wow Nighthold M Race: Top 5, Guilds Quitting and Stats

[Starym 3,800]

More drama, top 5 completion and guilds quitting the race. It seems the excitement isn't quite over yet.

 

Well, it's been a while since we checked in on the World First progress race in Nighthold, and a lot has happened since our last visit. Only two more guilds have finished the raid in the past 8 days, with From Scratch downing the orc 3 days ago, and Limit (who also got the US first) getting him just now. Many more guilds climbed up to 9/10 and downed Elisande, making it 19 guilds currently 1 boss away from done.

The other big news came only in the last couple of days, as three top guilds declared they would be going casual for Tomb of Sargeras and beyond: long time No.4 French guild From Scratch, US guild Midwinter, that's been in the race since forever, and US guild SNF, who've recently gotten a lot of WFs on the early bosses. Raiders that don't want to quit progress from MW and SNF have already formed a new guild, Solace, to at the very least finish up Nighthold, but their future is currently unsure.

We're going for more casual goal for Tomb of Sargeras. Not excluding going back to the race in the future but now we just wanna njoy playing

— From Scratch (@FromScratchWoW) February 13, 2017

Midwinter is stepping down. Read more @ https://t.co/lOz8m0YrcT - Good luck to our raiders who are continuing to push into ToS & beyond.

— Midwinter (@Midwinter_WoW) February 14, 2017

Now, everyone thinks this was due to the much increased stress and dedication required of the racers in this expansion, with the AP and legendary grinds, and that may well have been the case here, but every few raids some guilds do quit, so it's not exactly the end of the world. Every time a big name guild quits you can hear cries of "hardcore raiding is dying", with the most prominent of them going back to Cataclysm, when Paragon decided to downsize to 10 man. Now, there's also been some rumblings in the top 3 about possibly going casual, especially from current No.1 Exorsus, depending on just how soon Tomb of Sargeras is going to be released, as raid testing for the next instance started before even From Scratch finished off Nighthold. So, despite this faster content release plan being generally beneficial for most players, it and the AP/legendary grind seem to be putting a lot of additional stress on the top end raiders, and even pushing them towards quitting.

In other news, the gods of drama weren't quite done with Nighthold yet, as rumors of Prestige Gaming buying a player away from Exorsus were confirmed. Now, that may not sound like a bad or even strange thing, but when you consider that player came with the full Gul'dan strat from the World First guild, it starts getting a lot more shady. And if that wasn't enough drama for you, From Scrathches Gul'dan kill video was leaked recently, after they had a private showing of it for the guild and someone re-uploaded it. The usual etiquette for final boss kill videos is that the No.1 guild gets priority and usually waits until 5 guilds downed the boss in total. Exorsus' World First kill video is expected this evening (EU time), as we now have 5 guilds done with Nighthold, but they had some trouble with their video editor so it may take a while longer.

And finally, here are some stats in the form of wipecounts for the top 5 guilds. Keep in mind when looking at the stats that From Scratch had the benefit of an extra reset's worth of gear and Limit had two (for Gul'dan and some earlier bosses as well).

	Exorsus	Serenity	Method	From Scratch	Limit
Skorpyron	0	0	0	0	0
Chronomatic Anomaly	0	0	2	2	0
Trilliax	1	0	2	0	0
Spellblade Aluriel	34	16	39	49	23
Tichondrius	71	8	6	58	20
Krosus	14	5	22	19	9
High Botanist Tel'Arn	18	14	10	15	12
Star Augur Etraeus	130	130	281	319	328
Grand Magistrix Elisande	198	229	205	296	153
Gul'dan	248	347	270	316	212

As you can see, each of the top 3 (who killed all the bosses on the same gear level, reset-wise) each had trouble with a specific boss: Exorsus was severely held back by Tichondrius (as you can read in their interview), Serenity had a more classic approach and struggled most on Gul'dan, while Method got stuck on Star Augur, which cost them a higher placement.

As always, thanks to Method.gg for the live coverage and the data!

[Sanaka3 0]

First some random guy desperate for attention buying MT spot in guild, now this. Seems like Prestige isn't so "prestige" after all.

[Elfin 1]

Well, yep. Proper Bird summarized this in her last vid better than I can repeat, worth to watch it.

[demonardvark 556]

It's not surprising to see guilds dropping out, it takes incredible work and dedication to get firsts even before the ap and artifact system. Heck, even server firsts can be like work. When I was doing competitive raiding it was 6-7 hours a night every single night and that was just for the raiding itself. It was basically like a second job. Games are typically meant to be enjoyed but the stress of trying to hit those big margins first can be pretty big, and also not fun. 

Just one bit of more recent progression that sticks out in my mind was mythic gruul back in warlords of trashcan. Three days in and the same people were still getting clipped by his fireballs and tensions were so high it just turned into a two hour screaming match. So you take all the stress all the time all the investment and the payoff isn't necessarily high enough for some people. You get a chieve and some bragging rights and many i suppose would rather have lower blood pressures and still like the other players in their guild .