Day 17 of the Race to World First: Zovaal was close to being defeated, until we hit the secret phase

It’s been 16 days since the Race to World First began and we’re close to the end — or we were until we got to the secret Mythic difficulty phase. The top six guilds in the world — Echo, Team Liquid, SK Pieces, Skyline, Method, and BDGG — are all working on the Jailer. BDGG has only just arrived at him and put in a single pull so far, so once again it’s time for a showdown between Echo and Team Liquid. Liquid has the edge in the pull count but Echo, however, had been pushing the Jailer’s health lower in fewer pulls. When they start their next morning of raiding they could be sneak the Jailer out from underneath Team Liquids feet.

Jailer standings at the writing of this post:

1. Echo 9.99% after 226 pulls
2. Team Liquid 15.8% after 312 pulls
3. SK Pieces 49.6% after 119 pulls
4. Skyline 52.4% after 115 pulls
5. Method 60.9% after 80 pulls
6. BDGG 89.7% after 1 pull

There was one hotfix from Blizzard developers late on Thursday evening that has allowed these guilds to actually progress in the third phase.

Prior to that change of the number of Desolation missiles, if you didn’t have all 20 players alive and healthy as you went into the third phase, you were never going to be able to keep up with the damage that the Jailer deals to Azeroth. It turns out that if your planet gets blown up, the bad guys win. Who knew!

To actually learn the third phase of the fight, Liquid and Echo were just letting the Jailer’s pylons reach Azeroth in the center of the room and starting phase three early. That’s why we saw them stuck for a whole day with only getting an extra 13% of the Jailer’s health down. Now it all comes down to the raw talent of the players and how much damage and healing they can pump out.

The Jailer’s Mythic-only phase

We also finally have confirmation that there is a secret fourth Mythic-only phase! Once the Jailer reaches 10% health he’ll cast Diverted Life Shield and siphon Azeroth’s health into his own. Going back up to roughly 30% health again and potentially gaining a new set of skills. I say potentially because as of the time of writing only Echo has managed to even see the Diverted Life Shield get cast, and then they died almost immediately afterward.

Wowhead has some other datamined spells that could be involved though. There’s a massive tank smash that needs to be split amongst the group and knocks everyone back called Meteor Cleave. Something that is doesn’t sound so bad on its own, until you see the other new ability — Death Sentence.

Death Sentence starts fairly easy to deal with since it starts on only one person, but that first cleanse takes it from one to two people. It doubles every time it’s dispelled until you have 16 members of your raid with a Death Sentence debuff. Since there aren’t 32 people in a Mythic-sized raid that last cleanse means death. Put together with the damage from the Meteor Cleave it’ll be a mad dash to the finish line to see if they’ll be able to stay ahead of the massive raid-wide damage as the final phase ramps up.

With this final Mythic phase, it’s now looking likely that the Jailer will come close to Kil’Jaeden’s record length — or he might even break the record!

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

Originally published 3/25/2022 10 am, updated 3/26/2022 1:40 am