The WoW professionals from Echo found a good tactic in the race for the First Kill in World of Warcraft. But Blizzard didn’t like that – and made a quick change.
Update 07/20, 1:30 PM: In the meantime, Echo secured the World-First Kill. You can find all the details in this news.
Original news: In the race for the “World First Kill” of Sylvanas Windrunner on Mythic difficulty, the professional guilds pull out all the stops in World of Warcraft. Sometimes players become so creative that Blizzard has to intervene in the ongoing fight and simply gives creatures new abilities so that certain strategies do not succeed. The European guild Echo had to experience this firsthand.
What did Echo do? The professionals from Echo had only recently failed at the 50% health threshold of Sylvanas – because apparently the fight lasts longer and the Banshee Queen needs to have several million health points beaten out of her. To make that possible, Echo developed a different plan: they play Phase 2 of the fight differently, to take more health points from Sylvanas than actually intended.
This is how Echo’s tactic worked: In Phase 2 of the fight, the raid actually has to split up to defeat two groups of additional enemies (“Adds”). However, since the phase ends with players being teleported to another location, these Adds do not necessarily have to die as long as at least one player on each side can interrupt the deadly spell, the “Hymn of Doom”.
Echo split the group – 19 players went to one side and the Death Knight Naowh alone went to the other side. Through a lot of cooldowns, strong self-healing, and even a Soulstone, Naowh was able to stay alive long enough.
This gave the other 19 players enough time to deal significant damage to Sylvanas and additionally take 3% of her health points before the phase ended. This was a significant advantage that would also shorten the last phase of the fight. Here’s how it went down:
What did Blizzard do?
This is how the devs govern: Blizzard simply curtailed the tactic. With a change to the ongoing game, the fight was altered so that the remaining Adds go into a frenzy shortly after Sylvanas is interrupted. Those Adds then deal a whopping 900% additional damage until their death, attack with 150% increased speed, and dismantle even tanks in most cases with a single blow.
This guarantees the individual player’s death and they can no longer prevent the “Hymn of Doom”, leading the entire raid to follow in death a few seconds later.
The change was implemented by Blizzard almost an hour after Echo used this tactic for the first time.
Does Blizzard do this often? Yes. Especially in the race for the “World First Kill”, it happens time and again that the professional guilds develop strategies that Blizzard simply hadn’t considered to make a boss significantly easier. Even with N’Zoth, Jaina, and many other bosses in the past, an enrage mechanic was often added at the last second to close a “gap” in encounter design.
After all, Blizzard usually has a pretty good idea of how players are supposed to experience each phase and how much time they are supposed to spend in the respective phases. Dramatically shortening a phase by exploiting mechanics is probably not in the developers’ intent.
What do you think of this hotfix? Blizzard’s right to allow the fight to proceed correctly? Or a “dirty move” to prevent Echo’s First Kill? Let us know in the comments.
In any case, Echo is running out of time right now – because tonight is the reset in America and could bring victory for Complexity Limit.
