The Venomous Abyss
It's been over a week since the start of The Venomous Abyss, and the Raider.io Leaderboards confirm that Heroic Venomous Abyss is a very difficult raid. The Race to World First guilds progressed slower than expected in Week 1, and ran into trouble splitting Coiled Altar and Ula'tek; many other guilds who normally steamroll Heroic had some trouble on the final bosses. Part of this was due to scaling issues and bugs, but it's been clear to many players that Heroic Venomous Abyss is much more difficult than normal.
Looking at the Raider.io Leaderboards, only 231 guilds achieved Ahead of the Curve: Ula'tek in the first week of the Patch. This marks the hardest Heroic raid since Vault of the Incarnates, where only 110 guilds killed Heroic Raszageth in the first week.
Raid TierTotalNAEUOC
Venomous Abyss23159 16210
Manaforge Omega60329656839
Liberation of Undermine53514236221
Nerub-ar Palace63718742327
Amirdrassil89327157943
Aberrus101631265648
Vault of the Incarnates11021827
During the first week of Heroic Ula'tek, there were two strategies that made the encounter easier - but these no longer work with the Weekly Reset. Without these strategies, the total AotC Ula'tek kills would likely be even lower.
The first was a "Tether Skip" strategy, where players would use the Warden in Phase 2 to delay the cast of the Tethers. This would hopefully give you enough time to defeat the add before it could cast, which made the damage intake and coordination much easier. The second strategy was to sacrifice the players handling the final soaks of the encounter. While players have additional gear sources, tier sets, and Crests this week, the encounter itself is slightly harder, so we'll have to see how many guilds earn AotC this week.
In an interview with Psybear, Ion mentions that because Heroic gives Myth track loot in your Vault (and from Bonus Rolls), the team can now tune Heroic to be more challenging. We'll have to see if this Heroic tuning continues into future tiers, but for now, Heroic Ula'tek is a significant challenge that awards great loot for players who can take her down.
