Mythic Battle of Dazar’alor World First race, day 3: It’s all about Jaina

With the third day winding down in Europe, we’ve reached the endgame of the Battle for Dazar’alor Mythic race. There are now six guilds who have beaten the Stormwall Blockade and reached Jaina. Limit has been working on her for a couple of days now, but we don’t really know anything about how much progress they’ve made. They did let us know their total pull count for the rest of the instance — it only took 154 to get to Jaina. Method is slightly ahead of them with 143 wipes across all the bosses leading up to Jaina. They’ve already crossed the one hundred pull mark on her though, so with Limit reaching her first, I can only imagine how many they’re up to right now. For everyone else, there are 13 guilds who’ve killed High Tinker Mekkatorque, including the top Alliance guild P G who are currently sitting at world 11th. The top 40 guilds have all deposed King Rastakhan.

https://twitter.com/maximumwow/status/1091223329816625154

It sounds like there has been some behind the scenes tweaking of the last couple of bosses. Limit reports that there have been issues with extra Sea Swells during their pulls on Blockade, affecting about 1 in 5 pulls. Any extra coverage on that platform in the second phase would make for extremely tight positioning requirements on top of the excessive damage needed to bring the Energized Storm elementals down before they can charge up the boss. It’s also been reported that Jaina was buffed overnight. It sounds like her damage during the transition phase where you get off the ship and join her on the frozen sea was increased. Method has started running five healers in order to keep up with the cold.

The Jaina encounter feels hard in a way that is tough but not frustrating — unlike a fight like Mythic Kil’jaeden who took 19 days and 654 wipes before falling. The difficulty on Kil’jaeden was because of how many different random abilities he used, and how deadly each of those was. If you didn’t execute Rupturing Singularity perfectly you were knocked off the platform — and that was present for all but the last phase of the fight. Jaina’s abilities aren’t as deadly by themselves, and if you make mistake you’ll be able to recover if the group is in a good place. Her Gathering Blizzard ability is something that you can plan for, but still increases in difficulty the longer you’re in the fight. We’re also seeing Method using Skystep Potions during the first intermission to quickly get to Jaina and her Icebound Images before being overwhelmed by stacks of Chilling Touch.

I’m hoping that Jaina can last into the second week of Mythic difficulty. I love seeing the decision making that guilds use to choose between extending the encounter to keep working on the hardest boss, or risking going back and clearing the raid again for extra loot. There were only about five hours between the world first and second kills of G’huun.