Onyxia 101: "Yes, you're tanking."

Tuesday night, immediately after I logged in, Om whispered me to ask if I was willing to heal their Onyxia run. "It's only 10 man, it will be easy," he says.

Oooh...easy...yeah I'm sure. I'd been pulled into maybe 3 or so other groups and it was just intense failure after intense failures. Tanks never could seem to pick up the whelps fast enough, the lair guardians were being tanked by healers...and that godawful deep breath from Onyxia...Every other attempt I'd been involved with turned quickly from a happy raid group into a writhing nightmare...Needless to say, I was a little hesitant.

We had a little trouble finding a tank, so I offered to switch and explained that my guildie could also heal if he was willing to bring him. Thankfully he said yes and off we went!

We logged into their vent server after being promised that their strategy was a no fail strategy (unless, of course, odd things happened during the encounter...). We listened to their strategy, buffed up, and got ready to go.

Well, the first, second, and third attempts ended shortly after phase 2 began. If you're not familiar with the Onyxia fight...here's how it works.

~Phase 1~
~ Tank picks up Onyxia and runs her to the wall straight behind where she is resting at the beginning of the encounter. Just avoid the tail and her frontal attacks and life is good.

~Phase 2~
~ Onyxia takes off into the air once you bring her down to a certain % of health. This phase probably requires the most coordination for the group. She lifts off into the air and you have waves of whelps spawning, Lair Guardians spawning, AND her deep breath to avoid. It's not hard, but raid members really need to be paying attention and aware of their surroundings. Usually the groups focus on killing off the adds and ranged will work on bringing Ony down to 40%.

~Phase 3~
~ At 40% health, Onyxia will land again. A tank has to pick her up and take her back to where she was initially being tanked. This is the Fear Phase. Every few seconds she'll do Bellowing Roar (or some such thing) which is a fear. It's probably a really good idea to have a shaman in the group to drop a tremor totem for this phase, but I'd imagine Fear Ward might help also.

Now that you know how the fight works, you can see a little more easily why the pug groups struggled so hard on Phase 2. At any rate, this group wasn't getting much farther. After our 3rd wipe, we lost and replaced one member. We pulled in one of the paladins from my guild (Again, thank you for inviting him Om!) and gave it another go.

There was something very different about this attempt. When the whelps spawned, the dps wasn't pulling aggro on them and getting splattered at the beginning of phase 2.

Actually, the only person that died during this fourth attempt was one of the hunters because I was sloppy in picking up Onyxia and didn't turn her fast enough to save him from her cleave. I'm really sorry about that, sir.
Well, we got her down.

I think the absolute best part about it was learning a new strategy so that I can lead my own guild against her. Now I can't wait until next week!