While the final boss of the first raid of the World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion was to be the opportunity to decide between the three usual guilds (Liquid, Echo and Method), a fourth challenger enters the dance. This is the Chinese Huoguo Hero Guild. And she can pose a threat for the top 3.
One would have thought that the competition to become the best guild in the world on World of Warcraft was going to be a head-to-head between Liquid, Echo and Method. These are in fact the usual suspects which we find every time there is the race for “World First”, which consists of first killing the final boss of each new raid, on maximum difficulty.
Defeating the final boss of a raid on maximum difficulty is the most common metric on WoW to classify guilds.
The traditional “explanation” between these three guilds, which are used to competing at a very high level in the MMORPG, is finally done by four. Indeed, the final battle which is underway to take down Queen Ansurek (the eighth and final boss of the raid called Palace of the Nerub’ar) has just welcomed a new challenger.
This is the Chinese guild Huoguo Hero (火鍋英雄), which operates on the server called The Scarlet Crusade (血色十字军). She was able to join the three Western guilds in this final challenge, being for the moment the only one (besides Liquid, Echo and Method) to have passed the previous obstacle, the “silky courtyard”.
At this point in the competition, Liquid and Echo have a good lead over the next two guilds.
The American guild Liquid lowered the boss’s life points to 15.27%, with 309 attempts. Echo, which operates on a European server, has 249 tries and is a little further away: Queen Ansurek has been reduced to 27.35%. Both guilds have reached “phase 3” of the boss. Each boss has several phases, each with its own mechanics.
Technical glitch with raid lock
Huoguo Hero does not seem to be able to catch up on time. First, because the Chinese guild had time to train less (174 attempts), then because ofa problem reported by the specialized site Raider.io: raid locking, a specific mechanic in WoWdid not work well.
So, instead of being able to continue their progress on Ansurek, Huoguo Hero players must start from the start of the raid and re-kill the previous seven bosses. If it can go quickly enough for the first ones, they could possibly stumble on the last ones, which are much harder. Even though they have already been defeated, these are still big obstacles.
It is not impossible that technical intervention by Netease will take place to correct the raid lock malfunction. In China, World of Warcraft is published by a local company, as part of a commercial agreement. This first existed from 2008 to 2023, before being stopped, then relaunched in 2024.
Method threatened for its top 3?
If the positions of Liquid and Echo do not seem directly threatened by the progression of Huoguo Hero, the possibility of seeing the Chinese team disrupt the final ranking remains plausible. It is the Method guild which is at this stage the most exposed, with 190 attempts and life points lowered to 55.78%.
Huoguo Heo is at 63.44% after 177 tries.
Obviously, the global guild hierarchy will form around these four guilds for this new expansion. They are the only ones to be on the last boss and to have beaten the penultimate boss. But the pressure is building behind: five other guilds have beaten the fifth boss and around twenty have passed the fourth.
Source: www.numerama.com
