Liquid Kill Mythic Coiled Altar After 310 Pulls — Only Ula'tek Left

It is done. After 310 pulls spread across several days, Team Liquid have killed the Coiled Altar on Mythic difficulty. Only Ula'tek stands between them and the World First.

This one earned its reputation. The Coiled Altar held every single top ten competitor at the same position for days, and it now holds a genuine distinction: the most difficult second-to-last boss in terms of total progression time.

Why it took so long

Not the raw pull count, oddly. In pure numbers this is not the longest progression we have seen — but the time spent on it was, because guilds kept stopping to reanalyse rather than grinding attempts.

The comparison being drawn is to Mug'zee in Liberation of Undermine and Tindral in Amirdrassil: a brick wall that everyone hits at once and nobody passes for days. Getting through it needed vantus runes, near-perfect execution, and a fair amount of luck with the encounter's random elements.

The first nerf did real work by cutting the phase 2 damage check substantially. A second nerf was applied and then quickly reverted, which left guilds grinding an inordinately difficult boss for longer than anyone expected.

The composition Liquid used

Worth studying if you are working on this boss, because the healer count tells you where the pressure sits.

2 tanks: Guardian Druid and Protection Paladin. 5 healers: two Preservation Evokers, two Discipline Priests and a Restoration Shaman. 4 melee: Havoc Demon Hunter, Windwalker Monk, Subtlety Rogue and an Arms Warrior. 9 ranged: Balance Druid, Augmentation Evoker, two Marksmanship Hunters, two Arcane Mages, a Shadow Priest and two Affliction Warlocks.

Five healers on a penultimate boss is not a comfort choice. That is a fight where the healing check is doing at least as much killing as the damage check.

Two things follow from a race kill. First, the boss becomes a known quantity — logs, comps and strategies land within hours. Second, the customary post-kill tuning pass usually follows shortly afterwards, which is what turns a race-only boss into something a good guild can execute.

If Coiled Altar has been your wall, the next week or two is when it stops being one. The harder question is Ula'tek, whose Mythic difficulty is still an unknown even to the guilds standing in front of her.

For most guilds the realistic path is still the same: clear what you can, and pick up the bosses that are blocking you rather than losing three raid nights to one encounter.