Death to Onyxia redux!

Having killed Onyxia solo before she levelled up, Kam stepped back into her lair for a rematch, this time with 9 friends. Despite being similar to the level 60 fight, the increased toughness made it all the more delicious. Due to some fire damage going on, the raid-wide Fire Resistance Totem is recommended if no paladin is present to put up their aura.

Phase 1 or You Tank It and We'll Spank It
Phase 1 is just totally straightforward, the only tricky aspect is when the tank pulls Onyxia to the back wall, you have to be careful to run at her side. Getting too far in front gives you the chance to eat a Cleave which will likely kill you, getting too far behind and that massive tail can swipe you straight into the whelp cave. No one likes getting swiped into the whelp cave *blush*.

Once she is in position with the tank's back to the back cave wall, standing at her side hitting her soft ribs is the order of the day, liberal use of Magma Totem is advised.

Phase 2 or I Tire Of You Irritating Gnats!
At 65% Onyxia will wander off toward the entrance of her cave and proceed to take off. A Flame Shock and a bit of Lava Burst & Lightning Bolt action will show your disapproval, then it's into phase 2 proper!

Initially whelps will appear and pester the MT and OTs, but in all honesty apart from annoy a couple of them, there is very little for Enhancement to do here. I dropped Magma Totem to sear them lightly, but generally Kam is hanging around waiting for the...

Lair Guards who will spawn from the entrance every so often and get tanked away from everyone else. These are almost prime melee territory, apart from their ever-so-annoying Blast Nova which require you to run out of the Nova (so much like Emalon it's unfunny) then back in again to continue the pwnage.

Occasionally Onyxia will deep breath, that most terrifying of classic raid emotes. All you need do here is look at which direction she is facing, if toward you, the fire stuff will be on you, so it is essential to move to one side or another, so you are no where near the direction her head points.

This phase is pretty straightforward if on Guard duty - while I destroyed the Lair Guardians the ranged were dealing with whelps, racking up silly AOE DPS numbers and bringing Onyxia carefully down to 40% when nothing else was up because...

Phase 3 or Ph34r Teh Lavazor
Onyxia lands at 40% and immediately fears everyone, so Tremor Totem needs to be down before she lands or asap afterward. True pros can keep Strength of Earth up for phases 1 & 2 then switch to TT - I tend to miss the initial land, leading to calls of "do we have Tremor Totem down?" over vent. Tremor Totem is of course party only so those expert raid leaders will have you in a group with the tank and a healer or two.

Lava will also start spewing up from the cracks in the floor, but it didn't really seem to do much damage (around 5k without resistance according to WoWWiki) and I had Fire Resistance Aura from some paladin.

Adopt the side position, DPS Onyxia and have a relax during the running-around-feared bits and soon enough she should be dead. A good and fairly epic fight, although due to the length of the phases, quite a lot of trouble for 3 Emblems of Triumph! It was much easier when Onyxia was level 60, but grats on the ding anyway old girl.

Updated totem ranges

Thanks to a comment from an anonymous source, I've updated my old post on Totem raid wide or party wide to consolidate Poison and Disease cleansing into just Cleansing totem, still party only, and indicate that Mana Spring Totem is now raid wide.

The rest is still valid, so make sure you're in the right party for Tremor Totem use on Onyxia!

I can haz Mr Chilly!

This morning I logged in to discover Mr Chilly in my mail box, the "reward" for merging my account with Battlenet. Or is he compensation for the recent EU downtime due to the "improved" battlenet login servers? Either way, he is very cute and is far nicer than Pengu imo. He is BoA so can be mailed to alts, although they probably have also received a Mr Chilly in the mail, so I'll end up with about 10 of the little buggers! Sigh. Witness my limited Mr Chilly photo gallery below.

Mr Chilly occasionally preens himself!


Mr Chilly looks around sometimes!


Mr Chilly look straight forward sometimes!


Alas poor Pengu, you are no longer the cutest penguin in the land, in fact you are down right ugly. Back in your box Mr Pengu!

Reincarnation to 30 minutes?

Reading MMO Champion this morning, it seems some nice individual has drawn up a list of self-res mechanics and how our one is a little... rubbish at the moment. This drew the following response:

Reincarnation cooldown
We might drop Reincarnation to 30 base, talented to 15. That's a slight nerf to the talent, but at the same time taking the cooldown that low might make an unattractive talent more attractive. source

[...] We were concerned that a really short cooldown on an ability that rezzes you and only rezzes you would lead to bizarre behavior. Shamans could just commit suicide every fight knowing that they could come back. Standing in the fire too long? No problem. Too far away from where you want to be? Just die. Out of mana? Just die. Yes you might lose dps or healing time, but we still think it would happen and we think it would look weird.

Soulstone by comparison can easily be used on the "wrong" person (if they don't die) and Rebirth can't be used at all if the druid dies. In some ways, Reincarnation is the only cooldown that you are guaranteed to see every fight as soon as it becomes that dependable. source


As the sort of nub who dies sometimes, I would greatly love Reincarnation to be 30 minutes instead of 60, so I can die more often on bosses but come back to finish them off! Just last week I missed a Legion Flame cos I was trying to heal someone else, died, but as soon as it disappeared, I was back, rocking Shamanistic Rage to get my mana up and up to full health. You look far more professional when you don't have to be scraped up after a boss kill.

Later on Ghostcrawler gets tough on QQ, tough on the causes of QQ!

Too much QQ in this thread.

I said I was going to spend less time trying to point out to players when their posts crossed the line from helpful to junk. Instead we're just going to lock threads that have become nothing but venting and bashing.

Is Love Is In the Air 2010 two weeks?

The latest build on the PTR has some interesting entries in the in-game calendar. Currently on live Love Is In The Air for 2010 is 11th - 16th February, an intense 6 days to grind loads of achievements.

On the 3.3 PTR Love Is In The Air for 2010 is 7th - 20th February, a much more reasonable 14 days. If this is intentional, then Blizzard have made a frequently requested change to lengthen the holiday, making it far easier to grind all the various achievements needed. But wait, there's more!

On live the Lunar Festival is 12th February - 3rd March, a frankly boring 20 days, but on the PTR it is 14th - 27th February, 14 days. Are the holidays being normalised to 14 days? These two were always a serious grindfest, no sooner was the Love Is In The Air grind over than we had to hit a hundred Elders in and out of instances. Now we get 1 week to do Love Is In The Air alone, 1 week overlapped with Lunar Festival to finish up and start on Elders, then 1 week for the Lunar Festival alone.

This is a really awesome change! Unfortunately, Children's Week is still a week :( Screen shot of the PTR calendar below!

Back to the Heroic Emblem grind?

See MMO Champion blue tracker and the official forums. Bornakk says:

General reminder: Things can still change.

The current plan is to make Emblems of Triumph the "base" of emblems so everything that drops Emblems of Conquest would be changed to Triumph and then the new raid content would drop the new highest emblem along with things like the heroic daily and such.

I am ok with this change as now I don't need to be bummed I didn't get into Trial of the Crusader, because I'll just be able to grind heroics come 3.3 for full Tier 9.

However I am annoyed that I'll have to once again grind heroics come 3.3 for enough Triumph for full Tier 9!

Patch 3.3 PTR

Patch 3.3 is up on the PTR and the notes have appeared. Several blogs have already covered the changes, among them Big Hit Box, WoW.com, Windfury and Healing Way. Although I've refrained from commenting on PTR changes in the past, if I don't there isn't much really to discuss on patch day, cos its all been said before!

Sadly the premade character copy is full on EU, so I have transferred Kam the not-geared-for-Icecrown across to participate in the fun. Now I have a huge new hard drive, I am able to download the many gigabytes of patches required to get a 3.3 PTR client running. Just a pity I can't get a premade across, the best tactic is to constantly refresh the character copy page until the premade copy gets enabled.

So what are the interesting changes so far?

Elemental

* Fire Nova now Causes the shaman's active Fire totem to emit a wave of flames, inflicting 893 to 997 Fire damage to enemies within 10 yards of the totem.
* Elemental Reach now affects Fire Nova
* Improved Fire Nova now Increases the damage done by your Fire Nova by 20% and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 sec.

The few times I've been AOEing as Elemental, I have been using Magma totem so with this change instead of waiting for CL to get off cooldown, I can be spamming the Fire Nova spell instead. The Elemental Reach change means I can still stand back from the action and get the Fire Novas off, although with a 20 second duration, I need to run back in a lot to relay Magma. Perhaps Blizzard could add a "Refresh Totems" spell to reset the counters on them all? Please pretty please?

My current Elemental build has two talent points spare which I couldn't really find anywhere DPS increasing to put. Not any more, they will go into 2/2 Improved Fire Nova for a chock-full build.

This may or may not affect Enhancement, see the Big Hit Box article for more details... discussions on EJ are still ongoing basically.

* Enchant Weapon - Black Magic now cause your harmful spells to sometimes increase haste rating by 250.

Possible replacement for Berserking!

Right, now to get that PTR client installed so the fun can begin!