For the third consecutive time, Echo Esports have won a World of Warcraft Race to World First. Europe’s top WoW team became the first guild in the world to clear the Vault of the Incarnates earlier today, winning the first RWF event of the Dragonflight expansion.
After winning the last two races of Shadowlands, Echo picked up exactly where they left off here in Dragonflight. Just as Complexity Limit bookended Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands with consecutive RWF victories, Echo have now done the same as competitive WoW progresses into a new era.
In total, it took Echo 265 pulls to down Raszageth. Their raid-capping kill was the only World First boss kill achieved by the guild during the raid tier. Four were claimed by Liquid and another two were earned by Vesper.
This Race to World First was dramatically altered just past the first raid reset, with Blizzard handing down nerfs to Raszageth, the final boss of the raid, after it quickly became realized that the boss’ first phase may have been overtuned. After the nerfs came down, Echo and their main rivals Liquid both began to make significant progress on the boss, and it became evident that a kill would happen sometime in the coming days. Unlike the Sepulcher of the First Ones, which took 19 days to complete, the Vault of the Incarnates was wrapped up in just 10 days.
Many WoW fans were of the belief that the impending Christmas holiday may have had something to do with the timing of the nerfs given to Raszageth. It became obvious that the game’s top players would have continued to raid through the holidays if they kept their current pace and the boss remained untouched. Thankfully, Raszageth’s power was decreased significantly, allowing Echo (and Liquid for that matter) to get past the previously impassable wall that had been the boss’ first phase. Once the two teams broke through the first intermission of the fight, progress began to come in droves. Eventually, it was Echo who made the biggest strides in terms of overall boss progression.
Additional nerfs were applied to Raszageth prior to Echo’s final pull as well. Blizzard apparently nerfed the boss’ damage output during the fight’s third phase, making the closing moments of the encounter significantly easier. The boss’ soft-enrage ability, Raging Storm, had its enclosure speed reduced, giving players a more forgiving window of DPS. These nerfs may have played a factor in Echo’s ability to easily kill the boss and take such a massive stride in terms of progress during their final pull.
Related: WoW Dragonflight Vault of the Incarnates Race to World First live tracker
Echo’s final pull was miles cleaner than any other pull they had attempted throughout the course of the race. All 20 players were alive at the time of the kill and Echo nixed any mistakes that had plagued them throughout their previous attempts, chunking eight full percentage points of progression off of Raszageth.
Echo’s effectiveness in final bosses is nothing new, either. With just 265 pulls, Echo defeated Raszageth with relative ease. Liquid, who have yet to begin raiding for today, will look to grab world-second and are already 349 pulls deep. During the Sepulcher of the First Ones race, Echo downed The Jailer in just 277 pulls.
The next WoW: Dragonflight raid, along with the next Race to World First, will be coming in spring 2023, Blizzard has announced. Echo will look to become the first WoW guild since Method in 2018 to win four consecutive Races to World First.
Update Dec. 23 1:20pm CT: Raszageth’s Raging Storm ability was apparently nerfed prior to Echo’s World First kill. This piece has been updated to reflect the possible effects of those balance changes.
