Now that the race is over, it’s a good time to compare the latest raid with older ones!
Pull Count?
Over the years the way WoW players count just how hard a boss is has changed. First, the standard was the wipe count (how many times a guild attempted to kill a boss but failed). Relatively more recently this has changed to the pull count (the number of individual encounters with the boss, which includes the final kill), and has become the standard. It’s just a difference of 1 pull, but we like things accurate!
Speaking of accuracy, pull count isn’t always the best comparison point between bosses. Some take longer and the context around each individual kill affects the stat as well. Some guilds do far fewer pulls and talk more strategy in between them. The best example of this is the Chinese guilds, who prefer very rapid-fire attempts to get the boss down. They’ve been known to have over 1000 pulls on the first kill of certain bosses. In the current raid, the best Chinese guild’s pull count is 2-3 times higher than the rest. And so which guild gets the World First affects the number greatly.
Highmaul and Up?
The below spreadsheet was created and is being edited by Gronfors of the Tichondrius realm. It tracks the number of pulls each World First kill took for each boss. It starts in Warlords of Draenor, since pull counts for non-endbosses are hard to come by before then.
The earlier boss pull counts are actually incorrect. Gronfors decided to use the number of attempts one of the top guilds made to better indicate the difficulty of the bosses. In reality, the World First kill pull count for the earlier bosses is much higher, as they’re usually done by lesser-ranked guilds while the top guilds are off gathering gear for the race. The way it’s presented below does, however, showcase a more realistic raid difficulty curve.
How Does Liberation of Undermine Stack Up?
As you can see, if we go by pull count, the latest raid isn’t quite high up on that chart. Now, a lot of the raids in there can’t really be compared to it, as they have more bosses. Among the raids with the same number of bosses, LoU comes in fourth of five, only beating out Vault of the Incarnates.
Overall it seems only the final boss, Gallywix, really stumbled in terms of difficulty compared to other endbosses. Only the legendarily easy Xavius from Emerald Nightmare had fewer, and Sarkareth from Aberrus and Imperator Mar’gok from Highmaul are close. The penultimate boss, Mug’Zee, Heads of Security, actually stack up much better against their peers, sitting very comfortably in the middle of the pack. And, of course, then there’s Stix Bunkjunker, one of the hardest early bosses of all time, only beaten by three bosses (one of them is by one pull, and the other could be considered that raids actual penultimate boss, due to weird raid pathing and the WF guilds’ choice of boss order).
What did you think of the Liberation of Undermine Race to World first? And what did you think of the raid itself?
