Blizzard has apparently decided that is enough.
With this week’s reset, the final boss of The Venomous Abyss is receiving another enormous round of Heroic and Mythic nerfs. This time Blizzard is not shaving a few percentage points from one troublesome ability. Damage is being reduced across multiple mechanics, several adds are losing 20% health, Mythic Caustic Waves is being cut from seven waves to three, and Serpent’s Bite will no longer require more than three players to soak regardless of raid size.
We recently covered Blizzard cutting Ula’tek’s Stone Venom damage by 40%. Compared with what is happening now, that is starting to look like the warm-up.
Heroic and Mythic Are Both Getting Hit Hard
According to Blizzard’s latest Ula’tek tuning announcement, Spectral Coils damage is being reduced by 20% on Heroic and Mythic. Stage 2 takes an even bigger beating: Warden’s Protection damage drops by 80%, Virulent Spit produces fewer ground targets, Grasping Fangs periodic damage falls by 30%, and Blight Vein lasts four seconds instead of six.
Then Stage 3 gets involved.
Blightscale Shrieker and Blightscale Clutch health are both reduced by 20% on Heroic and Mythic, while Mythic Slithering Clutch loses the same amount. Circling Prey raid damage drops by 30%, and Mythic Toxic Burn also takes a 30% reduction.
This is not cosmetic tuning. Entire sections of the encounter are going to feel different.
Mythic Caustic Waves Goes From Seven Waves to Three
The most dramatic individual change may be Caustic Waves.
On Mythic, each tail will now emit three waves instead of seven. That removes more than half the waves players previously had to navigate while simultaneously dealing with everything else happening in the final stage.
Serpent’s Bite is also being made much friendlier for smaller groups. Blizzard has adjusted its drain rate so that the mechanic will never require more than three players to soak, regardless of raid size. Players had specifically been complaining that Ula’tek scaled awkwardly for smaller raid groups, where mechanics could demand a much larger percentage of the available players than they did in bigger raids.
Apparently the snake finally read the feedback.
Ula’tek Has Come a Long Way Since Race to World First
The boss Blizzard is presenting to progression guilds today is very different from the one Team Liquid defeated after 306 pulls to win the Venomous Abyss Race to World First. Even during that race, Blizzard was already reducing Blight Vein damage and adjusting Soul Constrictor while top guilds worked through one of Season 2’s nastiest progression walls.
Since then, Stone Venom has been nerfed, player gear has improved, the Venomous Abyss raid skip has made reaching the final encounters faster, and the entire raid has gradually moved away from World First territory and toward ordinary guild progression.
That was always part of Blizzard’s plan. The Venomous Abyss was designed to become easier over the course of Season 2 through both increasing player power and direct encounter tuning.
This Looks Like Blizzard Opening the Gates
The size of this tuning pass suggests Blizzard is no longer interested in protecting Ula’tek’s original difficulty curve.
That makes sense. Patch 12.1.5 arrives next week with The Unbinding of Kith’ix, higher item levels and another layer of Season 2 progression. Keeping large numbers of Heroic and Mythic guilds stuck on last month’s final boss while new endgame content arrives would be a strange way to move the season forward.
Ula’tek is still going to kill raids. There are still eggs, positioning checks, overlaps and enough poison to make the health bars look personally offended.
But seven Caustic Waves becoming three tells you exactly where Blizzard thinks we are in the season.
The Race to World First version of Ula’tek is gone.
Now Blizzard would quite like the rest of us to kill the snake too.
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