wow Sanctum of Domination Mythic Race: A Critical Day 5

[Starym 3,800]

 

Well, day 5 was possibly the most critical and eventful one in the race so far, brought along some highs and one (possibly) very big low, as we have moved on to the final section of the Sanctum of Domination, with Sylvanas Windrunner being the only thing on the menu for the top 3 guilds!

Let's start the day with a little Starym-story, as I didn't prepare a Kel'Thuzad kill graphic for the Raider.IO coverage as there was just no way the boss died before I woke up in the EU evening, considering how the progress on him went the day before. Well, what I didn't count on was some extremely creative use of game mechanics (but the clean kind, which actually isn't even in discussion for being an exploit) which just trivialized a fair chunk of the Kel'Thuzad encounter difficulty.

So what was it? Well, let me (or to be more exact, Echo) introduce you to Weave of Warped Fates. One of the bigger problems on the KT encounter is the adds that spawn in, as they hit hard, need to be interrupted and make everything more messy. Unfortunately for the boss/the race, they also despawn when the player that has threat dies... and you see where this is going. First off, the Weave trinket does not count as a battle rez so it's basically free and you get an option to res up like an Ankh. The players then found a spot to die in with low enough incoming damage for the trinket to trigger - and that's it, they pick the bad add timings of the fight to use it and major part of the fight skipped! This interaction had been reported on the PTR as well, but since the trinket works exactly as advertised and the boss has this death mechanic, this is an entirely legitimate way of solving boss mechanics. It shouldn't have been, but that's entirely up to Blizzard and it has certainly made this race a LOT shorter than it would have been otherwise. If, on the other hand, this was actually the intended way to do this encounter, then it was criminally undertuned.

A lot of the fight was also players just waiting around for their cooldowns to line up with the damage-intense parts of the fight, so you'll see players just not doing damage for 30-40 seconds at a time to ensure the correct phase transition timings. You can take a look at the Echo kill video, where the casters explain the interaction as well:

But I did skip past the early hours of the day a little to get to the juicy part, as Echo still hadn't killed Fatescribe the day before as you'll recall, but they remedied that situation promptly, taking only 16 pulls to get the World 2nd and move on to Kel'Thuzad, which we've talked about already.

And so Echo surged into the lead as they took KT down after only 3-4 hours of progress on the boss and 22 pulls (compared to Limit's eventual 71), but as soon as they started utilizing this new strategy they also revealed it to Complexity-Limit. The US guild then promptly adopted the strat and got their own kill only an hour after Echo, but still spent a much, MUCH longer time on the boss the day before, basically all (EU) night.

But then came the fun part, as we had both top guilds arrive at the final boss of the Sanctum of Domination, the last stop in the race (well, until the reset, which she'll hopefully live to). Sylvanas progress started off strong as phase 2 and its chains arrived swiftly enough, with both guilds pushing for each meter/yard and each add pack to get to the top and enter Oribos. A big thing to note about the Sylvanas encounter is that while we do know there isn't going to be a Mythic-only phase (as confirmed by Blizzard multiple times) there MIGHT be a Mythic-only fight end percentage. Usually the fight ends when Sylvanas is at 50%, but we don't know whether that's the case in Mythic as well, so take that into consideration when we talk about percentages (and when we do, we will be talking about the absolute ones, aka the actual numbers seen on the screen from Sylvanas, so subtract 50 from it for the presumed fight end number).

Here's Echo's best try before they went to bed about 9 hours ago, as they didn't quite make it into phase 3:

Then there's this very short clip of Fragnance being awesome I can't really not post:

And that was it for Echo for the day, as Complexity-Limit continued on and got quite some progress done by the end of their day. Sylvanas remains somewhat safe, but she has been taken to 70.28%, and we've seen a LOT of phase 3, including some faster platform removal timings, a lot more damage and more. Let's start at the beginning of phase 2 this time:

And that's it for Sylvanas progress for the day, but we have even MORE to talk about in this gigantic, never-ending day! Method claimed a World third on the Fatescribe and got KT down to 2.2% before stopping, while BDGG went a step further and (after a tragic 0.4% wipe quite a while before the kill) claimed the World third on Kel'Thuzad, earning a ticket to the Sylvanas show! We'll stop here because it's already getting to be a ridiculously huge article, but if you want even more details on the events of the day (and a mini-rant on KT from me), head on over to Raider.IO's progress coverage.