a lot of raiding hours. There were  also some nerfs to the encounter, but not extremely significant as they didn’t seem to affect performance much:

However, around an hour ago they had a perfect pull (No. 127) when everything went right and they performed phenomenally, getting VERY deep into the intermission, clearing almost all the adds that were needed, except…

That’s right. They managed all that on ONE platform. Barely. As you can see there at the end of the pull, Raszageth just calls time on the intermission and starts nuking everyone, as too much time was spent there. On ONE platform. There are two. That’s double. 2x even!

Joking aside, this tuning is either EXTREMELY tight, even including the second reset’s worth of gear, or someone is missing something major about the fight, as the guilds are not consistently making it into the intermission, barely getting ONE platform cleared with the full raid on that side. This wouldn’t even be that much of a concern if Christmas wasn’t looming at the end of the week, especially with the guilds spending quite a bit of their time on re-clears and more splits when the resets come. Liquid did manage to get into the intermission much more frequently after this specific try, and on one of the following pulls (157) they actually managed to clear one full platform – and revealed some further truth:

So Rasz just starts off phase 2 after a while, with her giant  118 million HP shield up, spamming her huge AoE, with escalating damage, until the shield is destroyed – and Liquid only got one add platform cleared. There really must be something they’re missing here because these numbers are very off. 

And here’s one of Echo’s latest pulls from their morning, as they run into the same issues:

All in all it was both a quiet day and a sporadically very exciting day on Raszageth, but that wasn’t all that happened! BDGG got the World third on Kurog Grimtotem in their battle with Method, who had to end their day with a 2% best on the big tauren. Meanwhile Instant Dollars stepped up and got Kurog down to 23% during their non-day raiding pulls (after a Dathea World 4th),  as Skyline is progressing on the grimmest of totems as we speak, getting him to 68% in their 10 pulls so far. I also have to give a special shoutout to FatSharkYes, who didn’t quite manage to down Dathea on their (also not day-raiding) evening, due to their heartbreaking™ 0.11% wipe, with 114 pulls on the boss.

So, Raszageth is very much no joke and will almost certainly require more nerfs, so now the question becomes when they will arrive and who will they benefit more. The US reset arrives today as Liquid will have access to better gear sooner but, as we’ve seen, that may not matter as much considering the mechanics here. Don’t forget, this is literally just the INTERMISSION between phase 1 and 2 – and the boss has three phases. Yea.