wow Castle Nathria RWF Day 5: Stone Legion Generals Is One of the Toughest Penultimate Bosses of All Time

[Starym 3,800]

 

Today was quite the day in the Nathria Race to World First, as we had two guilds catch up to the top and one push incredibly hard on a potentially un-tuned boss, as there might be some Blizzard intervention coming in soon. Whatever the case may be, Stone Legion Generals is one of the hardest penultimate bosses in WoW history.

They day opened up very explosively, as Echo went right for the kill and downed Sludgefist World second almost immediately after waking up!

With the top two favorites now at the same boss once more, it would be a while before we heard any news of a new World First. However, Pieces provided some excitement, as they had a very similar Sludgefist experience as Limit, getting a 0.8% wipe in the EU afternoon. It didn't take them quite as long after that to down the boss, however, as they got the World third kill some 2 hours after it, producing some truly top level nerd screams in there as well, which you'd expect after over 200 wipes on the boss.

Then all the focus was on the Stone Legion Generals, as even after the bug fixes, they were till having some pretty crazy issues with the Wicked Blade ability, as it just sometimes hangs around a player and stacks a whole lot of bleeds on them instead of moving on, and does a whole host of other weird things as well:

With the fight being pretty erratic and long, with pull times around 8 minutes before guilds even get into the final phase, the pull counter was constantly ticking up. Complexity Limit has gotten the boss down to 49.5% in phase 2 and managed to move into the second intermission phase (aka phase 4 of 5), just before the final phase relatively often, while Echo were at 60% phase 2.

Echo called it a night pretty early, perhaps recognizing that the fight was just a little too random for their tastes, as the Crystalize and Wicked Blade abilities have some very random timers due to spell batching, making only some pulls actually even theoretically doable. Here's Limit's best pull, at least in terms of boss HP:

This was far from over, however, as Limit kept on pushing through the EU night, as they racked up a huge number of pulls, ending at 217, which is one of the highest numbers for a penultimate boss ever! When you also consider the fight isn't exactly short, coming in at 8 minutes so far, it's a huge amount of time spent there, especially compared to the Sludgefist fight, which ended after 167 pulls, each of which lasted around 5 minutes. It's already beat ALL BfA penultimate bosses based on pull count (and most likely actual progress duration too), and it hopefully won't get past the next highest count. That would be Fallen Avatar from back in Legion's Tomb of Sargeras, clocking in at an insane 454 pulls (and about the same encounter duration).

As you'd expect, Limit's players aren't too happy with the boss:

This is without doubt the most garbage boss I have ever progressed on.

— Lightee (@Lightee7) December 19, 2020

There have been entire raid tiers with less bugs than Wicked Blade has on its own.

— Lightee (@Lightee7) December 19, 2020

And so the Stone Legion Generals are getting quite the reputation, both good and bad, and it's completely unclear if this is how Blizzard wants the fight tuned for the RWF contenders, or if they'll be nerfing/fixing the fight soon. What we do know is that Castle Nathria is shaping up to be one of the harder raids in WoW, especially for an expansion starter, which isn't quite good news for the top guilds and staff of all the RWF stream events and their holiday plans.

Many more guilds also pushed farther into the raid, with the top 3 on the Generals on 8/10, and 10 guilds on 7/10!

As usual, for a whole lot more details and live coverage, head on over to Raider.IO.