ONYXIA

In the far off land of Kalimdor, there lies a region of swamps, bogs, and wastelands called Dustwallow Marsh.  And in the southern end of the Marsh lies an area called the Wyrmbog that is the home of many kinds of dragonkin.

It is a charred desolate region.

And it is here where the dragon, Onyxia, makes her lair.

I was invited to join a raid on Onyxia today by Ogrimx, and I'd like to thank him for taking on the largely thankless task of organizing the trip.  Organizing any raid group is a major undertaking and organizing one involving a largely pickup community can be especially daunting.  Kudos to Ogrimx and the others like Berilac who helped him pull everything together.

The home of Onyxia is locked by a large gate of teeth, and the normal way of obtaining a key to her lair involves a very lengthy and difficult quest series in the Blackrock Depths instance, related to a jail break of Marshal Windsor.  (We'll see part of this series later).

However, Blizzard wants beta testers to try out the Onyxia raid instance, so they've placed a handy goblin vendor in front of Onyxia's lair who hands out the Drakefire Amulet that acts as the key.  It kind of makes things easy.

When you wear the amulet, you can open the teeth-like gate and see the green raid instance portal behind it.  It is at this point that the most difficult part of the raid on Onyxia commences.  That is, getting the d*** thing organized.

I was lucky in that I was one of the later people to be invited to the raid (I had just logged on).  Some people had mentioned that they had been waiting for the raid to get going for almost two hours, which led to a lot of frustration.  I have a few suggestions for both raid group organizers and participants, based on my experiences with this group.

For raid organizers:

1. When you're doing the initial recruiting, let people know that it's going to take some time before the raid starts and ask them to invite their friends and guildmates.  Something like, "We're still recruiting people, so it'll probably be about a half an hour before we start. Let me know if any of your friends or guildmates want to come."  That way, you'll get some help in the recruitment effort, and you're letting people know that they don't have to get to the instance immediately.  It's better to let people hang out in Ironforge or do some outdoor quests, while the recruiting process is still going on.  Then, when things start getting close (like when you have 35 people), you can tell people to make their way to the instance.

2. Early on in the recruiting cycle, recruit a couple of warlocks and ask them to farm shards for summoning.  The idea isn't to summon the entire 40-person raid to the instance but to instead summon the last 5-10 people added to the raid.  The point where the biggest frustrations seem to occur is when the raid is *almost* full, but where the last people are still on their way.  That's when people get bitchy about starting and often will quit the raid in frustration, because the "noobs" won't get started.  Speeding up those last moments via summoning makes a big difference.

3. When most of the raid is assembled and you need to give instructions, use the yell command so that your text comes out in a different color than the general raid chat spam.

For raid participants:

1. Take a chill pill.  It's hard enough getting a five person party together, and the time and effort it takes to organize a group goes up exponentially with the size of the group.  It takes time to organize a good raid group, so show patience.

2. Take it easy on the raid organizers and help them as much as you can. Recruit friends or guildmates and help newer players find their way to the instance.  If you're a warlock, farm some shards and tell the organizers that you're willing to summon people.  And if a warlock says that he or she needs people to come outside of the instance to assist with summoning, leave the instance and help summon.  The more you help, the sooner the raid will start.

3. When the organizers say it's time to make one's way to the instance, do so with all possible speed.  Don't dally around, and don't ask for a summon.  You have feet and you have a mount, use them!

4. Cut down on the spam in raid chat.  I know, everyone's excited, but it can be mind-numbing to watch the general chat speed by.  And when much of the chat is spam, people can miss more important instructions from the raid organizers or requests by people who need help getting to the instance.  Also, please leave yelling to the raid organizers.

Anyway, somehow a 40-person raid group managed to get formed this afternoon and commenced its raid on the lair of Onyxia.

There are four Onyxian Warders to kill before reaching Onyxia herself, and the first one we encountered was a level 60+ elite.  These raid elite warders are tough compared to what people are used to in regular instances.  They hit hard and have a massive aoe fire attack that does on the order of 2000 damage on each strike.

However, the first fight went smoothly due to some simple but effective organization.  First, all of the paladins spread among the various parties in the raid used their fire resistance auras.  Second, while the melee players charged the warder, the healers and ranged attackers stayed well back to stay out of range of the warder's aoe attack.  Third, the rogues and paladins in the group attempted to keep the warder stunned as much as possible.  I gather that the warders are highly resistant but not immune to stun effects, so if enough people try to stun it, then occasionally someone will get lucky and successfully land a stun.  Finally, the priests cast a lot of Prayer of Healing (AoE heal) spells to keep everyone healed.

We had a few deaths, but on the whole the battle went well.

But while we were rezing, buffing, drinking, and generally recovering from the first battle, possible doom was creeping up on us.

The second warder sent the group into a scramble, and since not enough people were prepared for the battle, the warder managed to get several aoe shots off straight off the bat, killing or severely wounding a large number of players.  The party recovered somewhat, but the warder made consistent inroads.  One member after another was dropping and soon all or nearly all of the melee fighters were dead.  As you can see in the screenshot above, nearly two-thirds of the raid party was dead and the remainder was composed largely of squishy cloth-wearers.

Luckily, though, by the time the above screenshot was taken, the warder was down to about 10% health.  The warder made more headway into the group, but all the surviving casters spread out and dealt all the damage they could.  For my part, I used all my mana, a mana pot, and Inner Focus.  Seeing that the warder was down to a sliver of life, I broke out my wand and fired a 21-point damage wand shot, which turned out to be the death blow.  I was quite proud of that.

After rezing, buffing, drinking, and otherwise recovering from this second battle, we moved on to the third warder who fell more systematically.

The fourth and final warder was level 62+ and was therefore much tougher to kill than the earlier warders, but by this time, the raid party had the system down and we had no trouble dispatching him as well.

All we had left to do was kill a dragon.

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