Midnight Season 1 Race to World First recap: The great Belo’ren battle is now over

The first Midnight Race to World First started on March 24 with the launch of Voidspire’s Mythic difficulty… but that first week wasn’t a particularly exciting one. The raid launched on Thursday for NA realms, and a day or so of running splits for gear, Team Liquid went into Mythic Voidspire and steamrolled through every boss by Thursday. The most difficult encounter was the second to last: the Lightblinded Vanguard, which was dead within 52 pulls. The final encounter, Crown of the Cosmos, took even fewer pulls: Alleria was defeated after just 35 attempts. It was a far cry from raid tiers where some bosses took hundreds of pulls and hours of planning strategy.

But Midnight Season 1’s raids were timegated. The season first launched with the Normal and Heroic difficulty Dreamrift and Voidspire raids. The week after, Mythic difficulty launched for both raids. The week after that, the March on Quel’Danas raid opened in Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulty, completing the tier. That meant that after defeating Alleria, Liquid — and Echo and Method after them — had four days without any more Mythic bosses to fight, so it was back to gearing. The raid was so straightforward for these guilds that they ran Mythic splits to gear up more characters even further. So I say again: it hasn’t been the most exciting race.

But that brings us to the final two encounters of the season: Belo’ren and Midnight Falls (L’ura), which launched on March 31.When the raid opened on Tuesday, it was immediately obvious on Heroic difficulty that these bosses were not pushovers, which sent all of the guilds in the race back to gear farming before attempting Mythic Quel’Danas. That meant even more splits as players pushed their item level as high as possible as fast as possible.

Belo’ren is a tight damage check that requires serious coordination, with the entire raid constantly swapping between light and void, and only being able to interact with the appropriate light or void mechanics as they spawn. Light and void orbs cross the room, first in orderly rows, and then in a random scatter, and must be intercepted by players of the appropriate type. Soaks, also, must be taken by the appropriate players. In Phase 2, you have to DPS down Belo’ren’s egg, during which the floor is filled with light and void segments which rotate randomly — sometimes there will only be a tiny sliver to stand in, while other times the floor may be divided equally. As you might expect, you can only stand in the appropriate colors.

It’s a bit of a juggling act, and the random element — you don’t know which players will be flagged light or void, or which color things will spawn or where — keeps things interesting… and keeps you from being able to make a strict plan or assignments for the encounter. Both the damage players have to do and the damage being done to players is extreme, and the combination makes this a tough one.

World First! Liquid downs Belo’ren

On Thursday, a week after first killing Alleria, Liquid successfully killed Belo’ren after 196 pulls, followed some hours later by Echo after 216 pulls. This was the slow grind of a fight we’re more used to seeing during the Race to World First, as guilds practice, refine their strategy, and optimize their play over many pulls.

Because the Voidspire raid was relatively easy, quite a few guilds are up to Belo’ren in this tier, but with the difficulty it seems unlikely that many will beat it this reset.

What’s next for the race? Midnight Falls

The last encounter in March on Quel’Danas already looks a lot more difficult, requiring a level of team coordination beyond anything we’ve seen before. It requires many interrupts on rotation, and includes a memory game that two groups of players in different phases have to execute on the fly with very little time to act. Like Belo’ren, there’s randomness to the encounter that keeps things spicy.

But the interrupts are particularly rough. The L’ura encounter requires you to have 15 players with kick abilities to interrupt casts, and in a twenty-player raid with four healers the maximum number of kicks a group can have is 16. (And no, stuns, CCs, and disorient effects that can serve as an interrupt in some cases do not work here.) This is because of three adds who cast Terminate, a frontal cone that does extreme damage, and requires five kicks each to end. Coordinating these kicks can be tough, and if you lose more than one player the fight is over.

Then there’s L’ura’s memory game. A random series of runes will appear, and random players will be flagged with those runes. These players have to arrange themselves in the same order that the runes appeared, so that a beam hits the runes in the correct order. Players are separated into two different phases during the fight, and groups in both phases must execute the mechanic correctly. The same rune may appear multiple times in the sequence, so even calling out on comms that you have triangle and are going left can get confusing when four players across two different phases have the triangular rune. Plus the beam can rotate in either direction, and casts far too quickly to adjust on the fly if players get it wrong the first time.

And that’s just talking about challenges for the early portion of the fight, which was not tested on the PTR and did not have an entry in the dungeon journal. Everyone is figuring out this fight in real time. Many of the pulls we’ve seen so far haven’t gone longer than a minute or two as players fumble these early mechanics. (I won’t judge anyone for it, as I know I would do much worse.) But practice makes perfect, and we’re sure to see guilds improve over the course of the day.

That’s all for the Race to World First right now, but I’ll keep you up to date as guilds keep progressing on this final fight, so look for another recap tonight. In the meanwhile you can find up to the minute updates on Raider.io or watch the Race to World First guilds playing live to see the action as it happens. We’re in the final stretch of this race, but there’s no telling the winner yet.