Memoires (Part 6 - Onyxia)

...and beyond.

"Lady" Onyxia

The Kindred and Co group enjoyed much success after the Azuregos kill. As word of our deed became more well known around the server, and as more and more people began to reach level 60, there was a clamour building to get spots in the raid group as at that time, no other guild was able to pull together a raid group with any noticeable success. However, slots were not just up for grabs and as the group became tighter raid spaces began to become reserved for regular goers - we were beginning to gel as a team and that was a really good feeling. The Kindred guild leadership were quite good about this, and it became a regular group of Kindred guild members alongside a regular group comprised of members from mainly three or four other guilds.

We took down Lord Kazzak shortly after Azuregos, and then turned our attention to Onyxia. This encounter was on a whole new level of difficulty. The fight was split into 3 phases, with varying tactics for each one that had to be memorised and honed to a high degree of competency. We set about this with gusto - the end game was still new to us and this novelty factor combined with the collective hunger to beat the encounter provided us with quite a high level of focus. If I remember correctly, it took us about two weeks to finally master the encounter, with something like three evenings per week dedicated to attempts. I'm not going to go over in detail the nature of the fight in this post, however, interested readers can visit here. Instead, I'll post some screenshots which I still have!

There she is!

The main tank gets her attention whilst the rest of the raid runs in and gets into position (half the raid goes to her left and the other half goes to her right).

Dragon hits main tank, damage dealers hit dragon.

Phase 2 is a war betwen her breaths of fire and our ranged damage dealers (she won many times).

But that doesn't mean the melee fighters are left standing - they had to kill all of Onyxia's little whelplings.

Phase 3 is her landing. Cue lots of lava eruptions which are pretty painful. If you're curious about the interface, it shows the health and mana status of each member in the raid in the boxes on the left hand side. As you can see, the majority of the raid is dead.

She kicked our ass many a time.

We got her back just as many times in the end.

The fight where we first took her down lasted over 15 minutes. 15 minutes of intense concentration, with all the raid members playing their roles like following the steps in an intricate dance. The elation and rush when she finally went down was incredible, I think it was partly due to the fact that there is something intrinsically satisfying about co-operating as team - it was the same sort of feeling I had from playing the violin in my school's string quartet, except of course, slaying dragons was much cooler, and 40 people is more like an orchestra than a string quartet, making it feel very epic indeed.

However, the other part of the rush came from my innately competitive nature - we were the first to do it on the server. We had made our mark on the virtual world, and our names would be forever embedded in the history of this server. I think everyone wants to make an impact and leave a legacy, and when Onyxia was slain, that's what it felt like - we were shaping history in this virtual world.

When we slew Onyxia, we took her head back to Stormwind City, and it was hung up in the city as a grisly trophy.

Onyxia's Head

As her head was hoisted, a rallying cry went out through the whole city announcing her death and crowning the raid as dragonslayers. Suddenly, the chat channels exploded with people offering their congratulations, and as the raid gathered underneath the head for some screenshots (which I sadly no longer have), many other players came to see the head and to check out the raid which had killed her. There were of course some snarky comments, which I put down to envy, but on the whole the response was overwhelmingly positive and honestly at that point, things felt awesome.