Once upon a time in Onyxia's lair

I ran with a pug for 10 men newly improved Onyxia's lair last night. I was one of the three healers. We wiped a bunch of times but I learned the fight (at least the first two phases) really well.

Trash:

They are 3-4 trash pulls before you engage Onyxia. We wiped twice on the elite dragon guards trash mainly because we pulled more than one at a same time.

Onyxia's is a three phase fight.

Phase 1.

Tank charges in and aggros Onyxia and drags her toward one of the side walls. She has a couple of attacks including, flame Breath (heavy hit front), Cleave (10 targets), Tail Sweep (a large knockback), and Wing Buffet (front knockback). This part is straight forward. As long as all DPS and heals stands on the side of Onyxia they will not take damage. The healer's job is to keep the tank up. The OT is mostly on damage role here. As long as you don't stand in front/behind Ony you will be fine. This phase ends when Onyxia gets to 65% health. The tank need to stand against the wall so the knockback won't move the tank around. We were able to easily reach this stage under 1 min.

Phase 2.

In this phase Onyxia will take flight and whelps will appear from both ends. OT/MT need to grab all the adds and DPS need to AOE them down. This phase is really long and everyone MUST STACK TO TANK because they are so many of them. Tanks with lots of AOE taunt cool downs are best for this fight. In our raid we had a DK doing this. This phase doesn't end until Onyxia's health drops to 40%. Onyxia can be hit by range DPS as well as melee DPS standing directly under her (I was told, I had no way of verifying this). In this phase she will also randomly drop deep breath on raid. You will need to get behind her as soon as warning messages comes up. The damage is huge and can't be healed through. I had close to 20K health and was one shotted by her flame breath. She will also summon additional elite guards that need to be picked up by tank and DPSed down. We were not able to make further than this stage because we keep losing people to the deep breath.

Phase 3 (copied from wowhead).

Phase 3 starts when Onyxia's health reaches 40%. At this point she will land permanently and cast a raid-wide fear, accompanied by lava eruptions. Raid wide damage, with extras for the tank - nothing you haven't seen before. Unlike the original version of the fight, Onyxia will no longer wipe aggro between phases, which means that your tank from Phase 1 should be the first person she goes to in Phase 3. Throughout this phase Onyxia will continue to use all of her abilities from phase 1 (Flame Breath, Cleave, Tail Sweep, Wing Buffet), alongside with Bellowing Roar (3-second fear) and Eruption (AoE during the fear). Whelps will continue to spawn as well, but they won't be nearly as many as in Phase 2, so a few of your ranged DPS should be able to handle them quickly.


Overall the fight didn't seem overly complicated. Gearing maybe less of an issue with the brooding mother. I would suggest everyone to be in at least naxx 25 gear level before trying her. Range DPS seem to have an easier time than melee due to the flight phase.

In my view point this is is more of a coordination fight like the one in OS instead of a gear check. I think at our guild's current gear level is adequate to attempt her (naxx 10, badge, H. ToC). We just need to coordinate and learn the fight.

Oh yeah. I think I wet myself a couple of times.

How to serve death knights

My paladin is in outlands! Him along side of another 99 screaming death knights (DK). Leveling my paladin and blacksmithing in outlands made me acutely aware of two things.

One, if you can heal in outland, your life is wonderful! Well, maybe not that wonderful since you have to deal with the incessant plea of DKs looking for healer in LFG. But if you need to run an instance as a healer invites would fly in like snow flakes. What is also funny is none of the DKs seem able to tank. Since I can only tank or heal at a time I am often relegated to the unfortunately choices of either heal a DPS tank that thinks he can tank because he has put 3 points in frost or tank myself and wait for the group to find another healer.

Two, you can make a good living in WOW just by catering for DKs. I already kind know this since my primary glyph customers are DKs. Out of all the glyphs my inscriber can make, DK minor glyph sells best. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had made a flying mount doing exactly that. Blacksmithing is all together something else. It has been a huge money drain from the get go. Not only does it cost a fortunate to buy the ores so you can level up; save the occasional rod sell the crafted items from BS has been completely junk. They are either white or crappy greens that doesn’t sell at all on AH. The situation completely turned itself around after the painful stretch of 250-300. As soon as I skilled up into the DK range (>300), stuff made using BS suddenly are selling like hot cakes. For earlier recipes (300-310) I would break even on AH while the lately most things I craft are selling at a profit! My currently best seller is the Adamantite Cleaver which costs me 15 gp to craft but sells between 30-40 gp on AH. I looked up these buyers and sure enough they are all DKs.

Considering 40% of server are DKs I guess BS is worth having just to serve them.