This past week, history was made when the top North American World of Warcraft raiding guild called Limit went head-to-head with the reigning world champions, Method Gaming, in the world-first race to clear the newest raid instance, Uldir, on Mythic difficulty. In all 22 tiers of raid content in the game since the very first raiding tier in 2004, there has never been such a close race to the top. Rather than being a matter of days in between each top world team, it came down to a mere 7 hours difference between first and second place. While it may not have surprised the the world to see Method come out on top, Limit getting world second and nearly beating Method definitely put a lot of age-old memes about North American raiders to rest.
For a long time, European teams have been considered to be superior to North American teams and teams from all other regions of World of Warcraft. Despite European teams always starting 1 day behind North America due to the release of content on servers, Europe has still always dominated the world first race in the top few spots of the race. This has created a lot of jokes and memes about the caliber of North American raid teams, given that we even have an extra day head-start over European teams and still manage to lose. Additionally, the winners of the most recent Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI) were a European team call Kjell’s Angels and most of the top teams in the world for Mythic Dungeon score were from Europe.
However, the U.S. team called Limit came in a very close second this tier for the first time in WoW history. In fact, Limit even had the lead by beating Method to the Mythrax kill (the seventh out of eight bosses in the raid tier), but had an extremely close 1% wipe on the last boss, Mythic G’huun. This means that Limit lost their best attempt by a matter of 639k boss health. While North America still technically had a head start, this is the closest we have ever seen a U.S. team come to beating a European team for the world first title.
Additionally, we saw another U.S. team make it into the top 10 world guilds for the tier 22 race. Wildcard Gaming managed to snag the #8 world spot, securing them the #2 spot in the North American division and their best performance in any raid tier to date. The results of the tier 22 race has definitely put North America on the map as a more serious region to contend in the world race. This tier was a remarkable one, since Method also made history to be the first top world guild to stream the entirety of their world first race progression live on Twitch for everyone to see. By doing this, it allowed another layer of competition since Limit and other guilds were able to watch footage and analyze Method’s strategies in their hours of down-time in order to close any gaps in strategy. Now that guilds are finally streaming this competitive content live on Twitch, I think we will see more teams from all over the world begin to emerge as serious contenders as the race gets closer and closer each tier from now on. Where the world first race has always had a lot to do with strategy, I think it will now ultimately be decided more upon pure performance to see who is really the best WoW guild in the world.
VITAMINPEE 