What Is Race to World First?
Race to World First (RWF) is the unofficial world championship of Mythic raiding: the first guild to kill a new raid tier's final boss on Mythic claims the World First title. It is not a Blizzard bracket tournament with seeding and prize pools — it is a community race that became a multi-day livestream event, with org broadcasts, casters, pull trackers, and sponsor integrations.
World First kills have existed since early WoW, but the modern broadcast format took off when 
Method livestreamed the 2018 Uldir race on Twitch (Method cites ~263k live viewers for that breakthrough). Today 
Liquid, 
Echo, and Method (plus CN and other NA/EU guilds) race in parallel while fans follow every percent on Raider.IO and Warcraft Logs.
Sources: Method — What is RWF?; Raider.IO / Warcraft Logs race hubs.
How an RWF Works (Heroic Week → Mythic)
Most modern tiers follow the same skeleton:
- Heroic week: Normal and Heroic open first. Guilds clear, learn fights, and start split runs — farming the same bosses on many characters to funnel loot onto the 20-player Mythic roster.
- Mythic week: Mythic has usually opened one week later — but not this tier: the Venomous Abyss schedule puts Mythic in the same week as Normal and Heroic. Early bosses often fall in hours; mid and end bosses become multi-day walls with hundreds of pulls.
- Hall of Fame: Blizzard still awards in-game Hall of Fame recognition to the earliest Mythic end-boss clears (exact cap/rules have shifted by expansion — treat the prestige as the signal, not a cash prize).
- Economics: Consumables, repairs, BoE buys, and gold for crafts are a real race cost. There is no official Blizzard prize purse; top orgs run on sponsors (e.g. Alienware as Liquid's presenting partner for Midnight).
Midnight Season 1 was unusual: three launch raids (Voidspire, Dreamrift, March on Quel'Danas) with staggered Mythic opens, so the "race" was to 9/9 across the tier, not a single 8-boss instance. Boss lists and loot bands are in our Midnight raid guide.
Midnight Season 1 Recap — Liquid's Four-Peat
Liquid defeated 
Midnight Falls (L'ura) on April 6, 2026 for World First, after a razor-close race with Echo. Liquid's own recap cites 474 pulls on the final; Wowhead coverage rounds to 473. The defining storyline: Liquid "killed" the boss into a Mythic-only secret fourth phase (not on Heroic), handed Echo free intel overnight, then closed the race the next day on a near-perfect pull. Echo took World 2nd (~493 pulls on the final per Hotspawn; Warcraft Logs lists 494 on Midnight Falls); Method contested third (~502 pulls on the final per WCL).
This was Liquid's fourth consecutive RWF after Nerub-ar Palace, Liberation of Undermine, and Manaforge Omega.
| Date (2026) | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Mar 17 | Heroic week — Voidspire, Dreamrift, March on Quel'Danas open on Normal/Heroic |
| Mar 24 | Mythic opens for Voidspire + Dreamrift; early WFs (e.g. Melee Mechanics on Averzian, Nurfed on Vorasius) |
| Mar 25–27 | Liquid takes key WFs including Dreamrift's  Chimaerus, then Voidspire end boss  Crown of the Cosmos (Mar 27) |
| Mar 28–30 | Gap week — splits, reclears, Heroic prep while waiting on Mythic Quel'Danas |
| Mar 31 | Mythic March on Quel'Danas opens |
| Apr 3 | Liquid World First  Belo'ren (long wall; ~196 pulls — Blizzard Watch / WCL) |
| Apr 4–5 | Midnight Falls wall + secret-phase discovery / fake 0% |
| Apr 6 | Liquid World First L'ura (~474 pulls) — Midnight RWF over |
Sources: Team Liquid (Apr 7, 2026); Raider.IO Tier 35 coverage; Warcraft Logs RWF; Hotspawn / Blizzard Watch day logs.
Recent World First Winners
Hardest-difficulty final-boss World Firsts from Sepulcher through Midnight. Guild colors + icons: Liquid, Echo, Method (historical Method wins predate this table window).
| Raid | Year | Winner | Runner-up | Duration / notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sepulcher of the First Ones | 2022 | Echo WF | Liquid | Long modern race (Jailer) |
| Vault of the Incarnates | 2022 | Echo WF | Liquid | 11-day race; 258 pulls on Raszageth (Method recap) |
| Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible | 2023 | Liquid WF | — | Liquid's modern streak begins |
| Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope | 2023 | Echo WF | Liquid | Tight Echo win |
| Nerub-ar Palace | 2024 | Liquid WF | — | TWW S1 — four-peat starts here |
| Liberation of Undermine | 2025 | Liquid WF | — | TWW S2 |
| Manaforge Omega | 2025 | Liquid WF | Echo (close) | Dimensius WF |
| Midnight S1 (VS / DR / MQD) | 2026 | Liquid WF | Echo | ~2 Mythic weeks; ~474 pulls on L'ura |
For the live Midnight DPS meta that these races shaped, see the Midnight tier list.
How to Watch and Track RWF
When a race is live, you do not need a ticket — you need tabs:
- Org streams: Twitch/YouTube for Team Liquid, Echo, and Method (player POVs + desk commentary).
- Progress trackers: Raider.IO global coverage (day blogs, pull counts) and the Warcraft Logs RWF tracker (top guilds, live standings, region/boss filters).
- Between races: VODs (Liquid Day 1–N archives, Method recaps) and community threads on r/CompetitiveWoW.
Between tiers, the same skill ceiling shows up in keys — our Mythic+ guide covers how the broader player base gears toward raid readiness.
Why Races Take 7–14 Days
Viewers often ask why the best players in the world need two weeks. Short answer: Mythic end bosses are designed as research projects, and the soft costs compound.
- Splits before and during Mythic burn calendar time so mains sit in better gear than a single lockout allows.
- Pull count walls (100–500+ on a final) mean days of learning — Midnight's secret phase literally added a full unknown fight mid-race.
- Gold and consumables: flasks, potions, food, enchants, repairs, and BoE snipes across a 20-man roster for 12–16 hour days are expensive even for sponsored guilds.
- Sleep / region offset: NA and EU trade the lead overnight; one region's "morning" is the other's progress window (exactly how Echo used Liquid's secret-phase discovery).
- Hotfixes and exploits: Blizzard can invalidate strategies mid-race; guilds plan comps with backup specs ready.
That is why clean kills look "easy" on the final pull — the two weeks before are the real product.
Next Race: The Venomous Abyss, Week of August 18
The next Race to World First runs on 
The Venomous Abyss, the eight-boss raid of Patch 12.1 — The Curse of Ula'tek. The dates are no longer a guess: Patch 12.1 releases August 11, 2026 and Midnight Season 2 begins August 18, 2026.
| Week | What opens | Matters to the race? |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 18 | Normal, Heroic, Mythic, Raid Finder Wing 1 | Yes — the race starts here |
| Aug 25 | Story Mode, Raid Finder Wing 2 | No |
| Sep 1 | Raid Finder Wing 3 | No |
| Sep 8 | Raid Finder Wing 4 | No |
Source: Wowhead — The Venomous Abyss (page updated 1 Aug 2026), read 7 Aug 2026.
The detail everyone is skipping: no Heroic-only week
Read that first row again. Mythic opens in the same week as Normal and Heroic. Season 1 did not work that way — Voidspire and Dreamrift opened Normal/Heroic on March 17 and Mythic only on March 24, giving the top guilds a full week of split runs to funnel gear onto their twenty-player roster before a single Mythic pull.
That week is gone. If the schedule holds, guilds walk into Mythic Ula'tek gearing during progression rather than before it, on a tier whose last two bosses drop 344 item level. Expect the early bosses to fall on day one anyway and the wall to arrive lower in the roster's item level than it did in Midnight Season 1 — which usually means a longer race, not a shorter one.
One honest caveat: the source groups a whole week together, so a day-level stagger inside the week of August 18 is still possible. What is settled is that Mythic is in week one of the season, not week two.
A date conflict worth knowing about
Wowhead's Season 2 Overview currently reads "Season 2 begins on August 11th, 2026, one week after the Patch 12.1 release" — which cannot both be true, since Wowhead's own patch page dates 12.1 to August 11. Its top-rated sticky comment flags the same thing. Icy Veins and Warcraft Tavern both report 12.1 on the 11th and Season 2 on the 18th, and the raid page's own schedule starts the week of the 18th. Take August 18 for the season and the race; August 11 is patch day only.
The eight bosses
The Venomous Abyss sits on The Coiled Isle, inside the Vaults of Atal'Utek. After the first boss the raid splits into two wings of two bosses each; clearing both returns you to the central pit for the last three.
- Nek'zali the Soulcoiler
- Entombed Sentinels · The Lost Explorers (wings)
- Vashnik the Malignant · Sszorak · The Twin Fangs
- The Coiled Altar
- Ula'tek — the World First kill, freed after 16,000 years of imprisonment
Mythic Ula'tek drops the Primeval Skyfriend mount, and the final two bosses drop 344 item level on Mythic (Myth 9/6). Season 2 also adds the first Lair — The Tidebound Grotto, with Nymrissa Wavecaller, the only raid boss in 12.1 offering Flexible Mythic — but a one-boss Lair is not the RWF target.
Full Season 2 raid and dungeon picture: Midnight Season 2 guide. If you want the clears without a twenty-player roster, browse raid runs.