Onyxia

[MongoJerry]

Battle erupted and Onyxia yelled out:

Onyxia: How fortuitous. Usually, I must to leave my lair in order to feed.

Clearly a 40-person raid group was not going to frighten her away.



She broke out of the melee pack somehow, (death of the warrior tanks?) and charged the back rank of spellcasters. Things were not looking good.



More than half the party had died and we had hardly dented Onyxia's health bar.



This wasn't just a beating. This was a rout.



All of the group's visions of glory died in less than a minute of battle. This wasn't a case where a little better organization would have helped. We had hardly touched Onyxia's health bar, so we had clearly missed something.

I thought back to the days long ago, when I played the old text-adventure game, Adventure. This game from the 1970's could really be thought of as the great-grandfather of all modern adventure games. One day, as I was playing Adventure on my Osborne 64, a 20-pound "portable computer" with a 4-inch green screen monitor (*way* dating myself here), I came across a dragon sprawled across a persian rug. Clearly, I was supposed to find some way of getting the dragon off the rug, so I could take it back to the house on the hill (don't ask).

For three days, I tried to get the dragon off the rug. The first thing I tried was killing the dragon. The user interface could only understand two words at a time, so I typed, "Kill dragon," and it responded as usual, "With what? You're bare hands?" And then I said, "With axe," and the axe flew out of my hands and bounced harmlessly off the dragon's hide. I then tried bribing the dragon with food, tried shackling the dragon with chains that had bound a bear I'd found, tried exchanging gold coins for the rug, and tried just about anything that could possibly be tried to get that dragon off the rug. Finally, in frustration and in a fit of ironic humor, I went to the dragon's room, and typed "Kill dragon." The game then responded as usual, "With what? Your bare hands?" I then typed, "Yes." (pause) "Congratulations! You killed a dragon with your bare hands! The dragon falls and rolls off the persian rug."

Knowing Blizzard's penchant for ironic humor and knowing that Adventure was the great-grandfather of the modern adventure game, I suggested that we try to attack Onyxia with our bare hands.

The party didn't go for it.



However, some others made another observation. On either side of the path to Onyxia were dragonet eggs. Some mentioned lore related to Warcraft II where a dragon was captured when the dragon's brood was threatened. So, we made plans to attack the eggs first to see if that might affect or weaken Onyxia in some way.



Unfortunately, at this point, we ran into one of the major problems with raid groups in general and with pickup raid groups in particular. While half the people were still buffing and drinking, the other half decided to take it upon themselves to start showering spells and attacks on the eggs. At the moment the attacks started, I had no mana after buffing my party (with the good fortitude buff, by the way -- I'm no cheapskate). So my group's priest (me) became designated as in combat, (read: unable to drink) while she had no mana. That meant that not only was I toast but also the other four people in my party, who I was supposed to protect. This situation repeated itself in one form or other in other parties in the raid group. This illustrates raid group cardinal rule #1:

RULE #1: WHEN YOU ARE IN A RAID GROUP, DO NOT ATTACK ANYTHING UNTIL THE RAID LEADER TELLS YOU TO.

Dozens of dragonets sprang from the damaged eggs and overwhelmed the group. Onyxia herself didn't do anything, but the dragonets were more than enough to pick apart our disorganized group. The eggs themselves also respawned quickly. After the fight, the Game Master watching us let us know that the "secret" to Onyxia doesn't involve the dragonet eggs. The eggs are there just for decoration.



Recriminations flew about the raid channel, and it didn't help that the Onyxian Warders that we had killed earlier started respawning while the party was being rezed. Things started getting chaotic at this point. People were running around, people were yelling for rezes, and lots of bitching and moaning was going on. Some people kept yelling to be rezed, even though there were four warders between their bodies and the main body of rezers. It was an ugly scene.

This brings up one last suggestion for you if you get involved in an Onyxia raid group: When you die, release and run back. The graveyard isn't far away, you can run across water as a spirit, and you'll save a lot of stress and anguish on yourself and the party if you do it. You can't be rezed in combat anymore, so there's no need to stay around to make it easier to select your body to be rezed in combat. You might as well release immediately and make your way back while the rest of the party continues to fight. Plus, if a rezer does rez you before you make it back to the instance, you haven't lost any time.

Finally, one suggestion for the Blizzard developers: Eliminate the respawns on the Onyxian Warders. Raid groups have enough trouble keeping themselves together as it is. There's no reason to add a respawn timer on top of everything else. If those Warders hadn't respawned, we could've gotten in another run or two at Onyxia.

As it was, the raid group fell into chaos. Some people left, because they had to go do real life things. Others left after accusing the group of being a bunch of "noobs." The situation got ugly. It was too bad, too, because the group was actually functioning reasonably well until the attack on the eggs fiasco. We did discover one thing, after all: The dragonet eggs have nothing to do with defeating Onyxia. That is actually a significant piece of information.

At the time the group fell apart, two theories were broached for how to kill Onyxia:

1. You should fight Onyxia with your bare hands.

2. Maybe you can only damage Onyxia, if your are wearing your Drakefire Amulet. Most of the party had probably thought that the amulet was only for opening the door and was not actually wearing the amulet during the fight. Many probably hadn't even gotten the amulet from the goblin in the first place and had just walked through the gate when someone else had opened it.

However, before we got a chance to test this theory, the raid party had disintegrated to 28 people and many more were talking of leaving. It was at this point that Rynin suggested that we do the Stormwind raid event, which doesn't take as many players to do, and I strongly agreed and urged everyone to go to Stormwind. We got enough, "What is that?"'s and "Um, ok..."'s to coopt the group. We had to act fast, though, before too many people bailed.

UP NEXT: The Marshal Windsor Stormwind Raid Event!