The Venomous Abyss
The Venomous Abyss Race to World First Coverage
Although frontrunning initial progression after a victory against the Coiled Altar, this victory comes as something of a stunning upset, as Echo had pulled massively ahead with several sub-10% wipes while Liquid remained seemingly far behind in the 30% range early this morning. This reversed in a matter of moments, however, as they leapt from 22% to 11% to a clean victory in barely 10 pulls!
This marks the North American guild's 5th consecutive race to world first title, though this particular raid has been a grueling challenge, not the least of which from facing back-to-back 300 pull bosses, both of which going through multiple hotfixes before reaching a killable state. Even with those changes, Ula'tek proved to be another long fight of extremely tight damage and healing checks, with the group engineering new strategies putting most of their raid into the acid to buy just a little more time and space at the very end of the encounter.
As both guilds drew nearer to a kill, Blizzard hotfixed the strategy, preventing players from swimming under the waves to ignore mechanics and tunnel the boss, which the guild discussed briefly on their kill pull. Persisting through seventeen days and three resets, the Venomous Abyss has been one of the longest race to world first events in history, and a well earned win.
Group Composition
2 Tanks: 2 Blood Death Knights
4 Healers: 2 Preservation Evokers, Holy Priest, Restoration Shaman
6 Melee: Havoc Demon Hunter, Windwalker Monk, Retribution Paladin, Arms Warrior, 2 Assassination Rogues
9 Ranged: 2 Balance Druids, Augmentation Evoker, Marksmanship Hunter, 2 Arcane Mages, Shadow Priest, Demonology Warlock
No more heads for this hydra.
The fantastic boss images have been provided by Warcraft Logs; check out their own real-time race coverage at Warcraftlogs.com/race!
