Liquid kills Mythic Gallywix for World First Liberation of Undermine!

The Liberation of Undermine Race to World First has come to a close after 12 grueling days, with Team Liquid defeating Chrome King Gallywix for World First in just 100 pulls. Congratulations, Liquid!

Here’s the kill:

After guilds moved sluggishly through most of the raid, with high pull counts starting at the fourth boss, Gallywix seemed to die at record speed. Liquid only killed Mug’Zee on Friday after a long day of pulls, including one oh-so-close 1.9% pull (which was too much for Yipz, Paladin and last player standing, to whittle down). It’s a hard fight with tight healing and DPS checks, and it took Liquid 149 pulls to get the one perfect pull where everyone performed at their best (and no one died).

In this last, perfect pull, the team made the Mug’Zee fight look easy, but it is not. Echo continued to struggle with the fight, killing Mug’Zee the next day after 191 pulls. Those extra pulls ate up a lot of time and Echo called it a night after 12 pulls with Gallywix down to 66%.

It’s pretty surprising that Gallywix died so quickly (or at least quickly for a Mythic end boss). After such high pull counts on earlier bosses — 114 pulls for Stix Bunkjunker, 107 pulls for Sprocketmonger Lockenstock, and 149 pulls for Mug’Zee — no one expected Liquid to kill Gallywix in just a hundred pulls. I doubt Echo went to bed thinking Gallywix would be dead before they woke up.

Mythic Gallywix is a very different fight than it is on other difficulties: it starts on the intermission, with Gallywix in his robot body, and then progresses from there into what I have dubbed the olympics of dodging circles. (Sometimes the circles are lines, but most of them are circles.) Throughout the fight, sections of the platform Gallywix is on are blocked off with lightning, and by the end raiders are corralled into a quarter of the platform with the tiniest slivers of space to avoid Gallywix hurling barrages of rockets.

Liquid spent Saturday slowly progressing through the fight, perfecting positioning and eking out every last bit of DPS. The final pull was far from perfect, and Gallywix fell with only four players alive in a flash finish.

Now the question is who’s coming in second — and third, and fourth. Echo is currently the only guild on Gallywix, and they’re certain to get the boss down in the next day. Method and 火鍋英雄 (Huoguo Hero) are both on Mug’Zee, with Method down to 10% and Huoguo at 43%. Instant Dollars just killed Sprocketmonger Lockenstock for world fifth, progressing to One-Armed Bandit, and everyone else is even further behind.

The race seems likely to stay in this order, but we have seen Huoguo Hero push up the ranks very quickly, rushing to fourth place and holding on to it, despite the raid opening two days later in China. It’s been an extremely impressive performance from the team.

For Echo and Method, Liquid getting a Gallywix kill so quickly is going to be a morale hit. But both are far enough ahead of the rest that I think it’s unlikely anyone else will catch up. However, this race has been full of surprises, and it’s never too late for more.

We’ll see how the European guilds do with the state of the race, and who winds up with world second.