Liquid are the world first. At 19:04 UTC on Thursday, September 3, the Illidan guild killed Ula'tek, the eighth and final boss of The Venomous Abyss, sixteen days and four hours after the raid unlocked. The kill pull started at 18:53 and lasted ten minutes. Echo's Ula'tek went down at 19:29 UTC, 25 minutes later — the closest finish between the two in five tiers, and a race that the ladder had Echo winning for most of its final week.
Twenty-five minutes
Going into the last stretch, the ladder on the RWF hub had Echo at a 1.9% best pull on Ula'tek and Liquid at 8.0%. That is the number everyone was watching, and it was pointing the wrong way. Liquid got there first anyway: their kill came on pull 307, and Echo — whose kill pull began fifteen minutes after Liquid's boss was already dead — closed it out on pull 335.
For scale, Echo's margin in the last four races was measured in half-days: 29 hours behind at Nerub-ar Palace, eight and three-quarter hours at Liberation of Undermine, thirteen hours at Manaforge Omega, fourteen and a half at the first Midnight tier. This one was measured in a single reset of the boss.
307 pulls, and the two walls before it
The final-boss pull count is the number a tier gets judged by, and Ula'tek's sits in the middle of Liquid's recent finals: Chrome King Gallywix took them 100 pulls, Dimensius 385, Midnight Falls 474, Queen Ansurek 404. What made this race close was the boss before it. The Coiled Altar cost Liquid 310 pulls — more than Ula'tek did — while Echo cleared it in 219. Liquid's route through the eight bosses, in pulls:
- Nek'zali the Soulcoiler — 1
- The Lost Explorers — 1
- Entombed Sentinels — 7
- Vashnik the Malignant — 19
- Sszorak — 6
- The Twin Fangs — 54
- The Coiled Altar — 310
- Ula'tek — 307 · 705 pulls for the tier
Echo's run was cheaper on pulls — 612 across the raid, 219 of them on the Coiled Altar and 335 on Ula'tek — but slower on the clock. Liquid entered mythic on August 23 at 23:21 UTC and Echo followed thirteen hours later on August 24; Liquid reached Ula'tek first, on Sunday morning August 30, about two hours and sixteen minutes ahead, and never gave the lead back for long enough to matter. That is the shape of the race in one sentence: Echo pulled better, Liquid pulled earlier.
The rest of the field
Method are the only other guild on Ula'tek, with a 2.93% best pull and past 350 attempts as this publishes; their kill is the next thing the ladder will move for. Behind them, 中洲队 of Scarlet Crusade are seven of eight and pulling Sszorak, and a pack of six-boss guilds — FatSharkYes, Instant Dollars, Identity, JSUUG, Advance, Honestly — are at the Coiled Altar, the wall that decided this race.
The final ladder stays up
The RWF hub now carries the finished race: the world-first banner, the full fifty-guild mythic ladder with every guild's pull count on the boss it is stuck on, and a page per guild. The pull counts on killed bosses are new — until today the ladder went blank on a guild the moment it killed, which is exactly the moment the number matters. Every past race we have tracked lists its winner the same way. Followers of the race have their kill notification; the next tier gets the same treatment from the first mythic pull.
Five in a row for Liquid, all of them over Echo. The next one is going to be closer still.
