We had an almost full Mythic progression day, and a very single-minded one at that! Stix Bunkjunker and his… well junk was the target of the day and he made it through!
EU Catch-up
The start of the day was more of the same for the EU guilds. Eventually, they did make it to Mythic. Method were the first to dive in and get 1-shots on Vexie and Cauldron. They decided to put off Rik for later, opting for more Mythic+ instead. Echo went in some 5 hours after that and did the same thing, poked Sprockermonger a bit and, of course, Mythic+ after that. They did come back to Rik Reverb later on though. They grabbed the World 3rd after 3 pulls, compared to Liquid’s 5. That was it for the EU action, as Echo did a few more off-stream pulls on Sprocket and then called it a day.
FatSharkYes also downed the first two bosses, having a bit of trouble on Cauldron, and didn’t manage to get Rik down after a few tries.
The Trash Always Rolls Downhill
Liquid started their day wiiiith, say it with me now, Mythic+! A couple of hours later they did get into Mythic without the plus and from then on it was a giant trash fire. No, really, you light trash on fire in the Styx Bunkjunker encounter. Well, you try not to but it still happens.
This was the big focus of the day as Sprocketmonger was clearly deemed to be much harder by basically all the guilds. And so, this was the only avenue of progression. We’d seen the boss from Instant Dollars’ perspective and they managed to get him down to 64%. But this was Liquid and surely they were going to breeze through in a 10 or so pulls right? Well, it seems Nerb-ar Palace came back to bite everyone in the ass! Its joke-easy first four bosses led to Blizzard making the fourth boss here a serious contender. Initial pulls were promising, with Liquid getting the boss down to around 55% in pull 7.
They rejiggered their raid composition a little. There was some heavy spec stacking: 3 Shadow Priests, 3 Moonkins, 3 Mistweavers, and two Blood DKs. It took a long while to get some solid progression, over 11 pulls in fact, and the next low pull was at 42%.
The boss had already surpassed most players predictions on pull count, but he wasn’t even getting started. Liquid pressed on and managed to get an incredible pull at 21%, except the thing that wiped them was a new piece of information about the fight.
A Big DPS Check
That’s right, ol’ Stix has a 6 minute 30 second enrage and they had hit it! This called for some serious composition changes as a tank was removed and the DPS swapped around a lot. It took a while to get a better pull with the new composition, another 13 pulls in fact. The 38th put the boss outside anyone’s predicted pull count but it also brought the new 18% best.
This wasn’t exactly enough progress and 10 pulls later Liquid went even more extreme DPS home makeover, and dropped a healer! This is the usual way these things go – the raiders get better and better at the fight, but then make it harder and harder for themselves as they strip away any safety measures, from tanks to healers, when the DPS check is this high. It took a while to get used to the missing healer, but at pull 62 it all clicked and we saw a new best at 11.62%! Liquid ended their day on pull 69.
The Head(s) to Head(s) Begin Today
And that was it for the day. Stix lives and is quite the boss, surprising even the highest pull-predictors. Today Echo and Method will get a shot at the trash heap, and we’ll see how they fare now that they know what the fight is all about. The specter of Sproketmonger looms above all of this, and considering the guilds are just avoiding that boss like the plague, we could see a stealth hotfix go out before any of the guilds starts pulling him for real if he’s such a tough cookie. When it comes to Stix, any potential hotfixes would have to be very carefully timed, as Liquid spent most of their day progressing on the boss.
