Earlier this week, top World of Warcraft guild Method defeated the Mythic difficulty version of the game’s newest raid boss, Jaina Proudmoore, who became available to fight on January 29.
Yes, the Jaina Proudmoore, an Alliance leader you’re probably familiar with even if you haven’t touched Warcraft since it became an MMO. It took Method 347 tries. And then they did it again.
As typically happens with new raids, Method raced against a plethora of other top guilds to be the first to solve, slay, and loot the gilded socks off the new boss. First, they had to take down the Battle for Dazar’alor raid’s other bosses.
Guilds “Big Dumb Guild” and “Wildcard” saw early success with the Champion of the Light and his much less grandiosely-named counterpart Grong, respectively, but Method’s longtime rival guild, Limit, proceeded to world-first the next five bosses, putting them in prime position to win the fantasy character murder race.
All of this happened within about 24 hours of the Mythic version of the raid going live. Then the guilds slammed face-first into Jaina. Jaina’s multiphase fight challenges players with ice spells that stop them dead in their tracks unless they’re near a certain amount of other players when those attacks hit. Jaina also casts other ice-based debuffs that can trip players up and leave them susceptible to additional damage from subsequent attacks.
Interestingly, to partially counteract this, Method ended up switching their characters’ races—which costs $35 per character — to trolls in order to get a racial ability that reduces the duration of movement-impairing effects by 20 per cent.
Here’s the moment Method finally won on February 5:
Even so, Method spent months preparing for the raid and is now, according to database site Wowhead, 40 to 100 million gold in debt, having cleared out three auction houses for crafting materials.
That didn’t stop them from downing Jaina a second time yesterday, three hours before Limit managed to become the second guild to defeat her.
You might be wondering why these top guilds — especially Limit, who spent money to switch over to the Alliance faction in order to exploit factional imbalances in preparation for this raid—are fighting Jaina Proudmoore, longtime Alliance hero of all things good and frosty.
After all, she spent most of her early years, starting with Warcraft 3, trying to compromise with the Horde and then-Warchief Thrall, figuring they had bigger problems on their hands (and/or claws, hooves, etc.) in the form of the demonic Legion battering down their entire dimension’s front door.
Jaina’s relationship with the Horde soured over the years, shattering entirely when Garrosh Hellscream assumed power and — among other heinous acts — bombed Jaina’s home isle of Theramore into oblivion. Since then, she’s oscillated between scepticism and outright hostility toward the Horde, and the recent atrocities committed by Horde mega-heel Sylvanas Windrunner haven’t exactly helped.
The Battle for Dazar’alor raid, then, sees Horde players facing off with Jaina after an Alliance assault on the troll city of Dazar’alor. Alliance players are transformed into Horde characters for the purposes of making the whole thing make sense.
Even upon defeat, however, Jaina did not die. She only waded into battle to slow the Horde’s pursuit, and after winning 346 times and losing once — you know, like you do when you’re a lore hero confined to the eternal state of living death that is being a raid boss — she teleported away so she could live to fight another day.
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11 responses to “World Of Warcraft Guild Beats Newest Raid Boss Before Anyone Else, Twice”
Probably because nobody else is playing anymore.
Suck shit Limit! a Full day head start and faction swapping the entire guild to alliance just to take advantage of two quests giving heroic Ilvl gear and still failing to beat Method
I still remember the drama in the Wrath days when Blizz would cherry pick ‘Elite’ guilds to run the dungeons in the test servers and balance the released dungeon around them. It all came to a head with Ulduar where Blizz’s chosen guild used a cheat to get clears, but only reported the cheat when another guild started to clears using it. Needless to say, when the second guild got the ban, and the first one didn’t, no one respected the ‘world first’ guild anymore for the favouritism and blatant cheating.
Unless they’ve stopped the practice in the intervening years, ‘world first’ kills on the live servers have no meaning whatsoever.
And by dungeon I mean the raids (before anyone else points out my using the wrong words XD )
Yeah, Blizz stopped the favoritism long ago. They put the raids up for set time periods on the public test server, usually just a few bosses at a time and pretty sure never on mythic difficulty. Can’t remember if they test a couple on mythic or not but definitely never the last boss.
Blizz have commented on it before that they have better internal test teams than they once did, many in the teams were once in world 1st or world top 10 guilds themselves.
Thats good to hear. I came back to playing Warlock when Legion came out after having last really played during Wrath, and the changes of gameplay put me off. I got to Panda-land and stopped. Picked it up again recently due to family peer pressure, and while I’m still hating how they’ve split the skills I’m enjoying playing through each xpac a lot more than I expected from having read various reviews and comments over time.
I quit at start of Cata, came back 5 years later for Legion…quit again less than 2 months into BFA, currently not playing.
Same as you, I found the skill re-vamp a bit jarring at first…but then I remembered there was only ever 1 or 2 decent builds for each class anyway. Everyone played the “cookie cutter” builds or they were sub par in performance. The same thing still exists now, except in Legion at least they managed to add some choices (for some specs at least) so you’d switch a couple skills out depending on the fight/situation.
WoW people still care about WoW
So I assume at some point Alliance players will get to raid Sylvanas?
Haven’t followed Warcraft lore since Cataclysm, but I’m glad I stopped. Jaina Proudmoore is now supposedly somehow stronger than the Lich King or Death Wing combined? Lol. Clearly the result of Lazy, uninspired trash writing.
Don’t know where you’re pulling that from…she’s a raid boss fighting players. That doesn’t say anything about her relative position in power scale according to lore.