How much gold was spent in the Sepulcher of the First Ones Race to World First? All of it, apparently!

As the dust has settled on the Sepulcher of the First Ones Race to World First and Echo stands triumphant as the best raiding guild in the world, it’s time for my favorite part — seeing just how much gold the top guilds have spent on racing. The number has been getting steadily more ludicrous with each successive Race to World First, and I’m happy to report that this race is no different. We have billions of gold spent between the few guilds that have reported their numbers.

Yes, you read that right, billions with a B.

In order of most gold spent:

1. JiTianHong spent 1.1 billion gold.
2. Team Liquid spent 723 million gold.
3. Echo spent 694 million gold.
4. SK Pieces spent 679.9 million gold.
5. Method spent 480 million gold.
6. BDGG spent 293.5 million gold.

You definitely don’t want to do the math on how much real money that would be if you bought it all with WoW Tokens. It’s a lot.

Of course, the biggest gold sink for most of these guilds was the astronomical sums they offered to people who could trade tier armor, with some offers of up to 10 million gold for people who could trade the tier chests and shoulders from Rygelon and the Lords of Dread. Those last two pieces fetched higher-than-average rates because they weren’t available the first week, so when the RWF guilds were doing their splits, they couldn’t have gotten them in the week prior to the race. This is also why we spent the entire first day of the race with no guilds killing any Mythic bosses at all.

Other culprits included Legendary items, repair bills, consumables like feasts and flasks, Bind on Equip items, and PVP boosting. Why PVP boosting? It meant that guilds would have more high items available in their weekly vaults.

So with guilds continuing to spend ridiculous amounts of gold per race, how do they earn this back? Well, they’ll most likely spend a lot of time in Sepulcher of the First Ones, selling Mythic clears and quick Heroic Jailer kills for gold, as well as Mythic+ carries. At least this time they won’t have to do it all in a row, so it shouldn’t be quite as taxing mentally.

This isn’t so much a pay-to-win situation, as Team Liquid outspent almost everyone else and still came in fifth. It does feel more like just the cost of doing business, much like Olympic athletes have to spend a lot of money every year on training fees and equipment. BDGG still managed to take 10th on the Jailer with only spending 293 million gold, which is roughly what SK Pieces just spent on their Heroic split runs.

I’m just sad that Rendle the Dredger hasn’t been accompanying us into each new raid. I’m sure he would’ve loved to get his hands on all of this gold!