Vault of the Incarnates: Echo Opens Dragonflight Under a Winter Storm

The Race to World First for Vault of the Incarnates began on December 13, 2022 — the first raid tier of the Dragonflight expansion and the first time Blizzard had released Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulties simultaneously at the start of a new raid. That scheduling decision compressed the usual gearing window and meant guilds arrived at Mythic with less time to optimize than in previous tiers. It also meant the race ran directly into the Christmas holiday, setting up one of the most unusual and dramatic finishes the community had seen.

When it was over on December 23, Echo had defeated Raszageth the Storm-Eater — but only hours before Liquid did the same. In a race that lasted ten days, the margin between first and second place was measured in hours, not days.

A Different Kind of Race

The simultaneous difficulty release changed how guilds approached the opening week. In previous tiers, Mythic would open a week after Normal and Heroic, giving raiders time to gear up and study the fights in lower difficulties. With Dragonflight's new format, everything opened at once. That meant less pre-Mythic preparation and a steeper curve on the early bosses as guilds entered with lower average item levels.

The first four bosses — Eranog, Terros, the Primal Council, and Sennarth the Cold Breath — cleared quickly across the field. These encounters were tuned to be accessible to the first wave of Mythic guilds and functioned as expected, with Echo and Liquid moving through them without significant drama.

The Difficulty Wall

The mid-tier began to separate the field. Dathea, Ascended stopped guilds for longer than the early bosses: Echo required 59 pulls to defeat her, Liquid 63, and Method 100. Kurog Grimtotem was shorter, at 35 pulls for Echo, 43 for Liquid, and 89 for Method — a sign of how much variation in optimization existed between the top three teams.

Broodkeeper Diurna emerged as a meaningful checkpoint before the final boss. The encounter functioned as a combined HPS and DPS check that forced guilds to push their item levels and fine-tune their add management. Echo cleared her in 46 pulls; Liquid took 67; Method, surprisingly, managed her in just 45 — the only boss in the tier where they slightly outpaced Echo.

What no one could fully prepare for was Raszageth.

Raszageth: A Boss That Wasn't Ready

Raszageth the Storm-Eater, the final boss of the raid, arrived on the Mythic tuning sheet in a state the community quickly identified as not just difficult, but mathematically broken. The damage output from "motes" in her final phase exceeded what any raid composition could realistically survive, regardless of item level or execution quality.

Blizzard implemented several waves of nerfs to Raszageth's health and to the mote damage in her final sequence before any guild could achieve a clean kill. This mid-race adjustment is not unusual — bosses frequently receive tuning corrections during progression — but the degree of correction needed for Raszageth was notable. The encounter had to be substantially changed for the race to continue.

Even after the nerfs, Raszageth remained the hardest boss in the tier by a significant margin. Echo's kill required 263 pulls. Liquid, progressing slightly behind, required 367 pulls. Method, who reached Raszageth later, spent 407 pulls before their kill.

Outside the Game

The final stretch of the race unfolded against a backdrop of extraordinary real-world events that made it unlike any previous Race to World First.

BDG's 0.05% Wipe. The North American guild BDG suffered one of the most painful moments in Race to World First history when they wiped on Raszageth with the boss at 0.05% health — approximately 300,000 HP remaining on a fight measured in hundreds of millions. The wipe was shown live on stream and spread immediately through the WoW community. BDG recovered and eventually secured World 4th, but the moment became one of the defining images of the tier.

COVID Hits Skyline. The Chinese guild Skyline competed through much of the race while their raiders dealt with a major COVID-19 wave hitting China at the time. Several of their players were visibly ill during streams, raiding through high fevers. Despite this, Skyline finished World 5th — a result that earned widespread respect from the community given the circumstances.

Winter Storm Elliott. In the final days of the race, a severe winter storm struck North America, causing power outages and travel disruptions across the US. Raiders from Liquid and BDG dealt with connectivity issues and, in some cases, interrupted power during the most critical progression sessions of the race. That Liquid still finished second despite this spoke to the depth of their roster and their ability to continue pushing through external disruption.

Holiday Pressure. The race ran through Christmas week. For Echo and Liquid — the only guilds with a realistic shot at the world first at that point — this meant raiding through the holiday. For guilds further down the standings, the calculus was harder: the gap to the top was large enough that many chose to slow down and spend Christmas with their families. The race effectively compressed into a two-guild sprint for the final days.

The Finish

Echo killed Raszageth on December 23, 2022. Liquid killed her the same day, just hours later. The final standings for the top five:

The four-day gap between the top two and the next guilds reflected how far ahead Echo and Liquid were from the rest of the field — and how dominant the race's closing stage had become as a two-guild competition.

What It Meant

Vault of the Incarnates was a race defined as much by what happened around the game as by what happened inside it. The simultaneous difficulty release changed the pacing. The holiday timing compressed the competition. The weather, illness, and a mathematically impossible final boss in its original state all shaped the outcome in ways no team could fully plan for.

Echo emerged from all of it first. Their 263-pull kill on Raszageth — the fewest of any guild and achieved under the same external pressures as everyone else — was a clear statement about where they stood heading into the rest of Dragonflight. Liquid's same-day finish confirmed that the gap at the top of competitive WoW raiding was as narrow as it had ever been.

The race had barely ended before guilds started looking ahead to the next tier. Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible would open in May 2023 — and nearly everything from Vault suggested the rematch would be just as close.