RWF Retrospective: Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope

On November 14th, Dragonflight’s final raid opened its gates to players. After four full weeks of progression in Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope, only a little over a dozen guilds have managed to defeat the final boss of the raid, with two dozen more having killed the penultimate boss, Tindral Sageswift.

In this retrospective look at the recent RWF, we analyze why so many guilds are trailing much further behind the RWF competitors than usual and why “T.Swift'' is ultimately to blame for the fact that we still see so few Fyrakk kills. We also discuss the role of some particularly impactful tools, such as Racial abilities, WeakAuras, and Augmentation Evokers.

Table of Contents

The Amirdrassil RWF concluded in a spectacle that few of us will forget for years to come, as Liquid and Echo had a neck-and-neck race that culminated in hours of pulls and wipes on Fyrakk. Both guilds could have killed the boss at any moment, and whenever one guild would wipe, we all questioned whether the other would claim the World First in their current attempt.

After a tense and exciting few hours of progression, with multiple incredibly close wipes at single-digit boss HP, Echo were the ones to claim victory over Fyrakk, bringing down the boss 12 days after the raid opened its doors.

RWF Timeline

Every Race for World First (RWF) evokes feelings of suspense, tension, and excitement. However, every RWF also shares one unfortunate commonality: Seemingly endless amounts of splits. While in previous expansions the RWF was prefaced by a week of Normal and Heroic-only splits, allowing the guilds to take their time in preparing and gearing as many characters as possible, the simultaneous difficulty release that has been a staple of the Dragonflight raid release schedule has put a damper on the very start of each RWF.

Guilds typically spend about 2-3 days just farming gear via Heroic Raids, and every Race, they get more and more efficient at it. This time around, the guilds ran over 35 Normal splits, and about half as many Heroic ones, despite the last several bosses being quite difficult in the first week. Guilds planned their schedules and downtime well in advance, so some players were not present in every single run, allowing them to also farm specific items from Mythic+ like trinkets and weapons.

The top guilds ran splits for about three days in Amirdrassil, with Liquid and Echo stepping into Mythic for the first time on November 17th. However, by the time they claimed their first Mythic loot, over half the raid had already been cleared…



It has become the new norm that not all the World First Mythic kills will go to the biggest RWF competitors anymore, and the simultaneous difficulty release is certainly contributing to that pattern. These days, the first few bosses typically fall to guilds who do fewer splits, but those teams are eventually overtaken by the top RWF guilds once they come into the raid with a much higher item level.

Instant Dollars took advantage of the top RWF guilds running splits for days once again. Instant Dollars only ran 5 Heroic splits, allowing them to claim the World First Kills on Igira, Council of Dreams, Nymue, Volcoross and Larodar. This put them at 6/9 Mythic almost an entire day before Liquid, Echo and Method even started their progression.

It wasn’t until Smolderon, a boss that served as a DPS and execution check for many guilds, that Instant Dollars lost their leading position in the RWF. Towards the end of their first day of progression, Liquid claimed the new Firelord’s head, and put themselves on top of the leaderboard at 7/9M. With what many considered to be the biggest DPS and healing check out of the way, and only two bosses left in the raid, worries kept growing that this RWF would be a quick one, as almost all of the bosses in Amirdrassil fell to the reigning RWF champions within a single day of Mythic progression. Little did we, or the RWF guilds themselves know, the race was only getting started…

“TSwift”

In our pre-RWF interviews with the top 3 ranked guilds – Liquid, Echo, and Method – many of the respondents named Tindral Sageswift as their most highly anticipated boss due to the unique, fast-paced mechanics and the persistent, high mechanical skill required throughout the entire fight. Colloquially referred to now as “T. Swift”, the encounter certainly delivered – it took close to 20 hours before we saw a World First Kill by Liquid, with the guild spending 435 pulls on the encounter.

To put this into perspective, Smolderon died after a little over 50 pulls for both Liquid (56) and Echo (53), and Method needed only a few more than that at 79, whereas we barely got to see a glimpse of Phase 3 on Tindral after over 200 pulls.

“I think Smolderon and Tindral could be very interesting if tuned right. It would be exciting if we could catch up to Liquid there and then smash our heads against a tight DPS check while the viewers see multiple guilds simultaneously having very close pulls.” –Xerwo (Echo)

“I’m fairly excited but also worried about the Dragonriding boss in Amirdrassil, Tindral Sageswift. Penultimate bosses are often very unique but miss the mark. A Dragonriding boss sounds epic, but it will need to break the penultimate boss curse.” –Sanghelios (Liquid)

“Amirdrassil looks to be more fleshed-out than previous raids when it comes to testing, featuring great boss designs all around with the obvious standouts being Smolderon and Tindral Sageswift.” –Speed (Method)

Liquid met Tindral first, and it was their early progression that allowed other guilds to get a basic understanding of how much more difficult Tindral would be than anticipated. Thanks to their NA counterparts, the EU RWF guilds were able to prepare for the timings and overlaps before even seeing the boss for the first time – not that it mattered much as it took over 200 attempts, more than twice that of all the previous bosses combined, before we even saw a glimpse of the third phase of the encounter – and the boss still had over half his health remaining!

With this many wipes already and no kill in sight, it became clear that Tindral was going to uphold the tradition of raids like Sepulcher of the First Ones and Tomb of Sargeras, which both featured penultimate bosses that were able to rival not only the pull count, but the mechanical and gameplay difficulty of a fully-fledged raid or expansion endboss.

While the boss himself did not offer too many mechanics, it was the cadence and lack of repeat patterns that made the fight so intricate, fast-paced and difficult to overcome, with almost any individual mistake causing an instant raid wipe. The handful of mechanics in the fight happen very quickly, never allowing the players to take a breather or focus on simply DPSing the boss. Instead, the fight is a ~8 minute long exercise in endurance, concentration and individual excellence, and even now, only about 50 guilds have managed to best the penultimate boss of Amirdrassil.

Looking back at previous raids and expansions, even the tiers that had a very challenging final boss, like Raszageth in Vault of the Incarnates or Sylvanas in Sanctum of Domination, did not make it past the second week of progress. A two-week RWF has only occurred whenever a boss (or in the case of Sepulcher, multiple bosses) prior to the final boss takes up multiple days of progression, as was the case with Tindral.


Tindral received a nerf prior to the first weekly reset, and with the added gear of a second round of splits and a Great Vault choice, Liquid, Echo and Method were able to significantly improve their item level. The boss ultimately fell to the top guilds after a grueling round of progression that certainly took much longer than initially anticipated. The final pull count: 426 for Liquid, 399 for Echo and 375 for Method - more than all of the bosses in Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, combined.

Fyrakk, the Blazing

After the euphoria of downing Tindral, which many players called one of the greatest bosses of the expansion, with some even going so far as to call it one of the best of all time, the guilds didn’t quite know what to expect from Fyrakk, the Blazing. As the final boss of not just Amirdrassil, but Dragonflight as a whole, expectations were high, especially after players learned that the developer for the boss also designed greats such as Sludgefist, Painsmith and Halondrus. Of course, in typical end boss fashion, Fyrakk was not available for testing at all on the Public Test Realms prior to raid release.



While the guilds were able to get a basic understanding of Fyrakk’s core mechanics on Heroic already, Mythic difficulty added a lot of extra spice to each phase. Looking back now, over half of the top guilds’ total progression hours were spent on Fyrakk, even after two small but impactful nerfs, and despite the ~400 pulls on Tindral.

The blazing Primal Incarnate was a tough nut to crack, as each phase added new mechanics to the fight that had to be puzzled out. Reaching deep into the bag of tricks, from old engineering enchants, to providing a cab service to some of the friendly NPCs in the encounter, the RWF guilds managed to pass the gauntlet and make it into the last phase of the encounter, aptly named Shadowflame Incarnate.

A familiar mechanic made its way back into the game in this final phase, as the boss features a modernized and fiery version of the (in)famous Halondrus bomb ability. The players had to carefully juggle a set of seeds, and if even a single mechanic hit one of these, the raid would wipe seconds after. Though the premise seems simple, these volatile seeds added a lot of pulls to the encounter.

Once guilds started reaching Phase 3 on Fyrakk, the optimizations started coming in, ensuring that the raid would have enough damage to actually kill the boss before inevitably succumbing to the onslaught of mechanics in the last stage. This led to many wipes in earlier phases, as more and more damage cooldowns, potion assignments and the use of Bloodlust had to be shifted around. After a small but noticeable nerf to the boss’s HP, DPS was no longer a concern – simply surviving the last phase was.

In the final few days of the RWF, we were graced by one of the best and closest finishes in 19 years of the game’s existence. A grueling battle between Liquid and Echo ensued, with both guilds one-upping each other as they inched closer and closer to a kill. Both teams avoided sleep, as every hour spent sleeping was an hour the competition could potentially grab the World First. With every pull being a possible kill if the raiders managed to stay alive long enough in P3, watching both streams simultaneously was a real treat.



Eventually the Blazing Primal Incarnate fell first to the raiders from Echo, who were crowned the new RWF champions with their victory. Liquid took down Fyrakk a couple of hours later. Watching the two best guilds in the world trade low wipes on such a visually and mechanically intense boss will certainly remain in our memories for a long time to come.

The Importance of Racial Abilities

The Amirdrassil RWF also saw a return of Racial abilities (Racials) being a very important part of progression. While Racials have historically been used to cheese certain mechanics (like Trolls completely negating a mechanic on Jaina in Battle for Dazar’alor), or to allow classes to deal with mechanics they otherwise wouldn’t be able to (like Goblins jumping around the lines of spikes on Painsmith), this time around, Racials were largely used to deal with debuffs on both Tindral and Fyrakk.

Dwarves and Gnomes made frequent appearances this tier, as both the Mass Entanglement and Fiery Growth debuff on Tindral, as well as the Aflame debuff on Fyrakk, were difficult to deal with. Racials helped significantly with these mechanics, lowering the burden on healers in particular, and giving players more control over their fates, instead of relying on other players for supporting spells.


Escape Artist proved to be a useful tool to break roots on Tindral, which was necessary in certain moments of the fight, as the raid had little time to get into perfect position to AoE all the roots down. Dwarves stole the spotlight this RWF, however; Stone Form has consistently been an incredibly powerful tool in Mythic+, but it has now crept back into prominence for the RWF, as well as raiding in general.

On Tindral, the Fiery Growth debuff had to be dispelled in quick succession, and giving players the ability to do so by themselves, off the GCD, allowed guilds to quickly clear as many of these debuffs as possible. On Fyrakk, the pressure on healers was even worse, as the boss applied the Aflame debuff to the entire raid at the beginning of each intermission, creating a strain on the healers to mass dispel, heal and keep players alive. But thanks to Stone Form, many players were able to clear the debuff themselves, allowing the Mass Dispel to hit those who were unable to dispel themselves via a Racial or class ability.

The value of Dwarves and, to a lesser extent, Gnomes, was certainly unexpected, as the intensity and coordination required to deal with these mechanics was hard to predict. With Fyrakk not testable on the PTR, and Tindral being a lot easier on PTR than on live servers, we saw many players swapping races midway through progression. Thanks to cross-faction raiding, this no longer proved to be an issue for the weekly lockout like it was in previous tiers! Well, almost not an issue…

Augmentation to the Rescue

Halfway through Aberrus, Blizzard added a new spec and archetype to the game, which has remained a contentious decision. Augmentation Evokers are one of the most sought after specs in all types of content, and having two capable Augvokers was key to many of the Amirdrassil RWF encounters.

Beyond their ability to buff DPS or healer throughput when needed, Augvokers also have a vast array of support spells that saw a lot of use in the current tier. While many expected Augmentation to be one of the most important specs of the RWF, with guilds preparing in incredible detail to get the most use out of the specialization, its usefulness in Amirdrassil still exceeded already high expectations.

With the way the last two fights worked out, the bosses were essentially unkillable without an Evoker present. Evokers massively contributed to the guilds’ ability to break out players from the Mass Entanglement on Tindral, buffed the DPS that would carry the damage on each set of roots, provided useful utility like Zephyr, Time Spiral, and Spatial Paradox, and could even switch their throughput buffs from DPS to healers at key points in the fights. With the massive healing requirement on Tindral, healers needed these support buffs to keep the raid healthy throughout the entire fight.

Depending on the boss, Augmentation players had to buff various raiders at particular points in each fight, sometimes applying their support spells to 10 or more different players throughout a single encounter. While assignments for these buffs were supported by WeakAuras and outside analysis, executing this consistently was a tough ask. However, Augvoker value didn’t stop there!



Evokers’ ability to Rescue their allies quite literally saved Azeroth, albeit in an unexpected way. One of the mechanics on Mythic Fyrakk required the Augmentation Evokers to rescue one of the friendly NPCs that would keep the World Tree alive, and the encounter seemed impossible to beat without the Evokers’ cab service. The allied NPCs are simply too slow to reach the tree, so a well-cast Rescue allowed the raid to keep Amirdrassil just healthy enough to push into the last phase of the encounter. Between the Rescues and their ability to help with crowd controlling the Screaming Souls with their Oppressing Roar and the Dracthyr’s Tail Swipe racial, Evokers had a massive impact on the raid’s ability to succeed in this tier, much more so than most classes have ever had in previous tiers.

With how impactful Evokers, especially Augmentation, have been so far, the question of whether or not individual classes, racials or abilities provide too much benefit is one that remains to be answered. This raid certainly saw even less flexibility in raid compositions, as the benefit of abilities like Mark of the Wild, Windfury Totem, Rallying Cry, Blessing of Freedom, and many many others allowed for little choice in which classes to bring.

WeakAuras in the RWF

We have previously touched on the subject of WeakAuras and their ability to help plan out the usage of cooldowns or even singular abilities like the Augmentation Evoker’s Rescue, healers’ dispels, or even Gateway reminders.


In our Unsung Heroes article, we discussed how extensively the WeakAura developers prepare for the release of a new raid, especially in conjunction with the numerous Analysts that work for each of the RWF teams. By preparing WAs that tell players when to look for certain mechanics, automating assignments, or reminding players simply when to use their defensives at a pre-assigned moment of each encounter, Analysts and WeakAura developers enable players to focus more on executing the boss strategy; less brain power is required to worry about when to use certain abilities or cooldowns when the reminders will simply pop up on each player’s screen.

Blizzard recently started hiding more of the previously trackable Auras, commonly referred to now as Private Auras. However, as we’ve seen in the Amirdrassil RWF, there are always workarounds that allow the guilds to continue automating as many parts of their strategy as possible. The downside of this surge in automation is that other guilds who do not have dedicated teams of developers or Analysts are walking into the same encounters with fewer tools at their disposal, widening the gap between the top RWF guilds and those that raid at a high level, but without the highest-level support staff.

While these WeakAura packs are often available to the general public once the RWF finishes, utilizing them is easier said than done. Oftentimes these packs require at least a base level of understanding of the LUA code and the way the WAs are written in order for them to be useful for your own raid.

From soaking the fixating orbs on Smolderon in a timely fashion, to dealing with the Fiery Growth debuffs on Tindral, or managing the Seeds on Fyrakk, Mythic raiding without WeakAuras makes encounters much more difficult, and in many cases, downright unplayable. While nerfs to the bosses are typically aimed at alleviating the pressure that these mechanics would often put on the raid, it nonetheless begs the question of whether the current design and tuning of the bosses is only serving to widen the gap between the RWF raiders, hardcore raiders, and more casual raiders – despite all of them playing the same raid difficulty, only at different times of the patch cycle.

Tuning

Looking at just the RWF guilds and their performances, the tuning for Amirdrassil was fairly on point. We only saw four sets of changes during the RWF, and none of them were as significant as the ones we saw during the Vault of the Incarnates RWF, for example.

The first change happened on Smolderon; following Instant Dollars’ Larodar kill, they reset Smolderon once and discovered that the boss had suddenly lost a chunk of HP. This nerf seemed to be almost perfect, as we saw numerous guilds struggle to take down the Firelord. Many wipes ended at single-digit percentages, and even more of them were only a percent or two away from a kill. Without this nerf, the boss likely would’ve ended up taking a lot longer to kill, requiring a triple-digit pull count or even the gear of a second reset.

The nerfs to Tindral during the RWF were hotly debated, but their actual effects weren’t immediately apparent. The boss received a massive 20% nerf to his HP, as well as an increase to the duration in which the Germination Seeds would stay soakable before wiping the raid in Phase 3 of the encounter. While these changes shortened the progression time on the boss, at the time of the nerfs, guilds were still wiping in Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the encounter; neither phase was affected by the encounter adjustments.



Tindral ultimately fell after the reset, but with his incredibly high difficulty, the requirement of flawless execution for up to 8 minutes straight, the value of Racials and WeakAuras to coordinate different parts of the fight, and the fight’s high damage output, even the most recent nerfs are likely not enough to make this boss accessible or killable for most guilds. We might very well see Tindral kill more guilds than guilds kill Tindral.

Fyrakk received two sets of nerfs during the RWF, and both were crucial to making the boss as tight of a fight as possible. The first nerf reduced the health of the Colossi in Phase 2, which the RWF competitors were Bloodlusting in order to bring them down in time. Thanks to the nerf, guilds were able to allocate more DPS to the boss instead of the adds, which ended up working in everyone’s favor.

The second nerf was a direct boss HP nerf, and it likely saved the RWF guilds a couple of dozen pulls, if not more. The way the encounter ends, any small mistake can lead to an instant wipe; with the boss dying faster thanks his reduced HP, and the raid having more DPS cooldowns available to burn the boss, the guilds did not see its actual enrage – which would be the fifth Apocalypse Roar, when the raid no longer has the protection of a Seed of Amirdrassil available to them.



The tuning of the fights ended up working out fairly well, but one notable issue we saw with both Tindral and Fyrakk is that the bosses ended up dying before their actual enrage. Tindral is supposed to cast a Supernova in Phase 3, similar to Rygelon’s Massive Bang. But we never got to see this part of the encounter, as the boss fell before this ability ever happened. Tindral was already straining and difficult enough without reaching his enrage, of course, and the same was true for Fyrakk, as no guild reached the point where the raid was juggling 8 Corrupted Seeds and wiping to the final Apocalypse Roar.

The rarity of racing to beat the boss enrages in Amirdrassil speaks to the tuning as a whole being slightly off, as the fights were simply too difficult to deal with on a mechanical level, but did not have quite enough tight DPS requirements. However, there is a clear upside to this: With the last phase of each encounter being more difficult to deal with the longer it lasts, gaining more gear and DPS will make the fights significantly easier, essentially serving as a way to nerf the bosses for guilds who will venture into these fights with a much higher item level than the RWF guilds. Killing Fyrakk just 30 seconds faster essentially means that teams only need to juggle 6 Corrupted Seeds instead of 8, which will save a whole lot of pulls for guilds that are going to progress the boss further down the line.

Since the RWF concluded, both Fyrakk and Tindral received additional nerfs. Thus far, Tindral has been the main target of these nerfs, as the boss received three sets of changes since the World First kill, allowing for dozens of guilds to finally claim the Seer of Flame’s head.

Conclusion

As a whole, the Amirdrassil RWF was one of the best in the game’s history. While the tuning was slightly off and the last 3 bosses needed adjustments to be killable, the hotfixes came at a point where they didn’t skew the results too much towards one region or another. Many players and casters clearly enjoyed the race, calling Amirdrassil the best RWF they ever experienced.





This was a Race that required all hands on deck, and the amount of preparation, as well as outside staff and help that went into the RWF is something only a few guilds will ever be able to achieve and support. This is worrisome and raises concerns about the overall quality of the competition, as there really are only 4-5 guilds that can muster this kind of effort: Liquid, Echo, Method, Huoguo and Skyline.

Method and Instant Dollars in particular had incredible performances in this RWF, and ID not only set the pace for the first half of the raid, but also managed to keep up with the absolute best of the best when it came to finishing up the tier. Method also stayed close on Liquid and Echo’s heels, finishing off Fyrakk at the start of the third reset without reclearing another time. However, the big worry remains: Will any guild other than Liquid or Echo be capable of leading the field on the most challenging of bosses, where a big team of dedicated Analysts and WeakAura devs are a basic requirement at this point?


Time will tell, and with Dragonflight’s Big Bad Evil Dragon defeated, it will be a while before we get to enjoy (and analyze) another Race for World First.

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