You're going to learn a dirty little secret in this post. Just you wait!

SO - our guild, as a whole, has never done Onyxia. Many people in the guild have done her - I've done her twice - but it was always with another organization setting it up. As we keep growing, and making friends, we felt it was time to do her on our own.

I set up the event. We posted a time (which was the source of much confusion, because I screwed up remembering it repeatedly) and a day. People started to sign up.

You're supposed to use 40 people to take her down. We had 27 people or so sign up. Fortunately we had some other people show up, too, and we ended up with 36 people.

We went into the lair. If you haven't done Ony before, you've got a few trash mobs - "warders" - to take care of first. They do big AE damage around themselves, so one warrior tanks them and we take 'em down with ranged fire. We blasted our way through them and to Onyxia.

Onyxia basically has three phases. In phase 1 she's on the floor. The tanks point her away from the raid (to help with the tail and fire breath attack I think - I'm not certain on the latter if it's in this phase or not). The rest of us just pound on her, being conservative with mana because it's a long fight.

At around 65% she takes off into the air. At this point, everyone spreads out to avoid having her "Deep Breath" the raid (which does a ton of damage). She randomly fireballs people, and whelps start coming out of the egg areas to each side. One group of mages and pallies handles the whelps on each side, while the ranged people all DPS her down within the time limit (if it takes too long, she starts deep breath-ing like crazy). Rogues can also attack her from right below her.

At about 40% or so she lands back on the ground. The tanks have to grab her aggro fast and get her pointed away from the raid again. At this point the ground starts to spew fire, and she'll randomly fear large hunks of the raid. From here it's a race just to kill her.

In the first try, we had a poor transition from phase 2 to phase 3 and wiped out when she was around 22%. Not bad for a first try! So we rallied back at the entrance.

Here's the dirty little secret. We wiped again - but before we got to her! The warders hadn't respawned yet, so we thought we could run through and get to her before they did. Unfortunately, just as we were getting ready to go, the one closest to her respawned. As we fought that one, people had panicked and run the wrong way, and aggroed another. Wipe.

We'd also lost two rogues thanks to time considerations.

So we went back in and tried again. This time - she died. New helmets for one of our warriors and hunters, a new amulet for a rogue, and the head of Onyxia (which can be turned in for an item and a big buff to everyone in Stormwind) went to another hunter. SUCCESS!

We're going back this upcoming Monday. Hopefully this time we can do it in one shot!