Liberation of Undermine Race to World First, day 3: Many splits, handle it!

Though we’re a couple of days into the Race to World First for Liberation of Undermine, this is our first update on the state of the race. That’s due to something that’s become quite common amongst world first guilds: splits, in which the raid group breaks up and repeatedly runs sets of players through different difficulties and bosses in an attempt to funnel loot to the characters most likely to be needed in the world first race. It’s a lot of hard, focused work for raiders, in which the guild has to meticulously plan splits to maximize loot chances, recruit helpers to fill raid slots and pass loot to raiders, and simply put in a whole lot of hours at their computers.

But it isn’t very exciting to watch… save one bit of drama when a guild killed Mythic Gallywix.

Wait, what?!

The guild RAoV Quality Assurance on Silvermoon (EU) managed to snag the achievement for killing Mythic Gallywix without killing any of the other bosses in the raid. It was, unsurprisingly, an exploit, and Blizzard has since removed the guild from the Hall of Fame. But between the kill happening and Blizzard commenting, there were plenty of conspiracy theories, including the idea that these were actual Blizzard QA staff testing raid mechanics live. With that question resolved, the race has continued.

The raid is certainly looking tough, and we’ve seen guilds struggle on the late bosses even in Heroic difficulty. It was only today that we saw Heroic Gallywix die, with Chinese guild 天猫佳佳拍网游 taking the world first kill, followed by Liquid. When it’s day three before the final boss dies on Heroic, you know we’re in for a serious race (or a lot of nerfs). Here’s the video of Liquid’s world second kill!

None of the top three guilds have gone into Mythic Liberation of Undermine yet, which isn’t entirely unexpected as these guilds usually spend a lot of time on prep. But usually we see other guilds jump into Mythic and snag some of the early world first kills, which just hasn’t happened yet. So far, there has only been one world first Mythic kill: Melee Mechanics rushed into the raid and killed Mythic Vexie and the Geargrinders in just three pulls, taking the team about 12 minutes… and then they went to do some splits.

After Vexie, guilds have a choice to tackle one of four encounters: Rik Reverb, Cauldron of Carnage, Sproketmonger Lockenstock, or Stix Bunkjunker, and we’ve seen guilds try various encounters but no one has cleared any of them yet. The Amazing Zoo (EU) has gotten Cauldron of Carnage down to 2.92%, but ended their raid day. No other guilds have any of the next batch of bosses

We will probably start to see some actual racing — at least a little — on Friday, when Liquid will probably jump in, and perhaps Echo and Method as well. Until then, we’re still watching the latest Heroic splits on repeat.

I’ll be back tomorrow to update you on the state of the race, hopefully with some boss kill videos to enjoy!