Hunting Onyxia!
September 22, 2009Onyxia is a specially re-released encounter to celebrate WOW’s 5th anniversary. Today, I’ll go over the basic strategy for the fight from a hunter’s perspective. The fight has 3 phases:
Phase one
This phase is a simple single target burn that lasts until you get her down to 65%. During this time, she will do moderate raid damage and will periodically send people in melee range flying back.
Phase two
Once you get her to 65%, she takes flight and will summon a veritable army of onyxian whelps. I didn’t get a good count, but there were at least 25 on the 10 man version- and with this many whelps, their name plates were literally covering my entire screen. Use your new powered up volley here, but keep Onyxia targeted and fire more DOTs (black arrow, explosive shot, and serpent sting) at her when they’re off cooldown between volleys. Also, save your feign death for this phase- you might attract some whelp attention with all the AOE you’re doing.
She next starts to summon lair guards. These don’t last long, but they do a hard hitting AOE. Take them out.
During this time, she will take that deep breath we keep hearing jokes about- what this means is that she will pick a direction, and destroy anything in her path. Watch her carefully, and when you see an emote about a deep breath, make sure you aren’t in her path.
Phase three
Once you get her to 40%, she lands again and starts to fear people in addition to all this other stuff. These fears last 3 seconds. She’ll also cause parts of the floor to gush fire which does light fire damage- try not to stand on the cracks between floor plates. If you get feared into one, have a health pot handy. Sometimes she fears or kicks people so far/hard that they spawn another army of whelps. If this happens, you’re going to need a lot of heavy tanking, healing, and AOE DPS to get back on track. Position yourself close enough to minimize the risk of your being the one that gets kicked/feared into the caves.
That’s pretty much all there is to this fight- straight forward, and easy to outgear. The rewards are on par with the T9 content in ToC. Have fun!
[edit: don't forget the secret hunter perch.]
euripidesoutdps
jurgwena
M
lemli
eidotrope
How easy is it now? Walkover? On-par with Naxx, Ulduar or ToC?
On par with one of the easier fights in ToC in my opinion. It can’t be facerolled with a pug that averages 1200 DPS, but you don’t need to have everyone in T9 either.
Ugh, my guild tried to run this tonight, it was awful.
But that was entirely because of the server lag and the fact that people wouldn’t get out of the way of the deep breath attack.
Then everything crashed, we waited an hour to get back in while four people debating American politics on ventrilo (being Canadian, I found this intensely dull), and then it crashed again before we even got in for a second attempt.
Although this is a great chance for people to go back and listen to that “FIFTY DKP MINUS” thing. Hilarious. Someone played a song remix of it on ventrilo.
Hopefully it’ll be fixed so we can give it a shot tomorrow.
Oh, and fun fact, it appears to be on a three day reset timer instead of a full week timer. Dunno if that’ll be changed or if I was just looking at it wrong, but if it’s farmable and the loot doesn’t suck, bonus.
Damn, the three day timer was a glitch, it’s fixed now.
Got a nice new gun off it though. Looks like crap, but it packs quite a punch. :)
I spent the entire day yesterday wiping before I finally downed this. Her first and third phases aren’t hard at all. Her second phase is tough just because it’s hard to see her when she does her Deep Breath and the transition between the second and third phases will be very hard if there are adds up. But we downed her even though half the raid died when she landed.
I also was able to get the Dragonstalker’s Helm. I’d like to get some thoughts on the gear because I’m kind of confused about the item. It’s a slightly better helm than the Conqueror’s Scourgestalker Helm but the resistance stats seem like wasted itemization. Other than that though, it looks like I’m wearing Onyxia on my head =)
It might be free itemization- I’ll have to do a comparison.
Grats, clra2, on one of the best looking armor items in the game, especially on a Tauren. I used to love my T2 dragonstalker’s helm.
One tip to help you and your raid cope with Deep Breaths: Since you’re obviously a hunter, ue Track Dragonkin to be able to see Onyxia easily on your mini map (don’t get her mixed up with the whelps, however :) ). Occasionally ping her location on the mini map to inform your raid members of her position. She will always deep breath across the room, meaning that if she’s a the 3 o’clock position (by the eastern whelp cave), the deep breath will aim for the 9 o’clock position (the western whelp cave). Standing at either 12 o’clock or 6 o’clock (or around either of the two) means you will be perfectly safe from taking deep breath damage. That’s how we did it in Vanilla, at least, and it seemed to work just the same when we one-shot her tonight. Was great seeing her (dead) again :)
Oh, and Euripides! Thanks for a nice blog and a fun pod cast!
Welcome :) Thanks for the tip!
Cheers! It seems alot of people are unaware of this simple yet helpful trick, especially those that never played a hunter in Vanilla. Hopefully spreading this can help them to a smoother phase 2.
For phase 3 when the fears are going off. Our tank dragged her back to the back side and kept her there facing the back wall like he had in phase one. Some of us, due to positioning, ended up hugging the wall about 45 degree angle away from her. If you look down you’ll see there’s a long rock that travels along the wall. If you stand here, the fear will cause you half the time to run against the wall or up and down this long rock, rather then through all the fire bursts. Helps the healers and means you’ll be able to return to DPS quicker. Stand at the closest end of the rock to onyxia and hope you run in terror against the wall.
Yeah, I actually posted this as a separate post, and then forgot to mention it in this one.