you you you you you you you you you you you you you All right, I finally turned the splits thing off, the thing that just keeps spamming your chat. No, it's not time for this song. It's also not Saturday, but I like this song. Can we have High Guard back? Yeah, wait, did that stop spamming? It did. I'm going to turn it back on, Drew. We still have Christmas deals at Alienware at least. I also turned that one off because it's just been too long. Max, can you leak me the liquid add-ons for this tier? Dude, what do we have that isn't publicly available? I'm pretty sure there's like most things that we're using. There are versions of it. I could be wrong, but reminders? I think there are definitely public reminder tools, right? Thoughts of the MDI being so soon? Well, I don't have any thoughts personally, because I'm not doing that shit. But yeah, it's definitely they're going to lose a lot of good players with it being this close to the race for sure. A lot of our players are that we're going to compete, I believe are not going to because they're just so burnt out. Dude, your add on is so clearly better than everything else available. I mean, we can look at that today if you want. But I don't think that's true. Like which add-on are you referring to? Like which specifically? It's just that yours does the work of like four to five add-ons in one and the UI is more approachable, maybe. Max surprisingly preached it out of much to say about the race. Max I'd love it if we take a look at add-ons in general. It's been kind of new to WoW but really binged it since Dragonflight and with Sad they turned their back on a lot. I mean, dude, I mean, you can still just get every add-on. It's just you just have to get, you just have to get more. Like you can still do everything you want with technology, except for one thing. Or maybe a few things. It's just you have to get a lot more add-ons to it's like more annoying to get add-ons, basically, and they're all slightly worse. And I think more importantly is some people got like smart with add-ons and they were able to just like maybe some of you guys even Learned how to make yourself a quick week or a You know to like solve a very basic problem and now like you can't do that anymore You need someone else to make it and I think that's like a pretty big problem Max, do you think this raid format will return next year? Was it too bad for viewership? I don't think the raced world first viewership accounts for how they create raids in any way. in terms of like whether they do multiple raid instances or one. Like it just doesn't matter. Were whales shopping at whale mark type shit? Max, do you think that Rett was stackable for the last boss this year? No. Like I mean could you have killed it and ran two Rets? Yes, but that wasn't better than running one. Rhett I don't think was the best class at that fight at all. Like basically Rhett, it's nice to have Rhett to like help with the second adds in P1, but like there's better classes at P1, P2, and P3. Rhett's the best class in P4 though. Rhett does, so maybe the reason Rhett topped is, I believe Rhett does more damage with the last phase like holy mechanic. And I don't know I don't know if that's because of their mastery or like whatever, but I need to remove that song from the playlist and add the real one. Here, I'll show you actually. So let's look at our kill. Okay, so in P1, pretty important phase. I mean, it's pretty dominated by hunters. Rhett is fine, but like if you were to look at specifically boss damage in P1, it's unsurprisingly aug. Everything else is a little close. If you're going to look at crystal damage, it's probably hunters, but yeah, hunter, basketballs, Warlock Rhett, surprisingly Shaman actually. We could look at P2, but I just don't, it's, you know, it's probably not a big deal. Some people like holding CDs for being a P3, whatever. And then P3, I think RET just gets like an extra cooldown use, but other people are holding on purpose. And these, you do like extra damage in this phase. So losing a use in this phase really matters. And then in the last phase, well, the damage isn't attributed to them. How do you show this? Is it augmented damage? No. I mean, the log just shows it being done by Dawn Crystal, but I guess Rhett and DK popped off in this phase, just in general. did a lot more holy shit. The DKs did insane damn. But I'm pretty sure Rhett did more Dawn Crystal damage than everyone else. So like if you wanted to make the P4 check easier, it was Rhett in like one other class, like randomly just did more damage with this spell. I don't know if it's mastery based or some other reason, but yeah. Max, what is the damage amp in P3? We have no idea. It's like some server side shit. It's not only is it like technically a damage amp, we don't know how much, and also some spells are doing more damage than other like specifically if you have an ability that reads like if you have an ability that says something like this like when you use wake of ashes the target takes x amount of damage over x seconds or if you have like an embellishment or a trinket or something that just makes the target take damage based on the damage of a regular ability like basically every class has something like that or something that you could relate to for that those things just like did more damage during that phase than other things for whatever reason it's really complicated like I don't know how to answer that question we we never were quite positive how exactly how it left your damage just that it did in fact we played arcane mage for the reason of touch of the magi working in that phase and we tried arcane and it did like way more than frost which you and it was just doing more on logs and frost of the boss so that's how we were playing it and then we went back for us and our raid damage went up pretty noticeably and the only thing we can really think of for that is that maybe auger voker was like basically arcane was stealing damage from auger voker and it wasn't attributing the damage back to them somehow My read was Holy wasn't going to bring Devo since it was Beans and there are better tanks to bring for your tanks. Oh as to why you played Rett? Yeah, I mean yeah, so people think we played Rett because it was really good, but it was just the, it was the best of the three things. Like, like basically Rett could have been way worse than it was and you still would have played Rett. Because like Prott kind of wasn't playable and Holy definitely wasn't playable So you just had to play red and then it happened to be that red. It was actually pretty decent. So it was nice Are you ready to know life the diablo expansion? Yep It's texting shroud about that yesterday. I told him we're setting records And he asked what records and I told him I don't know yet, but we're gonna fucking figure it out We're gonna make something break them Max, do you guys start farm right away or do you take a break after the race? So we finished last Monday, so like right now all of our characters are unsaved. Our next farm day is Monday, so like in a few days from now, four days from now. But we're not doing Bellaryn or Lura, we're just like chill, voidsfire farming. Like we'll probably gear up again. I think our goal is to get all of our players the mythic achievement. And then once we do that, we're just going to start like selling prior runs, like basically bring buyers in so they can get every single item and stuff, which is pretty rare. You usually aren't able to do that because you need to gear so many characters for the next raid, but after you get the mythic achievement, your characters are basically geared for free. So you now have four peats or six peats. We have won the race four times in a row. The six in a row thing is more of a meme. It was like a rage bait meme. And what that is is basically counting the void spire and dream rift as their own raids. Which is, I mean, technically true. Like going by Hall of Fame, it's true, but like it's like not true, you know? Just a good old rage bait. Max, do you think Blizzard will address splits with how many non-Racer World First Guilds are doing splits? I think they would do that, and it would have already done it if they could. Basically, there's no, and please do not take this as an opportunity to throw your take out there on how to fix it, which I promise you they've all been thought of before. just don't even just move on right but there's basically no way to make the top guilds not do splits that wouldn't still find a way to do it or that wouldn't very negatively affect the the community like the rating community as a whole which is like not the point of this right so it's not really doable however I do think it is a much bigger problem Like, I don't think these two things are the same. Like the top guilds doing like a bunch of splits is, I feel like at least that's been normal for a long time, but like within the last few years, you've seen like a lot of guilds start doing splits like really far up the world ranks. And then I think that's like probably, like the reason Blizzard might look to change it is like it's something that people are doing because they feel like they have to, but they don't think it's fun. And I mean, if you're someone who creates a game and people are doing something that you already don't like, but you also think is lowering people's enjoyment of the game, it would increase your, like, urgency to try to fix that problem. Where if it's just like the top guild, it's just like, you know, the top guilds are going to do whatever the top guilds do. But it's pretty widespread now, so. Yeah. Max, do you prefer the Heroic Week setup, or do you want all the difficulties at once? I'm a fan of Heroic Weeks in normal raids. I wasn't as much of a fan of it this time because there were just two Heroic Weeks. I like one Heroic Week. Surely the only fix to remove the need for them, but that means ending the whole gearing system and making live into a tournament realm, which breaks the gameplay loop. Yeah, or like other bad takes you'd hear or like make it so you can only clear The raid on one character and get geared. No other characters on your account can do it and it's like okay First of all that would fuck every player in the worst way, but also we would just create new accounts We just have one account per character like like there's ways around all of it. Um So Yeah, it's just there's no way to solve it. It's just the way it is I don't think heroic splits are as much of an issue. I mean, they're not great but they've been happening for a while. The mythic split thing I think is the biggest problem and they can simply fix that by just not releasing multiple raid instances at the same time, right? Or the issue with this raid with mythic splits this time is that they released two raids that were all very splittable where like for example March of Kildenos, you're never going to split Bellerin because you need to progress the last guy. So like let's just say you had nine bosses in each raid had three bosses one easy one medium and one hard that would be a lot harder to split you know what I mean because you your intention would be to kill the hard boss but you can't split the first boss if there's still a hard boss to kill in that instance right the dream rift obviously that's not true the void spire that's not true um so like that's one way to do that but wouldn't be the thing at that point to remove mythic track gear mythic is a skill grind not a gear grind that goes like very fundamentally against the way they look at They're gearing philosophy in an MMO that would never happen. Max, did you do any misdirection or baiting during this race, giving misinformation on purpose? No. I don't think so. You would never like do a bad strat to bait someone else, because the other guilds are smart enough to just be like, that looks bad, and then do something else, you know? So nothing like that. I don't, I'm trying, can you give an example of what you're even talking about? Like, what are you referring to where we intentionally gave misdirection to like another guild? Oh, the on all fours thing, yeah. Yeah, but that was more of a meme. I think most misdirection is for chat like when we made up that we extended last year and it like lived rent free in the minds of so many people Like that was that none of the guilds got tricked by that, you know Max you said two Augs were bad because two bad ebb and mice than used to That's probably not exactly what I said. What I probably said was one AUG gains full value, but for every other AUG you bring, they're technically a little worse, because instead of you just buffing DPS with your spell, you're also buffing one other character that's not doing a lot of damage, which just lowers its overall value objectively. That doesn't mean we weren't going to play them or that it wasn't good. It turns out that is true. It's just AUG is so overtuned that it's even still good to bring more than one or two of them. Max, can you ever see a scenario where Blizz makes a data mined secret phase to have a second truly hidden phase on top of that? Uh, nah. I mean this was the only secret phase that ended up feeling like it wasn't going to happen when it happened ever. Every other secret phase was known about before it happened. Um, like but so many things had to go into that being true. Like it's not even, it's false that it wasn't datamined. Like reintegration was datamined. The boss healing itself back up at a certain point was datamined. It's just, it also happened to be that the boss was so hard that all of us had convinced ourselves that that was some old like spell that they left in, which happens all the time, and it doesn't actually happen anymore because it would be insane to think that a boss that hard could have another phase, but then you know we were wrong. Not to mention most secret phases don't happen when a boss hits 0%. It's usually at like a slightly higher percent. So as soon as we were getting to zero it was even less likely that there's a secret phase also a lot of secret phases are At least recently are at the end of expansion rate Not at the beginning night hold is at the beginning, but that's fucking like almost 10 years ago, right? So like the recent secret phases have been at the end of expansion. So it wasn't an expansion it wasn't At like five or ten percent or something and it still was data-mined But the boss was so hard that we just figured that they gave up on it and it just wasn't going to happen And like basically everything had to go right for that moment to be what it was which is really fucking cool But I think it's pretty unlikely to happen again, and I can tell you Going forward will be skeptical that there's secret faces all the time if there's any spells like it because because we were like baited by it, right? Is there a scenario you'd bring AUG if it's not the best EPS, it's more to help classes with their niches making them stronger. You can't really do that with AUG anymore. Like AUG used to be about like, you could bring an AUG for the whole fight, but during the multi-dot part they could just buff the multi-dotters and like kind of transform into a multi-dot class. And during the burst part they would buff the people that are getting PI and all their CDs. That's not, AUG doesn't really make those decisions anymore, like they technically do with a couple of things, but they really don't. Most of their power is just kind of evenly spread out through the whole raid. Unless you do the like belleran thing, which is probably a good example of what you're talking about, where you specifically buffed the exact classes that were going to do the most damage at a certain time. But they've already fixed that. In fact, funny thing, I don't know if you guys are tracking this. The Blizzard made some nerfs to belleran over the weekend. And then alongside those nerfs, they hot-fixed bellerin, or they hot-fixed Augs, ebb and might buff to not be 100 yards, but 500 yards. So you actually can't do the like triangle formation, gigabuffing your egg DPS people. And now the DPS check, I don't know if it's impossible, but it's like really, really hard. They basically made the boss a lot harder by fixing the Aug thing. And basically, I think there's a lot of guilds right now, including very good guilds, like top Very good guilds like top 20 world guilds are sitting at bellerin unable to kill it Be until they fix this which is kind of like an ongoing situation Like northern sky for example Rilo's guild absolute banger guild had a pole where they had a 40% burn Which is probably good without the odd stuff and then they wiped it two and a half percent And they're just sitting there like literally just what do we do and Before you guys suggest it Doing a third p1 is not an option That phase is so that phase is probably harder than Lura We saw like five seconds of that phase in progression and we changed to a two-egg phase burn strat Before we even knew that it was mathematically possible we actually knew that from what we were doing at that point, you actually couldn't do it. But we just said there's a better chance of us optimizing and somehow figuring out how did two-phase this egg than it would ever be to do whatever the fuck that third phase is. Like do you know how insane of a decision that is? Like there's four quills. This is before the nerf. There's four quills. There's probably, we don't know how the orbs actually buff in that phase. We know at the end of the second egg phase you get circular orbs to come in. You can actually see this on our kill. Let's see, liquid armory. All right, look at this. It's near the end of this fight. We're in the last egg What do you guys notice about the end of this egg phase? Do you guys see, the fight's about to end so you don't realize it. Do you see the orbs coming in towards the boss? Right here. There's like 10 orbs coming in to the boss that you would have to immediately deal with after this phase ends. And this at the same time, when you come out of the first egg phase. Okay, so you're coming out of the first egg phase and look at like, oh, shit, I'm back up a little bit. So the first egg phase ends and you have all of these orbs to deal with. They're all trying to hit the boss. But you're going to have to deal with these at the exact same time that you're dealing with the orbs coming in the center. And then we don't even know how the orbs buff. So like when you're in the second P1 phase, you know how they added to this where like the orbs come in in a circle. Well, we know in the last P1 of Bellaryn that the orbs are increased again somehow. And our theory is that they might spawn from all four walls at a time. Like, do you notice how it's spawning right here from like this wall, and then also on the other side of the room it's doing this and they're like coming together? I think there's going to be all four walls in third P1. Like I think the third P1 of Bellaryn is the hardest boss of all time and is probably impossible. Maybe not after it's been nerfed, but the solution of like, okay, the AUG thing no longer works is like the boss just becomes like fucking crazy but yeah because gills don't really have an option because if you don't have the damage now with no aug P1 is also not a third P1 is also not an option so We had today an egg one burn of 38.8% but it's crazy RNG. Yeah, you know what the RNG is, right? There's a little RNG across the board but there's one major point of RNG and it's whether your Augs, Crit or Ebonmite. They've got to fix that like right now. That's insane. The fact that Crit is their best stat, they still have like 30 to 40% of it. But if they cast Ebonmite And it crits on the whole raid. And if it doesn't create, it doesn't crit on the whole raid. Instead of it like, critting per person or something. It's so insane. Like, it's just a massive DPS check. Or just a massive RNG thing. And then the egg is just a massive DPS check now. How many polls will Lura take you this week? We're not even doing Lura this week. We're going to do some chill voidspire on Monday. How close are other guilds to Laura now? Oh, Chinese guilds in P4. So they'll kill it soon. As soon as you're in P4, the boss can die in E-Pull. P4 is one-shotable, straight up. Some of you in this chat will pull Lura and you could one-shot it for sure. You need exactly nine people to do splinters correctly, which is certainly something that could just RNG happen. And then you just win. Are you not doing Lura because Bellrin's impossible? Now we're just chilling. I've gotten flamed after by saying, Bellerin is badly tuned. What do you think? Do you mean like right now? I mean, you have to be careful of who you're talking to. An example, the best example of this is Gallywix. I've used this example before, but if I'm using the Court of Public Opinion being my Twitch chat, if I were to say Gallywix was tuned poorly, they missed on Gallywix. And you were to say that right after the race world first, where still most of your viewers are basing their opinion on watching the race and a lot of them are race viewers and not players they'd be like, yeah, bro, so true Gallywix they told what is Blizzard doing? They totally fuck this. I'm fucking mad and If you even one month later said like they missed on Gallywix your entire chat would have the opposite reaction They're like, yo fuck you shut up race to world first elitist Like it is so much better to have bosses around Gallywix's difficulty than whatever the fuck answer Ike was So like there's clearly a major difference based on your priorities And you'd be surprised at how some people will feel about that versus others. That makes me wonder about how they're going to do the 0.7 mini raid. Yeah, I mean I asked them in an interview, which I thought is like, I thought that was a relevant question. Like, what is the tuning target for the one boss raid? You haven't done this in a long time. The last one you did was fucking UNET, which obviously was really poorly received by the general public. So like, you'd assume maybe you're going the opposite direction. It's gonna be really, like, I don't think there's, personally, I think there's like no way they're gonna make it super hard. Because like, what are we even doing? Like, it's replacing like some other things that are usually like giving you gear in the .7 patch. And like, don't they want that to be accessible? it's already near the end of the season. You're not getting the beginning of the season draw, and it's also right before the new season. Yeah, basically it's the Dell belt, exactly. So like, I mean, personally would blow my mind if they made it like multiple hundreds of polls for a race to world first skill that laid into a season. Because if they were also, I feel like wouldn't they be communicating that to us? Because then we would be like, okay, maybe we'll make an event for this or something. We could have two events every season now That's massive for the game's marketing and it's also massive for us they would they would want to communicate that to us But they haven't and We've asked and I asked in a public interview like what's your tuning target and they're like yeah We're not really talking about future patches. It's like okay. I get it PR training But like this I feel like everyone the game is kind of interested in what at least the ideas for that I don't think you're like jeopardizing your content by at least letting people know what to prepare for So, yeah, I'm looking for probably not, there's not going to be like a race for it, I think. At least the first time, because even if it's hard, none of our guilds know that it's hard, so we can't really like separate time for it or make an event for it. Because, like, imagine you do that and it just dies instantly, like, you can't do that. Has there ever been an end boss with so many instant raid white mechanics? Kind of Gallywix. Like, I mean, Gallywix had the fire-accid thing. But, I mean, obviously the rest of that boss wasn't that difficult. Yeah, I mean, the way that Lura plays out is like, if you lose anyone in P1, you're just going to wipe to the next kicks. So it's not even just the fire-acceed people. The boss requires as many kicks as you have in your raid. So if anyone's dead, you just automatically die. Max, maybe it's already been asked today, but how do you feel about the current state of mages? I'm not even going to read the rest of that. I don't really care. Not about your question just about mages. not the right person to ask for that. Max, you really took sneak.lua personally because you have just went off since then. I mean, I think we were going off before then and then. I don't think so. I've never really felt like massively driven out of like anger or anything in the race at all like after Razageth I just felt defeated because it's like not Echo's fault that happened it's just like what do you even do okay you get mad at Blizzard like cool like you're just gonna do their next raid anyway so who cares the only time I've truly felt like driven because I just wanted to like spite someone is there was a couple of clips after sepulcher specifically, where like a couple of their raiders were like, getting real. You know, just basically making fun of us for stopping and especially their casters. There's a couple clips of their casters. You know, just poking fun at us. And I don't know, that was a pretty sensitive time. And that made me really fucking mad. And that made me want to make them lose for the rest of my life. And like that hasn't lasted since then, you know, I don't like actively think about that anymore, but that's probably the only time that I felt like I felt like that was pretty bullshit and not like very sportsman like, and that that definitely drove me. But it's It's been a long time since I've even thought about that. Max, how did you feel when you saw that Echo was at 5% to 6% and you had just started the day? I felt the same way as Demensius, which is, I felt kind of happy because I assumed I was gonna wake up and have lost, and that it wasn't the case, so we're immediately starting off on a positive, but maybe I'm just pessimistic, I don't know. And then after, like Demensius, I was kind of like, shit and bricks the whole day, and then we won. So this tier, I was like, I don't know, we kind of did this last year, maybe we'll just outpace them, and then we did. And then the next day we woke up, and now we've done this twice, so it's like, I mean, fuck it. Let's just let's just hit this shit again. All of that is some combination of certainly playing well under pressure, but also getting a little lucky, right? Like just literally it's the smallest margins ever. Like on Demensius, they could have had like an extra crit, basically. And they could have won. They obviously you have people not dying stuff in this raid. They had multiple polls where like literally one thing if that did not go wrong, which is perfectly reasonable that that wouldn't have happened. But I mean, it's kind of hard to look at stuff like that. Like, that's just kind of how rating works. Like, basically, when you boil that down, all you're saying is, man, that's crazy. They could have killed the boss if they just didn't wipe. It's like, well, yeah. A lot of times, making one mistake on a boss like this just wipes you. That's how hard they are. That's kind of just how this works, right? But yeah, seeing how close they got afterwards. I didn't know how close they were, but that doesn't really, like, I knew when I woke, I knew they were at 10%. I never knew they got any lower than that, but that's not any less or more nerve-wracking. Like, whether you wipe it 10%, 20%, 0.5%, 5%, all that means is they could kill at any pull. No one of those means that more than the other. So it's just kind of like, I'm hoping I don't get a notification and discord that they killed it, and I'm just going to keep pulling. Max, is it true you guys were going to play seven MM hunters if the damage check on Paladins was harder? Yes. We had seven hunters geared for that boss. Also for dragons by the way, like if the dragon's DPS check was super tight, you also would have played just more hunters. If you're that close in a race, do you want to know when they kill it or just focus on the day? I mean, yeah, once they kill it, you want to know because then you just take like a long break. Like once they kill it all the pressure is gone it obviously sucks, but it's like You know You kind of need to like take a little break and like relock in to just finish the tier But yeah I mean you have to know when they kill it But you don't want to know when they're close to killing it because it could make you play worse But as soon as you lose nothing matters you could Take a week off go on vacation and come back and just kill it whenever it's completely irrelevant Getting second means actually nothing Um, Max, you say Blizzard doesn't care at all about the races. That really true. Um, I, first of all, I didn't say that. It's the first second time day someone's just said Max, you said this and I just didn't say that. Um, yeah, they, uh, yeah, it is a huge free ad for them. They obviously care. For example, if the race world first wasn't a thing, do you think they would have like turbo buffed bellarine in the second week? Like clearly they do some things to make sure there's like a spectacle in the race, but they also don't go as far as to like own the race or run it or put up prize money and stuff. But also I don't know if that's a bad thing. I don't have a lot of criticisms for the way Blizzard handles the race. As opposed to before, they massively fix issues quicker now and there are less issues that happen for like a streamlined smooth progression and they don't really get in our way. So I don't know, I'm not like disappointed with how they handle that. And I don't know if I would want them to like fully run it. They don't have a exactly a stellar history with eSports. And I think race is one of the most like very, it's just so interesting and different than most other eSports. I don't, it's kind of is what it is because of the community. I don't know if they want to get into that. Doing the fact that the race is streamed helps Blizzard identify issues in a timely manner. I don't know if it helps them, but it certainly makes them care more about fixing them. As the race has gone and gotten more popular, they fix things faster. Like even in the Ashara race, the third stream graced world first. The boss was unprogressively overtuned for two straight days and it wasn't fixed. There's no way that would happen in today's day and age. Like it's just gotten way better over time. What was the first stream grace? Oh dear. Max, can you explain how Liquid solved the memory game? That's right, mentioned that they had an external player watching and sending inputs, sure. All right, so here's the, so there's three, there's three phases. There's like the main phase, there's the blue phase, and there's the red phase, okay. In those phases, you get different signs, okay. So in the main phase, you get signs 1 and 4. There's five total signs. I don't remember if it's the blue or the red phase that also gets two, but I'm just going to say it's the blue phase, doesn't matter. It's just one of the other two phases gets mark 2 and mark 5. And the other one gets mark 3. And it goes out sequentially like this. Okay, so how we solved it is actually pretty similar to how you could solve this with basically typing it in chat So basically a tank is guaranteed to be in the main phase And it always sends one healer down to the blue and red phase now if you wanted to always be the same healer You could actually give the other two healers seeds And then they would never go downstairs to guarantee it's on these two people We thought healer seeds were terrible. So all four healers had to learn how to do this um But basically, those people have a thing on their UI that looks something like this. It's like a box, and then it just has like the five icons. It's like a triangle, a X, a diamond, a we use circle. I know this is very confusing. Some people saw like the triangle as a G and some shit, but it's whatever. And then the last one is a T, which we used blue for that for some reason. But I get it just because like we didn't think it really looked like a star. So, but you could use star fat. So let's say those are the five symbols. So each of those, each of these people, the tanks and the healers all have a box on their screen. And basically when the tanks first thing goes off and they see orange, they type orange. And then that puts an orange at the beginning of your week aura. The healer downstairs is blue. They see a diamond. The healer downstairs red. See something. Let's say it's a triangle and then the healer and then now back up to the tank. The tank sees number four. And let's say it's a star. And then the last healer sees five, which is an X, or a triangle. Let's say a triangle, because it can actually be two of the same thing. And not use one of the markers just to make it even more confusing. They press that, and then everyone else that shows up on their screen. Think of this thing on your screen as, and this is why this was allowed. It's basically just a chat box. So obviously what we did was we used the actual icons from the fight, but you could just use raid markers. And this is no different than if you just had raid chat, And your tank had a key bind that just simply put in a circle marker and raid chat. And then your healer had a key bind that had a diamond. Then your other healer had a key bind with triangle. And then your tank had one with star. And then your other healer had a triangle again. And then everyone just basically reads their raid chat instead of reading these markers on your screen. It's very binary, just regular communication, right? That's why they didn't remove this, because it's just very, very simple. Echo said on their stream that they had an analyst sit in their raid and do this. We had our players do it. We talked about having an analyst do it. And for two reasons we didn't want to. Number one, that means you're just wasting an analyst. Like, this person is just strapped to their computer pressing buttons for all progression, instead of like doing something helpful. Number two, and it's not helpful because it's not hard to do this in-game at all. We had like zero wipes to this. Not zero, but very few. And then on top of that, we kind of didn't want Blizzard to get mad at us. Like we felt like if this was players in-game, just typing these memory game mechanics out, it's basically just a smarter way of displaying and inputting the information that you could just type in Raid Chat, which is like, they could never get mad about it. They could never nerf this. That was important going into the tier because you never want to go in on a solution that they might change then you're losing time right you have to create a new one, even though we had backup plans and stuff, but something that we thought was Blizzard would not be mad at all about this this is super normal but as soon as you have someone outside the raid solving the memory game. That can be something where I could absolutely see them being like this is if you just look purely based on their philosophy I can see them hating the fuck out of that So that's why we didn't do it But I understand why echo did it though because like I feel like once you see us doing this You're like, okay Well, we can just use someone outside the raid doing it and as soon as they're not punishing us They're not gonna punish them even though it's slightly different. I also doubt maybe they would punish for it at all we just felt like if you're if we're putting ourselves in Blizzard shoes you hate the outside of the raid person doing this 10 times more than doing it inside the raid and we just didn't want to fuck with that. But what's the difference between that and 21st Man? Because what the 21st Man is doing is they are communicating things to you and they are saying things in comms and like basically raiding you. This is literally making this is someone outside the raid doing a mechanic that's happening inside the raid by literally like doing the mechanic. It's you're right though like you could say like what's the difference between them typing a thing in-game in their wow client Versus like just saying the things well obviously it's like better to see them But I mean it's still just communication right like saying it versus typing it But I don't know we just nothing's gonna happen anyone no one's getting in trouble for this I'm just telling you why we didn't do it because we just felt like it crossed the sketch line That's simple That's how that worked. Also, something that we didn't implement in that would have made the last phase DPS check a little easier. I was talking about this in a Discord last night. You can actually save some seeds in the last phase. So usually how the last phase works is like the first thing happens, right? The first arc arc angel happens. Each side use the seed. Okay, then after that, you go up here. Now each side uses a seed again. And at this point, there's like, I guess I could do this real quick. Okay, there's some like massive fucking frontal shadow thing here. Right. There's another one here. Okay. And then you do a second one, right? Okay, So now you go up here and you do your last one. I guess I should make this even more clear. So you actually have three, you have three here. And then now you have two here. And then now you just have the one remaining with the other two massive frontal things. Okay, something like this. It's actually much, much bigger than this, but something like this, this looks like pretty, it's actually even bigger than this, but whatever. Okay. Then you use this, and then after you use these last two lights, like basically this last frontal is going off and you're just trying to like beat the enrage. This is what you guys saw. If I go back to my handy dandy liquid armory here, This is what you guys see at the end of P3. UCS using our last two seeds right here. But what's possible is at the beginning and the end of this phase, because you're all next to each other, you could actually have one of these seed players actually put their seed down here and have one group stand on this side and the other group stand on this side. and you can use one seed to solve this Dark Archangel cast. Now if you use that idea over the whole phase, you can actually gain three extra seeds. So if you go back to the beginning of the phase, when you do the first Dark Archangel, like when you actually do the first Dark Archangel, Instead of using one on each side, you basically come to the middle, right? And then, you basically have a gate. You gate the first one instead of the second one now. And you basically have one side on each. You'd be very careful not to touch each other because you'll instantly die. And then now, once you go to the second one, Now you have three on one side and two on the other. What does this, but what does that give you? Just more space on the secret phase. Oh, you'll see. I'll get done explaining to you in a second why you would do this. Okay, and let me copy some of these things. Okay, so now you have extra lights. So I guess it kind of makes this phase a little bit easier, right? Now, after this, you use, this is just normal. You just use one per. So I'll go up here on the next one. This group would now have one. This group now has two. And there's two more massive funnels. Okay, and now at the end of this phase, after these last sets of mechanics, you use, I'll show you where your extra seeds are in a second, but now you have two remaining seeds, one on each side. Everyone gets in here. You live the dark archangel, what you're looking at right now. You live this with just one seed in the middle, and now you have two remaining seeds. Why that's important is now you don't rot out anymore at the end of this. Now you can heal until the frontal's about to go off. Once the frontal goes off, okay, so after this, you're now down to what, you use this again, and now you're down to one seed, everyone standing still. now live the frontal. And then after that, after the frontal is over, to just live the ray damage, you use the last one as well. And now you're here again. What this does, it extends the enrage in P3 by 10 seconds. Which if you guys watched the amount of times we wiped at like whatever percentage, obviously the DPS check in this phase becomes infinitely easier by doing this. We didn't see this in progression. Well, we thought about this in progression. I talked to Roger last night and they did as well. It is a little challenging because like once the time we actually saw the enrage, we didn't need to do this to beat the enrage. And it also presents some other challenges like, like for example, you could have some deaths of people cleaving each other, it's pretty tight proximity. And we wanted to do it specifically like maybe near the end of our day after we saw the secret phase, but we knew if we did this and it actually worked the way we thought it worked because it wasn't actually positive because like the way if you notice the seeds only really, let me find a POV. Who pops our first seed here? Or Smacked has it right here, I think. So I think I'm watching the right POV. Yes, Smacked has the seed. So you'll notice before he presses the extra action button, it's like, it becomes like a different thing when the actual Dark Archangel is happening to like kind of show you that this is what you're supposed to use it for. So, in other difficulties. So we kind of thought of this as a binary way to just solve Dark Archangel. But it's actually just a massive DR you could technically use for anything, including the frontal or rotting Ray Damage or anything. So it was a little unintuitive to come up with it, but this, and I don't know if your guilds should do this either by the way, because now the DPS check on this boss is going to become easier and easier, and it's definitely more technically difficult to do this. so I don't know if you'd want to do it. But what you could do is just ignore the first one. Like, don't do the first thing. Just keep it all the same. And just once you get to the last part, if you're behind on damage, just only use one of the two seeds instead of both. And then try to do this. Only if you know you're behind, because maybe you'd make it with five more seconds of DPS. Sorry, that's probably really technical. And a lot of you guys don't care about that, but it's something that I was thinking about yesterday. Max, anything interesting was said in the talk with Roger? Yeah, probably a lot of stuff. Okay. We were gonna look at the pre-raid tier list. I was gonna maybe do that today, But I also don't know how long I'm going to stream today mainly because I'm still at the team liquid facility and there's going to be insanely bad traffic starting at like 4pm. And if I go home now, I'll get there in like 15 minutes. And if I go home in an hour, I'll get home in like 50, 50 minutes. But I'm also having fun streaming at the moment. So maybe not. Max, sorry if someone asked this, but do you take a week off after race road first? Yeah, usually. For example, we killed it last reset and then this reset, we haven't rated until next Monday. So yeah, we generally speaking, yes. I live in LA so the gambit is stream for the length of rush hour, bro That would mean if I have to stream for the length of rush hour that means I would stream From now until like 7 30 or 8 p.m. Be like five hours, which is fine Well, my girlfriend just came home from vacation, so I want to spend some time with her so I'm not gonna take that long Max, are there any players you thought leveled up this year? I think everyone in our guild just played so insane. Max, apologies if I'm repeating myself, but do you see yourself taking 20 characters into next year? Well, the issue with 20 characters is way big. So there's two answers to this. Number one, I'm going to go with I hope not Because I think if we do this again, our entire guild's going to quit Number two It is a lot easier To maintain 20 characters going into the second and third tier of an expansion that it is at the beginning at the beginning You have to level all of them and then there's like infinite mythic zeros and And like just crazy amounts of work to do but going into a new season It's actually very chill like you basically show up with full this mythic gear from the previous patch And especially this patch when you get the mythic crest achievement like all of your characters are just gonna be business Fuck just crazy good. So I Think it's gonna like it's possible that way because now the characters are already made like it's possible We still like utilize them for splits, but the reality is if we're doing a simultaneous release of no Heroic Week. Heroic and Mythic are released at the same time, which is the expectation right now. That's what we did all through the Wharton. You don't really have time to use 20 characters. Like, at least you don't have time to do 20 full, like, Heroics. Like, that's just too much time. In that scenario, you pretty much only do that when you have a whole week to do it and there's nothing else to do. However, you could like keep the 20 characters and some of them are just for the last boss on Heroic because sometimes doing more of those bosses is really worth it. But I don't know. The answer is hopefully not. I'm personally very concerned about Burnout right now. This has been the hardest tier for them to prepare for and I don't want them all to quit the game. So if that and And by the way, if that means we have to go into next tier with like two or three or four less characters than our opponents, that just might have to be the case. Cause like, I don't know, like having slightly less gear is not as bad as having your best players quit the game. Max, do you think there will be more difficult bosses in the future or will Blitz chill? I mean, is there a limit for the hardness of bosses? I don't know about the last thing, but yeah, I mean, they're probably going to keep making hard bosses. Look at the last end bosses in a row, right? It is Firak, and then Ansarak, Gallywix, which is the polar bear in Arlington, Texas here. And then there is Demensius, and then Lura. So all of those besides Gallywix are like five of the ten hardest bosses ever. Most of them are within the five hardest bosses ever, and they were all really good. So like, if you look away from Gallywix, they basically just are consistently doing what would be considered the hardest boss ever, and they're re-upping themselves every single tier on that. So I mean, the expectation is going forward, they will probably keep doing that. Like, basically they've gotten themselves in a position now, or they don't really expect the majority of the community to kill this version of Lura. It's not possible. So they won't do it. Lura will be like this for this reset, and then it will look absolutely nothing like this. It'll probably get nerfed five times. And that's just kind of what we've gotten used to is like they release it for the top guilds, and then they just keep nerfing it so it becomes more fair for other people. And I think they've done a pretty, like I think that's a hard thing to do, and I think they've done pretty good job. Still guilds getting cutting edge even after these bosses are nerfed infinitely and they have 10 eye levels more or plus than we have, they still are taking 100-200 plus pulls on these bosses at the end of these patches, which is still a very difficult boss and still a very rewarding kill, right? So I think they're better at that than you think and I think it's a really hard thing to do to make content that is suitable for both the the best guilds in the world and the lower end of cutting edge. I think that's the delta between those things is enormous. So I think they overall do a pretty good job. How did you guys get Yargie? I don't know how to, we just did. We like, we just recruited him. He's not like a rare bird or something, you know what I'm saying? like he's like a player in a wild guild and we recruit him. Do you feel that method is on par with you in Echo or is there still a gap between you? I mean, there just obviously is, right? No flame. There's just very evidently a gap there. As far as like, if there's going to be a three horse race in the future, who knows, man? They're in a really tough spot. They're having us recruit their best players all the time. They have less experience naturally because of the way the race works, but hopefully they do, right? I mean, I can't answer that. Max, would you say that Bumi is the highest value addition to the guild in recent years? Maybe. He's way up there, yeah. Do you think enough players exist in the game to have a three-horse race? Enough players of that skill level? That is like probably yes, but enough players of that skill level that will realistically end up like committing the time and the characters to do this? It is is extremely, because it's already just so rare to even find people that are good enough. And then on top of that, they're willing to put in the work, because it's a very small pool. How hard is it to sit a great talent like hopeful? Just curious how they take a decision like that. I mean, it's really easy. Like hopeful is just one of many players in this guild that is like one of the best players in the world, but happens to not be playing a class that you want on the last boss, right? Like, that's just how it goes. Like, you don't play two mages on the last boss. There are nine other players that were also not in on the last boss that are just as good as that guy. It's just how it works. Sometimes you don't need five healers, sometimes you don't need, sometimes Holy Paladin isn't tuned well. Sometimes you don't want to play a rogue. Like, you know, it's just how it goes. Would you ever try to convince was to do I level caps? No. Okay. Do you live at the Alienware liquid compound now? No, dude. I just haven't had the courage to pack my stuff up and leave. It's just so annoying to do it. So I just keep driving here to stream. Were you shocked Method played this bad this tier? I don't think Method necessarily played super bad. I feel like every tier so far, they have been a step behind us in Echo, and then this tier, that was the same thing. Do you think the wind streak is making it harder for Echo to recruit and maintain their overall business success? So business success is largely tied to viewership. Recruiting maybe? But I don't know. There's still a lot of people I think even if like they had offers from us, there's a lot of people that would still rather raid an EU. There are some downsides to rating in a different region. So I don't know. They seem to be still recruiting really good players. Like, they lost some of their players to method like two tiers ago or something. And all the players they recruited were just as good. And that is insanely hard to pull off. So it seems like there's still a decent amount of talent. Max is a second NA guild possible for the race in your opinion. Yeah, there used to be one. I think it's regardless of NA or EU, it's hard for any third team to like really enter the real race for this for all the reasons we've talked about before. But yeah, BDG used to go for the race in NA. That was fucking annoying too. I do not envy Echo and Method having to fight for the same helpers. That sounds so fucking annoying, man. I'd be straight pissed off if there's another NA team going for the race. That would be so annoying. I mean, it's really hard for a race, like a guild to start going for the race in general. Like, using BDG as an example, right? Like, they were the best late-night, five-night a week guild in NA before they went for the race. That means for people who are not trying to raid Race to World First Hours, they wanted to raid later in the day, so Pacific Time or like just Night Owls. They had cornered the market on those players and created a great guild of good players that did that. And then they wanted to go for the race world first. The problem with this is now you no longer have that niche of getting those players that want that specific time frame. Now you're competing for players with us, right? And you're no longer the best at what you do. You're now the second best at what you do. So it's harder to get recruits. Some of your players that can't raid that much are going to leave when you make the jump in the amount of effort Which happened and then now it's like you're just always fighting a harder battle and if and it's only ever worth it if you win and It's just such a crazy gamble, right because now winning is the only thing that matters and it can kind of drive you crazy So it's like I don't know I feel like when you actually look at the decision from a guild even one that's really fucking good for going for race world first, even if you had just as good of players, which is not the case right now for any guild, you are fighting the experience battle. You are locking yourself into multiple years of getting better at this to even remotely have a chance. And during that time, we're going to recruit your best players and going to be giving you setbacks at every point just due to the nature of the game. You know, like it's it's an impossible ask And it makes sense why guilds do not really think about doing it. You, I thought you said viewership is what matters business-wise it is. And guess what? Get, guess who's never going to get any viewers unless you're about to win these guilds. There, the viewership comes along with the longstanding history of success. And you're fighting the narratives of people knowing who Echo players are and liquid players are, and they don't know who your players are. Therefore it's harder to care about them. Similar to like being more invested into season three of a show than season one because you've been with them for a while, right? You have no way. The only way, like these guilds have done that. They have tried to get the same level of success, but the viewership is nowhere close because people don't see them as a potential winner. And until that changes, it never will, and then you make no money. Max, bit of a weird question, but what makes Liquid's biggest stream being yours while Echo is being their main broadcast? I think it's just like what it started as, like when Echo formerly methods started doing the race to world first, they streamed with their main channel getting the most viewers and they like set it up from that from the beginning. And then when we started doing it, we didn't have like, we were just limit the guild. We didn't have like a production staff. We had like the Red Bull event, but people just listened to our stream. Also we streamed comms like a tier or two before method did. So like when you used to watch the old Methodstream, all you heard was casters and not their players. And for the first couple of tiers, you could just hear our comms and people really liked that. Now eventually Method started doing comms, but by that point, their main channel was already so dominant that people weren't going to change what they were used to. The followers were on that channel instead of different channels. And I think the opposite happened for us. By the time we actually got like a proper casting setup with like really good production, we're just used to listening to the guild at that point. I think it's just that simple. People for over a year of time for each guild got used to watching the race a certain way. Those same people keep tuning in and prefer the thing that they're used to. I think that's all it is. Max, how much do you know about advance? They seem really impressive. Maybe nothing? Are they EU or NA? I don't recognize. Oh, wait, Viclin's in the guild, so EU. me look at a roster here. Is that Andy Brew? So they got Andy and LaZell, those are the only players I know. You said they're very impressive. What are they doing? They're World 5th, they're ahead of Fat Shark, yes. What's their raid times? Fat Shark, yes, is like the quintessential always hard to tell progression rate schedule because like basically every guild in the world rates more than whatever they post publicly but so four hours Wednesday, four hours Thursday. Is that four hours still? No, that's three hours. Right? Or not six hours. Oh, Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, you're right. So, okay, so, six, six, four, six, six, four, four. So, seven days a week, average somewhere around five hours a night. That is eight? Oh, dude, I'm sorry, I just assumed it was the same. NA Math, you know? Oh, yeah, 16. I just seem to do is 18 again. So on the weekends they do eight hours. Okay, that's a little bit more than Fat Shark, right? Fat Shark has historically been five hours a night, seven days a week. That's been their bit. I don't know if they've ever started adding day raids and stuff, but yeah, it looks like it's still five hours a night plus they do eight hours over the weekend. And also randomly eight hours. Oh, that's because it's reset day rate. Yeah. So pretty similar. Looks like advance definitely raids a little more but pretty similar that's the guild lummals the 21st man for oh advance oh yeah I think it is six hours with a 20 minute break seems crazy that's like pretty standard for top guilds. I will say guilds generally at the top level definitely take less breaks than they should but I mean when you're when you're only rating okay I was about to say when you are only rating six hours I know that sounds insane to a lot of you but like for us that's like fucking nothing. When you're only rating six hours it depends on what time of day to. Breaks can also be like a little detrimental it depends on the kind of guild like maybe the most relatable version of this to you guys would be, have you guys ever rated in a guild with mostly people who work like nine to fives, and then you start your rate a few hours after people get home from work on a weekday, and then you play pretty good for the first like maybe hour or two of your rate, and then you have like a nice 10 minute break and then people come back and play like absolute shit. I believe that phenomenon is pretty common, and it's because basically like as soon as you come home from work, you eat and then you're like locked into play, but as soon as you like, do the opposite of like the gamer meme, like, you know, where the gamer sits up in his chair and like locks in, whenever you actually take that break, people usually just remain not locked in for the rest of the raid. There's something about it. And it's usually because you've already worked. Like you're, you're just like you're already kind of tired. Like you weren't raiding all day, but you were doing something else that was kind of making your brain do stuff. 20 minutes of breaks in a six hour raid, if it's like after people eat right before it, I think that's fine. Max, weird question, but how do you make sure you still get exercise or activity raiding all day during the race? You don't. We used to do calisthenics in the morning, which was very funny. And just to get a little sunlight, actually, that was pretty OP, but some of our players didn't like it for obvious reasons. But you kind of just don't, I mean, I worry about that because I'm very active all the time. And during the race, I just feel like total shit just sitting in my computer all day. But any time I spent exercising is just going to be not helping us win the race. So it's kind of just something you sacrifice for this. definitely feels bad, but it's also the right thing to do. Walking pad while raiding. No, I can never do that. It's just too weird of a look. I've seen automatic Jack do it, and it looks like he's walking towards me to like trap me to tell me about how Holy Priest works or something. It's terrifying. Max, what's your favorite merge from the raced world first now? I think our Demensius jerseys were my favorite, but I actually think the Race to World First, the World First jersey from this one was my favorite one we've done. My single favorite shirt would be the one we released this time, but Demensius was my favorite jersey. Max, what was your favorite bit from this raid? It wasn't really a bit, but Shaq spoiling the wordle that short was just one of the, It's probably the funniest thing I've ever seen in regards to something that's happened during the race. Oh, this cannot be pretty good too, yeah. Max, what would your best idea for making splits not be a thing anymore? I've never heard a good one or thought of a good one. his favorite bit is actually the Yps raid leading on voracious because he was doing that on Lura and P2. Yeah, early in P2 I was. And then I kind of stopped. They was like, pick it up and put it down. Max, what will you do as the raid leader focus for the rest of your season, MDI? Fuck no. Oh my god, blow me up. That sounds terrible. But yeah, no. So what I'll do is help our guild re-clear farm for as long as these bosses are hard, And then I'll just drift off into the sunset and do my own shit until the next PTR comes up. 6th Man MDI, bro. Having like a experienced raid leader be a real 6th Man for the MDI would be so astronomically broken, but absolutely no one will ever do it because it is so, it's just, there's no fucking way. Didn't Echo do that? No. Meera's helped them as like their sixth person, but he was not doing what I'm referring to do. No, he did not do it. You guys do not know what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is having someone outside your dungeon group call every single stop, call everything you're doing in the dungeon and literally be there for your 16 hours a day practice for weeks and months leading up to your event and shot calling everything that's happening from outside the group. No one No one has ever done that, that is not what Mira's did. That would be so broken, but obviously no one would ever do that, because like why the fuck would you do that for the MDI? It would be so fucking, it would be insane though. Yeah, yeah, Mira's was like more of like an analyst for that team, which by the way is very good, but that's not what I'm talking about. Is that even allowed? Yeah, probably. Maybe not at LAN, which there is going to be this year for the first time in a while. Do you think Mira is whatever, Lee Vecco? No. But dear god, I fucking wish he was. That'd be fucking amazing. He doesn't even have to come here, bro. He can go anywhere. He can go to the fucking moon. That'd be great. like not there okay um let me let me did someone said there was like a mirrors did like an echo Q&A was that like on his stream do you not like him oh i do i do really like him i just he's just really good and he's really smart which is bullshit Max, is it ever a hard decision on when to have the stream go dark to hide secrets? It's always a very hard decision. We had to make that decision multiple times this race and we always came up with not going dark Mostly due to when we actually killed the bosses during our day Like it was in the middle of the day and had it been at the end I think we would have gone dark, but there's also another thing about going dark. That's kind of interesting You play like shit a lot of the time. I don't know exactly why maybe people kind of relax because they're not on stream or But like most times we go dark it is not an efficient hour of progression and Echo this tier had the same issue At least I heard that when they went dark this tier They like did not play very well and did not see what they wanted to see and I can relate to that because that has happened to Us for before for sure So like it's that's another weird thing with it Surely there was going dark talk when the secret phase was revealed. Yeah, there was. Bubba was like, every single time we hit the secret phase today, we should black out our screens. And we were like, does that make the most sense for winning? Yes. Is that the corniest and most lame thing of all time. Also, yes. So we probably should not do that. Max, when you first hit P4 the first time, the screen was like 0.5 seconds dark. Is that what you wanted to go dark and click twice? No, I did intentionally have it go dark. And then I was like, we've already shown this phase anyway, and then I just unclicked it. Because it was all just happening in real time. I was processing that the boss wasn't over at the same time as like our initial plan was if we ever saw a secret phase, we would do that. Because like giving away that information is bad, but I was just too shocked. And then I just changed my mind. It all it was like a just a quick four second think max if you could take the top twenty players in the world how many non liquid players you think you'd take absolutely none fucking love everyone this job fuck everybody else actually know me all take mirrors I'll take that guy real quick. Someone in our guild is getting killed for him, but I don't know who. Some of you guys said Echo had an interesting like post here talk thing and you weren't referring to the Skype thing and you mentioned Mira as answering some questions. can I find this? Is it a YouTube video? Is it a, is it a Twitch FOD? Was this made up? Have you guys been in the spot of losing four times in a row? How tough of a time do they have now? I don't think losing races consecutively matters at all like losing a race at all in the short term is just so bad for the next six months that How many you've lost or one before that is irrelevant. It's just pure sadness At least that's the way I feel about it I mean at a certain point it probably starts to add up we've lost Three times in a row twice So we lost three times in a row when we first started going for the race world first, Old Year, Battle of Dzaralor, and Eternal Palace. But that didn't really feel that bad because we were just so new to it, and I think looking back on it especially, we were kind of out of our depth, you know? Like we were trying to beat a guild that's won like 10 plus world first, and we were just a bunch of people just figuring it out and I've never done this before, right? That kind of was fine. And then we lost from Sylvanas through Razagath, right? So we lost Sylvanas, Sepulcher, Razagath before we won again. And that one was probably a little harder just because the Sepulcher thing was its own situation And then our competition was also like flaming us for that and like making fun of us, which kind of sucked. And then Razageth, I still don't ever even talk about Razageth. It was hard to really even process Razageth honestly, like that, because it didn't really feel like a loss. It just felt like a thing. I don't even know how to put that, but, yeah, but then we went after that, that was fun. Who has been the hardest player to recruit for you? Well, I guess the proper answer to that would be someone that just still hasn't joined. But I don't think there's a lot of people that haven't joined and we just keep reaching out to them. Actually, Asshine was that player for a long time. But then he eventually joined. So for people that have actually joined the guild, it was probably Asshine. us and Echo tried to recruit that guy probably every single tier since the race started. Why was he hard to recruit? I don't know, he just kept saying no, I guess. What fight this tier, did you have the most fun progressing? The easy answer to that is always the last boss, but I mean, maybe Illyria? It was like really short-lived and the boss wasn't hard enough, but I still feel the same way that I feel about Gallywix where when you're the guild progressing a boss without a dungeon journal, regardless of its difficulty, that's still just really fucking fun. You're like changing things constantly. There's so many more problems to solve in real time, and it's just really fun for like everyone. It seems like Alieria is going to be pretty hard for human guilds. You guys made it look so easy. I mean, it should. I mean, what is it? Is there still this prog stats.io or is that, is that even a thing they even have enough data to do this yet? Yeah, Crown of the Cosmos. Typical pull count, 41 to 86. Typical progression time, 5 to 8 hours. And how much did we do it in? We did it in like 32, and that was something around 36 maybe, and that's right around, that's like with learning the fight and everything, which obviously added a bunch of polls. And then I think Echo did it in 20. But it looks like other guilds are doing that and significantly more. Then so it's actually interesting if you order the tier from like basically Chimeris is like the second or third boss and then it's like light blinded Vanguard is the sixth boss, Crown of the Cosmos is the seventh, Balloran is the eighth, eighth and then the Midnight Falls is the ninth which is weird because Crown of the Cosmos was supposed to be the eighth but if you don't put it there, the pull counts seem normal if you look at this as just an entire raid. Look at these typical pull gowns for regular guilds, right? It's like super easy first boss, super easy voracious. Fallen King, slightly harder. Vailgor, slightly harder. Light Blinded Vanguard, twice as hard as that. Crown of the Cosmos, still like more pulls than that. And then Beloran is like a huge jump in pulls and then Midnight Falls is another. It actually ends up having the difficulty curve of a regular race. How much of a skill gap do you think there is actually between the guilds given how tight of a margin Dimmy was and a lesser extent Lura between what guilds, all guilds, top guilds? Max, is that YouTube video you were looking for with Mirrors and Stripe, a look at Echo's raced world first preparation, how pros get ready raced world first for dummies? Nah, I mean, I have no idea. I was just basically basing that off of what some people in chat were saying. Between awesome Echo. Oh yeah, it seems pretty close. See what feels the same. There were things that I think we definitely did that lost a decent amount of time, but that's true like every tier, like it's hindsight rate. And I bet Echo would say the same thing I assume. I'm not sure. Like last year, we lost an insane amount of time on Fractalist. This year, we definitely lost time due to a variety of things. Like I don't know if it's the situation where we felt like we messed up and lost a lot of time and Echo felt like they played perfectly, but I strongly doubt that. I imagine that they also felt like that they lost some time doing some things inefficiently. And if that's the case, that would be true of both guilds and ended up being pretty close, right? Max, do you think ECHO's philosophy is Do you think Echo's philosophy on sleep has been hurting them at all? They only took like five hours of sleep on the night before the boss died? It's really hard for me to answer that question because I think guilds react differently to sleep maybe. Like I'll give you an example. If we lost the race and it was midnight and we had a vote to go to bed or to stay up, all 20 people would vote to go to bed. And if I said no, they would kill me in real life. And then Ekko had that happen to them this tier and last tier, and in both scenarios the players voted to keep going late into the night to kill it. Which means that like EU people just don't need as much sleep or something because that is just such a stark difference to me. And then there's another thing where like when we woke up, so we stayed up till 2 AM the night before we won, trying to kill the boss. And then we felt like when we went to sleep we were going to lose. And then we did, and we went to sleep, and we slept, there was nine hours in between our raids, was the idea, which is less than the normal 10 hours in between our raids. So we slept one less hour than normal, but we still got eight hours or tried to get eight hours of sleep, because we felt that even in the scenario where we're still trying to win, we need more sleep than sleeping four or five hours. We learned this lesson on Sarkarith where like if you sleep like four or five hours, people actually end up sleeping less than that in general. And if you don't kill the boss in the first couple hours when you wake up, you just lose. You just straight lose. But if they're, I don't actually know if what you said is true. I don't know if they're choosing to sleep less, but. So what happens when you are low on sleep in a race situation is you don't actually play that much worse for the first like x hours of the day, like four hours, six hours, eight hours, something like that. But when it starts getting like late at night, that is when low sleep starts to affect you. And both an argument for sleep hurting them if they slept less than us, which I believe is true, although I don't want to say that because like I haven't actually looked at myself. If they were not playing as well in at the end of the night, which was kind And at least relative to us was true on both the day we killed it and the day before. I could see lower sleep absolutely being a factor, because that is kind of exactly what happens to you when you sleep less. What is it? They still had around eight hours off in between, so yeah, so one less hour even than that. And normally the guilds do like 10 hours in between raids. Obviously it takes you about an hour to go back to your hotel and like really sleep, so that's seven hours of sleep. And that's assuming you're waking up right at raid time. You wake up an hour earlier, so that's six hours of sleep. Plus, it's in the back of their mind that we could kill the boss in the secret phase before they wake up. And that's something that absolutely affects us and affects them and hurts your sleep as well. And I find it really hard to sleep in those situations. So you're even getting less sleep than that. That's why it's so hard. And like, dude, people, but the thing is, is like, viewers don't get this. Like, people were like adding Aya in her stream to like go to the hotel and wake us up hours early because they're like, It's like dude, you just don't get it like if we were to wake up hours early just because they're close We would have no chance of killing the boss. That's not how this works. Like you need sleep To do this but like viewers don't understand that they don't understand breaks and they don't understand sleep breaks are insanely OP Yes, they're a little scary to take when another guild is actively pulling and could kill the boss But you just have to do it You can't just play all day and not take a break because that could happen your poles doom spiral and you have no chance It's but viewers just don't really get it Does your group go to their hotels and pull up Echo Streams, or is that banned? You can't really ban anyone from not watching anything on their phone when they—we used to like ban going on Twitter during the race, but sometimes people just like to decompress. But yeah, we strongly suggest that they don't do that. That's like common. It's like a rookie mistake. Someone does the race for the first time, and then they go home, or they go back to the hotel, and then they like just start watching like replays of our kills, or like the best thing you can do when the race is over is to fully decompress and just go to sleep as fast as possible. It's so much better than the next best thing, but it is very hard to do that when you're excited. So it's actually one of the reasons why killing a boss at the end of your raid time is one of the biggest give and take things like a hard boss. Because like, yes, you are your morale is up. Everyone's happy. You're going to go to sleep and you're going to wake up the next day, whatever. But like, whether you kill it that night or not you're gonna wake up the next day with the other guild having also killed it and seen a little farther than you and killing any boss that isn't the last boss first means nothing but what does happen when you kill a boss near the end of a day is people's adrenaline ramps up and we all find it very hard to go to sleep if we normally end our raid at midnight and expect everyone to be asleep by one people are not asleep by one if we kill the boss at midnight no fucking way like way later than that because they're just excited. And I think that lost hour of sleep. I don't know if it's ever not because you're never going to actually make a decision like this. Like, hey, let's not kill it because that would be bad. We'll lose sleep. Like, obviously, you're going to try to kill it within your raid time. But like, I don't know if it's actually good. Echo did that on tendril. No, echo did something completely different on tendril. That is a decision that I will never understand echo doing what they did on tendril is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever seen a guild do. I cannot understand why they chose to do that. Like everything that we know about the race, that is like the worst decision you could ever make. I don't know if it was like ego or whatever, but what do they do on Tindral? Okay, so remember how I told you that like basically the only thing that matters is like killing the last boss first? On Tindral, their raid time came and went and they didn't have Tindral did, But I'm guessing it was an ego thing because we killed Tindral at the end of our previous day, and we were already on Firehack. And they usually use that as a bar of what they need to do or better, right? Because they also have information. So it really feels bad to go to bed and not have done what we'd done on the previous day. It's going to be a morale hit. So they basically chose to stay up, I don't know how late, but I feel like they played for almost close to 20 hours. They raided four hours after raid time just to kill a boss that wasn't the end boss. Why this is a mistake is you can tendrils an insanely hard boss, right? And on any insanely hard boss, you play way better right after you wake up than when you're at the end of your day. It's like so much better. So what you do is you wake up the next day, let's say it took them four hours to kill it at night. it would probably take half that or less in the morning. Overall saving you time and keeping your circadian rhythm at the same point, which is very important. But they chose to do that. And yeah, I just think, I don't know exactly how they reviewed that in their guild after the raid, but I can't imagine they viewed that positively. I think that was a huge mistake. What was crazier, Echo on Tendril or Method on Silkencourt? Well, those are two separate things. So Method on Silkencourt was trying to kill the boss before the reset. So they got an extra item in their vault. And that actually made sense. Like they literally got an extra boss, mythic boss of loot by doing it. Echo did not do that. This was, they did not, none of those things applied, right? But also, I think Method was a mistake too. Even killing it, there was obviously a risk of them not killing it. And then it would have been just one of the worst decisions ever. But even with killing it, I think it was a mistake. There's no way fucking your sleep like that is worth whatever you were getting out of it. Always fascinating to hear about how the race is in endurance sport. Exactly, yeah. Often misunderstood. Did you see Jinji comment and say you cried about Razigith? Oh well, okay. So first of all, I don't even know if you're saying that or not, but I could certainly imagine Jinji saying something like that. So let's just assume that's true. Yeah. Yes, it turns out when a boss was nerfed and killed while we were asleep, if crying just means complaining, We definitely complained about that 100p. Like, 100 fucking p. I'm complaining about it to this day. Feel like that's pretty valid. Hey, buddy. What a cute dog. Big husky. Hey, little dude. Can y'all see the dog on camera here? Everybody, hey. I don't know whose dog this is. I've never seen this husky before. Come here, little homie. Hey. Hey, little dog. He's so fluffy. Fluffy dog. It's hard to find a proper time to nerf a boss without giving any region a kind of advantage. Correct, yeah. All you can kind of do is if you're nerfing a part of the fight that both guilds have seen in okay mana times. Let's just say you've nerfed P2 of a boss and both guilds have seen P2 15 times If it's still going to take multiple days for the boss to die As long as it's true that both guilds have been about on it a certain amount of time That would be good. Like for example imagine if on tendril we were like have had 50 more polls on P2 seeds and we're doing them really well and Method just got to the boss, but then they nerfed P1 and P2 that would negatively affect us They try and I think to their credit do a really good job of making sure that never happens where they nerf a boss Significantly enough to where if a guild is getting there behind they now can catch up in progress because the other guild had to learn a like version of the phase it wasn't there But yeah as far as timing I Know EU views it as us getting these nerves at the start of the day It's like bad for them because they're getting it when they go to bed, which I mean I could see that I can certainly see being in That scenario and being tilted about it, but that's also just they've there is no real time I don't know if they could pick a better time than that I don't know if there is a time actually where everyone is happy though because it's kind of the inverse of that or It is Then I guess one thing you could do is try to just be consistent and just try to make it known that basic So every guild can plan around it like hey if we're ever going to change one of these bosses It's going to be at this time or something Not sure. Did you guys complain to Blizzard at all about the Raznerf? I mean, maybe. All I remember is like normally after tiers, we have like a interview with the devs. It's not public or anything. It's not like super secret or anything. secret or anything it's just like usually they just talk with each of the guilds with some of the fight designers about how some things When and like ways for them to improve and them to ask us some questions and stuff And we declined at that time and like they did some Rationalizing of the nerf basically without us having said anything and I'm pretty sure we just never responded to them Maybe we're just over it Because nothing was gonna come out of that and we were pretty tilted It's a six to eight hours notice just in case a guild wants to rest before the nerfs. Yeah, but I mean, giving a six to eight hour notice versus just doing it is like kind of the same thing though, because you're not going to ever choose to go to sleep. You're not going to sleep in that. You can't like sleep an hour early or two hours early. People don't go to bed because they're used to going to bed at a certain time. basically in a tough position. I'm sure some nerf timings for NA and EU could always be pushed in a slightly different way to not fever one of the teams as much or something, but I mean they pretty much do them at the same time. And at least for the past couple tiers, they've done it without, I can't speak about method, but at least for Echo and Liquid, they do it usually when the guilds have had almost the exact same pulls on the boss. So it, I think that's probably the closest thing they can do to make sure that like one team wasn't affected more by the nerf than others. I'd love to see you radiating echoes right now. Any tricks to falling asleep before a big day? I just take like a probably illegal amount of sleep medication. Do you consider extending on Gahoon limits biggest mistake? I think our biggest mistake was not doing enough splits in sanctum of domination, specifically. Because that one, you could have made a better decision without hindsight. The extend decision in Oldier was made without information that was needed. So they nerfed FETA Devourer on the Reclear, which is we felt like the loot from the bosses would not be worth the amount of time it would take to Reclear FETA Devourer. But it turns out that they had nerfed FETA Devourer on the reset, but just didn't post about it until three hours later. So by the time we had already made the decision, it was too late. And had we had that information, we wouldn't have extended. And if FETA Devourer wasn't nerfed, Extending was the right decision so most feted of our or most oldier stuff is hindsight shit saying it's a bad decision But I think the sanctum thing was just a bad play So, Max, do you think the add-on limitations had an effect on the race in general or the guild in particular? No, I feel like we actually adapted to that pretty well. There's still one thing that add-ons, as far as I know, can't do, right? There's like two things. So, let's just say there's a mechanic that goes out, it's a debuff. Let's say it's this debuff, and like, you need players to go to an exact marker with these debuffs. I'm not even going to, you guys can probably think of a million mechanics that are just like this. Breed twister is probably the most recent. And it's like, you need a weak aura to tell you to stand on Diamond, and you to stand on Triangle, and you to stand on Orange, and you to stand on Star, whatever. it's like super precise and you have to be on those exact markers and it needs a backup list and it dynamically assigns things. You cannot do this. And maybe unsurprisingly, they didn't really make any mechanics that require you to do this. Now there's another mechanic that is like this as well. Another mechanic would be like, let's say there's four soaks, right? There's four soaks and you need five players in each soak. And Let's say you assign people within each soak. Let's say everyone's a range DPS and there's one healer in all of them. But let's say these three people get picked with the actual mechanic. So naturally this person has to go here, this person has to go here, this person has to go here and this person also got picked with this. But now, oops, these people are gonna die to this soak because there's not enough people in it. So you have a dynamic backup list that tells this person to soak over here, tells this person to soak over here and tells this person to back up soak over here so you never have any wipes. It's like a dynamic assigned list. This you cannot really do anymore. But as I'm sure a few of you guys are recognizing right now, Blizzard has been really smart with how they create these mechanics now to where you no longer need this. Prime example, Midnight Falls in P2. So Midnight Falls has a P2 mechanic, okay, where basically there are four soaks. It's almost exactly, almost identical to what you guys were just looking at on that screen. Okay, there's a right before this happens. There is a soak, these four lines. This is a four-person soak. Normally this could pick anyone, but the smart thing Blizzard did is this line can only pick a tank. This line can only pick a melee. Or, I mean, well, it's not necessarily that line. But basically, between the four things, one picks a ranged DPS, one picks a melee, one picks a tank, one picks a healer. This makes you able to dynamically assign it. And they did another smart thing. They made it so seeds can't be picked with this mechanic. So when you look at our setup for this, one second, let me pull up a spreadsheet to show you how we assigned it. Alright, so how we set this up is based on our RAID comp, take a picture of this. So based on our raid comp we made it so we ran a certain amount of melee to where we didn't have 5 melee, so we put 1 ranged in this soak every time. Now if KSP didn't have a crystal, he could get picked with the ranged thing, so now he would have to learn how to go to Skull and then you'd need to assign a backup system for someone over here to actually take his place in the melee camp. But the way we set it up is we put a player with a crystal in the healer camp, a player with a crystal in the melee camp, and then three ranged all with crystals in the tank camp. So now it's impossible for anyone but a tank to get picked with this line. It's impossible for anyone but a healer to get picked with this line. It is impossible for anyone but a melee to get picked with this line because we did the specific spreads that we did and we locked them out of getting the mechanic. I'm sure did this intentionally because they also did this on Demensius and they also did this on They also did this on Whatever the boss was light-blinded vanguards. I think is the name When we did light-blinded vanguards assignments, I'm sure let me see if I can if that's even still on this fucking sheet Where the fuck is the vanguards thing that's feels so long ago Yeah, I don't think it's going to be here. Maybe it is. Yeah, no, it's not. But yeah, that boss had four soaks, right, on light-blinded vanguards. And a healer got every single one. So they just made it, so there's multiple ways to do this. had basically the exact same thing on Vanguard, where a mechanic like this last expansion before to the Mencius tier, it would have gone on a random player, but they knew that you would have at least four healers in the raid. So they put them all on healers. So the only the assignments are static for everyone in the raid, except for healers. Now you did five healers boss, which was interesting. So Driny had to like learn where the four spots was. And if Zevi ever didn't have it, he knew to go like back left or something like that, but that's like a little complicated, but yeah, not not needed for a week or a. Next, has there ever been a boss where you thought after killing it that you totally missed a potential strategy, even if you cleared it? Have you ever felt in hindsight that you did a boss on a self-imposed hard mode? Oh yeah, actually literally, I explained this earlier, but on Lura, I'm not going to do it again, but you can rewind the stream, but basically there was a way to make the P3 damage check 10 seconds easier. As well as I have a better P1 strat as well for midnight falls as well, involving the crystals. And it's putting difficulty in a slightly different place, but basically what you do is you make it so the mark people, the people who have the five marks never have to like do the crystal drop thing where they like the beam is coming to them and then they like drop the crystal and move off of it and then pick it up again. You can uh I came up with a strat where you basically just do a pixel stack drop of the crystals and basically you just pick up the crystal afterwards if you don't get assigned with a mark uh except for one player that you just have learned how to do it and then the this is by the way the number one biggest wipe condition of this fight is a seed player doing this incorrectly. Doing the memory game with the seeds is very hard and you can completely remove it. Max, who came up with the Windwalker Cook on the bird boss? Bubba and Lummel. Have you tried the raid planer raidstrats.gg? No, I had someone link me on this race, though. It looks pretty clean. Max, can you quickly explain how crystals getting damage spawn soaks? Sure, if you have the crystal on your body, like you're holding it, and you get hit with any cosmic damage, it spawns two soaks that if not soaked will instantly kill everyone. That's how it works. The alternative to that is, if the seed is ever on the ground and it gets hit by cosmic damage, it just instantly blows up everyone in the raid. There's two potential things where that can happen. I guess there's also a third. If you never heal up the crystal initially, it will just kill the raid, but that's not that's like after the first couple pulls that doesn't happen. Were there any console just for the last bosses that you were considering outside of bear? Yeah, we considered disc priest. We considered swapping out rogue for another on Holy UK. Max, how do you handle the kicks without week or is A few of our players were doing it without any kind of help. I think Fired Up was one of them. I can show you that. Okay, so how Fired Up did the kicks is, he was on boss frame 2, so let me just show you the pull. So the boss spawns these crystals, 3, 2, 1, and I'm going to pause it. it. You see his mouse. He's going to use his mouse. He's going to focus. He just has a macro to focus boss frame two. And he knows he's kick. I think it's like four. I think it's kick four. So when these things spawn, they spawn with five stacks. And every time they're kicked, they're removing a stack. So he knows that if he's kick four, he needs to kick when this thing has two stacks left, right? So what he does is he focuses this and then he has his focus frame right here. Okay, so now you're going to see it casting, it gets kicked the first time, it gets kicked the second time, it gets kicked the third time, and then now it's his kick, he's known three casts have gone off and he doesn't have to count the casts, he knows because it has two stacks of the thing. And then now he just has a macro counter strike holy shit to counter spell his focus when it hits two stacks so now the thing casts he uses his counter spell and then he kicks it. This is done fully default UI, zero, zero additions whatsoever. Now what some other people did is they had like a, I don't know exactly how this was done but it was Blizzard approved they were able to like get an alert when it's their kick basically and it just like plays an air horn when it's their time to kick but that's like there's some crazy technology going on with that but you certainly don't need that it's just helpful pretty sure that's a skin is not default UI okay but you give what I mean though right like all of this functionality is available with default it just will also not be skinned but that's just preference, right? I'm pretty sure default looks worse. Okay, yeah, so that's, I mean, that's kind of the thing with add-ons, right? So add-ons in a lot of ways are not doing things that you literally cannot do in the default UI. It just, or mechanics are not impossible to be done with default UI. It's just using add-ons can sometimes make them easier. That's the whole, that's like the whole thing. Not to say it isn't a problem, but that's just what it is, right? Seems tough for Melee. I think the only Melee ones that were weird is these things kind of rotate behind your character a little bit, and like I know definitely some kicks were missed because like someone was dodging a glaive and then they hit their kick, but like the thing happened to be rotating behind them at that point, so their kick didn't actually reach the target they needed to kick. it they tried to kick with it directly behind them and kicks aren't omnidirectional you have to be facing them in some classes cases Yeah Did rating from home fuck with Nick at all I was concerned concerned about that. I don't know that's not me. I Am a different person What's your take on rogues this year? They kind of low roll tuning a little bit. I feel like it's not super controversial. That kind of happens in classes every now and then. I think it's pretty unlucky if you have 3 DPS specs and they all low roll, which they did this year, but it is what it is. Max, what was the deal with Hopeful's tweet after the kill? Again, not me. I don't know. I don't even know what tweet you're talking about. He sat. Okay. The one where he said the best thing he ever did was sit on the bench. I mean, I don't know how I feel about that. It seems like pretty inconsequential. He's basically just saying like, I'm on the bench. I've been in the guild for two tiers and I've been on the bench and we've won so the best thing I've ever done is sit on the bench. W. He specified liquid. He was basically saying that he didn't play mage for Echo instead of Genji. Oh, like, I mean, I don't even think that's flame at him in Echo though, right? wasn't he the second major echo behind Jinji? So he would have been benched anyway. I think you guys are looking into it. I don't think it's like some fucking crazy like 10 head double entendre shit. I'm pretty sure he's just saying things. Yeah, just a quick little self-deprecating tweet, not that deep. All right, questions are about are becoming kind of static. Is there anything like, any like, anyone given any like think pieces on the race on YouTube or something? I looked for a mirror as earlier because you guys said there was one, but I don't think there was. Preach did a, preach did a thing. Okay. Preach gaming. Preach was also on the potty cast. We were going to record the podcast today, but then, uh, We ended up getting a cool guest for it, so it's going to be in a couple days instead. He did it on Twitch. He hasn't uploaded it yet, all right. Why would the first thing that showed up on Twitch or on Google be his Twitch team? That's interesting. We back post raced world first chat. Oh, he hits a no starting soon. We good. We good. He had to restart stream. No lefts, no lefts. Is there like a oh, he lagged out. Is this like in the middle of his? Is dorky still hated in liquid? Oh, what the fuck? We don't hate dorky. There's multiple of that title. It's the first one. Oh, my God. This is the the one where he talks race. All right, cool. We'll watch this in a second. I'm going to bear back. I'm just a quick heads up, we can see testicles, I'm sure it's one, just a quick address. It has been 552 days since rebirth, any day now, hold the faith. I I of What are they doing? What they do of There's no way you go for three phases yet. No. Ash in benediction now reduces healing done by 5% was 10% per phase. What? That's it? Bro, that isn't a nerf at all. The issue is people lost damage because of the AUG change. Why would you just only nerf the healing? That's a total meme. playing the third orb phase is not doable. Like maybe after the nerfs now, that's so bad. that I don't know of the I Did am I crazy in thinking that there's Too much emphasis put on One person being dead at the end of a fight because there's no battle res is left But it seems like no one puts any blame on the people who cost those battle res in the first place like am I wrong in thinking that? the mistakes of People that caused deaths. Let's say there's four total deaths and three of them were battle res is being that the other three just happened earlier They're all the same level of responsibility But everyone's only shitting on the one person who just there was no more battle res is left. I don't really get that Oh, this part was muted apparently does he have a whole like highlight real intro Ah! Comfortable chair! Oh, heaven be! Oh, there's no scheduled lunches anymore! I don't have to disappear and fucking wander away and do all sorts of other shit. We're here, dude. Yes, your most infamous, infamous world second caster, Hath returned. I had one thing to say say when liquid suck the world first man, I looked at medic because it was me and him or your under shift and I said, you're fucking doing it. I am not doing it for the full fucking time, bro. I'm not doing it. You can announce it. I'm not doing it for the full fucking time. This is on you, brother. This is on you. I'm not doing it again, man. For three times in a row, I've been on cast when liquid is be echo. I'm not doing it again, man. No way. Yeah, that's no fucking way. That probably is pretty hard like you Like if you look like you're tilted at all people are just gonna screenshot your face if you even say anything remotely weird People are gonna like Crucify you for being biased, which you obviously are like every caster is gonna be biased for their team There's like basically no positives that could come out of being that exact caster that has to do that Especially preach because people already don't do the thing with preach is Okay, so like when we killed galleywicks, I think like he got some blowback for that but I Still think people's original beef with Preach is really funny most of it stems back to like when everyone started doing Final Fantasy stuff and they had all those lawsuits and then like preach basically had a video that that was titled like I'm done with World of Warcraft or something. And like if you guys are used to YouTube, like usually titles and thumbnails are really sensational to get you to click on them. And that's all that was. If you listen to what he said, he never said, I'm never coming back to Wow. He never said, I'm done with Wow. He's like, I think I'm going to take a break from Wow for a few months, which is not controversial at all. and then everyone for so long took that like when he came back to wow which is what he said he would do people were like I thought you're fucking done with this bitch like they were just they took it so personally and he never even said that but honestly I think that comes with the territory because if you use clickbait titles on YouTube I think you are like kind of baiting the viewer so I think it's also fair that they don't watch the video and just think the title is what you actually said and meant. So I mean it kind of goes both ways but it is funny that he never actually said that. I'm sorry Phil. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I wish. I wish. Maybe I am the curse. We've decided I think that the SK gaming facility is cursed. Like the facility is a curse. We're out of it. I think Julie is the curse. Ever since we got nice food at the race to world first. Disaster. Disaster. I blame Julia entirely. I blame Julia entirely. She's absolutely worst. The kebab is an absolute curse. Like, fuck that. Fuck that. Medic too. Yeah. Yeah, man. That was a grim night. That was a sad night. They deserve to lose and they know it. They deserve to lose. They had every chance. They had every chance. Now, I should, before we get into this I ought to give you some context because I haven't spoken to the players at all because it was fucked at the last day it was absolutely fucked at 9 o'clock in the fucking morning I'm gonna use some TTS for a little while here so you're not feuding all over me while I explain this what at 9 o'clock in the morning on kill day we knew it was kill day right absolutely well if we'd known it was kill day for three days but then the fight kept going on right so for the third day in a row it's kill day which is very stressful on everybody because you're like you need to fucking dial in now and that includes the castors you gotta get ready for what's coming so at nine o'clock in the morning i'm in the gym and uh i've kind of got the uh there's like a bluetooth speaker in there so i've got the race on the speaker and i'm working out and uh in walks my uh grim he's like the uh big Fucking the big brain that's running the show kind of thing. He's doing all the bits and bobs, right? So Grimm comes in and he goes Mike We need to have that conversation. I'm like, I know which conversation this is and says can you stay longer in case this does not Still die today So I just said you have my axe That's all I said is like you have my axe as much as it fucking kills me I haven't seen my family now in a long time and this fucking thing will not die It just will not die. I was like you have my ex. I was like, all right I can stay and then some people couldn't stay in blah blah blah and I was scheduled to leave At 6 a.m. The following day. I was scheduled to leave at 6 a.m. The following day, right? So he goes okay, I'm gonna rebook the flights give everybody an extra a couple of days we're going to extend the hotels blah blah blah I'm like alright been there before not the first time right did it reciprocal back in the day so not unusual so the day gets going but we're all expecting Echo to have killed Lura and won the race 2 p.m. late and really including us yeah but I'm sure like that's the thing that I'm really surprised about is that dude when you wake up as a guild and you're like, Oh, dude, we're going to win. You play so good because everyone has like so much confidence. And there's like, you don't feel pressure really, because you're just like, we're like, they went to bed. Holy fuck, we win. I feel like in the past, like before Manaforge Omega, if Echo ever woke up and we went to bed with a killable boss, they were just going to kill that boss like every time. Um, so I'm, I'm definitely surprised that that didn't happen. Like they had so many P4 wipes and just P4s are not hard. I have a build. I've got to get into this, but I haven't been able to speak to anybody at liquid. I haven't spoke. So I haven't even spoke to anybody echo. So context there. I'm sure that liquid went to bed that night. They assumed they'd lost. I have to 100 P. I mean, not like 100% chance. Like when we talked before we went off, I can actually tell you exactly what I said. I'm like, guys, I know we were planning on staying up all night. I think some people are starting to get tired. I think realistically, we have a bit more to go and we're not going to kill it tonight. We're going to wake up tomorrow. And if they have not killed the boss, we are going to win. However, it is possible that we wake up tomorrow and they have killed the boss. And if that's the case, we're all really proud of you. you've done a really good job and you know just didn't work out basically and then that was it and then we went to bed so like it was it was publicly spoken that like we might lose but also if we wake up and it's not dead fucking you guys know what this feels like we've done this today and we did this on Demensius we know we can do it so it's just basically like once we woke up we just felt really good. I believe that they they probably thought at least a reasonable margin of error that they'd lost the race they were exhausted They were done They had to go to bed and I'm so sure and they should have been correct They should have been correct. I obviously love the Echo boys, but they should have been correct That boss should have been dead before liquid woke up And so, you know, it's very hard boss don't get me wrong and they do it so It's scheduled so that me and medical do the nighttime And I'm really happy with that and I said multiple times through the day The best thing that can happen is I do not cast today. I shouldn't be casting today I shouldn't be on and it's a other side was really nice that people were like what where are you coming on blah blah blah blah And it's y'all day and stuff. I should not be casting today. I think it was Alex and Someone else who were on I said I shouldn't be casting today and then The clock started ticking I had a really good pull We didn't get there, but we were saying they do need more experience in this phase. They probably need to hit like you know three or four more times and they'll be cozy and relaxed in that phase. It's not that hard. You know, you move around, you move out with some stars, but I mean it's hard, but it's not like the end of the world hard. They need a couple more times. They're now over killing Lura in phase three so much that she's not even casting Darkwave anymore. Like they're killing it before. They've got so much damage. damage, but FTM had to re-roll. So he's got to relearn a little bit with this, but he's a phenomenal player, so it should be fine. Yeah, I actually didn't re-watch their day of progression. I don't know how much regression they had with disc. We were scared of disc. Like, second disc is not great for healing that fight, for especially stuff in P1. Like, they're really sketchy when you go downstairs in P1, and P1's really hard, and people play worse when they're not as top even if they don't die. and also they're really bad for healing up the seeds. So like, when we thought about bringing in damage, we were like, fuck bringing in disc, man. Like that sounds so much worse than Guardian specifically. I think that decision might have actually, like I think they probably would have won if they didn't make any comp swaps. Unless again, they didn't even regress. Like they just instantly, like for example, I think one of the main reasons we won was how well we executed the Guardian comp swap. We on the first pull of Guardian we were in P4 with everyone alive. Like we one shot it after 400 plus pulls with blood decay. That was like a huge thing. That was also very morale boosting. So we're making all these sort of justifications in our heads. So yeah, 2 p.m. Ish 2 p.m. Ish sounds pretty good 2 p.m. Comes. It's not dead The 3 p.m. Comes it's not dead And then the conversation started to shift a little bit and it was before dinner, which was pushed back, which was like five, then the conversations changes again as people start going, well, when is liquid waking up? I'm like, oh no, we're having this conversation. We should not be having this conversation. When are liquid waking up? When is that happening? Because if they wake up and see that it's not dead, they're going to come out like a fucking freight train, right? They're gonna come out like a fucking freight train and the players are gonna know that and it's gonna be just the worst vibes ever But we shouldn't get there. So it's not that big of a deal And I was in the live chat and then I find out we haven't rebooked the flights That hasn't happened. I wonder if it also gave them an extra morale boost because like we We woke up an hour later because we stayed up later And I wonder if they thought You know like oh liquid's gonna be on soon and they saw that we weren't waking up and they're like okay We still have time, you know, but Because we expected Lura to be dead if Lura died by like 2 p.m. We can have a bit of a celebration Sure, I can't I like have a drink with the guys or anything because I don't think they even knew You know it's in like the back of your head You're not like checking their stream to see if they wake up, but like near the end of our night It's in my mind that like echo is waking up soon pretty sure I Oh, apparently, by the way, on the Lauren, this wasn't data mined, but they changed not only this, but they also nerfed the egg HP. So it's, so it's, it used to be 207 million. And now it is 187. So 20 million less HP on the egg. So you can go back to a regular progression of that boss now after the augner. shortly after I've got to get up around 6am so no big party or anything but it makes sense it's very expensive to rebook all the flights and the hotels and whatever right that's a lot of cost I think to like reschedule the US players so like Spen and Vin was like $2,700 like a person so it's really expensive to add more hotels and more flights so Grim decides we'll not rebook the hotels and the flights until it dies and then we know what we're gonna do right All right. Sounds good. 6 p.m. Comes Max, why are you complaining about the difficulty of the bird when Laura took way more to kill? What? I'm getting one guide. What are you talking about? I'm scheduled to start at 7 p.m. I'm talking about and I'm in the chat and I'm like I'm gonna have to cast Which is really fucking sad So sad. So sad. And so I got on with medic. I mean medic having dinner. And we're discussing like how this is going to go, how we're going to do it, and blah blah blah like because they still should kill it. Right, they still should kill it. So we're going through that and the players start chipping in as well because we had gobs, spen, arcsies, and stove on site that weren't in the raid. So they're having dinner with us and we're all throwing bits and pieces in it's like how should this go you know they're breaking this losing streak after nearly three years so we're all me and medica are all set and we're about to go on cast i put the fucking headset on and i'm like in the back of my mind for the first time in long time i'm like they're not gonna win i knew it i fucking knew it man wait when did you know it was like this is gonna sit on and I'm like both on site that weren't in the raid so they're having dinner with us and we're all throwing bits and pieces in it's like after dinner let's go you know they're breaking this losing streak after nearly three years so we're all me and medica are all set and we're about to go on cast I put the fucking headset on and I'm like in the back of my mind for the first time a long I'm like they're not gonna win. Let's fucking go bro. We have aura This is what everyone used to say about echo brother like dude when echo gets that fucking kill in their sights and they smell blood in the water It's fucking over bro, but now we have that shit. He literally fucking we're in his head rent We're not even awake yet, bro We're literally worse, we're fucking Completely asleep and aura farming I knew it behind by like 40% on the boss and P4 and this guy's like they're gonna win But I'm gonna give it my all 100% I'm absolutely gonna give it my all and be medic at this conversations Like we're gonna give it our all because they can do it they can absolutely do it and we want them to do it But the back of my head I was like Well, it's not gonna happen It's not gonna happen. And so we get on and We do a couple of hours and they get uh, I can't remember what pulls they had when I was casting I think it was the 16% and the 6% All 12% and 6% something like that. They got very very fucking close. I was like, all right The momentum's building yeah 4% so we lost our aura basically. I was like, okay. That's the fire That's what they need. That's it right there. They could do it now. They could see it's killable It's weird. There's a little bit of fire when you, you guys have probably heard us say this before, like, we'll have a poll where we don't kill it and the chat screaming like, no, but us in the guild are like, fuck yeah, bro, this boss is so fucking dead. When we say stuff like that, that's basically proving to everyone like, they can see it with their eyes, not from analyst numbers, they can see it with their eyes that we can kill the boss, and that gives you a lot of adrenaline and like focus. At least it's like a buff for like 30 minutes to an hour. However, when that starts happening more and more, when you start having wipes lower and lower, once you're past the point of, I know we can kill this now, those wipes are not adrenaline inducing, they're kind of tilt inducing because it's no longer, oh I'm excited, I know we can kill it now it's more like oh we probably should have killed it right there what went wrong and those two things are like very They're so close and I think as a viewer they look almost the same because the reaction is no From the viewers both times, but one of them is like super motivating and the other one is not motivating at all It's very killable. It's kind of you guys have probably seen this before have you guys ever wiped really low on a boss And then you like thought you regressed for a while because what you didn't realize is like a lot of the right people got the right mechanics at the right time and you got a way better pull than you were actually progressing and you trick yourself into thinking that you were more progressed than you were and now you view any pull that isn't at that point is regression even though it's not and then you're just like mad basically when you wipe instead of uh instead of just knowing that you just got a lucky pull basically it's really hard to figure that out like it happens to everybody including us one arm bandit perfect example everyone killed one arm bandit thinking they should have killed it 30 poles ago, right? So yeah, it's just a very interesting thing how that works. We were a little unsure on the DPS at first, but then Blizzard made a very quick hotfix. The DPS was quite high that you needed in that last phase. And so now they knew it was killable. I was like, that's what they needed. They now know 100% it dies. All good. Let's just slam three of these poles and it's dead right easy game didn't come they're like a break gets called I think it was a six minute break by echo they're gonna go for a piss they're gonna grab some snacks I think they put out some like little nibbles for the guys so me and Beneku obviously what I catch everything we're like right we'll take our break at the same time I walk out of the castor room and the way the castor room works is behind the players and it's at the other end away from the kitchen so you go kitchen cast kitchen cast the hangout room players actual cast a room so me about it come out there I see and I knew what was about to happen I look down the corridor every player is already out there sure and there is 20 people hanging out the cast the hangout room I'm like liquid if just fucking killed it They hadn't oh, I know that feeling I Know that feeling sometimes when you go on a break or you go to get lunch and you like pass the production staff If Echo's ever having a really good poll they kind of try to hide it from you But I mean if they're ever like having a really low poll You hear you see a bunch of people like surrounding a computer that like someone's watching it on and then you hear them like all breathe a massive sigh of relief when they wipe. Like that happened, dude. I, one of the main things that made me find out the second time Echo had a low wipe on Demensius is like on the first time it happened, I actually had it open on the second time it happened. I heard out in the lobby, people were like, Oh, thank God. I like very clearly heard that. And I'm like, Oh, they probably just wiped really low again. 10 seconds away from killing it. I walked down the corridor to to go have a pee and then I just see all the players disperse with heads down they just walk away and I was like it just died it just fucking died and then I hear it you know audibly people are telling people who didn't see it who were getting snacks or had been in the bathroom or areas like it just died it's over it's done and just sort of like going back to their chairs and shit. I will say it's nice to have it die when you're not at your computer. Cuz like you know if it dies when it's at your computer and you actually care about the result You're obviously gonna look really deflated when you actually see it And you know like someone in the other guild is gonna like clip your reaction to seeing it to like make them feel better And it's like I don't want to give them that so at least you're not on camera. It's it's pretty good Fuck man fuck So I Turn around immediately And start heading back and Alex is shouting me. He's like Mike. Do you know Mike? Do you know what I just gave him the thumbs up behind me as I close the door? I'm like, yeah, yeah, we know that's that's it's a medic is I'm not announcing it for the fourth fucking time Do you could do this? He's like, I got one point five times speed. I don't tell you what was really interesting Is I could never supply headsets on we've closed the cast of those so a silence in the players and then it just goes Oh shit Screams it's so loud, screams it's so loud. It's like, bullshits like this. I don't like, I feel exactly the same, man. I feel exactly the same. So we're like, right, compose yourself, get back on. Cast goes on. And how is he still telling this story? Because he's an entertainer, bro. If you can tell the same story that could take like a couple of minutes and you stretch it out into like much longer than that, people are actually interested the whole time. You got talent is what I remember is I remember is the very next pull is echoes one percent and they enter phase four and we are giving it our fucking balls as casters. I think if you listen to that pull, we're giving it the fucking beans and make Maddox pushing me and we're we're giving it our all and they get into phase four all alive. And I look at medic because we're not on camera. I look at medic and I go I just shake my fucking head and he's smiling he's like this is so stupid if they kill it now where the f- why? why do this? why fucking do this? so I'm just looking at him and I'm like ah yeah, it's like the 0.45% pull or something and then they go in and did it but then they start chain pulling and this is where I'm leading to the little circle here of how I might be missing some information 12 20. It's like 20 past midnight. I haven't rebooked the flights. I'm leaving in like five hours. I'm leaving and echo keep pulling. And medics like in the same boat as me because he's casting the LCS or whatever the league thing in a couple days and medic hasn't been home in six weeks because he was in Brazil casting for League of Legends. He flew from Brazil to us. And he hasn't seen his wife in six weeks, hasn't been home. And he's talking and I, I, uh, LEC went legal legends thing, right? Uh, so I did something I've never had to do before and I felt really bad, but I think it's understandable. Is I key up to talk to production. So you guys can't hear me. And all I could think of saying is like, I'm really not being an asshole right now, but I have to leave in like five hours and we haven't even packed my stream is all set up and shit I was like I need to get out of here I need to go and make sense Sam thankfully goes throw to comms and we'll have a chat about what we're gonna do I'm like all right because what I would really would have preferred is that we got an extra day I would have preferred that so I could you know it's not nice to be like oh you lost, I'm out of here. I mean, I mean, if you're echo and you're running a business and you know it's going to the next day and you've already lost, I feel like cutting off all the casters day rates by one day goes a very long way to making your event profitable or just making a lot more money because like the value of the casters on the last day is significantly less after you've already lost and regardless of any other circumstances, I feel like that just to make sense. Impression, but the flights are the flights and we've been up all day and we've tamed Red Bulls relentlessly. So I'm not going to exactly be able to get to sleep or anything. And I still need to like pack my show, but I'm going to be another hour here before I can even get out of the building. So I was like, I'm not being an ass, but we need to get off the cast. So me and Medic got off. Medic's flight was before mine. He was gone before I woke up. So, Medics was at like 5am or something. And then we go into production and they're like, No, it's totally fine, we understand. There's some people who are not flying out till the night time. I think every castler was obviously still there. So, we'll go and have a chat with them. But you two had done, you finished. All good, go and sort yourselves out. So, fair play to production for that, because it was our shift. But I mean, it had gone longer than it was supposed to anyway. So, we were like, all right, cool. And I couldn't talk to the players, because they were still pulling. I didn't get to say goodbye to Roger or anybody. I went to who I could But I thought I've got to go I had to wipe the PC I was on pack everything up go get the choir off the set You know, I was wandering around. Yeah, that sucks And then it felt that way for us to you this time basically The majority of the cost in these races is room and board like just just simply Feeding people and keeping them in hotels is just super expensive So once we get near the end of the raid, they basically have our flights booked for like a certain date and then once we get to that date, they'll just keep extending it by two days at a time. So sometimes we finish the raid and people are flying out in two days and you have some time to like decompress and celebrate. And sometimes, like this raid, we killed it right before they were about to rebook our flights. So then people just were basically flying out the morning after we killed it and we had no time to hang out at all basically. We got to party that one night, but yeah Displates came out The people like the most signing including the players Like this is gonna take like another hour. I was like, all right Look, this is the way we're doing this because I absolutely want to do this for sure But get it all sorted I'm gonna go and pack up my PC and wipe it and do all that shit I'm gonna pack all up now come back and we'll sign everything as fast as possible to get out of here And maybe it's dead by then, you know, I hope it was still there. Maybe it's dead by then And we'll get to say goodbye to the players But that did not happen as you well know that didn't happen So I came in I signed as many just this place as I could and I was like I've got to go I just grabbed a bin bag just that I just grabbed a fucking refuse bag through all my shit in it I'm left like like some orphan moving away, you know with the stick and the bag on the back I just grabbed all my shit threw it in a bin bag. I was like, I've got to get the fuck out of here It's gone like 1 a.m. I have to be in the I have to be in a cab in a few hours So I just grabbed all my fucking shit and was like I'm out. I've got to go and they're like see you later You know gave hugs to everybody I could I'd left the building and I just sent Roger a message I have a really funny message because we were unsure of the DPS in P4 and And so I said to Roger on a break I was like dude It looks like it dies at 10% and for lower reasons that kind of matches up So I said it might die at 10% and So we'll see and I shut my phone and Roger's just messaged me at 9 30 p.m. It just says by the way Mike it was not 10% So I just said laughing my assos laughing my ass off when I got home and then I texted him Roger I've had to leave the flight is in a few hours and I really don't want to disturb you I still pull in I'm really sad for you give my love to the team the wind is coming in the future thanks sorry I missed you it's so crazy we just had a point one percent wipe which I haven't seen I said sorry that was the last message I said to Roger was that well I was laid bed I was laying fucking bed and like yeah sorry like that's I was nearly 1am in the morning I'm so fucking sorry dude heads again at a point one four percent yeah I've not seen that either I know I woke up when I checked the stream that they listed on the thing as 0.0% something like that people were really confused as to why I said best poll 0.0% on the boss and so I did get to start to the players ultimately they killed it yesterday you know I did all that kind of stuff but it was the middle it was very late I slept two hours total so yesterday I slept a long time I went to bed he wiped that wipe yeah I thought I missed the kill because of that yeah exactly man like exactly but what do we think about this I mean where do we even start here we go I don't know I don't know where we even started this water. I mean, the story of this race is disaster to disaster to amazing. Right. What an unusual few weeks I've had being there. Just absolute. I think it was just because the other bosses weren't out. Honestly. Like crap race till the last two bosses is like most raids ever like most raids the last two bosses are basically at least if you care about the race world first that's what you're there for they're not really making many of the other bosses supposed to be for the race. Sometimes that's not true. Nexus, Princess Kyvez, us, Ledgefist. There's sometimes a boss in there. Palamity with the first week and the first, the first, you know, two weeks of the race to one of the most monumental, epic, epic conclusions you could ask for. Like if this was like Dementius mixed with Sepulchre, Dementius mixed with Sepulchre, it was like unreal it was unreal uh scrap said for the single bosses he doesn't think he'd do anything he thinks liquid would kill them before they even got up uh no we're not expecting i don't think anybody's expecting anything from the single one-off bosses um yeah i don't think that's not i wish blizzard would like clarify that though well the thing is i was talking to some of them big brains in the wow scene and they were like um this race would have been so much better if for Lyria was all so harder and I disagree with that like for my Interesting Wait, where is he gonna go with that point and everybody else thought to blizzard about it Hopefully I can when next time I get to chat to them But we I don't think we get Bella and and Lura the way they were without a Lyria being full bin I think Lura would have still been what it was, but I mean, I think Illyria, if Illyria was really hard, it would still give us a few days off at the end of the week. And then like, if you just basically trade the difficulty of Illyria to Ballora, and I still think that's a better race because a harder version of Illyria would have just been more fun overall. like if it wasn't for all area being absolute dog water and voids by and dream rift being such dog water we wouldn't have got what we got with March on Keldon ass so I think certain Dippity works out a bit there they had four days to cook on those bosses they had four days to really without stress without because you think about the hot fixes they throw out like they did to Vanguard and all area they've got to be pushed out within like ten minutes right they just sort of slap some fucking shit on it to try and make it live a little bit longer. So this whole thing isn't done in fucking five hours. So they just slap a bunch of shit on it as quickly as possible. But with Margell and ass, they really got to sit down and cook those bosses up to tune them like so well, like so, so well. I think it helps. I assume liquid to this as well, but they told Blizzard what gear level they were going to have going into Margell and ass, which was like to 79. So helps right like we're going to have 279 at level plus bantus runes going into going into this fight. So if you don't tune it around that like we're just going to stomp it and it the whole things wash eight the spells. Well the other big conversation is the add-on thing. All right. I think I think we've heard a lot of mistakes and we're going to talk about this on the podcast tomorrow. So we're probably good. I did like his story about how he learned about the, the race ending and stuff though. All right. I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to skedaddle, going to skedaddle out of here, recording the podcast either tomorrow or Saturday. So be on the lookout for that. When do you go home? I mean, I might, if I have, I probably should just take my stuff home now. Isn't it rush hour now? Yeah, I mean it was rush hour and LA starts at 4pm. So it was unless I was gonna make this stream one hour We were gonna be in rush hour anyway, so we'll figure it out We'll see Playing hockey tonight. Yep played last night played Tuesday, and I will play again tonight Although I am very sore right now just because like usually playing once a day over the course of a couple days is like nothing But after not moving my body for the entire race basically it's been a Definitely noticeable the body is getting shocked back into doing stuff