Black Raven Dragoons

[Grimblast]

Impressions
Well, there doesn't appear to be too many things different about the new and improved Onyxia fight. Adds are the same except a new elite guy who drops some heavy hits when he enchants his weapon. Best way to nerf him is disarm him or over heal like crazy. The fight is still mostly based on surviving phase 2 where she takes flight and occasionally deep breaths in a straight line from her. This time around you can actually gauge where the flame is going rather than the old 2d effect they had which made it look like it was going all over the place.

Gearing is a little tight for the fight since we do lack fire resist gear unlike back in the day but it appears the majority of the raid can be Nax geared and do fine if they can avoid the damaging abilities of Onyxia. It looks like if you want to take her down, you need a tank with 40k hit points(after buffs) and an offtank to deal with most of the adds as they come into the fight. Onyxia will hit plate for 15k with her cleaves and 15k to 18k with her breath weapon while in melee range with the tank.

The Fight
Onyxia's room is oval like in shape. She resides in the center of the cave and when you pull her, you will want the tank to move her slowly to the north centeral part of her cave. Moving her slowly allows the party to stay to her mid section so they don't get tail swiped by her. She does have a knock back ability which will knock the tank back during the fight but as long as the tank gets reasserted with her, you should be ok. This is a very easy fight to tank since you simply have to keep Onyxia still while the dps stays mid section to her head and tail and dps's her. When her health gets to 65%, she will take flight(phase 2) and adds will spawn into the fight. The adds come in timed waves. The first wave will consist of up to 40 or so whelps which will fly in from the whelp caves situated in the south east and south west portions of Onyxia's Lair. They do small amounts of damage and have around 65k health each. Both tanks should split up and pick up the whelps and then pull them into a single spot for dps to burn them down. As phase 2 continues, there will be a single elite spawn that will come through the cave entrance who has a sizeable health pool who can hit your tank for 15k hits just like Onyxia. He can be disarmed to nerf his damage for a short while while the raid dps's him down. During this time, whelps will be spawning every 60 to 90 seconds while the larger single elite will be spawning and walking through the cave entrance.

Occasionally during phase 2, Onyxia will cast deep breath while she is in the air. It fires in a cone like shape in the direction she is facing. The hard part about this for some is angling your camera to see where she is facing. If you are too late, you will most likely take a lot of damage and die. Her breath weapon deals 5k and ticks faster the closer you are to the center of the attack in the cone. A tip that was given to me was to imagine her room like a compass. It has 12 points where she will stop and fire straight out with her deep breath. For example, if she is at the northern most point, she will fire straight south, so safe areas to stand to avoid her attack is on the west and east sides of the room. She will always fire to the spot opposite of where she flew.

During phase 2, ranged dps needs to be hitting and dot'ing up Onyxia. The key to phase 2 is getting Onyxia to land as soon as possible or else the adds will eventually overwhelm the raid. Onyxia will land once she is down to 40% health. When Onyxia is down to roughly 43% health, it's advised to try and get the raid to position back to the northern portion of the cave. The reason being, when Onyxia lands, she will fear bomb right away causing the raid to run around for 3 seconds. This fear can be broken by class abilities, spells, and items. If the raid isn't at the northern section of her cave, they risk the chance of touching the whelp caves and causing more adds to be created. During this last phase where she is landed, its back to tanking her back at the north center portion of the cave and the dps and raid staying mid section to her head and tail. She will be randomly fearing during this phase.

Notes
It is confirmed that melee can no longer hit her while she is airborne so melee has to help deal with the adds while range dps focuses on getting onyxia to land.
On 10 man I didn't see any adds after phase 2 and we were down a healer and took her down. When she landed, we did have all of the dps finish off the remaining adds and then start killing her again. We had another elite spawn in play with whelps as she landed so our offtank taunted the big guy off me and kept the whelps busy for the raid while I tanked Onyxia to keep her from wandering around. We cleared this with a party makeup of 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 melee, and 4 ranged, I think. I've slept since then and can't remember. May have been 3 melee and 3 ranged.

Well, hopefully some of this info will help out when engaging this old world boss. It is still a very epic feeling fight due to the size of her and her cave. The loot isn't too bad either. Some of it is new in appearence and redo's on old world gear she used to drop. We found out there is no longer a buff from turning in her head and it gets turned in over at the Slaughtered Lamb in Stormwind so if you get the head, don't worry about when you should turn it in to get a buff. No more rallying cry of the dragon slayer. If anyone would like to add to this, please feel free to post replies and as I find time I'll add to it.

[alacor]

Look forward to it.

[Tirian]

What if we have one pally with fire resist aura and a warlock with an imp out? That'll be 75 resistance right there. I wouldn't mind trying out a destruction or affliction (i.e. imp-using) raid spec for this fight.

[Zancarius]

The only pally we had along did that for the first couple of runs. Due to the number of whelps, he decided it'd be better to stick with ret aura.

On the other hand, ret. pallies are incredible for that fight. He doubled up on the DPS output of the next highest in line (no, not me--warriors are the worst DPS to bring) just from consecrate. Try ~12k DPS during the whelp phase for starters!

[Tirian]

But these days we have a pile of pallies! And auras don't stack.