The World of Warcraft Sepulcher of the First Ones Race to World First finally came to a close on Saturday after 19 grueling days of progression from the top guilds across the world. Echo won the event, claiming its second consecutive Race to World First trophy.
Perhaps overshadowing Echo’s victory, though, was the length of the race itself. The 19-day event entered the WoW history books as one of the longest of its kind. Not since 2017, when the Tomb of Sargeras raid took WoW’s top players 19 days to clear, has a Race to World First dragged on quite like the most recent one did.
“The main thing is that we did not expect this,” Echo’s co-CEO and resident Hunter player Rogerbrown said in a post-race press conference earlier today. “If you know that it’s going to take this long, you prepare accordingly … it’s a bit rough, I would say. I think it went longer than it should, in general.”
To find a WoW race that lasted longer than the 19 days of 2022’s Sepulcher of the First Ones and 2017’s Tomb of Sargeras, you would have to date back to 2010, when the Bastion of Twilight raid from WoW’s Cataclysm expansion remained uncleared for 38 days. For reference, the two previous raids of Shadowlands, Castle Nathria and the Sanctum of Domination, saw their final bosses stand undefeated for only eight and seven days, respectively.
In a race with little precedent, Echo approached the race like a marathon and not a sprint by taking longer breaks between their scheduled raids. Rogerbrown noted the team would “chill out” a bit more in the mornings in order to start each day of raiding more comfortably, especially after the 10th day of the race.
Interestingly enough, the 10-day mark was also cited as a major turning point in the race by Team Liquid’s Maximum, the captain of Echo’s main rival in the RWF.
“We played insanely well nine to 10 days into this race and it just hit us like a fucking brick,” Maximum said on his livestream on March 26, mere hours before Echo won the race altogether. Later that same day, Liquid halted their progression-focused daily raid schedule, citing mental fatigue across the roster due to the length of the race.
According to Echo’s in-game raid leader Scripe, the extra time taken ahead of each day by Echo was a crucial factor in combating his team’s burnout while still making consistent progress through the 11-boss raid.
“Sometimes we noticed that for four hours, we’d make no progress because we were just tired,” Scripe said during today’s press conference. “At that point, if you’re losing four hours because you’re tired, you might as well sleep an extra hour, and maybe one and half hours out of those four would be good progress and it’s all worth it.”
In total, Echo spent over 67 hours of active time fighting bosses during the Sepulcher of the First Ones Race to World First, according to WoW stats tracking site WarcraftLogs. It took the team 1,121 attempts across the Sepulcher’s 11 bosses, with 277 of those pulls coming against the Jailer.
Echo will return to WoW‘s next Race to World First competition when the game’s next expansion releases in the future. The reveal date for WoW‘s next expansion is currently set for April 19.
