Liquid Take World First Mythic Ula'tek in The Venomous Abyss

Liquid win the race to world first

Liquid killed Mythic Ula'tek at 19:04 UTC on 3 September 2026, taking the world first kill of the final boss of The Venomous Abyss and closing out the patch 12.1 tier in front. It is their fifth consecutive race to world first win.

It was close. Echo killed the same boss 26 minutes later, which makes this one of the narrowest finishes the race has produced. Third place was still open at the time of writing, with Method the closest guild to it.

The pull count was reported inconsistently while the race was live, with figures between 306 and 311 circulating depending on how each tracker counted resets. The kill log settles it at 311.

The Coiled Altar was the real wall

The final boss was not the hardest part of this tier. The seventh boss, The Coiled Altar, held Liquid for roughly five days and 310 pulls before falling on 30 August, and Method needed close to 400 pulls on the same encounter. By the standards of the rest of the raid that is enormous: Liquid cleared Nek'zali the Soulcoiler and The Lost Explorers in a single pull each, Sszorak in six, and Entombed Sentinels in seven.

That shape matters for reading the race. A tier with one wall in the middle and a long finisher rewards a roster that can rebuild strategy under fatigue rather than one that simply outgears the content, and it is the main reason the gap between first and second stayed measured in days rather than hours.

The roster

The twenty players on the kill, with the item level each brought to it. The raid averaged 325.7, with the tanks at 324.5, the healers at 325.3 and the damage dealers at 325.9. Wallifetree's 332 on Arms Warrior was the highest single figure in the group by five item levels, and Anarchydrac's 323 on Augmentation Evoker the lowest.

Maximum led the raid, as he has for Liquid's previous wins. Every player fielded both tier set bonuses.

The composition they brought

The twenty player setup was two tanks, four healers and fourteen damage dealers, with the damage split six melee to eight ranged.

Two tanks of the same specialisation and four healers is a heavier defensive core than a farm composition would carry, which is the standard shape for a progression roster that expects to eat mechanics while learning them.

The storylines that shaped the tier

Heroic Ula'tek was overtuned and stayed that way for days. The week one story was not Mythic at all: the Heroic version of the final boss survived several nerf passes, Liquid failed to kill it across more than sixty hours of attempts, and the world first Heroic kill eventually went to the Chinese guild Clear Water after four days. A Heroic boss that blocks the top guilds is unusual enough to have set the tone for the entire race.

Blizzard nerfed while the race ran. Documented changes included reduced damage on the venom mechanic, a retargeting of the grasping fang adds, and area damage scaled to raid size, along with bug fixes to spectral coil scaling and a Hunter interaction. Mid-race tuning is normal now, but the volume of it here was not.

Splits defined the preparation. This was a heavy split run tier, with Liquid planning more than a dozen additional Heroic clears after reset purely for gear. The consequence, as every guild openly discussed, is a gold cost that dwarfs anything the actual raiding requires.

An unresolved tactical question. Shortly before the kill, Maximum said publicly that Blizzard was looking at a phase three strategy of jumping into the venom to skip part of the damage amplification, and that guilds using it were not in trouble but that it could be changed at any time. Whether the winning pull used it has not been stated by anyone, so treat the question as open rather than answered.

Second place, and where the two rosters differed

Twenty-six minutes covered a 23 pull difference: Echo needed 334 to Liquid's 311, and brought a marginally higher raid average at 326 against 325.7. Both guilds were in the endgame of the encounter at the same time, and the finishing order came down to which of them stitched the last phase together first. Their split by role went the other way: tanks at 327.5 against Liquid's 324.5, healers at 324.5 against 325.3, damage dealers at 326.1 against 325.9.

The compositions were close but not identical. Both fielded two Blood Death Knights, two Preservation Evokers, a Restoration Shaman, an Augmentation Evoker, two Balance Druids, two Arcane Mages, a Havoc Demon Hunter, a Windwalker Monk, a Shadow Priest and a Demonology Warlock. Three slots separate them. Echo healed with a Holy Paladin where Liquid used a Holy Priest, and doubled up on Marksmanship Hunter and Arms Warrior where Liquid brought two Assassination Rogue and single copies of the Warrior and Hunter.

Where the race stands right now

Liquid first, Echo second, and third place still open. Method are the closest guild to it, with the leading Chinese guilds behind them.

Because this changes by the hour, everything below second place is the part of a race article that ages fastest. If you are reading this later, treat the podium as settled and the rest as a snapshot.

What is not confirmed yet

Third place is the only part of the podium still open, and no official statement has come from Liquid, Echo or Blizzard about either kill. Both rosters, both pull counts and both compositions above come from the kill logs and are settled.