wow Sanctum of Domination Mythic Race: Day 1 and Half Done, Nerfs and a Hard Raid

[Starym 3,800]

 

The Sanctum RWF has finished its first day at exactly the half way mark, with some very difficult bosses being placed in the guilds' way, and only one of them managed to get anything more than three down!

9.1's raid proved to be much harder than Castle Nathria in this first day, as most guilds struggled past the first three bosses, with only World Champions Complexity-Limit managing to down the 4th boss in any sort of timely manner (or, well, at all), and the 5th almost survived the day if it wasn't for a Blizzard intervention. But let's start at the beginning.

Things got going as usual, with the exception of only one top guild heading straight into the raid, as Limit and BDGG completed some chores, quests and such before entering. And so Imperative, with the backing of their new esport organization Soniqs, managed to plow through the first three bosses rather quickly, getting the World Firsts on all of them. Of the first three bosses, the Eye of the Jailer was actually the hardest, even costing Limit and BDGG a few wipes, so here's the Soniqs Imperative World First:

Unfortunately this is also where their progress completely stopped, for the entire day, as they still haven't managed to down the 4th boss. The Tarragrue, Eye of the Jailer and The Nine were fairly easy bosses comparatively, so the two top US guilds caught up very quickly.

This is where things get interesting, however, as BDGG were showing a lot of promise, being very close to Limit and even downing the Eye in fewer pulls. Unfortunately for them, they chose poorly, as there was a choice of two bosses after The Nine: Soulrender Dormazain (aka Garrosh boss aka dance/Heigan boss) and the Remnant of Ner'zhul. BDGG went for the Soulrender (perhaps wanting to see that cool cinematic again) and spent a LOT of time there, as Complexity-Limit went for Ner'zhul and managed to down it about 2 hours later. The kill itself was VERY messy, as the last few % took forever with many players dead, but hey, a World First is a World First! Here's the full kill pull, but you can see all the messiness at 5H:47M.

After that World First Limit also came to Soulrender (as there wasn't anywhere else to go), but after some progress (even getting as low as 20%), they called it and went to do Normal and Heroic splits. Yes, you read that right, NORMAL splits. Not quite as split as Heroics, but this tier has forced guilds to also do Normal raids, in order to have a better chance to fill those crucially important socketed armor pieces! Despite their low item level, the power of the Domination Sockets is worth the No.1 guild spending hours in Normal raids to get them. Limit spent basically the entirety of the rest of their day (8+ hours) doing split farming in both Normal and Heroic, while the other top two guilds slaved away against a giant suit of armor. Which is also technically a Lich King, but only the 0.5 version.

Soniqs Imperative, who claimed the first three WFs spent pretty much the ENTIRETY of their day progressing on the Remnant of Ner'zhul. Wipe after wipe, they ended up on 90 without a kill, their best try a 4%. Meanwhile BDGG figured out that Soulrender wasn't a good call and also swapped to the Remnant, but then also spent the rest of their day there, getting to around 15%, but only spending 51 attempts to do so (due to their previous Soulrender attempts).

During all of this, as these two top guilds struggled on the 4th boss of the raid, Blizzard came in and put a real damper on BDGGs parade specifically, as they significantly nerfed Soulrender Dormazain:

Soulrender Tuning (Source)

Soulrender Dormazain

• Unleashed Tyranny damage reduced by 17% on Mythic difficulty.
• Echoing Screams now ticks every 2 seconds (was 5 seconds) on all difficulties, with damage proportionally reduced on Normal, Heroic, and Raid Finder difficulties to keep total damage over time unchanged.
• Echoing Screams damage reduced by an additional 10% on Mythic difficulty.

This wasn't all, as today's hotfixes came with plenty of Sanctum changes to almost every encounter, all of which you can read here.

And so as BDGG and Imperative continued their labors on Ner'zhul, Limit came back from their many splits and took a whole 3 pulls to walk in and immediately down Soulrender Dormazain World First, as if it was nothing.

And that was basically it. Complexity-Limit stopped immediately after that, not wanting to reveal any of their strategy for what was expected to be the actual roadblock of the raid (and still might be) - Painsmith Raznal. It was the end of their regular raid day anyway, so they didn't sacrifice much (and possibly did a few pulls behind the scenes as well).

Of the other notable guilds we have a whole lot at 3/10, as only Limit managed to break through that particular barrier, as Soniqs Imperative, BDGG, Blood Legion, FlashPoint KTB, Instant Dollars, Midwinter, xD, Fused, Club Camel, Vision, Fierce, vodka, Strawberry Puppy Kisses, Country Club, Incarnate, Vesper, Wizards and Monkeys, Emphasis and poptart corndoG remain with only 3 bosses down. 16 guilds got to 2/10 and 269 downed the Tarragrue only.

The difficulty spike is somewhat insane here, as The Nine took most guilds between 1 and 5 tries to down, whereas the Remnant, which was definitely the easier one before the Soulrender nerf, is taking anything from 50-90++ pulls and still hasn't been killed by anyone but the No.1 guild in the world. Soulrender is probably the easier choice of the two at this point, but even that should be a GIANT leap in difficulty from The Nine and the Eye. In any case, the EU guilds will be raiding soon, as maintenance will probably finish soon after this is published, so we'll see what happens in day 2/EU day, with the guilds arriving some 16 hours late, but with a pre-nerfed boss and very good knowledge of how the fights work and what path to take.

For full live coverage, head on over to Raider.IO, or one of the many event streams.