Team Liquid thought they had just won the Race to World First.
During their progression on World of Warcraft‘s latest Mythic raid, Liquid pushed the final boss down to 0% health. In typical WoW encounters, that means the boss dies and the fight ends. Players get their achievement, loot appears, and the kill counts.
Not this time.
Instead of dying, the boss transitioned into a previously unknown phase. The health bar reset to full and new mechanics kicked in, that didn’t appear in the normal or heroic version of this raid.
Liquid became the first guild in the world to trigger this secret phase. Their competitor Echo had gotten extremely close earlier with a 0.45% attempt, but hadn’t quite pushed the boss to the threshold needed to reveal the surprise.
The phase appears to be a high-damage burn phase with some form of damage amplification mechanic. Some mechanics for this phase had been datamined from the game files beforehand, but the community wasn’t certain they were actually in the live version of the fight. Datamined spells don’t always make it into the final encounter, so guilds had assumed the 0% mark would be the actual end.
Secret Mythic-only phases that trigger after reaching 0% health are rare in modern World of Warcraft. Blizzard’s encounter design has become more transparent in recent years, and aggressive datamining by the community usually exposes hidden mechanics before anyone reaches them in live progression.
