Liberation of Undermine Race to World First, day 7: Sticking it to Stix and locked on Lockenstock

The Race to World First continues into its seventh day and Stix Bunkjunker has fallen! After 114 pulls Liquid managed to take out the trash and the trashmaster, and has moved further into the Gallagio. 114 pulls on a fourth boss is pretty wild. Usually we see bosses in that range take around 15 attempts. In fact even just last race Rashanan only took a single attempt for Liquid. Echo and Method both weren’t far off as they joined Liquid after just 83 and 133 pulls respectively.

Even with that extremely high pull count, it looks like guilds made the right choice starting with Stix, because Lockenstock is a giant pile of mechanics that are individually all things these raiders are used to handling, but the difficulty of the fight is that everything happens everywhere, all at once. Fighting this Goblin weaponmaker in his laboratory means that you have a full armory of abilities that you have to handle.

First, there are rocket launchers and lasers coming at you from the outer edge of the room. Next you have to keep an eye on the treadmills to make sure you’re avoiding the traps that are on them. Lockenstock will also target players with drills from the floor, and there are mines that are sent out that need to be set off in a staggered pattern so you don’t explode your whole raid. I haven’t even mentioned the giant magnets that come through the center of the raid that drag you out of position. If all of those mechanics weren’t enough, the Mythic only mechanic has the whole raid assigned to a positive or a negative polarity and if you come into contact with someone from the opposite polarity, you’ll knock each other out of position and probably explode. Since the fight is so position dependent with all of the different dodgeable mechanics happening at once, you really don’t want to be out of position.

As the fight goes on each mechanic also gets supercharged, so by the very end you’re standing in a narrow safe spot between giant purple laser beams of death, dodging giant purple balls of death (that will damage the whole raid if you touch them), having players step on mines, and running against the magnets — all while not touching a player of the wrong polarity.

Liquid is currently the leader with 13.91% as their best attempt after 71 pulls, but they’ve only got a couple of hours left of their raid night — and of their raid week, as North American servers will reset tomorrow. They’ve got the damage necessary for a kill now, they’re just playing a game of deadly dodge ball and losing. Echo is pretty close behind them with 17.58% after 58 pulls, while Method is sitting in third place at 42.9% after 39 attempts.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the raid, Instant Dollars is close to a world fourth Stix kill with 19.6% after 100 attempts. They’re racing against Poptart Corndog who’ve gotten just under 50% after 60 pulls.

Echo is likely to take a lead by the end of this first raid week as they have a whole extra day to work on Lockenstock and attempt the One Armed Bandit. One thing is for certain though, if Liquid can’t finish off Lockenstock by the end of their raid day, they’re looking extremely likely to come back with the extra gear for clearing the first bosses and make quick work of it.

We’ll have another report for you tomorrow with Liquid’s first raid reset and Echo and Method’s last full day.