Race to World First Day 1: Four bosses down, but the race hasn’t really started yet

Nerub-ar Palace opened on Mythic difficulty on NA realms on September 17, which marked the official start the Nerub-ar Palace Race to World First. However, the first day of the race doesn’t usually mark the beginning of the race: on day 1 we mostly saw guilds working on gear, primarily running Heroic splits and Mythic+ to gear up the characters that are heading the real spider’s web of Nerub-ar Mythic.

There’s some interest to this phase of the race, watching how team compositions are coming together as players collect and craft gear, but it doesn’t feel quite like a race yet. Day 1 is still mostly about prep, but here’s a rundown of everything that happened during the first day of the race.

Melee Mechanics kicked off the race. The guild Melee Mechanics jumped in with quick world first kills of the first two bosses, taking down Ulgrax the Devourer and The Bloodbound Horror before many guilds dipped their toes into the new raid. Great work on those world firsts!

Team Liquid actually spent some time in Mythic. In a surprise, Liquid paused its prep to steamroll the first four bosses, taking down Ulgrax, Bloodbound Horror, Sikran, and Rasha’nan. We’ve seen Liquid spend days and days doing Heroic splits in the past, and even though they went back to prep after running through these bosses, it was interesting to see them jump in so quickly. With four kills, Liquid is currently in first place, but this is a marathon, not a sprint.

poptart corndoG was sitting in second place this morning, with three bosses down (and having made good progress on Rasha’nan). poptart doesn’t typically rank with the very top guilds, but in Amirdrassil the team snagged a world 15th on Fyrakk. Is the guild going to break into the top ten this tier?

The state of the race

Current Nerub-ar Palace rankings

1. Team Liquid (4/8)
2. poptart corndoG (3/8)
3. xD (3/8)
4. Melee Mechanics (2/8)

Bosses killed: Ulgrax, Bloodbound Horror, Sikran, Rasha’nan

But by tomorrow, the field will probably look completely different. Mythic difficulty opened in Europe om Wednesday, bringing Echo, Method, and more into the race — but we’ll talk more about the European guilds tomorrow when we take a look at RWF day 2, because Echo is already making big strides to catch up.

Want to watch along with us? Here are the streams to follow to watch the Race to World First live. Or check our written coverage of day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7, day 8, day 9, day 10, and day 11.