Liberation of Undermine Race to World First, day 10: Liquid takes the lead with the death of the One-Armed Bandit

The Liberation of Undermine Race to World First continues to be spicy, as top guilds Liquid and Echo trade off world first boss kills. Echo pulled ahead by picking up the world first kill on Sprocketmonger Lockenstock on Tuesday (after 107 pulls), while Liquid was stuck with NA reset day, spending the entire day doing splits without stepping foot in Mythic.

But by Wednesday positions reversed as Liquid tore through Lockenstock with an extra reset’s worth of gear and, late in their raid day, got the world first kill on the One-Armed Bandit while Echo was doing its reset reclears. After a pair of bosses — Stix and Sprocketmonger — that both took over a hundred pulls, One-Armed Bandit was a relatively quick one, taking Liquid only 56 pulls. Echo followed the next day with a One-Armed Bandit kill after 61 pulls.

You can’t call this an easy fight. One-Armed Bandit is about managing coins: you toss specific coins into the slot machine, which changes what it does, but you can only do each combination of coins once, and if you don’t put coins in before a timer ends, it’s a wipe. Cutting that timer close let players eke out a little more DPS, but could lead to a wipe if the timing isn’t perfect — but it was a tight DPS check, and these guilds were doing everything they could to get through it. While Liquid and Echo followed the same strategy on the order of coin combos, they ran very different comps: Liquid loaded up on healers, running five to keep the raid alive, while Echo ran three healers to get the extra DPS. Method has only just killed Sprocketmonger Lockenstock for world third, and soon we’ll see what strategy they take for One-Armed Bandit.

The extra gear all of these guilds picked up at reset has made a significant difference in making these kills easier — I was personally wondering whether reclears would pose a challenge, considering the high pull counts we’ve seen on these bosses, but neither Liquid nor Echo hit any speed bumps on the Mythic reclear. On their One-Armed Bandit kills, Liquid had an average ilevel of 660.5 and Echo had an average of 661.3 ilevel.

The rest of the race is still stuck on Lockenstock, which is the everything everywhere all at once fight, except in this case “everything” is explosions (sometimes lasers). It’s been a significant roadblock for the few guilds that have reached it, and currently 火鍋英雄 (Huoguo Hero) is on track for the next kill, with the boss at 12%. However Huoguo is doing reclears today now with China’s late weekly reset. When they’re back, we can expect the guild to go in strong. Instant Dollars has Lockenstock with 60%, but the guild hasn’t done pulls in several days. The rest of the race is still working on Rik Reverb, and the low number of kills on these early bosses really shows what a tough raid this is.

But we’re on the last two bosses now, with Mug’zee and Gallywix himself being the final challenges in Liberation of Undermine. While the rest of the pack is more than a boss behind Liquid and Echo, there’s no telling which of the two top guilds will pull ahead in the end. Echo is currently getting late in its raid day, but Liquid is just about to get started — so we’ll see what another day of pulls will bring.