Finally Facing The Brood Mother

This week opened up with revisiting the Brood Mother, Onyxia herself.

Onyxia was something of a demarcation point for my WoW career. As I may have mentioned before I hit Level 60 about 6 months before Burning Crusade was to come out. I was in a Leveling Guild.

I had done the whole quest chain through BRD. The parade through Stormwind to confront Lady Prestor, aka Onyxia, was one of the signature moments in the game for my Paladin. I wanted to face her, in her lair, and now I would.

It was much harder to catch up during that time in the game than it would be now. Guilds were also much more stringent on their applicants. A gear check was mandatory and often they would require a run through a 5 man to trial you. The cutting edge guilds were running Naxx40. They wanted applicants in AQ40 and BWL gear. Of course the guilds running AQ40 and BWL, wanted you to have all your Molten Core gear. Nobody wanted to run 'old' instances just to get you geared up to their level, but there was literally no other way to attain that gear.

Entry level guilds ran AQ20, ZG Molten Core, and Onyxia. To get into those runs required you to have almost all blue gear which dropped in high end 5 mans, every bit as difficult, if not much more so than today's 'heroics'. I remember running Strat and Scholo for my T0 gear. Then doing a very long quest chain to get that gear upgraded to T0.5.

The big gear requirement for these entry level guilds was fire resist gear. Nearly all of Molten Core was fire damage and depending on your role (Healers, Tanks, DPS) there was a specific amount of Fire Resist you needed to have to survive the Bosses there, especially Onyxia. Fire Resist gear was not cheap and took both effort to farm up mats or gold to buy them. There was no such thing as a daily quest in those days.

With the Expansion so close, I knew that any guild at the ZG/MC/AQ20 point wasn't going to get much farther than maybe mid BWL before Burning Crusade hit. I decided it just wasn't worth it to get all the Fire Resist gear crafted. I did some 20 man stuff like Zul'Gurub and AQ20. I had been overly optimistic. Once people saw the Outland greens from Hellfire Peninsula, raiding pretty much came to a halt.

So I never defeated Onyxia 40 man at Level 60. I would go back later at Level 80 and 3 man her, but it wasn't quite the same. I was pretty excited about taking our 10 man down and finally fighting the Brood Mother as a 'real' raid.

Boston put me on Onyxia herself. I flipped her around and backed up to the wall. Our DPS tore into her and soon she was ready for take off. Between Boston's DnD and my Consecrate the Welps were taken down pretty quick. This is one fight were I love Righteous Defense grabbing 3 mobs. I could target our Priest healer and Righteous Defense and he was clear.

My big concern was her landing. She immediately feared and we all went running hither and yon. I still had one of the big Dragonkin adds on me. Thankfully, Boston grabbed Onyxia. Ranged finished off my add and we put the Brood Mother down.

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