Raid Setup
Introduction
Welcome to our Mythic Nek'zali the Soulcoiler guide, the first boss fight in The Venomous Abyss Raid in Midnight Season 2. This guide covers the fight mechanics and the strategy we recommend to defeat this boss on Mythic difficulty.
Fight Style: Single Target with Multi DoT on Adds
Recommended Setup: 2x Tank / 4x Healer / 14x DPS
Required Utilities: Dispels (magic) and strong AoE for the intermission
Hero/Lust Usage: Phase 2
Easy Mode
- Plays almost exactly like Heroic. Two real additions on Mythic: Grasping Depths and stricter corpse cleanup in the intermission.
- Grasping Depths spawns a Drowned Echo in the well twice per phase (P1, intermission, P2). Interrupt Soulcoiler's Curse, or everyone in the well gets ejected and Soulcoiled. If left alone, it grips a random player into the well and kills them, triggering a Soulcoil Rite.
- Send 3 DPS and 1 healer to handle each Drowned Echo. Watch Soul Exhaustion, don't hop in and out of the well repeatedly.
- In the intermission, burn the corpses. More than one Restless Amani reviving at once does heavy raid damage fast.
- Stop your own casts before Invoke in P2, it now silences interrupters for 3 seconds.
- Use Hero/Lust in P2. The boss triggers the intermission at 50% regardless, so there's nothing to gain by rushing P1.
Mechanics
A Drowned Echo awakens inside the Soulcoil Well, pulling players toward the well and ticking raid-wide Shadow damage until it's killed. While it's alive the well becomes enterable, and anyone who leaves the well after being inside is marked with Soul Exhaustion.
This spawns twice in Phase One, twice in the intermission, and twice in Phase Two.
Assign two teams for this mechanic (3 DPS and 1 healer in each team).
The Drowned Echo's cast. It coils around everyone inside the well, ejecting them and leaving them Soulcoiled.
This is the interrupt that matters: kick it, or the players in the well get thrown out and cursed.
Necrotic energy in the well deals constant Shadow damage every second while the Echo is active. More background pressure on the players assigned to the well.
Applied to anyone who leaves the well after entering it during Grasping Depths, increasing damage taken from the Soulcoil Well and Immortal Coil by 300%. So you don't want the same players hopping in and out repeatedly.
Invoke now interrupts all spell casts and silences the interrupting players for 3 seconds. So you have to stop casting on your own before Invoke goes off, or eat a silence at the worst possible time.
Strategy
Nek'zali is one of the easiest Mythic first bosses we've had in a while, and there's a real chance you kill it without any dedicated prep at all. But if you're a guild taking your first steps into Mythic, this section has you covered.
The fight plays the same way it does on Heroic, and the full breakdown of the base kit lives in the Heroic guide. Pull the boss to the entrance, face her away, keep the Restless Amani out of the Soulcoil Well, respect Possession Barrage distance on the tank, swap on Hollowing Strikes, and drop your Essence Rend puddles out to the sides.
The 50% intermission still works the same, kill the Echoes of Jawae to sever their tethers and drag her back, and Phase Two is still the Uncoiling race where you clear the puddles and burn her down before her energy fills. If any of that is unfamiliar, read the Heroic guide first, because Mythic changes almost nothing about that core flow.
What Mythic actually adds comes down to two things: Grasping Depths and good Corpse Cleanup in the Intermission.
Grasping Depths
This is the one genuinely new mechanic, and it appears twice in Phase One, twice during the intermission, and twice in Phase Two.
A Drowned Echo awakens inside the Soulcoil Well and immediately starts pulling the raid toward the water while ticking raid-wide damage through Immortal Coil. Your job is to kill it before it becomes a problem.
The clean way to handle it is to assign 2 small teams, 3 DPS and 1 healer in each group, to deal with the Echo each time it spawns.
While it's alive, the well opens up and those players can enter it to reach and kill the add, but the well is not a friendly place: Swirling Spirit stacks damage on contact, and anyone who leaves after entering picks up Soul Exhaustion, which multiplies the well's damage on them by 300%. So keep your assigned team consistent, get in, kill it, and avoid bouncing in and out repeatedly. You need two teams for this.
The most important part is the interrupt. The Drowned Echo casts Soulcoiler's Curse, which coils around everyone standing in the well, ejects them, and leaves them Soulcoiled. Kick that cast every time.
And if you ignore the Echo entirely, it eventually grips a random player into the well and kills them outright, which triggers a Soulcoil Rite and feeds the boss energy you did not want to give her. So this add is never optional, deal with it on every spawn.
Corpse Cleanup in the Intermission
On Heroic you can be a little lazy with the corpses. On Mythic you cannot.
Every Vessel Of Awakening left on the floor gets repossessed by a Restless Amani during the intermission, and if more than one corpse revives at the same time, the raid takes heavy damage very quickly and it snowballs.
So, the corpse-burning tech from Heroic (using the Hungering Pyre soak and the Slithering Flame to incinerate corpses) stops being an optimization and becomes mandatory. Keep the floor clean, keep revives to one at a time, and the intermission stays comfortable.
Phase 2
Beyond those, there are only two things to keep in mind for Phase Two.
First, Invoke now interrupts all casts and silences whoever was casting for 3 seconds, so you stop casting on your own just before it goes off rather than getting caught mid-cast.
Second, use Hero in Phase Two. The boss hits the intermission at 50% no matter how fast you push, so there's nothing to gain from bursting Phase One, and Phase Two is where the real damage race happens.
Outside of those, you play the fight exactly as you do on Heroic. Handle the well, keep the corpses down, respect Invoke, and you will defeat Nek'zali without much fuss.
