Avarice Alliance takes down Onyxia again...

[Tal]

I couldn't believe when I went down.  Got aggro, vanish, tail whip, pot and bandage.  Get back up to full life, beating her down, fear, run in front of her, Breath for full damage, survive with 50 life, fear into lava.
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I was in the midst of dropping a full heal on you when the fear went off. Sorry bro. :(

[lemekim]

You try to keep BoS up on 40 people in the middle of an intense, 15-20 minute fight.  Aggro is reset for Phase 3, and phase 3 is right when my BoS went down.
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That's what Stage 2 is for.

[Lissa]

Not sure, I think we were looking at 10 at most because of the transition issues.

I know I got a flash of light on Syladril when he got aggro after Anadrol couldn't stance dance due to the fears coming too fast and then someone got a big heal on Syl.  I threw a few hammers at her and got a lay of hands on anadrol at one point.  I threw a heal at some mage at some point, not sure who, but yeah we didn't have a lot left at the end and I was cursing the timer on the mana pots and just waiting for a proc of seal of wisdom and blessing of wisdom to get some more healing out there.  But I know I was standing when she fell.
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East side was decimated, only 1 person up in group 2, 2 in group 4, 1 in group 6, group 8 was dead (only 2 people though), West side was in a lot better shape where it was only about 5 total dead out of groups 1, 3, 5, and 7.

Also, it wasn't transition that killed most of the east side, it was a fear with a lot of people going through lava followed by and unlucky punt of Anadrol that pulled her around to look at east and breathe almost immediately after the fear wore off.

[Lissa]

That's what Stage 2 is for.
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Try running around the raid trying to rebuff everyone while trying to kill whelps and such.

[Tal]

That's what Stage 2 is for.
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Towards the end of phase 2 I usually refresh the buffs on everyone that is in range as I run north. I also try to refresh those that I missed between fears but even then there can be folks that go the entirety of phase three without BoS. Its not as easy in Onyxia to refresh on the fly as one would think. ;)

[Kevin]

That's what Stage 2 is for.
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And if you mistime your refresh, keep in mind that you are generating aggro that Onyxia sees. So yeah, she can land and head straight for that paladin that was trying to be good and rebuff people and then breath and kill half the raid because that paladin is standing on the side where they should be. If you buff too early in phase two then the 5 minute buff can very like just wear off again and not matter. If you buff at a bad time in phase 3, you can pull aggro with a buff and wipe half the raid.

Yes it can be done but it's not that simple. And of course if the raid is well organized and trying to maximize buffs you only have one or 2 paladins responsible for salvation. If one of them dies it's not the easiest thing to take over the duties and yes people get out of range and you have other jobs to do, especially if you only have 2 priests and 2 or 3 druids as your healers and remember with the global cooldown on casting if you are buffing 40 people or even 20 the first one you buffed has half to 1/4 of the 5 minutes gone by the time you buff the last person.

[kandrathe]

East side was decimated, only 1 person up in group 2, 2 in group 4, 1 in group 6, group 8 was dead (only 2 people though), West side was in a lot better shape where it was only about 5 total dead out of groups 1, 3, 5, and 7.

Also, it wasn't transition that killed most of the east side, it was a fear with a lot of people going through lava followed by and unlucky punt of Anadrol that pulled her around to look at east and breathe almost immediately after the fear wore off.
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Yes, I remember that vaguely. Fear, turn around and see a spiked tail flashing around your head, fear, get reoriented again and get cleaved as she's nearly standing on top of you. :) Props to Mio for getting the killing blow.

[Pesmerga]

Yes, I remember that vaguely.  Fear, turn around and see a spiked tail flashing around your head, fear, get reoriented again and get cleaved as she's nearly standing on top of you.  :)  Props to Mio for getting the killing blow.
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::dancedance:: I try. :)

[Tuftears]

This is an awesome achievement, not least because it marks the end of a 40-man raiding hiatus for the Avarice Alliance. Woot! I was afraid we were losing our mojo. :wub:

[TheDragoon]

East side was decimated, only 1 person up in group 2, 2 in group 4, 1 in group 6, group 8 was dead (only 2 people though), West side was in a lot better shape where it was only about 5 total dead out of groups 1, 3, 5, and 7.

What makes it even funnier is that I was in group 4 but I ended up on the West side (and survived up until about 7% when she turned and started attacking me and I ran her back up to Anadrol). When Darian got punted into the whelp pit, two waves of whelps came out, one that came out before he did and one that came out along with him. I saw that the whelps that came out with him were being handled well, so I chased down the other group of whelps to help out the west side. However, when I went to try and sneak back to the other side, Onyxia started turning around and so I decided it would be best to just stay where I was and keep the DPS up.

I guess it worked out in the end since I survived for a long time and got off countless executes before I stance-danced a fear and pulled aggro. :)

[lemekim]

And if you mistime your refresh, keep in mind that you are generating aggro that Onyxia sees.  So yeah, she can land and head straight for that paladin that was trying to be good and rebuff people and then breath and kill half the raid because that paladin is standing on the side where they should be.  If you buff too early in phase two then the 5 minute buff can very like just wear off again and not matter.  If you buff at a bad time in phase 3, you can pull aggro with a buff and wipe half the raid.

First, why don't you use the Paladin that has 15 minute improved salvation buff? I am sure you can find one.

Second, it is quite easy to know when to stop buffing. 40% rings a bell? Start buffing at the beginning of stage 2. Spend the rest of time regenerating mana. On horde side, most shamans stand around and shoot Lightning Bolt at Onyxia, with maybe an occasional heal. A few priests is more then enough to keep the whelp groups and everyone else in the raid topped off.

If for some stupid reason the buffing paladin gets aggro from an untimely BoS ahead of Hunters, Warlocks, Rogues, Priests and other Paladin healers, ahead of Warrior who is spamming his highest aggro abilities, you have a bigger problem then just BoS. But let's say you do get into that position, then you can just Bubble. No, it's not aggro wipe. But it's 12 seconds of you being aggro free and it should be plenty of time for MT to overcome your aggro.

Yes it can be done but it's not that simple.  And of course if the raid is well organized and trying to maximize buffs you only have one or 2 paladins responsible for salvation. If one of them dies it's not the easiest thing to take over...

Welcome to high-end raiding! Onyxia is not like Molten Core, where you can go on auto-pilot most of the fights. Anyway, the only reason anyone in Stage 1 or 2 should die is because of Deep Breath. And if you are having Deep Breath issues that early into stage 2, I don't think your raid is doing too well. And if the paladin dies to the random fireballs Onyxia shoots... Don't ever bring that paladin to the raid again.

... the duties and yes people get out of range and you have other jobs to do, especially if you only have 2 priests and 2 or 3 druids as your healers and remember with the global cooldown on casting if you are buffing 40 people or even 20 the first one you buffed has half to 1/4 of the 5 minutes gone by the time you buff the last person.
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Oh, that's right, I forgot that alliance has Blessing of Protection they can just put on the mages and not worry at all about mages dying. Horde needs priests for that job however. But that point is moot. Here is a simple plan for BoS buffing!

At the start of stage 2, a single paladin with Imp. BoS buffs people in this order - Warlocks, Hunters, Priests, Warriors, Mages, Rogues, Paladins. Once Onyxia gets to 42% or so, he stops wherever he was and regens mana for the rest of the stage 2. If he dies beforehand, he buffed the people who cause most problems in transition and aggro problems in Stage 3.


This whole argument reminds me of people who have a car and people who walk to work:

- Dude, you have a car, it's so good!
- Yea, but I have to fill it up with gas, and change oil, it's just a really big hassle.
- But dude... You have a car, and I have to walk...
- Car is overrated. Sure, you are protected from wind and rain, and it takes less time to get to work, but you get to have excercise while walking! It's not fair, we are stuck in this car sitting on our butts, while you excercise!
- Uh... k...

[Tuftears]

This is getting a bit over the top for 'Horde has it tough, Alliance has it easy' advocacy...

'Use the paladin that has 15-minute BoS'? 'Use the dwarf priest, I am sure you can find one of those!' 'Use the undead warrior with WotF to tank Onyxia!' Yeesh.

Can't we just be happy that our fellow board-mates have won a victory over a non-trivial raid boss?

[Quark]

In that case, it's time for us to start berating every post MongoJerry makes about BWL, bringing it down in flames for the advantages Horde has. Tit for tat, huh?

[mjdoom]

Ugh, I don't know why I feel compelled to post but...

Not trying to bring that dead horse up again[right][snapback]91623[/snapback][/right]

but I'm going to anyway for zero added value :wacko:

As far as I can tell the only reason Lissa mentioned this was because of the number of times people feel compelled to harp on fear ward in this and other forums. lfd then made a post that I view as tongue-in-cheek making light of the inevitable jabs that horde and alliance take at each other. Then all of a sudden you're on a crusade telling pallies how they should play and spouting all other wisdom.

The reality is such that both shammies and pallies bring extra value to the table. Some of these values are more beneficial in different circumstances. In reality none of these abilities are probably necessary for any encounter that I have seen thus far in the game although they can certainly help. Somehow Horde get by without blessings and Alliance get by without totems. Of course the grass is always greener on the other side...

Unless you've gotten to 60 with every class affected by totems and/or blessings (aka every class) and raided it is hard to know all of the effects so let's not all profess to have tons of knowledge we don't have. I've always thought that the Lounge was better than that. Instead let's go back to what Tufty said and just note the accomplishment and be done with it.

[Lissa]

First, why don't you use the Paladin that has 15 minute improved salvation buff? I am sure you can find one.

Second, it is quite easy to know when to stop buffing. 40% rings a bell? Start buffing at the beginning of stage 2. Spend the rest of time regenerating mana. On horde side, most shamans stand around and shoot Lightning Bolt at Onyxia, with maybe an occasional heal. A few priests is more then enough to keep the whelp groups and everyone else in the raid topped off.

If for some stupid reason the buffing paladin gets aggro from an untimely BoS ahead of Hunters, Warlocks, Rogues, Priests and other Paladin healers, ahead of Warrior who is spamming his highest aggro abilities, you have a bigger problem then just BoS. But let's say you do get into that position, then you can just Bubble. No, it's not aggro wipe. But it's 12 seconds of you being aggro free and it should be plenty of time for MT to overcome your aggro.
Welcome to high-end raiding! Onyxia is not like Molten Core, where you can go on auto-pilot most of the fights. Anyway, the only reason anyone in Stage 1 or 2 should die is because of Deep Breath. And if you are having Deep Breath issues that early into stage 2, I don't think your raid is doing too well. And if the paladin dies to the random fireballs Onyxia shoots... Don't ever bring that paladin to the raid again.
Oh, that's right, I forgot that alliance has Blessing of Protection they can just put on the mages and not worry at all about mages dying. Horde needs priests for that job however. But that point is moot. Here is a simple plan for BoS buffing!

At the start of stage 2, a single paladin with Imp. BoS buffs people in this order - Warlocks, Hunters, Priests, Warriors, Mages, Rogues, Paladins. Once Onyxia gets to 42% or so, he stops wherever he was and regens mana for the rest of the stage 2. If he dies beforehand, he buffed the people who cause most problems in transition and aggro problems in Stage 3.
This whole argument reminds me of people who have a car and people who walk to work:

- Dude, you have a car, it's so good!
- Yea, but I have to fill it up with gas, and change oil, it's just a really big hassle.
- But dude... You have a car, and I have to walk...
- Car is overrated. Sure, you are protected from wind and rain, and it takes less time to get to work, but you get to have excercise while walking! It's not fair, we are stuck in this car sitting on our butts, while you excercise!
- Uh... k...
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You know Lemekin, you spout a lot about how things are done, but have you ever tried to implement half the things you mention in actual game play? You always seem to look at things in the most optimal situation, guess what, it's not. If you were to watch how we raid Onyxia, it would look like chaos, but, it's fairly well organized.

Since we've started regularly killing Onyxia several months ago, we've been deep breathed TWICE (both in the same raid). As GG said, a lot of the people that are new to raiding with us probably think Deep Breath is a myth. We get through Phase 2 so quickly it's not funny and leaves very little time for rebuffing by anyone (Phase 2 for us is now down to under 4 minutes, try rebuffing 35+ people while everyone is running around doing their jobs either DPSing Onyxia or killing her whelps and see how well you can rebuff everyone before we reach 40%).

So, until you start raiding with the Stormrage group and see how we fight the encounter, you have very little room to be telling us how we're s'pose to fight her.

[Kevin]

Did I farking say it was impossible? No. But it's still possible that BoS isn't going to be up on someone.

And anyway BoS is, as I mentioned, not the important buff in Onyxia.

You can be condescending all you farking want. We did something that is not simple for either side and people are being farking pissy about it. I'm tired of it. I also like how you admit Onyxia takes some skill and yet still try to claim we have non when I point out something that can go wrong.

Onyxia as you farking said is not easy mode. We won. We've beaten her several times. We had 2 priests last night. As you said that is enough to do all the healing on fireballs, if you want them to have no mana at the end of stage 2. Or you can just use bandages and hope that she doesn't shoot in the same direction twice in the span of 5 seconds, which she is known to do. So yeah, unlucky things can't happen, ever. Oh yes we do let people that are wearing just blues and greens face her. We don't require people to have certain gear or certain specs and we still win.

She doesn't always land at 40% and if you have killed her you know that. She's been as high as 48% and as low as 29% for us.

Ony has a brand new aggro table when she hits the ground. Since no one should be doing any damage to her other than the MT with a rend and spaming high aggro skills that one blessing will be the only aggro she sees and yes you can lose track of her, and her health if you are running to try and get in range to bless someone. I'm not saying it happens often, and yes it is an easy mistake to spot and fix, but it can happen.

It doesn't matter if you have aggro for .1 second, she is facing you and other people and a breath attack can kill them. But you ignored that. Anyone getting aggro who isn't a tank is a bad thing. And if you faced her lately you will know that she doesn't always like to move to a nice spot. She'll sit there and happily breathe at the main tank from half the cave away. She'll even teleport the MT to her after a bit of doing that.

Oh and as I mentioned we don't have people die in stage one and I don't know the last time that we had a raid of more than 30 people where we've seen a deep breath. Yes we go after Ony with sub optimal groups and we win. Oh wait our first attempt in 1.7 where we had 33 but not a lot of ranged DPS she did deep breath. Haven't seen one since. Keep in mind those uber paladins can't do damage to her at all in the air so that makes deep breath even more likely. Every horde class can hurt her in the air so I'll be all derisive and dismissive of horde who see deep breath because you guys have it easy mode there. No actually I won't be because it's still not easy mode, you still can't go to sleep you still need hunters and warlocks and even druids to put DoT's on her.

I'm not going to take your condescending crap with an alliance has it easier than horde overtone. I'm not going to point out all the things that horde has easier or all the things alliance has easier.

We don't generally use blessing of protection on the mages because good warriors and paladins keep most of the aggro off the mage so a bubble is quite enough. And yeah when you have only 2 priests you expect the paladins to heal as well as bless.

It's not easy mode, quit implying it. If everyone of your Onyxia runs in a group of people that rotates 100 characters through raids so that everyone can see the content go perfectly every time then I'll think about taking pointless abuse from you. But I'm pretty confident that isn't the case. Oh and why don't we run 2 raids with that many? First some are alts, second not everyone wants or can raid every day. Yep some people can only make one raid every other week and we do or damnest to make sure they get in there.

I pointed out some weaknesses to the class after I freely admitted that paladins bring more to the table in most of the current 40 man situations. I'm not going to claim they don't. You still come back act like we don't know what the frell we are doing. Of course I still think that the other blessings, wisdoms especially, are way more powerful than salvation simply because they bring things to the table that good play can't cover for.

So yeah I've seen a new paladin mess up the timings on the blessings. We have new people a lot, we like new people. We like people that can only raid once a week as well as I've said.

I'll say what you want me to say. Paladins and fear ward can make the Onyxia encounter somewhat easier. Are you happy? Of course WotF can make the Onyxia encounter somewhat easier. A main tank that has the blacksmith trinket can make the Onyxia encounter somewhat easier. The Onyxia encounter can be done without all of these things though. What we are pissed off about is all the damn insinuation that we are only succeeding because of this. My biggest horde is only 56 right now, but I plan on seeing Onyxia with him and I plan on winning.

You put this group of people at the control of level 60 horde players and give us a few hours to learn classes we may not know as well and racial skills we aren't as familar with and we'll beat Onyxia with them. I'm sure the group you play with could do the same with alliance.

I should have let it drop but I'm a little pissed off. This board has way way too much horde is better than alliance. Alliance is better than horde. Rogues are too uber. Warriors are too uber. Warlocks have too many problems.

Yeah the thread did start in a fashion that kind of invited it but it's because our group on Stormrage is always on the defensive. Because we are always being belittled. I just don't see the alliance doing that back at the horde players here. I don't see the PvE people really doing it at the PvP people here. But I do see it from the other side.

Play the game have fun. Congratulate others in the community when they do something good. Don't expect to insult people and not have them get pissed off at you.

Oh and yes I got personal in this post. But then again I think you asked for it to get personal. I'm done with that now.

[Mirajj]

  How many were alive at the end?  The last 5% was where the miracles occured.  Some great saves by healers and warriors to control her that last bit.
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I wasn't, but due to some pretty dumb mistakes of my own. I ended up getting feared far away from where I was supposed to be (East) and instead of just going someplace smart (West) I tried to run to East, caught another fear through two lava cracks, and keeled over dead.

Of course, that's the day that I have Meg and another friend over, watching us kill Onyxia...

[savaughn]

This whole argument reminds me of people who have a car and people who walk to work:

- Dude, you have a car, it's so good!
- Yea, but I have to fill it up with gas, and change oil, it's just a really big hassle.
- But dude... You have a car, and I have to walk...
- Car is overrated. Sure, you are protected from wind and rain, and it takes less time to get to work, but you get to have excercise while walking! It's not fair, we are stuck in this car sitting on our butts, while you excercise!
- Uh... k...
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... and we have officially hit full blown troll territory. Welcome to Bad-strawman-ville. Population: you.

[kandrathe]

... and we have officially hit full blown troll territory.  Welcome to Bad-strawman-ville.  Population: you.
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Dude, I teleport to work. You suxxorz. :) Thanks for the laugh, and you almost made pop come out of my nose. :D

[lfd]

Keep in mind those uber paladins can't do damage to her at all in the air so that makes deep breath even more likely.  Every horde class can hurt her in the air[right][snapback]91722[/snapback][/right]

Can't they? I was under the impression that all melee classes could hit her when she was airborne if they stood directly below her. Can't say that I've tried, however.