The Great Masquerade (Stormwind Raid Event)

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: The Great Masquerade, part II

Marshal Windsor confronted Lady Katrana Prestor.

Reginald Windsor says: Bolvar, have the King escorted away from here.
Reginald Windsor says: The masquerade is over, Lady Prestor. Or should I call you by your true name... Onyxia...
Lady Katrana Prestor laughs.
Lady Katrana Prestor says: You will be incarcerated and tried for treason, Windsor. I shall watch with glee as they hand down a guilty verdict and sentence you to death by hanging...
Lady Katrana Prestor says: And as your limp body dangles from the rafters, I shall take pleasure in knowing that a mad man has been put to death. After all, what proof do you have? Did you expect to come in here and point your fingers at royalty and leave unscathed?
Reginald Windsor says: You will not escape your fate, Onyxia. It has been prophesied -- a vision resonating from the great halls of Kharazan. It ends now...



Reginald Windsor reaches into his pack and pulls out the encoded tablets.
Reginald Windsor says: The Dark Iron's thought these tablets to be encoded. This is not any form of coding, it is the tongue of an ancient dragon.
Reginald Windsor says: Listen, dragon. Let the truth resonate throughout these halls.
Reginald Windsor reads from the tablets. Unknown, unheard sounds flow through your consciousness.



Lady Katrana Prestor turned into Lady Onyxia

Lady Onyxia says: Curious... Windsor, in this vision, did you survive? I only ask because one thing that I can and will assure is your death. Here and now.

My muscles tensed and my fingers twitched over the keyboard hotkeys. Battle was imminent...

And then nothing happened. We stood there staring at this scene for a couple of minutes. Lady Onyxia sat there, Marshal Windsor sat there, and no NPC moved. I walked around the room. I even went up to Bolvar and got the unrelated quest off him. I then submitted a GM petition in the vain hope that a GM would know how to get the event to continue. I was worried, because I knew that a good portion of our party wouldn't stick around for a second try if it became necessary.

(Note: After seeing the real Onyxia, I couldn't help but be disappointed by seeing this lowly dragonkin model of her. If there are any Blizzard developers reading this, could you change it so that it uses the full Onyxia instance model for this encounter? It would be far more eye-popping to see a full dragon spawn right in the middle of Stormwind.)

Then all at once, due to no apparent triggering event, Lady Onyxia called her guards.



The eight Stormwind guards in the receiving room turned out to be dragonkin in disguise. Lady Onyxia shot some kind of magic bolt at Marshal Windsor, instantly killing him.



The eight Onyxia's Elite Guards charged forward while Onyxia herself teleported away. Battle was joined!



Things didn't look good for our heroes, but the group was going to make the best of the situation. The party's two druids each slept a guard while the paladins and rogues tried to stun or daze as many of them as they could.



But there were so many guards and they hit so hard that the losses for the party were starting to mount. We had all gone into this encounter with the expectation that we were just going to see what the event was like and never really expected to win. One person commented during the battle that we really needed a 40-person party to do this and a second person agreed. I didn't concede things that far. But a 20 person party seemed necessary.

Then came the moment that changed the battle completely: I saw a feared Onyxia's Elite Guard run by me. I don't know if it was Jesica, our other priest, or Inadel, our warlock, who feared the guard, but whoever it was bloody brilliant, as the English would say. As a priest, I'm not used to using Psychic Scream in PvE situations, other than when I'm running for the hills, because of the fear that it would cause even more mobs to aggro. But we were fighting in an enclosed space with no enemy mobs nearby. I ran to the main mass of guards and hit Psychic Scream.