Team Liquid has finally started racing.
After approximately five and a half days of Heroic splits, Mythic+ runs, gearing, bugs and increasingly elaborate preparation, Liquid finally entered The Venomous Abyss on Mythic difficulty near the end of Day 6.
That sounds absurd until you remember how modern World of Warcraft Race to World First actually works.
The raid may open on Tuesday.
The real raid progression can apparently begin on Sunday.
Liquid Spent 5½ Days Getting Ready for Mythic
When Team Liquid finally entered Mythic The Venomous Abyss, almost six full race days had already passed.
Those days were not spent relaxing.
Liquid had been working through:
- Heroic split raids
- Mythic+ farming
- Mythic split raids
- Great Vault and gearing optimization
- Raid boss bugs
- Overtuned encounters
- Server problems
- More splits
And then some more splits.
For viewers waiting to see the world's best guilds solve new Mythic bosses, it can make the opening week feel slightly surreal.
The hardest raid difficulty is open.
The best guilds in the world are online.
And everybody is killing Heroic bosses for the seventeenth time.
Heroic Ula'tek Helped Slow Everything Down
This race has also been unusually awkward because Heroic itself refused to behave like ordinary preparation content.
Ula'tek became a genuine progression wall before Mythic had properly started for several top organizations.
Liquid reached 9.87% on Heroic Ula'tek before stepping away to continue gearing, while Chinese guild QingShui eventually secured the first Heroic kill.
We covered the entire strange episode when Heroic Ula'tek finally died after days of wipes and early Blizzard nerfs.
Heroic is normally where Race to World First guilds collect gear for Mythic.
This time Heroic briefly decided it wanted its own Race to World First.
Why Spend So Long Doing Splits?
The answer is simple.
Gear.
Race to World First guilds are not preparing one character per player.
They build enormous rosters of raid-ready characters, then repeatedly clear lower difficulties with carefully constructed groups designed to funnel useful drops toward specific mains.
If one Warrior needs a particular weapon, tier piece or trinket, the surrounding raid can be stacked with characters capable of trading that item.
Repeat that process across dozens of players and several characters each, and suddenly "raid preparation" resembles warehouse logistics.
Season 2 makes this particularly important because The Venomous Abyss contains powerful tier sets, unusual trinkets and late-boss gear that can materially change character strength.
We already looked at how Venomous Abyss BoEs added another layer to the opening-week gearing economy.
Top guilds squeeze value from every available source.
Because once Mythic reaches the first serious DPS check, being one item behind stops being theoretical.
Mythic+ Is Part of the Race Too
The other enormous part of the opening week is Mythic+.
High keys provide Hero-track drops, Mistcrests, Great Vault progress and additional opportunities to fill weak gear slots before serious Mythic progression.
For ordinary players, running several Mythic+ dungeons is a gearing session.
For a Race to World First roster containing multiple competitive characters per player, it becomes an industrial process.
That is why the first several days of a modern RWF can feature some of the world's best raiders spending more time outside the Mythic raid than inside it.
The raid is where the race ends.
Mythic+ and splits are increasingly where the race is prepared.
Five Days of Preparation Sounds Ridiculous Because It Is
There is a legitimate debate here about whether this is good for the Race to World First as a spectator event.
Players watching the race generally want to see new Mythic bosses.
They want strategies.
Secret phases.
Low-percent wipes.
Twenty people screaming because something finally died.
Five days of split raids do not provide quite the same television.
And this race has pushed the preparation phase unusually far.
Even Wowhead's Day 5 recap described the situation as "Mythic, but not really", with top guilds still buried under Mythic+, splits and gearing while the Mythic raid itself waited.
At some point the Race to World First begins resembling the Race to Become Properly Equipped to Start the Race to World First.
Catchy acronym still pending.
Liquid Knows Exactly Why It Is Doing This
The important counterargument is that Liquid is not accidentally wasting five days.
This is optimization.
Liquid won the previous Midnight Race to World First after one of the expansion's wildest final-boss battles. We covered that race when Liquid defeated Midnight Falls after 455 pulls and a Mythic-only secret phase.
A guild operating at that level knows exactly how valuable preparation becomes when the final boss survives for hundreds of attempts.
If spending another six hours on splits produces enough gear to save dozens of later pulls, the boring option is also the rational option.
World First is not awarded to the guild that enters Mythic first.
It is awarded to the guild that kills Ula'tek first.
The Preparation Already Started Paying Off
Once Liquid finally entered Mythic, the pace changed quickly.
The guild began working through the raid and has already turned that preparation into early Mythic progress, including a World First kill on Mythic Entombed Sentinels.
That fight required strong damage efficiency to beat its enrage timer, exactly the kind of encounter where several days of aggressive gearing begins to explain itself.
The splits may not be exciting.
The numbers they produce eventually are.
The Real Venomous Abyss Race Has Finally Started
Blizzard officially opened all three major difficulties of The Venomous Abyss during the first Season 2 reset, with Mythic available immediately rather than being delayed behind another week.
Technically, the Race to World First began then.
Practically, Liquid spent most of the opening week preparing for it.
That also means the later bosses are going to encounter characters that have been optimized to a degree no ordinary raid group could reasonably reproduce.
And Blizzard knows that. The developers have already explained that The Venomous Abyss is designed to become more manageable for normal guilds as Season 2 progresses.
Race to World First guilds get the brutal early version.
They compensate by turning gearing into a full-time occupation.
Modern RWF Starts Long Before the First Mythic Pull
So yes, Team Liquid finally entered Mythic after roughly five and a half days.
That sounds like they started late.
In reality, they had been racing the entire time.
They were racing for tier pieces.
Racing for weapons.
Racing for Mistcrests.
Racing through Mythic+.
Racing through Heroic splits.
And occasionally racing against a raid boss that had not yet been informed it was supposed to be Heroic.
Now the preparation phase is ending.
The Mythic bosses are finally dying.
And after almost six days of getting ready for the Race to World First, Team Liquid has reached the unusual moment where it can begin playing the raid.
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