Only 231 Guilds Got AOTC — Venomous Abyss Is the Hardest Heroic Since Vault of the Incarnates
If Heroic Venomous Abyss has felt unusually punishing, you are not imagining it. The Raider.io numbers are in for week one, and only around 231 guilds earned Ahead of the Curve: Ula'tek.
That makes this the hardest Heroic tier since Vault of the Incarnates, where only 110 guilds killed Heroic Raszageth in the opening week.
The comparison is stark
Week one AOTC totals across recent tiers: Venomous Abyss 231. Manaforge Omega 603. Liberation of Undermine 535. Nerub-ar Palace 637. Amirdrassil 893. Aberrus 1,016. Vault of the Incarnates 110.
The regional split for Venomous Abyss was 59 in NA, 162 in EU and 10 in OC. So this is not a "one region got unlucky" situation — the whole tier is hard.
The race guilds felt it too. Progression through week one was slower than expected across the board, and guilds that normally walk through Heroic ran into real trouble on the last few bosses. Some of that was scaling issues and bugs, but the difficulty is genuine.
This is the important bit if you are looking at those numbers and thinking it cannot be that bad. Both of the tricks that made Heroic Ula'tek manageable in week one stopped working with the weekly reset.
The first was a Tether Skip, using the Warden in phase 2 to delay the Tether cast long enough to kill the add before it went off. That removed a significant chunk of damage intake and coordination from the fight. The second was sacrificing the players handling the final soaks.
Without those, the 231 figure would likely have been lower still. Players do have more gear, tier sets and Crests this week — but the encounter itself is slightly harder, so it partly cancels out.
Why Blizzard tuned it this way
Ion Hazzikostas explained the reasoning in a recent interview, and it is straightforward: because Heroic now feeds Myth-track loot into your Great Vault and through Bonus Rolls, the team has room to tune it as a real challenge.
The comparison they were uncomfortable with was effort versus reward — killing a Heroic raid boss had started to look like less work than a mid-level Mythic+ key for the same or better loot. So Heroic got harder.
Whether that tuning philosophy carries into future tiers is an open question. For now, Heroic Ula'tek is a serious fight that pays properly for the guilds that can finish her.
If your roster is 6/8 or 7/8 and stalling on the back end, that is the most common place to be right now. Filling in the missing kills is often faster than rebuilding the roster around them, and a Heroic clear gets AOTC off your list before the tier moves on.
