After out encounter with King Ymiron in Utgarde Pinnacle, Ula opened a portal to Theramore which, among other things, is the center of nostalgia in Azeroth.
He’s talking about vanilla WoW
Why Theramore, aside from the ability to make the joke above? Well, Theramore is a town on the edge of the Dustwallow Marsh, the location of one of my “things to do” items for Wrath Classic.
I am talking about Onyxia.
Onyxia slumbers
As our group lands at level 80, we’re in the zone to go poke at some of the raids back in vanilla WoW. Onyxia tops the list because at some point her raid gets upgraded to level 80. I have heard rumor that will occur when phase 3 of Wrath Classic kicks in.
So I had put the idea in the minds of the group and when we had some time left after Utgarde Pinnacle, Ula was able to get us into Theramore straight away.
There was still a ride across the swamp to deal with, and remembering that we had to convert our group to a raid in order to enter Onyxia’s lair, but otherwise we were able to stumble into he domain… which is honestly, pretty small.
Fergorin remarked that there really wasn’t much too it. A passageway leads from the entrance down and around to her big open room, large enough to accommodate 40 friends looking to party, with only a couple of perfunctory trash mobs on the way in.
So there wasn’t much to do in preparation. We made sure we had buffs up and went in and got her.
Playing with Onyxia
While her level shows up as “skull” even for us at level 80, he ability to damage us was pretty low. Two expansions of DPS and armor upgrades, spells and buffs, and whatever else, meant that our group of five was more than up to the match and was never really in much danger.
I think we literally ran into and aggro’d ALL the whelps, but the repercussions were minimal as we AOE’d them down.
The middle phase of the fight, where Onyxia rises up and flies around her chamber was a bit annoying for me, the paladin tank, as my ranged attacks are pretty limited. I was able to deploy the engineering rocket launcher on my gloves and the Gnomish lightning generator trinket I wear. During that time Onyxia seemed to focus on Bjorid, our hunter, so between whelps I kept having to go taunt her off of him… not that he was in any immediate danger, but that is my job.
There was also her breath weapon being deployed during that part of the fight, which we tried to avoid. But we had fire protection aura up to help mitigate that.
Then she came back down to the ground and I was able to get in there and do my melee tank thing and she was soon down.
Achievement cheesed
I find it interesting that they already have the “Level 60” notation in the title. When we did this very same thing back in 2009, that wasn’t there yet.
And, of course, there is the loot. Lots of stuff drops off of raid bosses.
The first items on the list
The gear is, of course, a couple of expansions behind the times. I rolled greed on Doombringer, thinking it had a cool model, but it wasn’t all that special.
A lot of stuff went to Ula to disenchant. The items in contention were Onyxia’s head, which starts a quest, and the Onyxia Hide Backpack. (We did not get the Onyxia whelp pet as a drop.)
Bjorid got the head, and I ended up with the backpack.
18 slots
A backpack that size would have seemed like luxury back in vanilla. It is still the biggest bag I have currently, but I was at least able to shift bags around and take a 12 slot bag out of my bank storage and put a 16 slot in there in its place.
Then it was time for a picture.
Posing with Onyxia
Bjorid then skinned her and that was that. But we still had things to do.
Ula got us another portal, this time to Stormwind, in order to run down the quest related to Onyxia’s head. We had to go see the king.
Hey, remember us? We exposed Katrana Prestor in this room a couple years back? Well, we have her head now.
The king sent us to the front of Stormwind to speak with Major Mattingly, who yelled out to the whole town about out victory.
Major Mattingly shouts
He goes on a bit and the head gets hung up in the arch.
There she is… not sure where Bjorid was hiding that head
The adulation of Stormwind was a bit underwhelming.
There was much rejoicing
We did not, however, get the Rallying Cry of the Dragon Slayer buff on us, despite Major Mattingly’s words. I seem to recall them making some change to that buff back in WoW Classic, and I suspect that there might be a level restriction on it.
But the whole thing didn’t take that long. We could go back and farm an 18 slot bag for everybody before phase 3 lands and she becomes a level 80 raid. But that is another item off the nostalgia tour list. Now to get the Leeroy Jenkins achievement.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 