We’ve finally arrived at the endboss days of the race. We had three guilds at the boss at the start of the day, and four by the end of it! Echo and Liquid pushed very hard on the boss and got very deep into the fight, with Liquid possibly hitting a serious wall. But is that wall breakable?
Echo Catches Up and Moves Into the Lead
The entirety of the EU day saw Echo do pull upon pull on Queen Ansurek and keep progressing more and more. From slowly getting through phase 1, it took them around 4 hours to get into phase 2 for the first time. Phase 2 is a very big deal as it’s a significant difficulty step up, and a very large gateway to the final phase, not to mention basically an entirely different fight. Here’s a look at the first proper phase 2 pull from Echo:
And then even deeper, seeing the second set of platforms, out of the three total in phase 2:
As it usually goes, phase 3 arrived after phase 2, with a lot of pulls in-between! Keep an especially good eye out for those 3 spider adds, as they’ll become VERY relevant later on.
This was Echo’s best pull, putting them ahead with the 47.8% best! Within an hour and a half of that pull, Liquid almost caught up, also entering phase 3 and coming within 0.01% of Echo’s best!
Meanwhile, Method re-cleared and got back to the Queen and got some solid progress, seeing phase 2 one or two times. Huoguo Hero also had a good day, downing the Silken Court duo and joining the top 3 at Ansurek! JiTianHong also progressed and downed Ky’veza World 5th, and we once again have a lone Chinese guild at Silken Court.
Liquid’s Phase 3 Shows Insane Difficulty Ramp
As Echo called it a night Liquid progressed for a long time. There were plenty of phase 2’s, plenty of % progress, and quite a few phase 3’s as well! They came up to almost 240 pulls by the end of the day, but had some serious progress on their hands. So first let’s take a look at a clean phase 2 and p3 entrance and then we’ll talk about what the real problem is.
Phase 3 Explanation and Spider (Im)Possibilities
As you see from the clip above, there’s a lot going on in p3, all of them deadly. But only one of those things could be an actual permanent progress blocker, potentially making the fight impossible. The three void-blue spiders hanging from the ceiling are acolytes. The “easy” part of those mobs is they need to be interrupted and killed in time or the raid wipes. The hard part is what happens after they die.
The spiders drop 
Acolyte’s Essence when they expire. So first there’s 3 adds and essences then 4. This is already a pretty tricky situation since each essence has to be picked up by a player and when they are dropped, the player gets a (basically) permanent 
Essence Scarred debuff, increasing damage taken from the essence by 1000% (or 500%, depending on which tooltip you believe). While held, the essence deals a lot of damage via the DoT, around 1 million per second. Then Liquid found out what awaits in the third round of adds.
The 5 Acolyte Problem
Unsurprisingly, it was indeed 5 acolytes! So the problem becomes figuring out who can even carry those next ones, since more and more players are pretty much blocked due to the debuff if they carried an essence in the previous wave. And so first 3 players get the debuff, then 10, and then, well, there’s 2 essences that have to be picked up by players who already have the debuff. So some two players need to be able to survive/immune 15 seconds of 10 million damage per second. And that’s only if all players without the debuff are alive at that very late point. We’re not even going to get into what happens when/if the next wave happens…
Liquid’s best came in late as usual, with 35.4% on the boss:
That’s 23 pulls in phase 3 with everyone alive during the day, which is quite a lot. So, is the boss possible at all considering the essences and everything else? These guilds are experts of doing what looks to be impossible, but this one is a tall order, even by endboss standards.
What’s Next?
Today will be really interesting, seeing what Echo can do in phase 3 and whether they run into the same issues as Liquid or if they can find some other solutions.
As usual, to see what happens in real-time, you can always check the coverage streams (Liquid, Echo, Method), or head on over to Raider.IO for live text coverage, clips, analysis and more.
