Venomous Abyss Race to World First Week 1 recap: Hope you like raid splits

The Venomous Abyss Race to World First is in full swing in World of Warcraft! Players around the globe have set foot in the raid and tried their best to defeat the snakes and snake-like creatures that exist within its walls. After the first week of raiding, we’ve seen five of the eight bosses fall, with Method sitting in the lead as the only guild in the world to have beaten Sszorak. They were also the first guild in the world to kill the fourth boss, Vashnik the Malignant, in just nine pulls! These world-first kills are simultaneously a big huge deal and not as important in the grand scheme of things. First, the good news for Method — these are their first world-first kills in six years. The last time they killed a boss first was back in Battle for Azeroth, defeating Queen Azshara in the Eternal Palace. This has got to be huge for guild morale and can’t be counted out as a motivating factor in their performance for the rest of the race.

On the flipside, we’ve seen before how easy it can be for guilds to get bogged down on the later bosses. The final three bosses taking drastically more time to kill is par for the course. Sometimes the first guild to reach one of them will be held up by an unfound bug or unintended interaction, since they get less testing on the test realms. It also means that Method took more time progressing on a boss further in, instead of running additional Normal/Heroic/Mythic splits like Echo and Team Liquid have been doing. So maybe the early lead will mean they don’t quite have the player power later on to brute-force some mechanics — and they may have to take more time later to do that extra gearing while other guilds are progressing.

The raid itself launched in a shaky position, with many bosses having bugs that caused unplayable lag or disconnects, getting in the way of a smooth launch. The first Mythic kill didn’t even happen until 58 hours after the raid opened — Consequence was the guild that did that in just one pull. This is a major break from tradition though; usually we see the first couple of Mythic bosses get downed pretty quickly as the raid opens. They’re not usually that hard, and a well-geared Cutting Edge guild from the last tier that won’t be racing seriously will just take their first weekly vaults and burn through them to get their name on the leaderboards. This time it took close to three days for anyone to score a kill! Heroic Ula’tek also managed to live to four days before the Chinese guild Clear Water secured the World First on that.

Many splits, handle it

Cat meme from Raider.io’s social media

The rest of the first week saw Liquid, Method, and Echo running raid splits after raid splits after raid splits. Guilds will take as few of their main characters into the raid as possible, with players from the community helping to funnel gear to those characters in exchange for gold and chances at being carried through Mythic kills later in the season. The Midnight Races to World First have seen Mythic splits becoming a thing as well. Previously, guilds wouldn’t run Mythic splits because of the more stringent lockout rules around Mythic difficulty, but if you change your strategy to not really try to defeat the whole raid in the first week, you can kill the first few bosses safely and get some good gear boosts for the second week. All of these raiders are gearing so many characters that even if a mistake is made, they probably have a backup that will suffice.

If you thought that basically a whole week of splits was enough, Liquid resumed their first day after the reset with a bunch more splits. They’ll be running around 12-14 more Heroic Ula’teks (or Hulatek if you’ve been paying attention to raider.io) total on their eighth day. The gold cost for all of the players helping them out must really be adding up. I can’t wait to hear what the final totals are for the guilds running all of these: we’ve seen some truly outrageous gold debts before, and I would wager that this race will put all of them to shame.

Echo and Method are both finishing up their seventh days and preparing for their reset, while Liquid has spent the day squeezing every possible piece of loot they can get out of the raid. The raid will kick into a higher gear over the next few days, and we’ll see if Liquid’s extra preparation pays off and nets them their fifth victory in a row.

Where to get Race to World First updates

Here’s our guide to watching the race live. For text-based updates, Raider.io has minute-by-minute updates on every guild racing, and we’ll be posting rundowns of the race as well.

Good luck to all of the teams taking part in the race — may the best raiders win!