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.

The Fifth Attempt

By the time we got around to starting the fifth attempt, it was already very late. We lost several people due to the time (damn east coasters and all their "work in the morning" excuses), and we were down to 34 people. Some people asked if we were going to try to recruit replacements, but we decided it wasn't worth it to make everyone wait while we found people, got them down here, and explained to them how the encounter worked. We knew we weren't going to kill Onyxia this evening, so we figured we would make one last attempt to figure out Deep Breath. We could do that with the 34 people we had.

We got to Phase II, and I and others tried to help out the groups killing whelps as much as we could. We were definitely getting better about focusing more aoe power on the whelps as they came out.

Still, I could feel how shorthanded the raid was when a couple people died to the first wave of whelps. After this screenshot, I faded, of course, and continued to help the shaman and mages you see here finish off the whelps. But I was damaged by the whelps and died when one of Onyxia's fireballs hit me for 2176 damage.

A druid combat resurrected me (that is such a nice skill in a raid situation), and I drank as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, I got hit again and placed in combat before I got a chance to resurrect anyone else. We were struggling, but we were managing. And then...

One of the ideas we had was that perhaps we could avoid getting hit by Deep Breath if we could quickly figure out where it was headed. So, we had one person ping the minimap periodically to show exactly where Onyxia was. (She slowly flies around the chamber during the fight). The theory was that she breathes toward the opposite end of the room, so we figured when the emote came, we could try to run to a side of the room out of the direction we thought the breath might go. It didn't work. Or at least, it didn't work well enough.

The Deep Breath cut a swath through an already shorthanded raid. The remnants tried valiantly to keep things going. (I'm confused by one of the screenshots I have. I think I may have been rezed again and then instantly killed by another fireball). Another wave of whelps came, and it was too much for the remnants of the raid to handle. The raid slowly but surely fell.

This was obviously the last run of the night, but we were feeling OK. Even with a shorthanded raid, we managed to get Onyxia down to 47% health. We still hadn't figured out this Deep Breath thing, though. It was getting obvious that the only way to deal with Deep Breath was to make sure Onyxia never used it in the first place. Looking back at my screenshots from the perspective of another eight attempts under my belt, I can see some of the mistakes we were making. We were bunching up way too much, and we should have told our shamans to not use any totems at all during Phase II. Instead of having someone ping the map to show us where Onyxia was, we should have had someone direct people where to go to make sure they didn't cluster too much. Oh, well. That's the kind of thing that a few wipes teaches you.

By the time that our fifth attempt was completed, it was getting late, even by pacific coast standards, so that was our last run. As we broke up, it was decided that we would meet again at seven o'clock the next day to see if we could kill this *expletive deleted* dragon.