It was a big day in the Nerub-ar Palace, with a brand new boss being a giant wall! This particular wall, however, got lowered juuust a little. We have a whole lot of Ky’veza, some secret un-streamed tech, and a nerf to check out today! Not to mention the HORDES of guilds getting stuck on those 2 colossal walls.
Back to Two Guilds on Top
Before we get into the Ky’veza of it all, let’s see what happened on the EU side. Echo did some more gearing before heading back to the palace, joining Method in there. Echo took on the 2-Blood DK tank composition as well. They then seamlessly continued to get better pulls than their 45% best from the previous day. The two top EU guilds went at it and were pretty close on percentages, with Method even being ahead for a while! But very quickly thereafter, Echo stepped on the gas and pulled ahead, starting to get sub-10% pulls. They were not spared Liquid’s fate either, getting several low percent pulls before the eventual kill.
While Method was around 17%, Echo went and finally downed the big worm on pull 83.
And the full kill pull:
After the twister of broods was down, Echo actually pulled a Nathria on us, and decided to not stream their Nexus-Princess Ky’veza pulls! They did around an hour of pulls and then called it a night. Method stayed up quite a bit longer, but didn’t manage to down the worm, with a 5% best. We also saw another Chinese guild, 火鍋英雄 (Huoguo Hero), enter the fray. They very quickly took the 4th spot overall with a 28% best on Broodtwister. End Myth was also still in there, and is still leading the pack in terms of pulls. They’re currently sitting at 196!
Here is a comparison of the three top guilds’ item levels:
And a pull-count comparison for Broodtwister:
The Liquid Princess
The bulk of progression of the day fell on Liquid again, as they pushed on Ky’veza the entire night. After a lot of roster adjustments, they solidified their build around pull 65, and started to get some really solid tries in. Their first really low best came in at 39%, so let’s take a look at the full attempt to get a feel for the fight. Also, spoiler alert, the feel is BLUE EVERYWHERE.
That was their best for quite a while, with a minor improvement to 38%.
The Nerf
Soon after pull 100 or so, Liquid recognized a hotfix happening in front of their eyes. The raid just sort of stuttered. Luckily they weren’t in a pull, and it was immediately obvious the boss had less HP. 6% less, to be exact, taking the Princess down from 8 billion to 7.5! The not-so-obvious nerf was the 10% damage reduction on THE biggest damage ability of the fight, 
Queensbane, as the post-charge DoT was really doing a number on the raiders.
After the nerf we had some new best pulls. They even went above and beyond the extra 6% from the nerf, which resulted in this 25% wipe quickly after the nerfs on pull 104:
Unfortunately, that’s about as good as it got. That was some 5 hours ago now and Liquid have not gotten a better pull. The enrage gets them every time, and it’s quite the spectacle. Because if you thought the room was looking very blue before, well, Ky’veza has something on an entirely new level saved for the end:
Update: and they got another improvement, down to 21%!
And that was pretty much it for the day. There were some composition changes near the end, as a Resto Shaman was brought in to help with the Assassinate that insta-kills anyone under 10% health, but didn’t result in a better pull (yet).
A Mounting Pile of Guilds on the Wall
Another consequence of the ridiculously easy first 4 bosses and insanely hard next two is the ludicrous number of guilds now hard-stuck on 4/8. We have 113 guilds at Broodtwister and/or Ky’veza. The former has only been defeated by the two best guilds in the world, and the latter remains undefeated, and is looking to stay that way for a while.
So what exactly are the, let’s say 105 guilds that have absolutely zero chance to get anywhere in the raid this week supposed to do? The difficulty curve was a joke for the top guilds. But it seems it’s now become pretty problematic for a whole lot more as well. And now Blizzard are in a tricky position where they don’t want to nerf the bosses further to keep the race fair, but also want to give those one hundred guilds at least SOME hope and reason to try to progress further. Because the amount of nerfs needed to make the bosses possible for the non-top 10 guilds would make them trivial for those 10. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
As always, if you want to follow the race more frequently than our daily summaries and highlights news posts, head on over to Raider.IO for live coverage, clips, analysis and more.
