wow Sepulcher of the First Ones Mythic RWF Summary, Day 13: Neck and Neck, Almost Jailer

[Starym 3,800]

 

Day 13 of the Sepulcher race has been quite an interesting one, as what was expected to be a relatively mindless slog through small incremental improvements on a wall boss turned into a pretty exciting side-by-side race where any pull could be a kill, and the top two guilds ended up 1% away from each other.

After day 12 and both guilds getting a solid amount of pokes at the penultimate boss of the Sepulcher, yesterday saw the perfection of the Rygelon strategy and a whooole lot of executing on it by both Echo and Liquid. One thing we definitely learned during the day is that Blizzard's tuning of the last two bosses before the Jailer is extremely spot on and almost perfect for this point in the gear cycle, as we now had two bosses that require almost completely flawless play from the perfect raid composition to down. This certainly bodes well for the Jailer!

The day started off pretty slowly as Echo were getting warmed up and experimented for quite a while, as both guilds found the relative randomness of some of the boss ability timers to be an issue, as Seliathan explained in the Raider.IO live coverage:

It looks like both Echo and SK Pieces are struggling with similar issues as Liquid last night: Rygelon is just too "random" of a fight. It is very reminiscent of Stone Legion Generals, in that timers are not consistent at all, and thus it is difficult to really plan your gameplay around what is supposed to happen next. The extremely tight DPS checks on the Quasars and Unstable Matter are reliant on the Dark Eclipse debuffs coming out at roughly the same time, but sometimes they seem to be applied up to 5 seconds later than in the previous try. This means that the DoTs and AoE damage of the raid is bringing them way too low at times if the boss decides to stagger or delay the next cast of Dark Eclipse, and the adds also travel closer to the boss already before you can kill them for players to clear their debuffs. Liquid played around that by running 2 Druids with Massroot and keeping them further in the back, but it doesn't change the fact that the longer the fight goes, the more messy the boss-timers and overlaps become.

Things picked up steam about 4 hours into the day as Echo had their first huge breakthrough pull, leaving the boss at 20% health, and showing us that a kill wasn't completely out of the questions this week. After a few splits they got that number down to only 10%, and now a kill was looking very doable, almost imminent. But that wasn't all for Echo's showing off, as they eventually managed a crazy 5.5% pull around the end of their raiding day, with 169 Rygelon pulls in total so far.

They called it a day after that, a little earlier than usual, and may have done some pulls off-stream and off-logs, but we're not quite sure about that (we are pretty sure they didn't kill it though). Meanwhile Liquid weren't that far behind as they were hovering around a 14% best when Echo got their lowest pull, but they also had a long time to raid ahead of them, which they used very well. Slowly getting better and better tries they ended their day with an overall best, moving out in front of Echo and being pretty confident they could get a kill once the woke up today. The current best pull on Rygelon stands at 4.3%, and the total pull count is at 204.

rygelon is insane fun, boss dies tomorrow with a fresh sleep.

— Liquid | Maximum (@maximum) March 21, 2022

And so we find the top two guilds within 1 percentage point of each other and extremely close to a kill on the penultimate boss of the Sepulcher, which is certainly a fitting setup for the finale of this extremely unique race on so many levels.

It seems almost certain that Rygelon dies today, which means we will get to see the Jailer before the reset, although it's extremely unlikely there's significant progress made on him. With the double legendary reset looming, and with the tuning of the bosses so far, it really is looking almost certain that the Jailer is set up with the extra power in mind, so we should be seeing at least a few days of progress on him come week 3 of the race.

The day wasn't all Rygelon and the top two, however, as the other guilds also did a lot of progressing, with the biggest news being Chinese guild Skyline rising up in the ranks and claiming the World 4th on Anduin:

Source: Raider.IO.

SK Pieces were moving around a little between Lords of Dread and Rygelon during the day, getting them down to 32% and 61%, respectively, and feeling pretty secure in their 3rd spot. The crab wasn't really in the spotlight anymore, but we have a soft spot in our hearts for tragic wipes, and it doesn't get any more tragic than this 0.17% one from Aversion:

Luckily it wasn't a tragedy for too long, as they did in fact manage to escape Hellondrus around 2 hours later, claiming the World 11th on the crab, joined a short while later by Soniqs Imperative. Those weren't all the top kills, however, as Method also had a big day, taking Anduin down World 5th and setting up right next to Skyline on the last two pre-Jailer bosses.

Today is going to be a big one, as we should be seeing the Jailer himself and at least getting an idea of just how tightly tuned he is (at least with pre-double-legendary gear), and seeing who can take Rygelon down first. Echo certainly have the momentum after their Lords of Dread win, as well as quite some hours of raiding before Liquid wake up, but with the nature of the fight, it's still anyone's kill to take.

And in closing, here's Echo's official Lords of Dread World First kill video: