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Aganej2's World Views
World of Warcraft that is.

December 18, 2006

Onyxia and Raiding Format
 

Hello, this would be my first article for the WoW section of Pojo so I hope to make it interesting for everybody. This article will be devoted to the wonderfully…interesting creature known as Onyxia. Most importantly, to inform about her strengths and her weaknesses which we’ll hope to give us the win.

First off, just what makes Onyxia so tough that we’d want at least 3 or more people with us to take her down? She has two decks essentially, an event deck and a raid deck. The event deck could be called her “quest deck,” the only different between an event and quest card is that the event card rewards are played for free. Therefore, she drops a resource every turn from a deck meant specifically for resources. Another question you might ask yourself is, why would she need so much mana? Her abilities. Here I should add that she has three stages, each stage has a different health total along with a different ability. Her first ability costs ten mana. This sounds like a lot for any other hero, but no other hero’s ability grants the power to destroy any hero. The second one involves the number of resources to create whelp tokens. The third stage is of course the worst of the three. For twenty mana, Onyxia destroys all opposing heroes. These are just her built in abilities. The cards out of her raid deck are absolutely insane. Most of the cards in her raid deck are even more powerful versions of other cards most heroes would have access to. A one mana hard counterspell is something to be feared.

All of the above seems more than intimidating but she does have weaknesses. Which would open us up to the most important question, “How on earth do we kill her?” As I said before, she needs her resource per turn to able to run her abilities, take them away and she has less to work from. The Cruel Hand of Timmy is a wonderful example of resource destruction. I believe it’s either one of the few or the only objection in the game that can destroy resources. In constructed one on one play, this card is next to impossible to be effective but against Onyxia this card is a termite. If she can’t even get to ten mana, she can’t kill a hero much less all of you quite so easily. Another weakness would be her life total. I mentioned that she has three stages, and in order for her to pass to each stage she has to take all the damage for that stage. If you can keep her on a “harmless” stage, you can take out a good deal of her advantage. For instance, some of her ability cards from her raid deck can only be used during certain stages. If she isn’t on that stage then she can’t use them.

So if you can manage to take care of her stage development and control her resources, what else is there left to fear? Pleanty. You can hold off enough mana for her to flip and kill someone but she might still have enough mana to cause serious damage. Not to mention she has “un-armed combat,” the built in trait that she will get +X attack where X is her stage. If she is kept at stage one, then she can only ping a player at a time but compared to the horrible amounts of damage, one damage is nothing. The strategies I’ve heard of in taking her down, as far as how teams are made, are to either have everyone in the group do the same task with equal effectiveness or two have different members accomplish different tasks. One member can be incharge of healing, beating, crowd control, etc. No method has proven itself better than another, which gives the new raid format such a great flair. Happy hunting everyone.

-Alex

Aganej2@aol.com