The second raid of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight<\/em>\u2014Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible\u2014is here, which means the game\u2019s best players will be participating in another edition of WoW<\/em>\u2019s most prominent and prestigious esports event: the Race to World First. <\/p>
In this raid tier, the top guilds in WoW<\/em> will buckle up for what\u2019s likely to be a heated battle, with the race being more open for new competitors to slide up the ranks, particularly once you look past the top two teams in the world. Beyond heavyweights Liquid and Echo\u2014the latter of whom are gunning for their fourth-straight RWF title\u2014the field of competitors is more closely stacked than it’s been coming into recent races. <\/p>
In recent expansions, the middle raid has seen extremely competitive races, with Battle for Azeroth<\/em>\u2019s Battle of Dazar\u2019alor and Shadowlands<\/em>\u2019 Sanctum of Domination both coming down to the wire. At the start of Dragonflight<\/em>, the Vault of the Incarnates race<\/a> was marred by a controversial nerf to the final boss at the end of the event (likely due to time constraints imposed upon the race by the then-looming Christmas holiday). But with a wide-open summer to play with, Aberrus could be a playground for unlimited tuning and power-creeping. <\/p>
WoW <\/em>fans should expect this race to be longer than ones in the past as its nine bosses are the most since Shadowlands<\/em> and the simultaneous release of the raid on all difficulties should keep top guilds in split raids<\/a> for longer than usual. While races tend to last anywhere between eight and 10 days, we could see more of Aberrus than we did of other raids. The longest Race to World First in recent memory was the Sepulcher of the First Ones race last March, which lasted 19 days<\/a>. <\/p>
