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Logging on the server today after the patch, I was just lounging around in Undercity, when I received a message from someone, asking if I would like to join in a raid on Onyxia, the new raid instance that the patch has just added. "Excellent!", I thought to myself, "this is a rare opportunity indeed, because everyone has migrated off the closed beta servers to the stress/open beta test servers." So I agreed.
I was subsequently invited into the raid group. It was about half full then, and invites were still ongoing. I waited for a few minutes while the warlocks in the raid prepared to summon everyone to the entrance of the Onyxia's Lair. From a raid group size of about 20 people then, it quickly swelled to the full size of 40, so we didn't have to wait long before the fun began within about 20-30 minutes. I thank the organisers of this raid for being able to bring everyone to Dustwallow marsh so speedily, especially the 4 or so Warlocks with their summoning.
Onyxia's Lair is located in Wyrmbog, in the southern regions of Dustwallow Marsh. Here it is, a map of Dustwallow Marsh, the green dot represents my location on the map.
The Wyrmborg and Dragonmurk (the entire southern region of Dustwallow Marsh) is a Elite region, every enemy in it is elite. In the middle lies the lair, and it looks like a wyrm's head with the mouth wide open. To enter the lair, you need a necklace called Drakefire Amulet, which is purchasable off a goblin vendor standing at the front of the entrance (for free). The following screenshot shows you how the entrance looks, where the "teeth" actually prevents access to the Lair without the key. The green instance portal whirls merrily behind the teeth. The highlighted target in the screenshot is the goblin vendor.
In the retail version of the game, this key (amulet) will have to be obtained through a quest, instead of simply just buying off a vendor as it is right now in the beta. Since the key has an inscription on it that says "The Blood of Drakkisath flows Within...", it is guessed that it has something to do with killing the General in the Upper Blackrock Spire instance.
Anyway, the raid group is almost complete at this point, with 39 players already in. Sadly, you can also see that of those 39 people, there is only ONE druid in there. The summoning rituals all complete outside (you cannot summon people from outside to inside the instance anymore), we proceeded to enter the raid instance. An exciting loading screen appears with the picture of a dragon appears ominously.
As a side note, you cannot enter the instance unless you are in a raid group. Trying to do so will just result in nothing happening and an error displayed on screen (so the minimum is a group of 2, converted to raid).
On entering, a dark and gloomy passageway extends into the darkness. Being excited, some of the more courageous players charged forward and brandished their swords, even as other players continued to zone in. From the numerous screenshots, I have actually collated a minimap of the whole instance from multiple screenshots, since the instance is actually VERY small in size. The left side here shows a winding path that curves and loops under itself at the start, then proceeds to U-turn into a big chamber at the right. The green line shows the path of travel and X marks where Onyxia lies. Or roughly anyway.
The winding path to the big chamber has 4 monsters on the way, 2 of them are roaming, 2 of them are stationary. Anyway, all 4 are pullable alone, you are recommended to pull them alone too). These 4 enemies are Onyxian Warders and they are level 61/62 Raid-difficulty Elite Dragonkin. And elite they are, for the first one wiped out our group very very quickly. Look at the screenshot, I have scrolled the text up to where the Onyxia Warder was doing Fire Novas to everyone ranging from 1200 to 2000 damage! And that Fire Nova range is huge, like 20 yards! The Warders are also capable of doing a Cleave of about 2k damage (Area Cleave too), but it is of a smaller radius. The Warders also cast a very nasty curse that lowers your fire resists by 3 digits...
So, chalk up one wipe for Onyxia. Ressurection by players no longer cause 30 minute ressurection sickness (it did yesterday, today it no longer does). In fact, player resses no longer even cause any sickness totally. As everyone performs a corpse run, some strategies were discussed back and forth. It is now known that they are stunnable although they cannot be feared or most other forms of crowd control.
Our next attempt was a success. With rogues and warriors doing their best to keep the Onyxia Warder stunned most of the time (like Kidneyshot), and with some warlocks draining mana from it. The casters all stayed as far back as they can and threw their best nukes, along with some counterspells and silences. Dozens of totems were placed and used, especially the fire resistance ones. A few people died at the front line but that was expected. Note that the Warder is immune to Cheap Shot, despite what people say on the forums (a screenshot proves it).
We proceeded on to kill the second, third and fourth Warder in pretty much the same manner. Enough coins dropped from the corpses of each such that everyone got about 29 or 67 copper. Nothing else dropped though. Since the dragonkin are level 61 and 62, of course, they required 305 and 310 skinning respectively to skin them, this can only be achieved with +skinning skill items and enchantments.
If you were still wondering about that warrior ability called Execute that supposedly did 12k damage on a poor 0-armor bugged ogre, they only did about 300-600 damage to these Warders. In any case, some deaths are starting to accumulate rather badly for a few players, we know now that every death takes 10% durability loss on all the equipped items (10% of max dur, not 10% of current dur), this meant that we can only afford about 9 deaths at most for the meleers in front.
Eventually, we rounded the corner into the final large chamber. Onyxia lies there, peacefully asleep, in the middle, with a nice skull symbol for her level. As everyone gathered to watch, an overly adventurous soul ventured too close to Onyxia. Onyxia yells: "Learn your place, mortal!" and begins to charge towards us, breathing plumes of fire! The raid begins (a bit prematurely no doubt).
Well, things went wrong ran from the start. The rogues and warriors started attacking. Since Onyxia is immune to stun, mez and root effects, and taunt only generates enough hate to make Onyxia aggro them, when large healing spells are casted by the healers, Onyxia made a beeline for some of the healers. A rampage began, and Onyxia was dealing 400 damage normal hits everywhere. That wasn't so bad, but from a platform below Onyxia's den, there is a cache of eggs. These eggs hatch into level 56-58 non-elite whelps, but nevertheless with about 10 to 30 of them, and full hitpoint mobs (i.e not 2-hit kills like the Reservists in Lyceum in BRD), this caused a lot of problems. Onyxia also spawns 2 Warders.
In this shot below, you can see a LARGE group of whelps on the left zerging us. The fact that the names are all blurred in red shows that it is a BIG number of them stacked on top of each other (they normally aren't so clustered, but everyone in front already died). As Onyxia walked around screaming death at everyone, the ground shook up and down.
Some healers pulled back, and started to ressurect players when Onyxia returned back to her rest state. This happened fine until a point where Onyxia seemed to like charging towards the resser if they attempted to res someone too close to her. It took quite a while to regoup after several deaths. Before a second try was made, one of the Warders that Onyxia summoned rampaged through and killed even more people.
By now, several people are declaring Onyxia as undoable by a group of 40 (during the fight, no noticable damage was done on Onyxia's hp bar at all, totally). Disgruntled with the durability loss of several deaths, they chose to leave. By then, the group had been seperated into 2 parts, the front of the entrance ressurected from corpse runs, and the other near Onyxia, with a rampaging Warder in between. A few more people left, and that was that. One or two people died enough times to have totally broke their equipment due to durability (I died 6 times in all, -60%).
So, the raid group broke up. Aftermath discussion reveals some possible ways to defeat Onyxia. It is possible to reach the eggs in the platform below Onyxia without attracting her attention although it is not clear whether it is climbable back up. The eggs are not attackable, going near them will hatch them though. Perhaps the trick is to kill the whelps first before engaging Onyxia? Maybe it is like the Uldaman instance where some people tank the boss first while the rest deals with the dwarf minions? We don't know yet, but it was obvious our strategy was wrong since no dent was made to Onyxia's HP. The best group known to date has only managed to bring Onyxia down to 85% health, and that attempt, the 2 Elite Warders didn't spawn.
It is also learnt the Warders have full stealth detection. Anyway, it has been a fun experience, although it lacked any coordination of any sort. It was simply a 40-man pickup raid group, and everybody participated in it with a zerg like manner, it's 40-man vs 1-enemy! Just nuke it! Perhaps more organised teams will be able to take down Onyxia in the near future, with some AEing the whelps while others concentrate on Onyxia (who I hear can do 4k damage hits once in a while, although I am uncertain about this).
My own repair costs of 6 deaths amounted to about 2 gold. Other players, especially the melee ones, reported repair costs of 6g, 8g and 9g for those deaths and worn down weapons. This is very very costly indeed and I think the durability loss needs to be looked at for PvE deaths. 10% per death seems a bit too steep, or otherwise the repair costs for high-end items are way too high. Perhaps cloth items are cheaper to repair, but in conjuction with that, caster classes have to deal with reagent costs of spells. I pity the poor single druid in the raid group earlier, every Mark of the Wild casted was 10 silver for him. It initially wasn't casted, but it was later, for it added some Fire Resists.
That's it, for the better part of 1 hour. Was a very fun hour experiencing it all, and we all know it will just get better in the release!
(I know somebody will ask, so I'll answer it now, I use a AMD 1800+, 512 MB ram, Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2 with 64 MB video ram. I actually played this raid in Window mode, if I used full-screen mode instead, the images would have been a bit brighter since my own in-game gamma settings would have been used instead of the desktop gamma.)
MongoJerry returns with a story regarding his raid on Onyxia. If you have enjoyed his Schooling Scholomance journal, you will no doubt enjoy this read too! (He is on the PvP Alliance Faction, I'm on the PvP Horde Faction)
Finally, Tyren just dropped a mean bait for all of us:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyren
There are many features/tactics to the Onyxia raid that aren't obvious at first because of the newness of the whole encounter. After a few attempts, I'm sure it'll become an exact science. :)
Great stuff... though I recall in the first screenshots of Onyxia had the dragon in flight for at least a time?
Please don't tell me this dragon sits there on the ground, every now and then lunging at someone and thats about it?
No deadly flick of the tail or a flap of the wings to send everyone flying or something... etc, etc.?
Oh, Onyxia certainly has knockback effects alright, that can knock you across the whole room (and beware the falling damage! :D :D ). He also has a habit of walking around once in a while...
[Shots] My Onyxia Raid Journal
Linear Mode
