Big Brain Strats: MDI Global Finals

By Hulahoops — Nov 2 2021 18:15 UTC

Season 2 of the Shadowlands MDI has officially ended, as this past weekend saw the culmination of the competition with the Global Finals tournament. With Championship Sunday falling on Halloween, it was a spooktacular finish to arguably the best MDI we’ve ever seen! The casters were costumed, but all eyes were on the exceptional gameplay showcased throughout the entire weekend. The caliber of all 8 teams that competed in the Global Finals this Season was something we’ve never seen before in this esport, and so many matches came down to mere seconds.

As many expected, Echo emerged from this weekend as the victors, defending their crown and earning the achievement being the back-to-back-to-back-to-back MDI champions. This is an incredible feat and we congratulate Echo on their impressive performance! Their victory was certainly not assured, however, as second-place team Aster.Y, the crew representing the Chinese Region, not only made history by being the first Chinese team to advance this far in a Global Finals, but by giving Echo a run for their money. Aster.Y are a relatively new team to MDI competition, especially on the Global stage, so we are incredibly excited to see what they bring to this esport in the future.

This late in the MDI Season, we don’t typically see new and innovative strategies, as the dungeons have been run so many times that any and all Big Brain Strats have already made their way into the routes. However, this time around, the teams knew what the affixes and dungeon levels were going to be a full two weeks ahead of the competition weekend. Historically, teams have not had this much time to practice with the specific affix combinations, and it appears that this extra time made a difference. During the Season 2 MDI Global Finals, we saw a number of new and improved Big Brain Strats emerge, including a couple from the MDI Champions themselves!

Rerouting, Rerouting, Rerouting…

A standard route arose early on this Season in De Other Side, as we have seen almost every single team first go to the Ardenweald wing and face Dealer Xy’exa. We saw a deviation from the norm right off the bat this weekend in the very first dungeon of the tournament. Perplexed and Ambition faced off in DoS on Friday morning, and both teams went straight for the Zul’gurub wing to face Hakkar the Soulflayer instead.

This appears to be due to two factors. Firstly, the affix combination assigned to DoS for the Global Finals was Fortified, Raging, Explosive, and Tormented. The most difficult pulls in the dungeon are arguably the massive trash pulls that make up the first part of the Ardenweald wing. This combination of affixes makes those pulls incredibly dangerous. By going to the Hakkar wing first, then Mechagon, and Ardenweald last, the teams end up killing two of the Tormented lieutenants, not just one, giving them an additional anima buff before taking on those crazy spriggan, stag, and bird pulls.

The second factor is that, for this MDI Global Finals, the teams were given the assigned affixes and keystone levels a full two weeks prior to the competition. Usually, they only have 48-72 hours to prepare, so big changes to routes are unlikely to be seen as a good use of prep time. However, with two full weeks available this Season for practice, we imagine the teams had plenty of time to realize it was more efficient to get a second anima buff by going to Hakkar first before taking on those very dangerous trash pulls on Fortified, Raging, and Explosive!

More Trash? Don’t Mind If I Do!

Efficiency has always been the name of the MDI game. As teams practice, prepare, and plan, the main objective is to improve the efficiency of their routes. Whether this means changing the order of bosses killed, or iterating on cooldown timings, these teams are always looking for the next competitive edge.

Complexity brought one of these small adjustments to the tournament this weekend, and it’s actually something that you can do in your own runs on live if you’re trying to push your keys and the timers are getting close. As Complexity was finishing the first boss in Theater of Pain, Complexity pulled a pack of trash right as the RP started, and they were sent down below. This caused that trash to snap down with them, right onto Executioner Varruth. Killing this Tormented lieutenant is part of the standard ToP route, so Complexity realizing that they could make this pull even more efficient by adding more trash count at the same time is very Big Brain!

Kurimonk’ll make you JUMP! JUMP!

So…..sometimes when watching the MDI we see the teams pull off incredibly difficult strategies that just blow our minds. Other times, we see them do something that makes us go “wait...you can do that?”. When it’s been almost a full year that we’ve been tackling these dungeons on a daily basis, new discoveries make us sit back and reflect..Why haven’t any of us thought of this sooner?? This weekend, Kuri hit us with one of these moments and our heads are still spinning.

On Day 2 of the Global Finals, Team Name competed against Obey Alliance in De Other Side. The dungeon was progressing pretty much as expected, until the teams made their way to Dealer Xy’exa. The boss has an ability called Localized Explosive Contrivance, which is basically a bomb debuff placed on one player that explodes after a few seconds. If the debuffed player explodes while on the ground, they damage their whole team, and at these keystone levels, it will kill the party. To deal with this mechanic, the debuffed player needs to use one of the Displacement Traps that Xy’exa places on the ground, shooting themselves into the air as the bomb explodes…

...or so we thought!

Turns out that you can just...jump into the air as the bomb explodes and it won’t damage your team. You can just hit your spacebar at the right moment and everything will be okay. Did you know this? We did not know this. Don’t believe us? Check out the clip below:

Many Shards..Much Damage...Wow

Most of the time, the Big Brain Strats we highlight from MDI teams are innovations that are creative and a bit out of left field. Sometimes though, we want to showcase a strategy that isn’t necessarily Big Brain, but certainly Big...britches.

This weekend in Halls of Atonement, Ambition and Echo both started off the dungeon with a triple-shard pull. You read that right: one pull with all three Shards of Halkias, and they managed to make it look easy! Check out the clip below and be amazed:

Source: Disney Entertainment

Hocus Pocus — Was This Naowh’s Magnum Opus?

To round out our MDI Global Finals Big Brain Strats, we’re bringing you a fun strat that Echo put together in Spires of Ascension. It looks like this pull was only possible due to having access to the instant-cast Magic Broom mount, a side benefit of this tournament taking place during the Hallow’s End celebration!

In the clip below, you can see Naowh hanging behind his team as they shroud through all of the trash on the way to Oryphrion. Standing off to the side of the stairway, he then drops a sigil on top of Executioner Varruth behind him. Naowh instantly mounted up on his broom, and flew up past the rest of the stairway trash, able to run past it all thanks to a handy sap on the Forsworn Warden from Fragnance. Once he makes his way up the stairs, Naowh hops, skips and jumps his way to the rest of his team behind the pillar, pulling everything else on the way. All of the trash groups up behind the pillar and Executioner Varruth snaps up and joins the fray.

The time between Naowh laying down the sigil to engage Varruth and it activating, putting him in combat, is too short for him to mount up on a regular mount, so this was only possible because he had access to an instant-cast Magic Broom! It’s possible a Guardian Druid could do this strat, but this dungeon typically sees Vengeance Demon Hunters in MDI style competition.

Very impressive adaptation of a strat making use of the tools available to them!

Please Sir, Can We Have Some More?

The MDI Season may technically be over, but there’s still more dungeon competition to go this year! The 2nd Great Push tournament is just over a month away, and it is going to be even better than the last one. Legion dungeons, in-game rewards, prize money...and did we mention Legion dungeons? You can still sign up to participate until November 29th, so get a team together and sign up here.

And that’s not all! It’s the season for Terrific Twos, as not only do we have the 2nd Great Push coming up, but we have Season 2 of the Oasis Keystone Builders Tournament (KSB) as well! Signups for this tournament are unfortunately closed, but make sure you set your calendars for December 3-5 so you can tune in to watch on Twitch. This is a dungeon-running competition that takes place on live servers with a really creative formatting. Click here to learn more about the KSB tournament, how it works, and to help support this great community initiative by donating directly to the prize pool.

The rest of 2021 is going to be a great one for competitive Mythic+ action!

About the Author

Hulahoops has been playing WoW since Vanilla. She has recently shelved Retail to go back and re-experience TBC in all its glory, but will one day make her way back to the Shadowlands. In her hey-day, Hulahoops could be found raid-leading in Mythic Progression, or competing in the MDI with her team Angry Toast. Hulahoops is a Holy Paladin in every sense of the term: she moderates the Hammer of Wrath Paladin Class Discord, and she was a practicing Lawyer for 7 years. Judgment isn't just a spell! Hulahoops decided to put the law books away and follow her passion for gaming and esports by joining the team at Raider.IO. In her capacity as Production Manager, Hulahoops oversees events, content, and more!