It’s been quite the day in the Midnight Season 2 Race to World First. Not so much for top guild Mythic activity, but unlike the day or so before, at least some things happened that weren’t hundreds of splits!
Heroic Ula’tek Is Crazy
We had quite a few attempts at Heroic Ula’tek by Liquid, as they tried both before and after the significant nerfs. These are still splits, but Liquid went in with all guild characters (the actual Mythic mains haven’t been decided yet) and still they decided the boss was not possible, let alone properly splittable. Then came word of upcoming nerfs so they waited and continued Normal and earlier bosses Heroic splits. Then came the nerfs:
Ula’tek Nerfs
- Blight Vein damage reduced on Heroic difficulty.
- Grasping Fangs now targets three players per side on Heroic difficulty, no matter the instance group size.
- Volatile Purge’s area of effect now scales with raid size in Normal and Heroic difficulties. The effect radius is largest in a 10-player raid and gradually decreases as raid size increases, reaching its smallest size in a 30-player raid.
- Resolved an issue causing the damage of Spectral Coils to unintentionally scale on non-Mythic difficulties.
- Spectral Coils now requires 40% of the raid to reduce its damage to a minimum value.
- Spectral Coils adjusted on Heroic difficulty so it has more consistent timing.
- Corrected an issue where the Blight Vein debuff did not properly inflict its damage based on the number of stacks applied, on Heroic and Mythic difficulties.
- Corrected an issue where Hunters’ Stampede pets from the Pack Leader hero talents would not properly damage the Heart of Ula’tek during the encounter.
Ula’tek Pulls
However, even those were not enough! Post-nerf Liquid even committed a 25-man Vantus group (again, these aren’t necessarily the mains yet, so it’s less of a commitment than in regular Mythic progression). In the end they came out with a sub-10% pull on the full enrage at 10 minutes:
And here’s that full pull so we get a proper look at the entire fight:
After that Liquid decided it wasn’t worth their time trying the boss. Max mentioned it is probably doable with a perfect pull, but considering they need to do a lot of splits on the boss (14!), a single kill after spending a lot of time on it isn’t really relevant.
That’s over 60 hours with no Heroic endboss kill so far! This hasn’t happened in a long time, and Ula’tek is looking to be one of the hardest Heroic bosses ever! We’ll see what Echo and Method decide, once they get to the item level Liquid is at.
Top 3 Guilds Item Levels Over Time
Speaking of gear, here’s a handy look at the progression of gearing up during Liquid, Echo, and Method’s splits. Interestingly, Liquid had over an item level over the other two guilds even before they stepped foot into the raid, just from the pre-season activities. Obviously they have the half-day’s extra time from the NA launch, so the EU guilds will catch up.
Mythic Kills
We also finally got some Mythic kills! And it wasn’t even the World Boss! In fact, Nymrissa in her Lair is proving to be very hard, with the best pulls coming in around 80%. The first boss of the Venomous Abyss turned out to be much easier, as we got several kills on him! The World First on Nek’zali the Soulcoiler went to Consequence:
And the full pull:
There were three more kills after that, with Daybreak, Mid, and Literacy Test all getting Nek’zali down.
It’s been a LONG week of splits and it’s not looking to slow down any time soon. Even if Ula’tek was further nerfed right now, it would still take the guilds a full day to do their splits on him. That means we’re not seeing any Mythic action from the top guilds at least until Saturday, possibly (and likely) Sunday. That Blizzcon date is looming larger and larger!
As always, for 24/7 live coverage, updates, clips, stats, and a lot more, head on over to Raider.IO’s global race coverage.
