Over the weekend, Team Liquid’s professional World of Warcraft guild took on the latest raid added to the MMORPG as part of the Midnight expansion. After finishing the final boss off following a grueling fight, they thought it was over. It wasn’t. The boss came back to life, stunning everyone, and denying the guild the glory of being the first to finish this challenging new raid.
As covered by PC Gamer, Liquid worked together over the weekend to push through the March on Quel’Danas raid, which was added to World of Warcraft on March 31. As with all newly added raids, multiple teams and players are currently racing to be the first to officially complete the difficult endgame mission and kill the final boss. Liquid, a team with a track record of taking down WoW raids first, thought they had done it. They pushed through the raid, reached its final boss, L’ura, and defeated her. Some Liquid players stood up and shouted, or even walked away from their PCs.
But no achievement popped. Instead, an NPC exclaimed, “This cannot be!” which was read in real time by one of the raiders. Then, L’ura’s health bar filled back up, and she entered her secret final phase. Uh-oh. She would go on to kill Liquid, and as of April 6 at around 5:30 pm EST, she and the raid both remain undefeated. (Update: Liquid has since defeated the raid and final boss!)
Thankfully, Liquid has uploaded a compilation video of different members of the team and crew reacting to this wild moment. And it’s amazing to watch.
“Usually, you can tell when you’re at the end of a boss,” Liquid raid leader Maximum said in a video posted after the failed attempt. “Like when a secret phase happens, you’re like ‘there seems to be the need for something else here’...But on this fight, I think the reason we celebrated is because zero percent was so hard to get to that it felt like a final thing, right? It felt like the end.”
The pro WoW player also mentioned that there were rumors of a secret phase via leaks from a previous datamine, but Blizzard sometimes changes things and datamining isn’t always accurate.
The team now has to restrategize and defeat an additional, and very difficult, final secret phase on top of everything else it takes to get to that finale. When Maximum was asked if this is now the hardest World of Warcraft fight of all time, the leader simply said: “I don’t know, man. I’m ready to be over it…”
Update: 4/6/26, 6:20 p.m. ET: …And just like that, Liquid has rallied after their surprise defeat and completed the raid, taking down the boss and its secret phase before any other guild. They pulled it off at 5:53 pm EST. Congrats!