Day 7 of the Sepulcher of the First Ones Race to World First: Team Liquid shattered the raid’s first wall with a Halondrus kill, but Echo has already caught up

Halondrus the Reclaimer has fallen. After a grueling weekend of fighting the crab, Team Liquid got the world’s first kill of it. It only took them roughly 18 hours of total time spent fighting the crab to finally break open its shell and get to the delicious crab meat inside of it. Final pull count: 357.

Echo grabbed the second Halondrus kill after 361 pulls, putting two guild at Anduin.

Video may contain NSFW language

Halondrus will now live in infamy as one of the hardest Mythic bosses ever. Especially for how relatively early it was in the raid. With Anduin, the Dreadlords, and Rygelon still to go before guilds can even attempt the Jailer — it’s possible that we’re in for the longest race since Tomb of Sargeras.

High off their victory Liquid moved on to see just how tough Anduin is. Turns out, he’s pretty tough, we could have another major blockage here as after 80 pulls Liquid has only managed to get to 72.5%. The Fallen King phases drastically increase the damage that Anduin takes, so once that health starts falling, it’ll really fall quickly. But they’ll still have to endure through two of them. Lucky for them they’ll have their weekly reset to gather more loot from the Sepulcher to make it a little easier to deal with the 165 million health that Anduin has.

Right now we have over a dozen guilds all stopped at Halondrus, at the time of writing here are the top five standings as reported by Warcraft Logs.

1. SK Pieces: 302 pulls — best attempt 9.1%
2. Method: 271 pulls — best attempt 13.3%
3. Skyline: 350 pulls — best attempt 16%
4. BDGG: 309 pulls — best attempt  23.6%
5. 佶 天 鸿: 114 pulls — best attempt 39.2%

Liquid reached Halondrus first, but Echo pulled up alongside them and managed to get into the final phase first — but Liquid still took Halondrus down first. Echo managed to catch up quickly and snag a kill, but unfortunately for them, Liquid has started getting valuable experience on Anduin. And with today’s NA reset, Liquid will likely be able to make sizable progress while the European servers catch up.

Method was the sixth guild to reach the crab after wiping numerous times on Lihuvim with heart-breakingly small amounts of health left. One of Method’s Lihuvim wipes had only 0.02% health left — only 16,000 health! Now they’re getting down to the wire on Halondrus. But SK Pieces looks to be in an incredibly strong position with a — relatively — low number of pulls and greatest success.

Why won’t that crab die?

So why is Halondrus such a roadblock? All of its mechanics are pretty unforgiving. If any of the tiny Ephemeral Motes reach the boss it’s game over: they’ll trigger an Ephemeral Eruption and the raid will die. The new Mythic mechanic also has players playing relay races with Volatile Charges that can’t be touched by the Ephemeral Motes, or the giant laser that Halondrus aims at the tanks.  The number of these Volatile Charges increases with each phase the raid makes it through, so as the raid gets further in they’ll have to dedicate more of their time to play with the bombs. All while still continuing to dodge the giant lasers, the smaller lasers, the missiles from the sky, the giant knockback bombs during the walking phases, and bouncing Ephemeral Motes away from the boss — easy right?

Apparently not! Raider.io and Echo are reporting that Blizzard has nerfed Halondrus slightly. This message came to them from Blizzard via one of the competitor’s Discord servers.

“We are in the process of making the following changes for Halondrus, and expect to have them live shortly: – HP reduced by 10% – Planet Cracker spawn locations are no longer variable – Crushing Prism less likely to target ranged players”

Echo raider Gingi isn’t thrilled that they nerfed Halondrus so quickly.

kind of sad that they nerfed it in one way. Would have been a great feeling downing this dirty boy.

— Gingi (@Gingitv) March 12, 2022

Meanwhile, the Jailer on Heroic has finally been defeated — Chinese guild Alpha took the honors today. The top guilds may have been deliberately avoiding pulling the Jailer since it doesn’t drop any pieces of class-tier armor. So it’s good to know that someone has put an end to his nefarious plans — at least on Heroic difficulty.

We’ll have more information for you on the Race to World First as more bosses fall — keep watching the ratings for the latest!

Originally published 3/12/2022, updated 3/15/2022