Imagine you’re a professional World of Warcraft player trying to be the first in the world to kill the final boss of the newest raid and, after days of attempts, you finally see its health bar hit zero. You begin to cheer, ecstatic that you beat all the other guilds around the world, that you might be able to sleep peacefully tonight.
And then.
You glance back at your screen to see the boss standing back up, at full health, and beginning a phase you’ve never seen before.
“This cannot be,” one of the raiders, THD, read aloud from the dialogue of a similarly stunned NPC watching the final boss of Midnight’s latest raid come back to life over the weekend. “Secret phase! No!”
Blizzard developers must’ve been grinning as they watched an entire guild realize their job was far from over. Rumors of a secret phase were floating around after dataminers found unused boss abilities in the files, but the already brutal difficulty of the fight made it seem unlikely.
That’s why just about every player leapt out of their chairs at the sight of the boss finally dying, only to sit right back down in disbelief as L’ura started “reintegrating” back to life. Liquid compiled everyone’s reaction into a video about “the L’ura Incident,” and it’s impressive how quickly some of them brush off the shock and lock back in.
World first races tend to involve boss fights at their hardest. Part of it is intentional: Blizzard benefits from the popularity of the streamed event and making it too easy would ruin the fun. But part of it is because most of these players are going in relatively undergeared compared to all the people who will tackle it over the next few weeks.
One of L’ura’s most challenging mechanics requires players to memorize the order of symbols and move on command to avoid instant death. World first raiding guilds, including Liquid, already have one player dedicated to shotcalling during fights, but this mechanic is so hard that they’d had to create a mod, or an addon, mid-race to help solve it.
Tight positioning, quick reflexes, and mastery over your class aren’t always enough when there are so many variables in fights as complex as these. L’ura has a particularly nasty first phase by all accounts, and that just makes it even harder to learn how to survive the rest of them. After hours and hours of failed attempts, I too would’ve been convinced that it couldn’t get any worse.
“Usually you can tell when you’re at the end of a boss,” Liquid raid leader Maximum said, reflecting on what happened. “Like when a secret phase happens, you’re like there seems to be the need for something else here … But on this fight, I think the reason we celebrated is because 0% was so hard to get to that it felt like a final thing. It felt like the end.”
A fourth phase means Liquid has to find a way to do the first three phases even cleaner than they have been. It also means every other guild now knows what they’re in for, making an already close race even closer.
As of today, L’ura still stands. Team Liquid is back at it, hoping to kill the boss before the UK guilds wake back up for another round. Meanwhile, Blizzard is being showered in praise from viewers who are thrilled to see that it had one last trick up its sleeve to keep the race going for at least another day or two.
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