It’s done! The final boss of the raid tier and March on Quel’Danas has been defeated! L’ura, aka Midnight Falls, aka the most insane boss in WoW for a long while, has fallen indeed. The incredible faceoff between Liquid and Echo has ended, after days of being single-digit percentages from each other, the shock of a secret phase after Liquid were sure they had won, multiple raid day extensions from each guild, and so much more.
The Tier
The tier was a very strange one, with a basically non-event first week, despite having Heroic week before that! The first 7 bosses in the first two raids were barely any challenge to the top guilds, with only Lightblinded Vanguard even registering as a proper Race to World First boss. The triple-raid nature of the tier also led to some really crazy item levels, as the guilds made a whole lot of Mythic splits on top of their usual Heroic ones, as doing so wouldn’t lock out any characters for the final two bosses.
The End?
Luckily, the March on Quel’Danas made up for the early lack of difficulty and then some, with the two bosses being proper challenges for the best of the best. Belo’ren took 196 pulls while the final boss… well, that was quite the story in and of itself. Midnight Falls has a bit of a lopsided difficulty curve, with the first phase of the fight being the hardest, but the rest weren’t exactly pushovers either. In the end, after both Echo and Liquid got the boss under 2% and raced neck and neck, it was Liquid who had seemingly won, getting the boss down to 0%. But death, as it seemed, wasn’t the end of this particular dark naaru.
The Secret Phase
L’ura just casually reformed and went all the way back to 100% health right in front of some truly shocked and bewildered Liquid players.
The timing of this particular resurrection was also very on point, as many noticed.
This was late in the EU raid day, as Echo had already extended their raid by 3 hours after some 0.45%-2% wipes. The advent of the secret phase sent them directly to bed, hoping the boss would live to the EU morning. And it did! Liquid played through their evening normally, getting to the secret phase 3 more times and seeing the full fight from start to finish, with a 44% best in the last phase, where a BIG damage buff was active, so the boss’ 1 billion HP went down a lot faster.
The Final Day
And so we came to this EU morning, where Liquid were now the ones extending and saying “it dies or we die”. Well, after about 2 hours of extending their raid day… neither thing happened. Getting to the secret phase was incredibly inconsistent and hard, and so the US guild did the same as Echo the night before and went to bed. The rest was all Echo and Method progress, with Echo getting the boss down to 6%by the EU evening.
But, in the very end, it was Liquid who won, getting all the phases down and claiming the colossal World First on Midnight Falls and winning the first tier of Midnight and Race to World First!
Here’s the full kill pull:
And here’s the raid composition:
For 24/7 live coverage of the race and much more info, head on over to Raider.IO’s coverage.
