Mythic Raszageth has fallen — congratulations Echo on winning the Race to World First!

Echo has defeated Mythic Raszageth after 265 pulls to earn World First in the first raid of Dragonflight. For the third Race to World First in a row, Echo has proven that they’re the best raiding guild out there, despite strong competition. A big congratulations to all of Echo’s raiders and support staff who made this win possible.

Thankfully this was a shorter race than Mythic Sepulcher of the First Ones — it only took 11 days for Echo to put the final nail in Raszageths coffin, when it took the guild nearly 19 days to finish the Jailer fight last tier. There was a surprisingly similar pull count between the Jailer and Raszageth though: the Jailer took 277 pulls to Raszageth’s 265.

There were only four guilds progressing on Mythic Raszageth when Echo finished her off. Team Liquid had gotten there first, but hadn’t resumed raiding yet for the day when Echo got the kill. While BDGG and Method had made it to Raszageth in third and fourth place to try their hands at taming the storm, but neither guild had enough time on the fight to catch up. Liquid and Echo had been the strongest competition with both guilds hitting the same walls in the fight and breaking through them almost at the same time, making for a dramatic race.

A few nerfs have helped all of the guilds progress on this tough fight. After watching guilds struggle, Blizzard made some adjustments to Raszageth’s first intermission and second phase to lower the difficulty. Some even called Raszagath’s massive damage shield in phase 2 mathematically impossible to break, and apparently the Warcraft developers agreed because they nerfed the total shield by 50%.

Echo was the first guild to really get through that shield and and make it into the final phase. With a massive jump on the 10th day of the race, they pushed their best pull from 45% to 19%.

Suddenly the fight looked like it would fall before the weekend was over.

Raszageth phase three struggles

With both guilds finally getting through phase 2 consistently, Liquid and Echo attacked with renewed ferocity, each managing to get Raszageth below 10%. But the final phase was no joke: the platform fills up with a deadly storm reducing available space, while raiders have to ensure that they can stand as far away from tanks as possible so that the Thunderous Energy left behind after her attacks won’t obliterate them. There were also healing tornadoes to intercept and a giant magnetic attack to position properly. As the platform shrank, all of these mechanics became more and more difficult to manage.

And the team had to do all of this while perfectly executing their rotation to deal as much damage and providing as much healing as possible. It was a chaotic final phase, to say the least.

But on December 23, a hotfix slowed down the storm and reduced the frequency of the healing tornados, giving players more time and space to maneuver. That little bit of relief was all Echo needed to get the killing blow.

Team Liquid hadn’t started their raid when Echo got the kill, but on Liquid’s first pull they got Raszageth down to 7.7%, so it’s likely that they’ll secure second place by the end of the day. The hotfix going live before the start of their day was unfortunate for them, but it really was down to any pull for Echo.

For their victory Echo had a fairly balanced selection of classes. We didn’t see a massive stacking of Balance Druids or Rogues for this raid. There were even two Preservation Evokers in the mix!

• 2 Tanks: 1 Protection Warrior, 1 Blood Death Knight
• 4 Healers: 1 Disc Priest, 1 Holy Paladin, 2 Preservation Evokers,
• 8 Melee: 1 Fury Warrior, 2 Assassination Rogues, 1 Enhancement Shaman, 2 Havoc Demon Hunters, 1 Death Knight, 1 Windwalker Monk
• 6 Ranged: 1 Demonology Warlock, 2 Balance Druids, 2 Arcane Mages, 1 Hunter

Now that Raszageth has been defeated Echo can have a nice relaxing Christmas before they start to work on paying off any gold debts that they’ve accrued. I’m sure they won’t be as high as the last tiers, but with some of the rare crafting patterns like the Elemental Lariat, I imagine they’ve spent a sizeable amount this race.

Once again congratulations to Echo for their well-run race!