wow Ny'alotha Mythic Race Day 5: N'Zoth 70% to Go, Didn't Spawn Initially

[Starym 3,800]

 

Day 5 was a big one as it was the first time we got to see the final boss of the expansion on Mythic difficulty. Complexity Limit took some time before actually pulling him, as a bug actually prevented the boss from spawning at the start of the day. Method caught up somewhat, with Carapace still left to go, while Limit's lead kept growing, and it's looking more and more that this is their race to lose. If you're just here for the N'Zoth action, here's an anchor leading straight to those videos for you, as we're going to go into detail on splits before getting to him.

On Corrupted Items, Heroic Splits and Their Timing

The start of the day saw both top guilds head into very long sessions of Heroic splits, with Method having hit the enrage wall on Il'gynoth late the previous day, and simply had to spend their splits to be able to get past the DPS check. All top guilds very, VERY reluctantly use their splits early due to the fact that they have to pick which of their 30-50 characters to gear, which is especially important in Ny'alotha because of the Corrupted items and the frankly insane power they add. This is why both Method and Limit tried to postpone their splits as long as possible, with Limit having used a couple of them before downing Il'gynoth as well.

Speaking of Corrupted items, their addition in this raid really threw a lot of things off, since balancing around them must be a nightmare for Blizzard, because even after the many, many nerfs they've received, they still dictate every player's performance more than any other non-player skill factor. What this means is that every boss has to be tuned around a certain number of Corrupted items and their levels for each raid group, and the disparity of how many of those each guilds has is huge between even the top 3-5 and everyone else. With Limit, Method and probably a few others having spent hundreds of millions of gold on BoE corrupted items to deck out their 30-50 character strong rosters, this completely disqualifies other guilds from being in the same league as them and even having a statistical chance of getting to the later bosses, regardless of player skill or commitment. This is also probably why Carapace of N'Zoth was such a disappointingly short fight, but on the other hand it also emphasizes just how well tuned Il'gynoth was.

However, back to splits, as Method actually used up a whole lot of theirs and 8 hours of their raid day to get that Il'gynoth kill - and it worked. They actually simply walked up to the boss they've been wiping on for a full day and 74 tries, and 2 pulls later the boss was dead:

Limit's decision to start with splits wasn't entirely voluntary, however, as their first morning meeting with N'Zoth wasn't to be. When they entered the raid to see what the boss was like for the first time, having gone to sleep without pulling him after their Carapace kill the day before, N'Zoth wasn't quite ready and was probably still scheming, as he simply did not spawn.

So Nzoth just wont spawn this morning so we're going to splits, probably about time for that anyway. WE NEED YOUR HELP we could use traders =] https://t.co/bPy5MvrH1F

— max (@maximumwow) February 1, 2020

It's hard to gauge just how much damage this has done to Limit's progress, as they spent almost all of their splits before even seeing the fight. Now sure, the early parts of N'Zoth aren't that different from his Heroic iteration, so they basically knew what was needed, but since they hadn't seen the boss in his Mythic version at all, including any and all HP numbers, it was still a bit of a disadvantage not to be able to take a peek before splits.

Both guilds took a long time to gear everyone and everything in Heroic, with Method resuming a bit later, as they had more splits to do, but presumably still saving some for either Carapace if needed or, much more likely, N'Zoth himself. 8 hours was the approximate total of Method's splits, as they came back to Il'gynoth around 8PM CET and downed the boss not even 20 minutes / 2 pulls later.
 

Method at Carapace

After their impressively quick work on the ex-tree, it was time for the easier boss, Carapce of N'Zoth, and a much smoother ride. 21 pulls and around 5 hours later, Method managed to get the penultimate boss down to 36% and his final phase, but had to call it a night as it was getting pretty late. This left them a boss behind yet again, knowing that Limit had half the day to progress on N'Zoth himself. As you'll notice, Method's individual pulls take them significantly longer than Limit, as they usually tend to have pretty long breaks after almost every single one, as they explain in this short interview:

 Mythic N'Zoth

Complexity Limit's splits took them around 5 hours, with their entire stream viewership crying out for a peek at N'Zoth, which we finally got around 9PM CET. The bosses health wasn't really budging at all in the first tries, with "bests" coming in at 96%, 94% and similar. Eventually Limit got in the groove of things and actually finished the day at 71.1% on N'Zoth himself after 56 pulls, with an almost insane 8-9 minutes needed per pull to get to those numbers. There's a whole lot going on in the fight, so let's take a look at their final pull of the day, and while it isn't their best (which we'll check out a bit later), it comes with some solid explanations from the casters at Complexity Limit's event:

Now that we have at least some idea what's going on in the fight (despite it not being that much different from Heroic), it's time for that 71% pull, with a note that the real difficulty of the fight, aka the secret Mythic-only phase that's been rumored to take place in the Chamber of Heart, hasn't come up yet and we have no idea at what percentage it might pop.

If you want another round of explanations for the fight, keep watching after the 71% pull, as the very next one also got some detailed info from the casters.

And so we got to see the final boss of Battle for Azeroth today in his true, Mythic form, and the race is progressing pretty expectedly, with Limit holding on to the lead they got back on boss 3. This truly does seem like Limit's raid, but we've been in this situation before, as they basically had the win in their pocket back in Uldir, with 0.3% pulls on the final boss, only to squander it by deciding not to reset the raid once week 2 came along. They then weren't able to get that sliver of the bosses health bar down without additional items, having to watch Method re-clear and take the World First down. They certainly look much more confident and not likely to make such mistakes this time around, but it will all depend on just how tough N'Zoth is, as everything up to now has really just been a warmup, and if the Old God truly is a worthy endboss, we might see some upsets yet.

The biggest shift in power today really did come from Method having to spend a lot of their Heroic splits before Il'gynoth, whereas Limit only used a few, but if we see the race to go to week 2 (as we hope it will), this may be less relevant. In the end those crazy 5 minute breaks after each and every pull Method do might just bring them the winning strategy on N'Zoth, but they'll have to get there first, as Limit keep pushing further and further away.

The rest of the top guilds had a relatively uneventful day, as we saw another 9/12 join Pieces, with Aversion finally getting Ra-den ra-down, claiming the World 4th, EU 3rd, with a few more 8/12es as well, with FatSharkYes and Pieces getting the World 5th and 6th on Ra-den, with Drest'agath waiting for them.

As always, head on over to Method's site progress coverage for live updates, or just follow Complexity Limit or Method's 24/7 streaming events on their twitch channels.

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