A massive congratulations to Echo, for winning the longest lasting Tier in modern WoW.
What an incredible, exciting race.
Also massive respect for Liquid, SK Pieces, Skyline, Method, BDGG, and all the other guilds who took part in this race. There are too many to name them all, but huge props to them all. Incredible effort all around.
I wanted to throw some of my thoughts about the race from a viewer perspective, and I would love to hear from other council members, Blizzard employees, and other players on the GD their thoughts on the event.
The Race
First of all, this could go down as the hardest, killable raid of all time. Outlasting the famed Tomb of Sargeras and Kil’Jaeden himself (who was unkillable on release), none of these bosses were unkillable. None of them had game breaking bugs.
The few HP% nerfs, and RNG fixes that were visibly implemented on bosses like Halondrus were great changes and felt appropriate from a viewer PoV.
Some of the highlights of the race for me were the amount of classes and specs that were utilized, the sheer expertise of the players, the ability for guilds to keep their mental intact after 300+ pulls on The Great Crab, etc.
I think the best part of this race was that nothing felt undertuned. I think Blizzard appropriately tuned these bosses for a full raid of 4-set geared characters, and The Jailer for Double legendary.
Now, lets talk about that. No one expected this race to see double legendaries. Many people thought they should have been implemented from the start of the race and I agree. I’m not sure the effect it would have had on the pull counts of the bosses, but it was said before, and will definitely be said after that double leggo should have been in from the start.
Now, the worst part of this race was by far the preparation. Hundreds of split runs, hundreds of millions of gold, and countless hours spent in normal and heroic preparing to gear characters. I’m not against splits. I’m not against spending gold to gain an advantage, but the level to which these were necessary to COMPETE in this race was absurd. We saw guilds kill Anduin and refuse to even pull Lords of Dread because they can’t field 4 survival hunters. My issue here is not with the composition requirements, it’s the fact that some guilds just can’t compete because they don’t have the resources.
It’s been discussed in other Community Council topics, but I sincerely hope we can work on a way to revamp the gearing system going into 10.0. This system works in some areas of the game, and very clearly doesn’t in others. There may not be any “one right way” to do loot, so having options will always be preferred. I have some other ideas about this that I have expressed here: Looking ahead to 10.0 - #13 by Letholas-veknilash
As a final note, as epic as it was to watch, this race did just go on too long. We’ve never seen a first boss on Mythic live as long as Vigilant Guardian did (not due to difficulty, due to needing more loot first)
We saw Liquid stop pursuing Echo because after 19 days of raiding, and trailing for the last week or so, they just couldn’t do it anymore. I have so much respect for their decision, and so much respect for Echo who kept plowing through.
For viewers, a race around 10 days is perfect. Halfway through the second reset. That’s what I want to see. Fast paced, exciting action. Though this race had its fair share of excitement, 18/19 days is just too long.
Hoping to see another amazing effort put in by these guilds for the next race.