Team Liquid becomes the 4-peat World of Warcraft Race to World First champions after 2 weeks, 473 pulls, and one fake out
It's been a long and painfully close Race to World First for Team Liquid and Team Echo as both have gone head-to-head on the isle of Quel'Danas for two weeks, to ultimately defeat the World of Warcraft: Midnight's Season 1 mythic L'ura.
Team Echo led the charge with a best-in-world pull of 4.07% at one point. But in the end, they just lost out on victory, with Team Echo getting sub 0.45% wipe at one point and a 1.1% wipe just after Liquid managed to swipe the win by executing the secret fourth phase that had shocked players, casters, and onlookers days before. This means Team Liquid has won RWF four years in a row, with the last victory for Team Echo being back in 2022.
"If I was in that position I would be gutted," Team Liquid player Maximum says in a post-RWF interview. "That's like a year of your life. So just shoutout to [Echo] for being as good as they are. They got better from last year as well, and they easily could have won the race."
L'ura had three known phases for most of the race, just getting through the third phase proved to be a monumental task for all teams involved. Liquid managed to be the first to get L'ura down to 0 health during her third phase, and their reward was the shock and horror of being the first to find out that their hundreds of attempts weren't enough to claim RWF victory, as they had a whole new phase ahead of them.
If you haven't watched the now-infamous "L'ura Incident" video, which is essentially just a compilation of everyone's horrified reactions to the secret phase, then I'd suggest you give it a watch.
After L'ura falls in the third phase players jump out of their chairs, cheering and celebrating, as their coach desperately yells at them to sit back down and one player even yells out "This cannot be" as he reads the dialogue from a stunned NPC. Meanwhile L'ura regens 100% of her health ready for round four. Luckily, we can all laugh about it now Liquid has won RWF, otherwise it would be a slightly more depressing watch.
The fourth phase saw raiders deal with waves of void monstrosities with only one single beacon of light for help, but even so Liquid managed to keep all 20 members of their team alive for the final attempt. In the end Liquid took L'ura down after 473 pulls and two weeks of hard work. A job well done.
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