Renowned EU guild Method has been beaten to the punch in Challenge Mode gold runs by three guilds who are hitting these hard: Organised Confusion of EU-Anetheron, Aquila of EU-Stormreaver, and aLions of EU-Sen’jin. A few days back, these three guilds were the first to get any challenge mode gold medals at all, on what seems to be the most popular dungeon for Gold runs, Gate of the Setting Sun. aLions decided to play it their own way, getting the first Gold on Scarlet Halls. Method are now sitting pretty in the top spot for Scarlet Halls, beating second place by 7 seconds. WoWProgress.com have put together some fantastic leaderboards, drawing together the results from all Blizzard’s server-level leaderboards.
Since the first few appeared, Golds have been coming in thick and fast for Gate of the Setting Sun, with 17 teams beating the 13 minute time restriction for Gold. Considering that the 22 minute cutoff for Silver has been achieved by 204 groups, and the 45 minute Bronze cutoff by 291, these 17 teams must be doing some pretty hard work to hit these times. On the US side, for Gate of the Setting Sun, Vodka have hit a Gold with 12 minutes 19 seconds, but are beaten into second place by Raiding Rainbows of US-Illidan.
What these Challenge Mode dungeons are showing is subject to constant and rapid change, with new Golds appearing all the time. Currently, again looking at Gate of the Setting Sun, where more Golds have been achieved than any other dungeon, there seems to be a lean towards Death Knight tanks, with 8 of the 17 Gold runs tanked by a DK. 4 were tanked by Warriors, 3 by Druids and only 2 by Paladins. On the healing side, the Paladins did a bit better with 7 Paladin healers, 5 druids, 2 Monks, and 2 shaman. One run, from Aquila, got a Gold with no healer, but used an Elemental Shaman and a Shadow Priest among their DPS, providing considerable off-healing capacity. Notably, not a single priest-healed run has hit Gold so far in Gate of the Setting Sun.
In other interesting observations, Elemental Shaman featured in 8 of the 10 top Gold runs, with one group bringing two as DPS. One of the two groups that didn’t bring a DPS shaman had a shaman healer instead, so in the early days of this feature Shaman are definitely in great form.
To get into Challenge Mode dungeons, an item level of 463 is required, and all players with an item level above that will be scaled down to 463. Challenge Mode dungeons cannot be queued for, like the normal Dungeon Finder dungeons, instead they have to be done by a pre-made group, and are scaled accordingly. So grab some friends and get in there! You could be the guild to knock Method off the top spot.
Loading ...
