Nek'zali, 15 pulls, and a well two teams cannot cover.

Grasping Depths wakes a Drowned Echo in the Soulcoil Well and drags the raid towards it, ticking shadow damage on all twenty players until the Echo is dead. Killing it means sending people down. Climbing back out applies Soul Exhaustion, which for 60 seconds adds 300% to anything the well does to you, so the same five cannot simply go again.

That makes a dive cost 89 seconds rather than 29: about 29 in the water until the Echo dies, then 60 locked out. Whether two teams can cover that depends entirely on how often the Echo comes back, and the fight answers that differently in each stage. All three bars are on the same scale.

So nothing is wrong with two teams for most of the fight, and every one of the day-one kills further down runs exactly that. Only the last stretch is short, which is also the stretch a kill spends the least time in. The rest of this page is about what happened in it.

Every pull of the night on one clock, in the order they were pulled. Bar length is how long the pull lasted and the figure on the right is how much boss was left, so a long bar and a low number is a good pull.

Most pulls never got past a fifth Echo, and the rotation held through all of them, which is what two teams at the Stage One cadence looks like when it works. The three pulls that lived to see 8 or 9 Echoes are the ones where whole teams went in early, every time in the last window before the wipe.

On the counting. Another two pulls show a single diamond, one person going in early on their own, which is a mistake rather than the rotation running out of people. Everything else that looks like an early entry happens after five or more of the raid are already dead. That is the wipe dragging corpses into the water rather than a call, and it is not counted against anybody.

Pull 15, 8:32, ended at 6.68%. Every well trip and every lockout, read straight from the aura events rather than inferred. A violet band is an Echo that is up, which is time somebody has to be in the water.

The last band never ends. The Echo that woke at 458s was still alive when the raid died, and Grasping Depths ticked on everyone for 53 unbroken seconds.

An Exhausted diver is visible in the damage alone, without reading a single aura: the hit lands at roughly 3.5 times its unmitigated value. The whole pull contains seven of them.

A clean Immortal Coil tick costs about 52,000 and an Exhausted one 208,000, which is the difference between a dive and a death.

The earliest public Mythic kills on record, all four from 2 September, the first day the difficulty opened. Every one of them ran two teams, the same as this raid does. Between them they took no Soul Exhaustion penalties at all.

Two teams works for them because a 416-second kill only ever asks for six dives. Their cadence compresses the same way this one does, but the 40-second regime only lasts for the last two Echoes, and two teams covers exactly two. Then the boss dies.

Three of the four never dive the final Echo at all. It wakes around 397s, they leave it alive, eat Grasping Depths for seventeen to twenty seconds, and kill the boss through it. The last Echo is something they outrun rather than solve.

Where the 96 seconds go, and which of them count

Only some of that gap bears on the well. The first Echo of Stage Two wakes about 29 seconds after Stage Two starts and they come every 40 after that, for every raid here, kills included. The schedule is anchored to the stage rather than to the pull, so a faster Stage One or a shorter Ritual moves the whole fight earlier without changing a single thing about the rotation. Stage Two's own length is the only input the well rotation has.

So both sides meet the same Echoes. The difference is where the last one lands. It arrives 18 to 21 seconds from a kill, so three of the four leave it alive and burn the boss down through it, and the fourth finished Stage Two before a third Echo could wake at all. Either way the rotation is never asked for a third turn. Here the last Echo woke with 54 seconds still to play, far too long to stand in, so it was dived by the only team whose turn it was, and they were 9 seconds short.

Stage Two damage, side by side

Which raises the obvious question of why Stage Two runs long, and the answer is not the one you would guess. Damage in Stage Two only, measured in the window rather than worked back from her health bar.

You do more total damage in Stage Two than any guild that killed it. 400M against their 374 to 396M, and the boss still lives, because 26% of it goes into Restless Amani rather than 12 to 16%.

The obvious objection is that a longer stage meets more adds by definition, so measure the same stretch: the first 129 seconds of Stage Two, which is a whole Stage Two for them. 27% into adds against their 12 to 16%, and 1.77M a second onto the boss against their 2.42M. Matching the clock barely moves it, so the add tax is not a consequence of the fight running long. In that same window this raid kills 33 Restless Amani to their 18 to 29, at 2.8M of damage each against their 2.1 to 2.9M: more of them, and each one costing at the upper end of what they pay.

Uptime is not the explanation. The Hex Pistols killed this on 84.1% uptime, against 85.0% here, and still put 2.46M a second into the boss against 1.69M. The difference is which target the damage landed on.

What she has left when Stage Two opens

One assumption worth checking, since everything above rests on it. The Ritual is gated at exactly half: 349M of damage went into her before it here, against 350 to 352M for the kills, which is 50% of a 697.1M health bar to within a percent for all five. She is not immune while tethered though. 28M landed on her during the Ritual here and 33 to 37M for them, so Stage Two opens at 46.0% rather than a clean 50, against 44.7 to 45.3% for the kills. That is the one figure on which this night starts slightly behind, and it is worth about four seconds.

Composition, gear, who dives, when they lust, how they handle the adds: set this night beside the four kills and almost all of it matches.

Same plan, better gear, faster reactions, and 16% less damage. The gap is not tactical knowledge and it is not loot. It is time on target.

Two health pools that do not move

The Echoes of Jawae are a fixed 198.9M pool, and every raid here did exactly that number, which turns the intermission into a stopwatch. The kills spent 130.3 seconds on it and this night spent 171.7, the same damage taking 32% longer. Nek'zali herself is 697.1M. The kills all did precisely that, and this raid did 650.5M before it died.

What the lost time costs

Grasping Depths damage taken, per player, across the whole pull:

Grasping Depths ticks on all twenty players for every second an Echo is up, and two windows went uncovered. The healers paid roughly 3.4M extra per player for time nobody was in the water, and that healing comes out of the damage that would have shortened the fight. That is the spiral: the slower the fight, the more Echoes, and the more Echoes the slower it gets.

The obvious fix is a third well team. The kill logs say that is the wrong first move: nobody who killed this on day one used three, and this rotation's shape already matches theirs. In priority order: