Tactics Schmactics

Time spent on Onyxia attunement quest chain: about 4 hours (maybe a little more)

Time spent in meeting spot before traveling to Onyxia’s lair: 45 minutes

Time spent taking the obligatory group photos outside the lair: 5 minutes.

Time spent explaining the Onyxia fight to the group, and getting ready for attempt #1: 10 minutes.

The Onyxia fight: Less than ten minutes.

We really overprepared.

We had 19 folks keyed for Onyxia that assembled in Bloodhoof Village before the raid.  Part of the reason for meeting here was that the whole thing was pitched as an RP event, and this was where the mandate to kill Onyxia was announced to us at a guild meeting.  We congregated by the bonfire and some fire resist gear bought in the AH was distributed.  There were also fire resist potions, fish that would give magic resistance, and stuff like that.  Some people even went to the trouble of crafting new fire resist gear (”I can make two more pieces for myself if someone gives me six primals and two pieces of crystal infused leather…”).  It did seem to go a little overboard, given the number of us that there were, and the fact that all of us were level 70.  Still, none of us had seen this encounter before and we were all pretty excited.  We just couldn’t help ourselves.

After everyone was ready, we traveled to Onyxia’s Lair via Orgrimmar, which was sort of the long way, but our flock of wyverns swooping over Durotar was an awesome sight.  When we arrived at the lair, we took a bunch of group photos, everyone took their final afk break, and in we went!

There were two pulls before Onyxia, and they posed no danger to us.  The mobs were dead before the folks at the back of the pack even got to them.  I don’t think I even managed to get my cat to the mobs before they died, they were downed that quickly!  Even so, filing in with 18 other people was really amazing… I can imagine how exciting this was for 40 level 60’s.

It was really cool walking down the corridor and seeing Onyxia sleeping in her lair.  We all stood there looking down at her for about ten minutes while the fight was explained to those who hadn’t read about it.  We had four groups, the evens going to the right, the odds going to the left, etc, and I tried not to laugh as the plans were described (thinking again about that Onyxia wipe video.  Hee…)  Strategies for the three phases were explained, and it was decided we’d save our resist potions and fish for the second or third attempt, in case we just wiped right away.

We ran down the path and the main tank grabbed aggro on Onyxia.  I waited a bit until he had her attention before I started shooting.  The whole fight was a chaotic mess of running around, dodging fire, getting knocked back into whelps (which we killed, no problem, so no DKP minuses), and before we knew it, we were in phase two.  The DPS ramped up, and as she flew around, I stopped to take screenshots.  I know in the end this impacted my DPS, but I just couldn’t help it!  The guy who coordinated the whole run was laughing in vent, “this is going so quickly!”  And then we got to phase three and poured it on.  In less than ten minutes total, Onyxia was dead.  Explaining the fight took longer than killing her.  Even looting her took longer, I think.

We decided that the guy who had rallied us all for the run in the first place should loot the head.  He came up with the idea, got enough interest to get a group together, helped bunches of people get attuned by escorting them where they needed to go in Blackrock Spire, and made sure we had some kind of strategy (that we didn’t particularly get to employ, but still!).  After all the loot was distributed (trophies!), we were portaled to Orgrimmar where we did a slow march to Thrall and then to the guy in the front of Orgrimmar who makes the announcement that Onyxia has been slain and puts the head on a post.  Awesome.

I realize that in the scheme of things, it’s not that impressive of an accomplishment for 19 decently geared 70’s to take down Onyxia.  I’ve seen videos of fewer  than 10 level 70’s killing her.  But, for our guild to get 19 people together was impressive given that we’ve had trouble these past few weeks filling Kara runs.  It was also a hell of a lot of fun.

The Path to Onyxia

About a month ago, one of my guildmates rallied the guild to key up for an Onyxia run.  Very few of us have done that encounter, and he thought it might be a fun change of pace.  It will also allow many people to participate (anyone who can get keyed, really, since there’s no way we’d fill up a 40-man), and offers a chance for those who haven’t hit 70 yet to try a bit of raiding.  Because we’ll have plenty of 70’s, we should be able to do it without a full group of 40.

I did one Zul’Gurub run (though we didn’t run the whole thing), but beyond that, my only raiding experience has been Karazhan.  I was interested in participating, but after being off for a couple weeks and knowing that the attunement quest chain is a bit long, I had pretty much decided to skip the run.  Then, last night I logged on to do some dailies with my mage, and heard that there were a couple of people just starting the attunement and thought, “oh, what the heck.”  Running some new content (I’d not been to LBRS or UBRS) sounded better than dailies.  So, I switched over to my hunter and away we went…

The beginning of the Onyxia attunement chain involves a quick stop in Kargath and then a trip into LBRS.  A 70 can just walk by most of the mobs in LBRS, which are upper 50’s elites.  There are a few that patrol right in your path, but the rogue that I went in with just sapped anyone in our way and we mostly sneaked by everything.  There were a few times where we accidently got aggro and had to kill stuff, and a few other times where we were killed (oops), but the whole process of sneaking to all the bosses we needed really didn’t take that long.  After that, we teamed up with a warlock, mage, and some others also doing the attunement.  The warlock summoned us and the mage portaled us to Orgrimmar.  Aww yeah.  That’s the way to travel!

After chatting up Thrall, we were sent to UBRS to kill another boss.  Since we had a bigger group this time, we just steamrolled everything in our path.  Good fun!  This all went very quickly since the others knew exactly where we were going (good thing someone did, because I didn’t!).  After this, we reported to Thrall again, then it was on to Desolace, Western Plaguelands, and then back to UBRS again.  This time, we had a collection quest where we had to gather dragon eyeballs to make a disguise to talk with a dragon later.  (Hee hee… this type of quest cracks me up.  I love the one in the early Draenei areas where you have to dress up like a tree to eavesdop on someone.)  There was a 100% drop rate and they dropped in pairs, but given that we all needed 20 eyeballs and there were 7 or 8 of us, it took a while.  We kept each other entertained in vent as we did this.

Once we all had our eyeballs, we went to Dustwallow Marsh to don our costumes and speak with the dragon Emberstrife.  I was second to arrive at the cave, and as I ran in, the warrior in our party who had just completed the quest was running down the corridor toward me in his dragon costume.  I hadn’t see the costume yet, so I was a bit confused… it had his name over the head, but … uh… Just instinctively I took a few steps back to exit the cave, and then realized it was him.  There was a lot of chuckling in vent after that when I admitted what had happened.  There was even more laughter when the warrior told us we need to be sure to have all three Test of Skulls (quests from Emberstrike) before we left.  When he said it, it really sounded like “testicles,” and being the only female there, I said I’d unfortunately fail that quest.  There were testicle jokes all evening after that.

These new quests were to kill some big dragons, one in Swamp of Sorrows (Mr. Ess and I have been killed by that one before!), one in Tanaris by the Caverns of time, and one in Winterspring.  We decided to do the Winterspring one first, and the rogue had gone ahead there to meet us.  He happened to see a warlock there, and asked for help in summoning all of us.  The warlock happily did so and they were able to recruit another person to help summon, so it saved us all a long flight from Dustwallow to the north of Kalimdor.  Woo!  After killing Scryer, we portaled to Stonard where we quickly found and killed Somnus.  Finally, we portaled to Shattrath and talked with the woman in the World’s End Tavern who beamed us to the Caverns of time.  There are several big dragons guarding the Caverns, but the one that we needed, Chronalis, wasn’t there.  This was a little surprising. (Was someone else on our server doing the Onyxia attunement?  No way!).  We danced around for a while, killed one of the other dragons, and then finally Chronalis respawned.  We disposed of him quickly and then made our way back to Emberstrife to turn in our testicles.

Emberstrife gave us another dragonslaying quest, this time for Axtroz in Grim Batol in the Wetlands.  Our warrior had some water walking potions, so we decided the fastest way to get to the Wetlands from Dustwallow Marsh would be to walk across the water to Theramore and then grab the boat to Menethil Harbor.  When we got to the docks in Theramore, we kept our distance from the guards and mounted up so we could just ride onto the boat as soon as it arrived.  As we all mounted, we noted a low level Alliance guy sitting afk on the dock.  We rode our mounts up to him and did a fair amount of posturing, laughing about what a sight it would be to return from your bio break and be surrounded by level 70s of the opposite faction.  Of course none of us were flagged, so it’s not like we could (or would) do anything to him anyway, but in our best RP fashion, we grinned wickedly and pressed our space bars so that our mounts did their growling and rearing up.  The guy returned, stood, shouted something in all caps, and then ran off the side of the dock into the water and swam away.  It was hilarious.

After that, we caught the boat to Menethil, went to Grim Batol, killed the dragon, and then had to call it a night.  Our homework is to go back to Emberstrife in our costume one more time, he’ll send us to Desolace again, and then it’s back to UBRS where we’ll need to kill the final boss.  There are groups of folks doing this next UBRS part tonight, I think, and probably this weekend, as well.  And that should be it!  Not so bad, not so bad…

So, the attunement doesn’t take that long if you’re a group of level 70s, particularly if you have warlocks and mages to speed up your travel.  I’m really glad I went along on the attunement quests last night, and I have a feeling that the raid this Sunday is going to be a blast if last night’s questing was any indication.  Now I’d better read up on the fight tactics so I don’t get a 50 DKP minus (not safe for work).

Nov. 30th for Wrath?

Look what Lassirra at The Hunter’s Mark found: Oops! WTG Amazon…

I just peeked at it, too, and it does say “Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on Nov 30, 2008.” So, do we finally have our deadline for doing all the things we wanted to do before Wrath? (And is that the day we’ll all go stand in line at Best Buy? )

Edit:  I told my husband, and he pointed out that Amazon has had a pre-release date on the next George R. R. Martin book for the past two years that gets regularly shifted forward.  So, this may mean nothing.  Still, it’s exciting to think about. 

Stampede!

Last Saturday night, I did the Running of Da Bulls, hosted by BRK and Ratshag on the Cenarion Circle server. It was initially proposed after the great success of the Gnaked Gnome Race, and then after their guildmate Sharvan passed away, it was determined that the bulls would run in her honor. And so we did… /moo!

It was quite an impressive turnout! I logged on about 45 minutes before start time and found the Tauren starting area loaded with racers, many of them sporting purple shirts. Within five minutes or so, I was added to a raid group.

I ran around, looked at all the names folks had chosen, and watched people duel. Those who weren’t dueling were mooing, dancing, and jumping up and down. All in all, it was very similar to the scene before the Gnaked Gnome race (but with more mooing).

I caught up with The Game Dame when she logged in and we managed to find one another in the herd.

We met up in vent, along with Dammerung, and mused at all the craziness. It was really fun to chat with them throughout the race, too. Everything was flying by in the chat window so quickly, I don’t think we would have been able to communicate at all that way!

Here we are getting ready to start the race, plus a classy exchange between some racers that I was lucky enough to capture. Someone also had a theory about how to reduce lag, but I don’t think it would have helped…

You can see here that someone was very concerned about the official starting line. Hehe… you definitely don’t want to be at the front of the pack for this race, dude.

And, they’re off!

It was very laggy, much more so than the gnome race. I usually have 60 fps, and was down to 20 or so. What was interesting was that my graphics were still smooth (I wasn’t getting the slide show effect), but all the people around me were gliding. There were times it seemed like I’d pulled away from the pack and was running (dangerously!) by myself, and then the other racers around me would all slide back into view at the same time.

We made it all the way through the Barrens to Durotar, where we crossed diagonally through the raptor and scorpion infested area, heading directly toward Orgrimmar. It was cool to see Orgrimmar appear on the horizon…

…but I only had a second to enjoy it because the zeppelin was already there! Aaahhhhh! Ruuuun!!

I ran up the ramp as fast as I could, but just missed it. Durnit.

So close!! It was pretty funny to watch the mass of Taurens grow as the racers behind us caught up. I also just noticed that in this first shot below, you can see the ultimate winner of the race laughing at those that missed the first boat. Hehehe…

A few minutes of mooing, jumping, and dueling later, the next zeppelin finally arrived, and off we went!

We hopped off the boat and into the darkness of Tirisfal Glades to try to catch up with the first pack. (And thanks, Surgee, I’ll be singing that song all day long now. )

Aaaand that’s when I made my fatal error. Most of the pack stayed on the road, but for some stupid reason, I decided to follow the small group of racers that veered left to take the shortcut through the water. I managed one last screenshot as I swam toward my death…

I realized I’d made a huge mistake, but held the small hope that the hungry pirahnas (or frenzies, or whatever they were) would be preoccupied with the racers ahead of me, and that I’d be allowed to pass by, but there just weren’t enough racers to feed them before I got there. So, I got eaten by a fish. He finished me off in about three bites. The rest of my race looked like this!

(And a note about that last shot — I snagged it because I wanted to catch the funny name of the runner that had just died there, but I also captured a bit of the general chat. There were a few people being annoying and spamming the general chat, and when someone asked them to stop, the first person there issued his opinion on the matter, while the second person just kept spamming those phrases. Continuously.)

I ran all the way to the finish line, but it looked pretty quiet since I was a ghost. Other folks have gotten some great shots of the area by the finish line loaded with dancing Taurens in purple shirts, but this is all that I saw.

I didn’t stay on for the raid to Ironforge because we had some guests over, but it sounded like it was a blast. There are a lot of great screenies out there, and you can catch some of the later shenanigans in this wonderful video put together by Wincefish: Running of Da Bulls. (It’s not Rick Astley, I promise.)

Anyway, even though I didn’t officially make it to the finish line in this one, it was great fun, and a nice tribute to Sharvan. I didn’t know her, but from what I’ve heard, she would have thought the whole thing was very funny. /moo!

Tremendous thanks to BRK and Ratshag for coordinating and hosting this event! I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with next…

Running of the Bulls!

Mark your calendars now for the upcoming BRK/Ratshag event: The Running of the Bulls. It will be May 3 (not exactly Cinco de Mayo) at 7pm EST on the Cenarion Circle server. Go now and reserve your clever cow name. As with the Gnaked Gnome Race, I’ll post my toon name here ahead of time in case anyone wants to meet up, chat beforehand, and try to run together.

/moo !

(P.S. I still think this is a good idea, too)

The Streak!

The Gnaked Gnome Race (which I accidently typed “Ganked Gnome Race” at first — would be if we’d been flagged, I bet!) on Saturday was a blast. I logged in just after 6pm, and the gnome starting area was already teeming with naked, screaming, hopping gnomes. It was like watching the Trade Chat come alive. I can only imagine the number of whispers that BRK got when he and Hobbes showed up.

We’d invited some friends over for the evening, so I ran back and forth between my computer and the living room while I waited for the race to start. There was so much activity in the chat window with all the yelling and emoting (plus the guild chat — I finally joined one of the guilds started for the race so I’d stop getting invites) that it was impossible to keep up with all of it. If anyone whispered me and I missed it, that would be why… It was a zoo!

I watched the gnaked guild I’d joined grow to 150+ people, and I noted that there were consistently fewer in the /gnakedgnomerace channel. At first I thought that channel might separate the bloggers and blog readers from the rest (because I’m sure there were a fair number of random folks who joined in when they realized what was going on), but the channel was announced in the guilds and yelled a few times as well, so it wasn’t quite what I’d thought it would be. Eventually I left the guild because in all the crap going by, I was having trouble keeping up with BRK’s announcements for getting raid invites, etc. Once the race started, there was much less chatter, as you can imagine. I’d actually hoped to chat with folks more (particularly Amava and The Game Dame, who I caught up with just before the race started), but between the navigating and trying to stay with the group, there wasn’t time!

My husband and our friends decided to watch the race as I ran, and I’m glad they did, because it turned out to be a very funny trip. All the little pink lemmings scurried along the roads and through the tunnels, and at a few points, broke off into groups running through the trees, peppering the snow with their tiny footprints. My strategy was to stay toward the middle of the pack — anyone on the edges was bound to get picked off. I watched the demise of several of my fellow racers up ahead as they were rushed by spiders and crocs. It was hilarious watching the mobs run toward the unsuspecting racer, the racer realizing they were hit and dashing to the center of the pack, and then collapsing to the ground. I think I did see someone survive an attack somehow, but almost all those spider bites were fatal. (My favorite corpse was that of “Crocfood” who became exactly that when he ran too close to the water in the Wetlands.) The other cool thing was watching everyone running near me level at the same time… *ding ding ding ding* Very amusing. Check out the great video of the race here at Short But Deadly.

I somehow managed to follow all the right packs, dodge danger, and finish the race. We all cheered as we ran across the bridge in Menethil Harbor, and many of us proceeded to the boat that had just docked there. Lots of folks were shouting “Let’s go the UC! Orgrimmar is next!” and stuff like that. Heh… Then there were frantic calls for all of us to get off the boat (I’m not sure why), but we all did (again, not sure why). We all stood on the bridge for a while, and then gradually we migrated back into town into a clump around the tents.

A mage from BRK’s guild came to open up ports to Shattrath for the various raid groups. This was a fun idea, but inspired more obnoxious behavior. People were yelling and demanding to be added to the current group being ported. I was sure that we’d all get a turn, so I waited patiently, but others just could not stand the wait, it seems. (I also wondered if some of the folks yelling were random people in Menethil hoping for a free portal.) Someone opened a portal atop a tent that was nearly impossible for gnomes to get to, and I sort of wondered if they did that on purpose to keep people busy and quiet for a few minutes. I spent a little time trying to get up there, too, I confess!

After my raid group finally got their portal to Shattrath, I had to log out to join my friends in the living room for our evening’s festivities. I’m glad I did the run though — it was a total blast, and should BRK (or anyone) decide to organize and host an evening of similar shenanigans, I am in!

Some screenshots after the break!

Gnaked Gnome Time!

For anyone running in BRK’s Gnaked Gnome Race tonight, I’m planning to log in between 6 and 6:30 with my little pink-haired streaker named Dessy. Send me a whisper if you’d like to run together! (I’ve also created a Night Elf called Dessina and planted her in Menethil Harbor to watch the end of the race, in the likely event that my gnome doesn’t make it to the end. )

Hope to see meet some of you there!

Clear Your Schedules

…for a Gnaked Gnome Race instigated by BRK!  The date is still to be determined, but it will occur in early February.  He has a poll set up so you can go vote for the date that would work best for you.

I’m going to roll a gnome on Drenden for the occasion.  I’ll post the name closer to the date of the race, and if anyone here would like to meet up and run together, post a comment!  I think it sounds like fun.