Running the Brewfest dailies may not have gotten me any closer to server domination, but it did get me a nifty pair of boots to go with my costume. Tonight or tomorrow I should get the cap (I like saving the cheapest thing for last) and that will nail down the last of the Brewfest achievements. I’ll still play along through the end of the holiday for the pet Elekk, but it isn’t a pressing need.
Much later I was chillaxing in Ironforge and waiting for the daily queue, when I get a whisper from a guildie. She’s in an Onyxia 10-man raid group that’s only half full. Would I want in? I glanced at my queue-counter. Fourteen minutes in and a dungeon should pop any second. I was glad she caught me when she did. I dropped queue, replied that I would, and in a minute I was chillaxing in Ironforge and waiting for the raid to fill.
For the uninitiated, the dragon Onyxia was one of the true end-game encounters back in Vanilla. Videos on YouTube abound including a rather famous (in some circles) animated one with a spastic raid leader utterly nutting up throughout the proceedings, which culminates in an epithet-spewing tirade when they wipe. That particular video is the source of the names of two achievements “Many whelps! Handle it!” and “More dots!” and is four minutes of Totally Worth It.
When Lich King came out, the classic raid was yanked, buffed up, and slapped back in as 10/25-man level 80 content. The raid itself is one of the easier ones, which isn’t surprising given that, as a developer, you want the new content to be more challenging and rewarding than the things players have seen for years.
We ventured forth to some remote spot in Kalimdor. (Well, truth be told, a couple of people ventured forth to a remote spot in Kalimdor. My happy butt stayed parked in Ironforge until summoned.) We delved into the dragon’s cave and explored the tunnels within which was, unsurprisingly, guarded by a number of various draconian adversaries. After a remarkably short distance, we stood at the doorway into a large cavern and Onyxia lay sprawled out dozing. Someone commented on how peaceful she looked sleeping.
We had a secondary mission: attain the “Many Whelps! Handle it!” achievement, if at all possible. This cranks the difficulty of the raid to 11. Don’t worry, dear reader. I’ll explain. Phase one of Onyxia is strictly tank and spank. The tank points the mouth of The Very Angry Dragon away from the raid and we wail on it until she hits phase 2. At the beginning of phase 2, she walks around and then takes to the air. When she does, players nears the sides of the cave will spawn up to a hundred dragon whelps. That is not an exaggeration. Around fifty whelps spawn on each side. Meanwhile, Onyxia will start blasting the raid from above, safely out of melee range. The achieve requires spawning more than 50 whelps within ten seconds of Ony taking to the air and then killing her.
The whelps hurt. A lot. They are fairly crunchy, but there’s a crapton of them. From personal experience, I can attest they each do about 1-2k damage per hit against cloth wearers who might be trying to blizzard them to death. Interestingly enough, the main danger the whelps pose isn’t from their teeth, but the sheer volume of them will cause many people to lose connection. This can be mitigated by lowering one’s graphic settings from ultra to ‘catass’, but even still, our first attempt saw two people drop. Given that one was a tank, this boded ill and in seconds we wiped from the Swarm.
We returned a couple of times, but each time the whelp swarm caused party members to disconnect and those that didn’t were quickly nommed to death. After the third time, we decided to play it straight and see how that went. (spoiler: better
The tank engaged and we streamed forward, guns a-blazin’. We entered phase 2 and I was shocked to see whelps—it turned out that Onyxia spawns a number of her own. My guildie friend died horribly, as did one other, but we pressed on. Avoiding fireballs and ‘deep breaths’ (read: horrific gouts of flame), I positioned myself underneath the dragon and blasted as I could at an awkward angle as the tanks scooped up rogue whelps and a couple of elite dragonkin that had spawned. After some time, she landed and phase 3 began.
This time, Onyxia’s normal attacks and wing buffet were supplemented by an area-of-effect fear and lava bursts around the room. It definitely made for an interesting fight. In the end, justice was served by murderous humanoids with sharp pointy things and the dragon lay dead before us and three achievements were attained at once: Onyxia 10-man, More Dots! (kill her in x time), and She Deep Breaths More (kill her without anybody getting nailed by the ‘deep breath’ weapon). This had turned out much better than I had hoped for.
There was a nice assortment of loot, including the dragon’s head (which was won by my guildie) and a 22-slot bag, among other nifties. Per usual, I lost all of the rolls and summoned the obligatory portal to Dalaran. I was then surprised by a trade offer: my guildie gave me the head! She noted that the trinket reward wasn’t needed, so I happily returned to Stormwind carrying my severed prize. The reward ring was actually a little worse than what I currently had, but the souvenir of my adventure earned a spot in my bank vault.
No comments:
Post a Comment