Just ahead of today's race start we had a short chat with Method's Cayna on the preparation for the final raid of Battle for Azeroth, the raid itself and also touched on BfA in general, including class balance, the race streaming events, the effects of everyone streaming progress now and even a scary prediction from raid leader Scripe.
How is the prep for Ny’alotha different from previous races? What’s the most time-consuming effort raiders have to put in and how much effort is it?
The patch did not bring much new stuff, outside of a handful of daily stuff in the new zones that take about a hour max. The most time consuming was farming 80 traits for the race. This basically took the entire week of spamming islands.
What’s the most important thing/item to have for this progress?
Corruption gear! Atm the tuning of a handful of corruptions are super OP, hopefully gets nerfed (*edit - some of the effects did get nerfed).
How’s the roster looking, are there any new additions or changes?
Almost the same really. Viklund and Nova we lost, we gained voci.
How’s the raid looking based on the PTR? Eternal Palace turned out pretty great, can we expect Ny’alotha to be on the same level or even better?
Hopefully even better. TEP looked amazing cause of the solid tuning, if they can keep it up I hope it will be very good.
With 12 bosses it’s possible we see a third week of progress for the top spot, have things changed now that the RWF event is supported and expanding or is a third week still a bit too much for everyone still?
3 weeks raiding gets a bit annoying. Hopefully it lasts 2nd reset into the weekend. This has always been the preferred time for most raiders.
How long would you expect N’Zoth to last?
Either a Xavius or KJ is what Scripe has been saying. I am scared.
The difficulty curve in Palace was once more pretty lopsided, with 7 bosses taking 2 days, the 8th 2 days and then the final one 8 days to clear. Is it really impossible for Blizzard to make a properly challenging penultimate boss (or even the earlier ones) without excluding them from the PTR/having secret phases on them on live?
TEP in my opinion was very good. The last tier a mid lvl boss has a big difficulty curve was Gorefiend in HFC. This boss made so many guilds disband it isn't even funny. I think what they have here is great IMO.
The previous race was one of the closest major ones in a long time, what would you say motivates and makes you guys play better, a really tight win, a big win or even a loss like in Crucible?
Loses and close wins are always better. A loss made us restructure a lot of the guild, how we prepped and how we handle things. A close win always keeps us tight. This tier has shown that, with the most insane AP farm from everyone (even our man Scotty reaching 78 traits).
Now that everyone is streaming progress the race has changed, but how much has it really changed? From your perspective as raiders what are the differences in preparing the strategies and executing them?
Its more weird now. With being ahead not mattering nearly as much. TEP had some things that we used from Limit and Limit used from us. Azshara had a tactic where both guilds took things from each other. But at the end we both still had a different tactic (2 healing vs 3 healing), different Bloodlust timing, ect.
Now that BfA is coming to a close, what are your thoughts about the expansion, both in terms of raiding and the game overall?
I hate islands. Pls remove islands. Pls cap AP. Pls. Thank you. It was a okey expansion, good raiding, felt a bit off maybe in the overall content to do. But pls never again 1 week of just spamming islands.
Which would you say were the dominant classes of the expansion and which are at the top now?
At the start: Warlock and DH Now: Warlock and DH Warlock just seems immortal to getting the slightest of nerf, and DH has a debuff. Atm fire mage is also very strong with the most insane 2 min burst window ever.
What’s been your favorite and least favorite feature of BfA?
Fav raiding cause most raids were pretty good. Least fav ….. Islands.
The Method guys will still have to wait 1 more day until they can get into the raid, but that won't stop them from prepping and commenting on the US/OC side of the race over on the RWF event stream which starts at 3PM CET today! Also make sure to check out our race progress page if you can't hop onto the stream or just want a recap of everything so far. And, as always, stay tuned on the Method twitter for all updates!
