Beros vs the dragon

Score round 1 for the dragon. I spent several hours wrestling with Onyxia last night. It's definitely not a trivial battle. I experimented with different mixes of gear in both prot and ret spec. Onyxia has 1 million hp, so the trick is getting to an equilibrium where I'm self-healing via Seal & Judgment of Light and then slowly grinding her down.

I hit the equilibrium point in prot gear and was able to get her into Phase 2 at 67%. Phase 2 was unexpectedly chaotic -- I forgot she spawns her whelps in clusters. I was able to Consecrate and dps the whelps down, but she's fireballing me while I'm doing it, so the dmg is fairly spiky. I ended up in a pattern of kill whelps, self-heal, hit her a couple of times and more whelps would spawn. I figured she'd run out of whelps eventually, but it was going to take a while, when suddenly a Warder comes patrolling in and it's over.

I'd heard about the problem of the warder respawns before -- it's a source of much controversy in the discussions about who truly solo'd Onyxia first. Some "soloers" have had a friend out in the hallway killing the Wardens as they respawn. Since they don't dps or heal in the Ony battle, you could claim it was a solo kill. However, it seems cleaner to have nobody else in the instance at all.

To solo the instance, you need to do 1,000,000 dmg before you get the patrol. On my Phase 2 attempt, it took me about 35m to get to Phase 2, which is roughly 190dps. That is consistent with my impression of my dps rate in full tanking gear using Seal and Judgment of Light. If I could double that (or so), it'd be close. I'm thinking 500 dps is a good target to shoot for.

After that attempt, I respecced Ret to see if I could increase my dps that way, but I was unable to get back to an equilibrium point of self-healing at her dmg rate. I stared at the Recap numbers for awhile without inspiration and decided to sleep on it.

I woke up with a few new ideas. In prot spec, I think I might be able to occasionally get away from the Light/Wisdom Seals because I'm pretty comfortably mitigating most of the dmg. If I can mix in Seal of Vengeance and stack up dots on her, that should boost my dps a bit, but I'm not sure if it's enough.

In ret spec, I was taking about equal thirds dmg from her melee, her cleave and her fire breath. The big difference is the melee, which I can virtually eliminate in prot spec. I misread Recap's report of 95% misses though, as indicating that somehow she was presenting as a lvl 63 boss (meaning I didn't need so much def gear). This morning I realized that I was blocking away that dmg -- she only hits for around 500 -- and a full block is being counted as a 'miss'. I can't get the +30% block in Ret spec, so I'm taking a lot more hits. What I need is gear that approaches "passive uncrushability." No, there's no crushing blows any more, but the passively uncrushable goal is to push normal hits off the table w/o needing Holy Shield (e.g., you stack enough avoidance and block rating that you block everything anyway). I will lose some block value in Ret spec as well, so I'll probably just take more dmg overall, but maybe I can crank my mitigation up enough to get to equilibrium.

I looked at getting passively uncrushable previously and it will require re-gemming and re-enchanting gear. However, with the patch, I now have a fair amount of redundant tanking gear since I had both the warrior and pally badge gear. All of my gear is set up for stam, which isn't ideal for this project. I don't actually need much stam, just enough to survive the rare spikes.

So, I think the thing to do is to set up a full-on mitigation tanking set. Then see if I can push up the dps rate while still maintaining the dmg/heal equilibrium. I'm still unsure about a few relatively minor issues, but since the balance point is so close, they might end up being important.

1) Ret or Prot? Mitigation will be easier in prot, but it'll be harder to get to 500 dps. Higher dps is easier in Ret gear *but* only if I have the mana to use my Ret abilities. Now, Judgment of the Wise returns a lot of mana, so I have a lot more mana in Ret spec and Divine Storm actually contributes some healing, but my dps won't be so high if I'm stuck fighting with Seal of Light to maintain the healing rate.

2) Blessings: Sanc or Wisdom? Sanctuary seems helpful in prot spec since blocks produce some mana regen. For example, I noticed when the whelps were up, my mana bar immediately went full (due to blocking the low-level mobs). OTOH, mana is a big issue no matter what and Wisdom is probably better overall mana regen. Is the -3% dmg worth it?

3) FR Aura. I'm pretty sure FR aura is the right way to go. I played around with more and less FR gear to try to minimize the fire damage, but I did wonder several times whether just to focus entirely on the physical dmg (although you can't mitigate the Cleave entirely). I resisted a fair amount of fire damag with just the aura up, but I wonder if I'd resist any w/o it.

4) Find a faster weapon? I was using the relatively slow 100 dps Unbreakable Will for tanking last night. The tooltips on the Seals all say "chance on hit," which, if accurate, means I could increase the healing rate with something that swings faster. Or I could use a int/spl-power/m5 weapon, but that'd kill my white damage -- which is all I have if I'm tanking with SoL. I wonder if SoV dmg goes up with spl power. If so and I can keep it up, it might be possible to tank with a healing weapon.

5) Finding the "safe spot." According to the paladin who tanked Ony solo pre-3.0, there's a spot you can stand in her room that won't aggro the patrol. I'm a little skeptical given that you can't control Ony's position in Phase 2, plus the whelps are all over the place. But I could watch the video (I haven't watched any yet).

6) Pre-empting the whelps. I wonder if I could survive jumping in and popping all the whelps one side and getting rid of them. Maybe in prot spec with a consecrate/holy shield combo.

Some other random technical notes: you don't actually have to be at perfect dmg/heal equilibrium if it's close because you can bubble every 4m (prot, 5m ret) and bandage & holy light. I went through a lot of bandages last night, heh. LoH is also every 20m, but obviously if you cast it twice, the patrol will be up. The fight is so long, you can't really count on these, though they help with the spikes. You're a bit RNG dependent for spikes because you can avoid the Cleave occasionally and resist more of the fire breath. But you can also get a run of not avoiding/resisting anything for a bit.

At the end of last night, I was about ready to give up, but now I want to go back and experiment some more. I think the first thing I need to do is bring a healer with me so that we can run some tests (e.g., they can heal me if I'm south of the equilibrium point), maybe I can get Recap-master Hawksy to come try things out for an hour or two. I'm figuring we'd try a couple of pulls and reset by having the healer run out while I just die. If nothing else, I'm pretty confident we could duo Onyxia, which would be at least a little interesting.

I'd also really like help clearing the stupid warders in the first place. They actually hit harder than Onyxia does and although I could get to equilibrium (in prot, not ret), it takes forever to grind down their 83k hp -- and there are 4 of them. And maybe if I can figure out the equilibrium point and plan for Phase 2, I can do the lame version of the solo and have somebody out in the hallway killing the respawns for me. That'd at least be something.

But not tonight no matter what. Tonight is back to MH to kill Archimonde. Then maybe to SSC to kill Vashj in the instance Bloc arranged to have cleared for us last night while I was messing around in Dustwallow. :) And then Friday, I think Kyoka was requesting a KZ run to the new boss before he goes away (possibly this weekend). I might need some more badges too to get more epic gems for tanking gear resocketing anyway. But maybe there's time for some quick tests Friday, or maybe Sunday will work.

BTW, somebody asked in /guild last night, "what if we don't get Archi?" We're going there for up to 3 full hours tonight. We know the strat. The only way we don't win is if noobs repeatedly run the fire through the raid. Like I said last night, if that happens I'm /gkicking people. Seriously. I think everbody wants to go back to BT on Saturday.