When I talk about something on the blog, I do try and pick out those things that are entertaining moments, weird moments, or teachable moments.

There has to be a point to it, even if it was just “Well, it made ME laugh.”

Something that happened that was a fun story, something that happened that was out of the ordinary, something that happened that called to mind a topic of discussion many of us might learn from… if only to know what not to do.

And in thinking of blog posts as a teachable moment, thinking about what not to do and how to present it… my mind, inevitably, turned to evil.

A new reality TV show… “How Not to Tank”, with your host, BBB.

Yes, thats right, I felt struck with inspiration for a horrifying series of Youtube videos.

I could join a random pug, and then intentionally do something that tanks should never do, narrate it, and film the entire sequence… including the reactions of the unsuspecting party.

“Today, the Big Bear Butt will demonstrate what happens when a Bear tank tries to free himself from movement impairing effects during the 10 waves of trash in Heroic Halls of Reflection, by shifting out of and back into Bear form. Repeatedly. What will happen, and how will our unsuspecting party react? Let’s find out!”

Seriously, can you imagine how terrible that would be? To be on a run with unsuspecting, innocent folks and intentionally do stuff wrong or stupid, just to film their candid-camera type reactions and then post it?

I have achieved a new, galactic level style of asshattedness.

Even worse… the temptation to actually DO this, if only once, is strong. Now I know what is really meant by “Tempted by the power of the dark side.”

How has this concept not shown up as a regular reality show or on the internet yet?

Stay tuned next week, when our undercover main tank healer goes on strike with loud drama over Legendary item loot priorities right as the main tank pulls the last boss of a heroic Ulduar 25 run, and how the guild leadership reacts after the epic wipe, here, on “Wipe That Raid!”

I’m a sick, sick bear.

I’d mentioned a long time ago that one of the things we like to do instead of actual raids, is to have fun in older, less frequently visited content.

Along those lines, Cassie put up the Black Temple on our raid calender, and the Sidhe Devils went in tonight and for the first time sought to explore it’s vast, cavernous interior.

Most of us had never seen it, and of those that had, we didn’t have any that had gone the distance. Most of the boss explanations we gleaned from World of Raids or Wowwiki, and then we winged it.

There were anywhere from 12 to 15 of us at any given moment, all but 2 level 80.

We had two tanks to start, myself as Feral Druid and Caladorn as Prot Paladin, and Sux as Feral Druid backup in case we needed a third. We quickly changed the plan to being one tank, me, and Sux as second tank if and when we needed one, which was rarely.

We went in with three healers, Jardal on Tree duty, Shadewynn on Priest and Kitsen as Shaman for a nice rounded mix.

Everyone else was DPS, and a lot of that was melee.

We cleared Black Temple, a new group learning as we went, in 3.5 hours exactly (30 minutes of that spent taking an afk break for bio), without a single wipe.

In fact, the only fight that we found truly taxing was Mother, and the Illidari Council of course.

Over the course of the evening, we reached Honored with the Ashtongue, we witnessed epic struggles, took part in bringing down Illidan Stormrage himself…

…and saw the drop of a legendary Warglaive go to Kaelynn the Rogue.

It was a wonderful night, sure to be remembered for a long time. Having nothing but friends by your side as you fight legendary battles, rather than pugging another meaningless heroic, is a priceless gift.

If you’re in a guild with a bunch of friends, and you occasionally find yourself at loose ends trying to think of something fun and different to do… why not give it a try?

I leave you with a few parting snapshots. :)

It’s rare that I run across something concerning WoW that, upon first reading, finds me confused as to how I feel about it.

Normally, for good or ill, I read something about WoW and my own feelings on it will be clear to me.

I might very well change my opinion after a lot of thought, of course.

At the moment, I’m right at that point, and it’s all to do with the raiding culture.

Last night, I had an email from a reader asking me what I thought about a recent post from the Tanking Tips blog, called The Road to Content; Reputation vs Gear vs Experience.

The post focuses on describing the things a new tank should take into consideration when planning on becoming attractive to a top end raiding guild; the gear you wear, the experience you develop in tanking content, and your reputation on the server.

The post left me feeling very confused.

You see, I feel the post holds several solid insights into the importance of these three aspects of a player’s raiding qualifications. Well written, thoughtful, you know… a good post.

The quality of the comments to the post also told me that the majority of readers appreciated the subject and how it was addressed, and offered many excellent suggestions and additional advice for how a new tank can develop gear, training and a positive reputation among the playing community as well.

So, what’s my problem, right?

It all came down to the feelings I had when the writer openly discussed strategic planning on joining guilds, with the specific intent of getting as well geared for raiding as possible before swiftly /gquitting and moving on.

Further, it felt that the unspoken assumption was that if your goal was to step up and be an end game raider, a new tank should be willing to intentionally deceive a new guild as to the players’ true motives for joining, because if a guild knew you intended to only remain long enough to gear your toon up, they would not take you in, and you would not get what you wanted.

That’s where my confusion came about.

For one thing, the blog author, Veneretio, stated further on in the post and comments that he didn’t actually approve of that behavior, but that sometimes it was good to talk about bad things. I’d have to say, pretending people didn’t do things like that when we know it does happen isn’t going to make for any kind of realistic dialogue.

Another thing that confused me was that, aside from one commentor, I really didn’t see anyone else that felt like I did about those parts of the post, the parts that felt like the writer was presenting joining a new guild with ulterior, self serving motives as an actual strategy.

Instead, it almost felt that, yes, the commentors acknowledged that doing that was one accepted way of gearing up and getting ready, but that the drawback would be openly developing a reputation as being untrustworthy, and so other methods would work better to develop and preserve a reputation among the community that would make you attractive to a raiding guild, such as running frequent PuGs.

I am not a raider. I never, never have been part of a hardcore raiding guild that tackled content seriously, night after night, putting forth massive effort and hundreds of hours into server first victories.

In reading Veneretio’s post, it led me to wonder if, when thinking of raiding in particular and the game in general, I’m guilty of a failure to think outside my own preconceived ideas.

I have always seen World of Warcraft through the filter of my own preconceptions of what an MMO is, right from the first moment; a place where you can play an RPG with a huge online community, live.

I have built upon those preconceptions on what an MMO is with my own beliefs about just how a person should act towards other people when playing a cooperative game like a tabletop RPG together. Yes, sometimes you get together with strangers to play an RPG, especially at conventions, but it’s still about sitting down and having fun, usually with folks that are either already friends, or might become friends soon.

I guess I could boil my attitude that came out of that to; if you’re going to play a cooperative game, why the hell would you play it with people who you believe that you will be screwing over in order to advance yourself? Why not just play a single player game instead? Why hurt other people? Johnny Fairplay my ass.

When phrased that way, my assumptions are easy to point out. Cooperative. Advancement. Screwing other people over. It’s all based on how I think the game is supposed to be played.

Why should I assume that the game is meant to be cooperative? That everyone else should care about the feelings of other people? Or act towards other players with courtesy or consideration, all friendly buddy-buddy?

Instead of my tabletop RPG mindset, where the team plays together as friends, how about I switch up the analogy?

How about if I look at WoW as predominantly a competition?

A competition such as Baseball.

Yes, it’s a game. There are rules for play, and structure, and people have fun playing it at the amateur level.

But if you truly want to go pro, your goal is, indeed, to do the best you can as a player… but you don’t expect to join one team in a one horse town, and then lead the entire team into the major leagues with you.

No, in this sports analogy, you join an existing team, and the coaches work at helping you improve and getting you set up with the tools to win… and getting you integrated into their team. They teach you the basics.

But if a major league team sees your play, and offers you a job in the majors to see the show, it’s expected by everyone that of COURSE you’ll take the opportunity to bring your play to the majors. You had to start somewhere, right? You had to learn the trade. And you had to develop your teamwork.

I can see it. It makes sense.

Using that analogy, as flawed as analogies are, it helps me to articulate the one thing that I believe remains true, whether raiding or casual.

Bear with me just a moment.

In the sports teams, when you join the minors, everyone knows that the hope is to someday be good enough to join the majors. Even if you’re playing in a sports bar team with the logo of a local barbershop on the back of your jersey, if a scout said, “Hey Mikey, you’ve got a hell of an arm, I think you’ve got what it takes, want to come start for the Yankees”, the rest of his team isn’t going to say, “Dude, you wouldn’t have gotten the skills without us. We just got you trained up, and we need you to stay here so we can crush the Malibu Bowl Bouncers in our bar league next week. ”

I think that, with the attention that is given to world firsts, server firsts, professional gaming league events, even Accomplishments, and the entire raid setup in place… it’s actually a realistic expectation that players, a majority of players, would have that same point of view.

A guild can represent a team, and for many players, perhaps your fellow guild members are not necessarily friends, but teammates.

Some teammates might be jerks, but hey… if they’ve got one hell of a pitching arm, it’s not like you’re going to bench them if you want to field the best team you can.

And let’s face the truth. Some teams are recognised as being more successful than others… and the dream of many players is to someday make the majors, whether that means being in the number one raiding guild on your server, your battlegroup, or even in the guild that are the the world first badasses of the universe.

Got it? It’s totally not how I have ever internalised the game before in all these years. Never. That’s my blindside, I didn’t ever look beyond playing with friends as being the core of the game for me.

But now that I’ve made that analogy, here’s the problem I’ve got… if you act as though you believe that others do not, and will not, understand your joining a guild, playing with them, getting good, getting geared, and then leave immediately, and you decide that you want to do that anyway so you’ll have to deceive them, then you’ve shown that you are deceptive and selfish in your dealings with others.

If you acknowledge that in order to get what you want, you must conceal your true motives from others, deceive them as to your intentions, and attempt to find situations where these actions will not be made public to the teams you do someday hope to join, then you’re not playing as though you really believe that WoW is a sport, and your actions are still inappropriate. You are acting as though you do understand that, no matter how you feel about what you are doing, the community as a whole will disapprove. But you’re gonna do it anyway.

You can bitch about it all you want. That’s the way it is. If you know your behavior is viewed as being wrong, and you do it anyway… the results are all on you. You have made the choice to play the way you want, aware of the potential consequences. Don’t hate the game, yes, hate the player.

I will continue to believe that, whether WoW is a cooperative game of leisure among friends or a sport played by competitive cyberathletes, if you intentionally deceive other players so that you can get them to give you what you want, that’s poor character, and it’s poor sportsmanship.

I know in my guild, if someone asked to join and told me as the guild leader that they wanted to raid, loved to raid, and hoped to advance to a more progression focused guild, but would like to play with us while they gained experience, gear and skill cause they like palying for fun with friends along the way… I’d say it depends on the person, and if the person is a friendly person and treats other guild members with consideration and courtesy, then okay.

I CAN make that claim, and stick to it. Because I already have done just that, a long time ago, and he’s still in the guild on one of his non-raiding toons.

We have a member in our guild that has been in Sidhe Devils for well over a year. I won’t say his character names, but he’s a really great guy.

One of his characters is in Sidhe Devils, and he logs in once in a while, says hi, chats, hangs out a bit.

But he’s not on often, because he is a raider, and that’s where his focus in the game is. And 98% of the time, he’s in the hardcore raiding guild he’s a member of on my server, and he’s raiding.

If he ever decided to finish leveling the one character he still has in our guild, and started signing up for raids, so what? Sure, come have fun with us.

And if loots drops, I’d certainly not say, “Well, we’d better pass to someone else that might stay in the guild.”

In fact, I’ll go one further. If he came to me and told me, “Hey, I’d like to begin hardcore raiding with my other character, they’ve got a spot just waiting for him, can you help me get prepared because they don’t ever run the earlier content and expect me to be ready on my own”, I’m much more likely to start helping get him IN runs to gear him up, or even get runs started just for him.

Why?

Because it would please me no end to help a proven friend who has always been open and honest with me to have the opportunity to achieve their goals in the game, if I can.

Because he’s a friend first.

When someone does the same thing, but hides it? Conceals their intentions, runs stuff with the guild and pretends to be all about the friendship, but as soon as they’re main gets as geared up as they could possibly get from the content you’re running, they take off for a guild that raids harder content? Buh-bye?

Yeah, you call them a snake. Or an asshat.

It’s not what they did, it’s all about how they went about doing it, and what it says about them as a person.

I think the post on Tanking Tips is outstanding. It really made me think, made me look at how I view the game, the stereotypes and preconceptions I’ve fallen into without questioning it.

I think there are a lot of things to think about there. The very definition of a great post; one that causes you to stop and think about things in a completely different light.

Everytime I write something like that, I expect to have the site spammed by dog lovers. :)

Bearwall #2 incoming!

I’ve been accentuating the negative a bit lately, asking recently for your stories of the grouping behavior that you hate the most.

Now it’s time for me to begin collecting the results and preparing for voting season.

In the meantime, let’s get some positive waves rolling here, and think about the fun stuff!

Yes, the word “anti” is in the title. This is a positive post, damnit!

Moriarty and his negative waves are verboten!

I’d like to hear about what behaviors you LOVE in groups, the things that just make you damn happy to be with the folks you are, and NOT in a pug.

Those special things that just leave you thinking, “What a great run”, or “What a great guildie”.

To kick things off, I’ll share a story of my anti-pug, from last night.

Last Friday, after the Onyxia run, I had to leave, but the rest of the guild group were still rarin’ to go, so they went on to clear Obsidian Sanctum, and a few wings of Naxx10; Military and Spider.

Sunday night, it looked like there were enough folks on in guild to go hang out and have some fun, and a few of them were recently dinged 80s of guildies.

Well heck, there’s more to WoW at 80 than running Heroics and ToC to gear up, right? Why not go do what feels like a ‘retro-raid’ these days, and see if we can finish a full Naxxramas clear for the achievements. If we’re lucky, someone might even get something that’s still an upgrade!

Yeah, I won’t hold my breath either.

On Sunday, we went into Abomination and cleared it quickly enough, but a few folks started feeling sick, hungry, etcetera, so we called it until later in the evening to regroup.

The nighttime comes, turns out that some of the folks are still sick. I threw the finisher up on the guild raid calendar, and let people sign up if interested in a Monday night close.

Monday night rolls around, and sure as heck, we’ve got a full group ready and willing to beat up Heigan and take his lunch money.

We proceeded to one shot Noth, Heigan and Loatheb, and had a great deal of fun doing it. Yes, our gear is all generally much better than you’d expect to see in Naxx 10, but the simple fact is, folks played very, very well. Everything was nice and smooth, explanations were kinda sparse but stuff just went down fast.

For the first time I healed Heigan and lived just fine. Usually, I tank it, and find it insanely easy to not get blown up, but as a healer trying to focus on healing everybody and run at the same time, I usually end up lagging behind and going kablooie. Not this time, sucker! Muahahaha!

My personal standard for professional tanking results in Heigan, by the way, are a tank that moves far enough into the safe zone that pets don’t end up getting blown up, and never get close enough to the pedestal to slow the casters, and don’t end up so far away it’s a constant stress-fest to see if they’ll make it (or be out of range). Olivar was the main tank on Bookley, and he freaking nailed it in all respects. Well done, sir.

After Plague was done, we went in and took on Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad, and by gosh and by golly, again it was a great time. Both one shotted, even though my description of the Kel’thuzad fight consisted mostly of saying, “In phase one we stand in the green circle… melee trash the big guys, Notulil icebolt the skeletons, and hunters, please blow up the banshees. When KT runs in, everyone have /range on to show when you get too close to someone else, melee be careful of voids forming under your feet ’cause it gets hard to see when you’re all closed up, healers watch out for that ice bomb thingie, and Sohle the offtank, just kinda hang out and wait for the two adds and pick them up when they appear. Everyone else ignore them, just keep blowing up KT. Oh what the hell, let’s just do it, seeing it once will make more sense than my description.”

Lo and behold, we blew him up without worries. Go figure.

Loot was had, fun times were shared, off to bed, right?

Nahhh. People still wanted to do stuff. Someone, I think it was Twicefallen, suggested we go do a Mammoth hunt in Vault of Archavon.

Sure, why not?

Archavon was fun and went down in an eyeblink… I love seeing tanks getting lunged and tossed across the room. :)

Someone then asked, “Are we going to try Emalon?”

Well, again… why the hell not? What’s the worst that can happen… we die? Brrr, scary. Don’t look, kids! Oh, the humanity!

Or the gnomerity. Whatever.

I asked if anyone knew a winning strat, since I had only ever seen it in pugs a couple times when it first came out, and none of those actually succeeded. Nobody was willing to own up to having seen it done in a win.

Yes, my guild for the most part hates pugging raids. For the most part. I’ve been known to occasionally go trolling for blog material.

Well, this time I’m not joking about winging it on strategy.

I say that from the pugs I’d been in, it seemed like one tank grabbed Emalon and drug him to the far end of the room, the other tank grabbed the four adds and took them to the stairs, everyone used /range to make sure they weren’t too close to everyone else, and every ranged and healer spread out across the middle of the room for good LOS on both tank groups.

The idea being, we blow up Emalon until an add gets enraged, and then all DPS destroys that add. I mentioned that I didn’t know if our three ranged DPS would be enough to take down an add in time before he blew up and wiped the group, and Kaelynn said she thought the melee would have to leave Emalon a few seconds early, beat feet to the adds, and help destroy them, so we should call out on the timer a few seconds early before the enrage to give them a chance to cross over.

Olivar/Bookley mentioned that the add would heal to full, grow to giant size, and should become automagically marked with a Skull to help in identification, so that’s the one we should kill.

I think that it was Sohle who mentioned that a new add would spawn after the enraged one died, and asked that Hunters Misdirect them onto Sohle when they did.

Okay, so what the heck. Let’s give it a shot. Everybody ready?

“Sure! You bet!”

Here’s how it went down.

Everybody did everything they were supposed to flawlessly the first time.

No, really. I’m not kidding. Maintaining proper spacing, running to adds early, Misdirecting adds, blowing up enraged adds, killing Emalon, running out of Nova, healing everyone up…

Flawless victory.

Really. I’m not kidding. Everyone, and I mean everyone… was perfect. On something they had never seen done successfully before.

I’d barely have time to call out “new add up!” and it’d be running right to Sohle.

I swear, it’s that kind of thing that can simply ruin the game for you.

How the hell can you possibly face a pug after that? I mean, really… HOW?!?

It was one of the most triumphant moments of the game for me… and it had nothing to do with loot. Shoot, I don’t even think he dropped anything anyone could use. I think Bookley got some PvP pants. Woohoo.

Nope, it was seeing a group of people who did everything just right on new stuff, because they knew how to play well, paid attention to what they were doing (and not the latest text whisper), and wanted to win. Or at elast not embarass themselves.

Hell, even Jess kicked ass on her Hunter! Go figure!

(I kid, I kid. We expect great things from Jess no matter what toon she plays. Even if it IS a Beast Master Hunter.)

Sure, on content you’ve seen a million times before, you enjoy victory, but you also expect it to go smooth.

On brand new never before seen content, I’m sorry, I don’t care how good you are, I expect someone to zig when they should have zagged. That’s what learning is all about.

Now, let’s not talk about the guild first attempt on the flame dude. Ahem.

I will say, next time, before we go in there, at least ONE of us will have actually read a strategy for it other than “Stay out of the fire”.

That Meteor Fist HURTS.

So folks, that’s my anti-pug story… running with a group of folks that are a dream to see in action.

What’s yours?

Following in the tradition of the recent posts by Honor’s Code and Pike, I’d just like to add… yay, we killed her too!

The guild went in last week for the first time, and unfortunately, while Cassie and I were signed up, we had the internet die in our house for the entire evening. So, while the guild went in and had a lot of fun… we weren’t there.

This week, the internet providers decided they liked money, so they chose not to dump our feed a second week in a row.

I did provide the heals with Shadewynn and Jardal, and a good time was had by all.

Our attempt answered a question I had going in… with Onyxia tuned for level 80 ten person teams, can a guild decked out in Naxxramas 10 loot and what you get from Heroics and Emblems of Conquest take her down? I mean, like, take her down decisively?

Hells yes, you can!

Granted, the gear you can get from Heroics includes Heroic Trial of the Champions, and the Emblems loot is pretty tasty these days too, but I think the folks in the guild are about half in Naxx 10 and half in the newer stuff. Certainly, we’re not all sporting Ulduar and Naxx 25 and ToC10/25 stuff.

The group composition was 2 tanks, Oliver the Warrior and Graimerin the Paladin, 3 Healers, Shadewynn the Priest and 2 Druids, Jardal and myself, and 5 DPS, Kaelynn the Rogue and Flamehase the Death Knight for melee, and 2 Hunters Wetfoot and Ruuaar,  and Essahn the Shaman for ranged.

A pretty good composition for the group. Plenty of classes to hopefully increase the chance of a class-specific Helm being useful to someone, as well!

Oliver and Graimerin were our tanks and co-raid leaders, and they did a fine job. They switched off who got the fun of tanking Ony first after wipes, and both did great.

What, wipes?

Oh, sure! I think all told we wiped for about two hours before she went down. It was a blast! It brought back so many memories from vanilla WoW…

The sticking point for us was learning a very solid way of dealing with the warders/dragonkin adds in phase 2.

Here, I’ll back up.

The fight, for those who haven’t done it yet, is a little changed from the original.

The setup, just for a fast recap, is a large oval chamber with a high, vaulted ceiling. You enter the chamber from the south. Onyxia is sleeping on the floor at the north end, the stretched end of the oval. At the lower west and lower east ‘corners’ of the oval are passages leading to the whelp egg caves… caves that are, indeed, filled with eggs.

The fight is a 3 stage fight. First thing to remember when running in, is that if you get into close proximity to a whelp egg in a cave… a few seconds later it hatches a whelp. So, you do not ever want to actually enter a whelp cave unless you are trying for one of the new achievements.

Onyxia herself, when fought, is a standard dragon fight with perks. Standard means that she is dangerous from the front and rear to anyone within melee range there, so for melee other than the tank, the flanks between front and hind legs are the safest place to be.

Perks means that to the person in front (the tank), she Cleaves… and she deals knockback. So, the tank wants to run through Onyxia and get his/her back up against the wall, to minimize the effects of knockback movement on the team. Also, you don’t want anyone up there getting Cleaved, it sucks. You don’t want anyone behind, because Onyxias’ tail swipe actually deals knockback… and if this happens when Onyxia is still in the middle of the room, you can end up getting knocked back into a whelp cave. Many whelps, deal with it!

Now, for those with pets, the pets will head for the butt of Onyxia. Onyxia WILL knock them back. From what I saw, if the tank has run through Onyxia and gotten his back up against the far north wall and centered, then the pet knockback won’t actually send them far enough to reach a cave and bring whelps.

However, if folks are running straight in behind the tank, then on the run in they CAN get hit by the tail, and easily be launched into a cave. So, my advice to you is to have the tank head straight for and through Ony, but have the rest of the party head right or left, and enter the chamber on a slant, aiming to be nice and far up one side or the other, centered on a dragon flank and close to the wall. This also has the benefit that, when everyone keeps getting feared in phase 3, if you’re that far up the wall, you’re far enough away from the caves you won’t quite reach them before fear wears off. So, no added whelps in phase 3. Just the fear scurry and the flames.

Okay, so, back to the fight. Phase 1 was a walk in the park. Straightforward fight, tank aggros Onyxia, runs through her, gets back against the center of north wall and builds threat. Taunting DOES work now, so there is absolutely zero reason for the old “wands and white damage only” routine from vanilla WoW.

A moment more of reminiscing, we did a lot of it Friday night. For the benefit of the newer crowd, original Onyxia was untauntable, AND in vanilla WoW tanks generated very, very, very little damage based threat. Also, Warriors were the premiere tank class. The most common method used to start phase one was for all DPS to sit and watch, doing nothing, while the Warrior tank would pop Sunder on Onyxia. Everyone would wait, and watch, until 5 Sunders were on Onyxia, and then everyone would be allowed to start “wands and white damage only”, white damage meaning auto-attacks. If you watch your combat log, special abilities like Sinister Strike are reported in the combat log in yellow colors, auto-attacks are reported in white. Or gray. Hence, ‘white’ damage.

So, phase 1 is now very easy for the group. The tank does tank stuff and can taunt if needed, the DPS opens up as soon as everyone is in position, and healers are cranking from the get go. Phase 1 lasts until Onyxia is at 65% health.

With our tanks, and with 3 healers, I found that I was able to balance my heals with the other two healers, with zero party damage to handle, for all of phase 1, and keep my mana at FULL with the 5 second rule. I could actually pop all HoTs on the tank, and then let the 5 second rule pass and have my mana return to full, then do it again, so when phase 2 started I was at full mana and with all cooldowns available. That’s pretty reassuring. Of course, Shadewynn the Priest might not have felt so fortunate. :)

At phase 2, of course, Onyxia at 65% walks to the south end of the chamber and then takes to the air. Moments later, a pack of whelps will fly out of the west cave, and a few seconds after that a pack of whelps comes from the east cave.

Graimerin the Paladin was picking up the whelps, first the west group and then the east group, and then we all burnt them down. No big deal, as long as we were careful to let Grai run back and forth and scoop them up. Grai had the hard job, and did a great job. Many whelps, he DID handle it!

Oliver and the two melee DPS headed towards the south entrance, and waited for the dragonkin adds to start spawning.

The ranged DPS concentrated on shooting Onyxia out of the sky. Phase 2 lasts until Onyxia reaches 40% health, so the more DPS knocking her down while airborn, the sooner she lands that big purple butt of hers.

Now, Onyxia picks targets and fireballs them, and the fireballs do splash damage in a small area around the target, so folks kept a little distance, but truthfully, they don’t do that much damage, even against cloth wearers. Do not fear being close when a fireball hits.

Periodically, Onyxia Deep Breaths (apparently at random), and when she does she faces in one particular direction, and then lays the breath down, a single blast that stretches from where she is in the air, straight across the length of the cave. If you are caught in it, you’ve got a good chance of just being dead. Okay, tanks are pretty tough, but the rest of us ain’t. Fortunately, she doesn’t target someone and track them. If you see the emote that Onyxia takes a Deep Breath, check her orientation, and then move out of the path she is facing. If you’re on her flank, you’re not going to get hit. Just don’t be in front of her or you’re toast.

If you’re a Tauren, then you’re a whole loaf of toast. :) Sorry, gratuitous Spaced Invaders humor there.

Really, once you get the hang of checking Onyxia positioning and getting the hell away from where ever she is directly facing to avoid Deep Breath, Onyxia can be ignored in phase 2, except by the folks shooting her.

The dragonkin, however, are a stone bitch.

They do an AoE that hurts REALLY bad, so you don’t want anyone near them like healers. They spawn every 40 to 45 seconds, so you’ve got to kill one as fast as possible before the next one spawns. And the big damage dealing thing they do is tied to a weapon, they charge up a weapon to do massive flame damage. So, if you keep them disarmed, they can’t do it. If you DON’T keep them disarmed, then BOOM!

What we found, and what kept resulting in wipes, was that Deep Breath would cause melee DPS to have to move, that would prevent disarms from going off and also reduce the active DPS on the dragonkin, a second dragonkin would pop before the first died, with two dragonkin the weapon disarm just wasn’t gonna happen for both, a melee DPS would die in the AoE, and shortly thereafter, so would the dragonkin tank, and then it was all over.

Really, all of our issues stemmed from learning the mechanics of proper dragonkin add management.

We asked Essahn, to switch his focus from just pew pew on Onyxia, to pew pew on Onyxia unless dragonkin was up, and to blowing up dragonkin along with the two melee DPS when needed to speed up the takedown. 

We figured that a longer Deep Breath cycle was preferable if we could more easily manage dragonkin annoyances.

As far as Deep Breath confusion was concerned, we went with saying that if Onyxia was facing south or anywhere in that vicinity, run to the west side (but not in the cave). If Onyxia was facing anywhere else, head south to be nearer the dragonkin spanking team. That seemed to work well.

We went with that plan, blew past phase 1 as usual (except for this one time, in band camp, with Graimerin and a flute named Righteous Fury, but that’s a story for the podcast), took on phase 2, and went right past phase 2 intact and straight into phase 3, and we were so excited we damn near blew it in our frantic “oh wait, what do we do now” excitement.

Graimerin picked up Onyxia great and headed for the back wall, everyone open headed for the northwest corner of the room to get back to the same arrangements as phase 1… but the dragonkin team was still working on the last dragonkin at the south entrance. We had some serious struggles making sure both Grai at the far north and Oliver at the far south got healed up while the dragonkin went down. All this, of course, while being feared and flame going off.

This attempt was successful, so we didn’t have the opportunity to steamline this process of phase 2 to phase 3, but I think to do it over again, I’d have two healers assigned to Graimerin to follow him with Onyxia to the north wall, while one healer stayed with the dragonkin team, and as soon as Onyxia landed have EVERY DPS concentrate on blowing up the last dragonkin so everyone could head north together.

A little secret. If you regain position in phase 3 just like in phase 1, then the fear doesn’t send you that far towards the cave. Also don’t ph3ar the ph-lame, the flame from the floor doesn’t hit that hard, so once you’re in phase 3 it’s once again tank and spank, just really exciting.

I loved the fight. It was lots of fun. Blizzard succeeded, at least for me, in resurrecting an old favorite raid, and making it just hard enough that it brought back all of the memories of  those classic 40 man raids, and left us all reminiscing.

As we’d run back from the graveyard that is RIGHT NEXT to Onyxias’ cave entrance… “Hey, remember when a 40 man raid would wipe, the nearest graveyard was outside the gates to Thermore Keep, and you’d have 40 ghosts running across the damn ocean to get back to Onyxia’s Lair? Oh yeah, and people would get lost trying to find the path over the mountains from the water, and others would have gone on /follow and gotten hung up and left behind? Oh yeah, and others would be afk for fifteen minutes? Shit, now we just appear 15′ from the cave when we die and run right back in. Man, that kicks ass.”

Ah yes, good times. Good times. Bringing back the memories was a lot of fun. Figuring out the challenge in taking on something so familiar, and yet new at the same time was truly enjoyable. What a great job they did in revamping it.

We had a great crew, and it was loads of fun. I will say that without having Oliver’s Warrior and Kaelynn’s Rogue disarming the dragonkin, it might have been far more irritating. But as it was… it was very cool. Totally workable, and left us with the feeling that nothing was stopping us from doing it but learning to coordinate effectively and playing well.

My favorite kind of raid. :)

Grats to Oliver on his sharkfin hat, grats to Flamehase on his new Death Knigget horny hat, grats to Grai on his tanky ring, and grats to Shadewynn for turning in Onyxias’ head to those ungrateful Warlocks in Stormwind. Yes, they gave you a ring… but the bastards didn’t proc that old 2 hour buff we loved so much!

Ah, grats again everyone. What wonderful fun.