A Look at the Liberation of Undermine Before the launch of Season 2

With likely a month left until Undermine(d)‘s release, I figured I would take the time, along with my other guides and content on 11.1, to talk about the raid—from the fights themselves to maybe even the season at large.

It’s no secret that Nerub’ar Palace was brutal for many guilds. While on Heroic it is a frontrunner for best raid of all time (hot take, I know), the Mythic iteration was plagued with problems from start to finish. While raiding in WoW has had its ups and downs, the difficulty has steadily increased since Heroic was first introduced all the way back in Wrath of the Lich King. Sometimes, it goes down for a tier or two (Emerald Nightmare, Antorus, Aberrus), but inevitably the pendulum swings back to shake everyone to the reality that this is a game in which the developers intend only to escalate the degree to which they challenge our reactions, adaptability, and attention.

In Liberation of Undermine, this trend has been proven true—for the moment. Thematically, everything is wonderful. The words of the various staff at Blizzard expressing their passion for the goblin theme of this patch ring true, with even the tooltips cheekily explaining mechanics in the most “This thing’s built to blast” vibe possible. While it is a bit disappointing that half of the fights take place in reused locations, as part of it takes place in the eponymous zone, they each go all in on their individual themes and gimmicks—a fight against a motorcycle gang involving riding the bikes, explosions, mechanics and so on; a mechanical dinosaur versus a cyborg gorilla; battling against propaganda and music, avoiding the DJ’s “soundcloud”…it goes on.

As far as creativity is concerned, this is some of their best work in quite a while. The past few raids felt a bit phoned in and lacking for the most part, not really utilizing the arena or high concepts available to the design team, but this one feels much more reminiscent of the Mists-Legion era, for better or worse. That is not to say that BFA-Now has been lacking in creativity—far from it. But, often, the creativity is more in the mechanics themselves than anything to do with the bosses. Again, there are exceptions, and I could list them all myself, but my point is that generally, it feels as if fights are often more about a single mechanic supported by other mechanics with different twists that you could slap on to realistically any boss, rather than looking at the boss itself, saying, “This is a big X. What would fighting this be like?”

But, let’s return to the difficulty. As of right now, I find the raid to be a bit similar to Amirdrassil, which is worrisome. You have your free, easy gimme-kills—Vexie, Cauldron, Rik, but after that things start escalating in a nice way. You get to Stix and Sprocket and say to yourselves, “Ok, this is tough, but it’s doable”. Things feel hectic, but as you pull them you see the method behind the chaos and flow into the groove. Then you get to Bandit, and you feel the pressure of DPS checks and the throughput requirement of a Mythic raid.

And then Mug’Zee smacks you in the mouth, and demands 300+ pulls and perfection of you.

Looking at the dungeon journal of Gallywix, I’m more than a little worried we may have an even harder fight than Ansurek coming up, and she is already a contender for hardest boss of all time by a lot of people who fought her pre-nerf to one or two nerf states. And that’s just my current estimation based off of the mechanical complexity. Tuning is in reality what makes things difficult. It doesn’t matter if a fight has a million things going on if only a couple of them are lethal.

Look at Cauldron of Carnage and Rik Reverb for example. While both of these had, and still arguably do still have design issues, in early testings of these fights Cauldron was much harder than Rik. Why? Well, Cauldron had a gazillion HP, and Scrapbomb did an incredible amount of damage relative to the rest of the fight’s mechanics. So, you had a fight that was quite long, quite boring, and where 1 or 2 people failing to soak meant that you would just slowly wipe for another couple of minutes (which is why people simply resorted to solo soaking with immunities/tanks). Whereas, Rik Reverb is definitely mechanically much harder (but still not that hard), but it had so little health that nothing mattered and you just kind of brute forced your way to victory.

The same thing happened this tier, though with later bosses. Broodtwister and Nexus Princess were not anticipated to be as difficult as they ended up being on live. The hardest thing about Broodtwister seemed to be just managing the egg breaks, and while that was definitely a mechanic that did wipe guilds—it was not the main factor in the fight’s overall progression curve at all. More specifically, the fight hinged on stringent positional and coordination checks, in the form of staying spread in semi-consistent spots and being able to chain together CC to manage parasites, consistently interrupt Worms, and even a high degree of threat management with the Spiders, which I’m sure anyone who has tanked the fight or DPS’ed it as a melee (fury warriors lol) can attest to.

Nexus Princess mechanically was simple on paper but difficult to execute while meeting the throughput requirement demanded of you, and early on required exceptionally consistent and proactive defensive usage in order to live each intermission, as well as exceptional spatial awareness in order to manage each section of the room properly. This may very well happen with Stix, Sprocket, and One-Armed Bandit.

Mechanically, none of these fights are very challenging. Stix tests your ability to remain spatially aware and really that is about it. All the “dodge” mechanics are quite forgiving. It hinges on proper target priority and controlling the field with the trash ball gimmick. However…what happens if the boss ends up being as long as Broodtwister? What if you have to absorb 5 Doomsplosives at the end of the fight? While properly absorbing and killing Scrapmasters before they kill anyone, while making sure to kill every single Bombshell in time and keep each trash wave under control, not setting anything extra on fire and simply not committing any major mistakes in 10 minutes? That’s a completely different fight, and could very well be a mid-raid wall.

Same thing with Sprocket. Sprocket’s a predictable, consistent and overall easy to execute fight on Heroic. The mythic mechanic does throw a wrench in things, but what if this fight ends up being a DPS check, where the 3rd intermission ends things? Then, slow reaction time and bad placements of mechanics start to become a serious issue. Splitting the raid up and taking your time with getting rid of the mines becomes an issue, and overall safe play is thrown out the window in order to meet the DPS requirements. Look at the intermission itself, which is simple enough to live through if that is your only objective, but becomes incredibly annoying and difficult to perform your full throughput while navigating the conveyor belt and dozens of swirls.

One-Armed Bandit is definitely poised to be the “Sludgefist” DPS check, and unless Blizzard misses the tuning mark dramatically (as they did with Magmorax, and to a lesser degree Smolderon), will likely be a triple-digit pull count encounter.

I remain optimistic about 11.1. As I have tested almost the entire breadth of content available on the PTR, from Delves to the Campaign to the dungeons and raids, I have nothing but excitement for the upcoming season…but there is this nagging voice that tells me it’s only going to keep getting worse before it gets better.