The Great Onyxia Race

[MongoJerry]

The Third Attempt



We charged forward for our third attempt.



Yeah, yeah, Phase I. We got this. What else do you have?

Onyxia yells: This meaningless exertion bores me. I'll incinerate you from above.



When you see Onyxia take off for the first time, it's an awesome sight.



She slowly glides over the heads of players who try to pelt her from below.



She then shoots fireballs at random players that explode for more than 2k+ fire damage with a wide area of effect.



At the same time, swarms of dragon whelps fly from the egg pits in the southeast and southwest corners of the chamber. In theory, we were setup for this event in that groups 7 and 8 had been assigned to deal with the whelps that entered on their respective sides of the room. In practice, the anti-whelp effort was disorganized (everyone was probably gaping at Onyxia) and didn't have enough firepower. When Onyxia shot a fireball at a party that clumped too close together while attacking whelps, she took the whole group out. The whelps then ran rampant through the raid, and after a few abortive attempts to recover, we wiped.

At least we got to Phase II, but we hadn't even seen Onyxia's most dangerous attack.

The Fourth Attempt



Fourth attempt, Phase I, let's move on.



Phase II started off much better than the previous time. Our whelp teams jumped to their stations and other people helped out as they could while also directing what attacks they could up at Onyxia. We still lost some people, but with soulstones and combat rezes, we were doing OK.

One of the shamans had suggested after the third run that perhaps shaman totems could be used to draw Onyxia's fireballs away from players. We had sometimes used a similar trick against Molten Core bosses who have attacks that target random enemies. Shaman totems count as an "enemy," so shamans can sometimes drop cheap rank 1 totems in an effort to have them absorb attacks. We decided to try out the idea and had shamans drop a bunch of cheap totems in the middle of the room. It worked! Onyxia did indeed target the shaman totems and saved players from being hit by fireballs. Unfortunately, they had another side effect.



Onyxia's most deadly attack is called Deep Breath. When she detects a large concentration of enemies, she issues an emote, saying "Onyxia takes in a deep breath...". In theory, you have five seconds to get out of the way. In practice, five seconds isn't enough time to figure out where to move to and get there. After the five seconds are up, she emits a huge flame breath that covers a huge swath of the room and is nearly always fatal. Looking at my log, I noticed that the breath seems to come in three waves in quick succession. One time, I managed to resist one of the waves and barely survived the attack. Go go fire resistance!

Also, you'll notice in the screenshot above that several players were calling for hunters to use Aspect of the Cheetah and for shamans to use tremor totems. Unfortunately, those are tactics for Phase III, which starts when Onyxia is down to 35-40% life. At this point in the fight, Onyxia was only down to 56% life, and we still had a long way to go before we got to Phase III. This was another sign of "opening night jitters" or perhaps "noob jitters." It's OK. That's why we were there -- to get over our jitters, to gain some experience, and to figure stuff out.



Those who didn't get killed by Deep Breath got finished off by the next wave of whelps. The whelps come out of the pit in waves. I didn't time it, but I would guess that the waves happen about once a minute. With the raid severely depleted by Deep Breath and constantly pelted by Onyxia's fireballs, the extra wave of whelps was just too much to handle.