World of Warcraft Classic hasn’t been kind to the public image of our old nemeses. With decades of experience, players who became battle-hardened on encounters far more difficult than anything vanilla threw at us back in the day went back to Blizzard’s official legacy servers and absolutely mopped up the bosses that made us sweat for hours on end. Onyxia has been hit particularly hard. This latest insult comes after the injury of a 40-player raid group downing Onyixa without wearing any armor, as well as a 32-play Warrior-only group taking the boss down in under a minute with an unprecedented burst of damage. After being basically one shotted and then killed by naked people, the final nail in this dragon’s coffin was being downed by just 2 players. Back when Onyxia first appeared with the release of Patch 1.1.0 over 16 years ago (sincerest apologies to the psychic damage dealt by that sentence to readers who were around at the time), the lady of the Black Dragonflight required a full 40-player raid group kitted with the best gear, with everyone showing at least some skill with their class to win the encounter. Now, all it takes is a Warrior, a Priest, an hour, and a lot of potions. The run was livestreamed by the dynamic duo Gendisarray and Shiftus, who had to burn through record amounts of health and resource restoring items to stay in the fight for so long. The three-phase fight has plenty of mechanics you need to keep in mind else getting wiped would become inevitable. No doubt the biggest challenge when attempting the boss without a large group is managing all the whelps that spawn in at various points. That said, being just two players did have some benefits. There was no risk of the healer losing focus of near-death party members, or someone from the large group triggering the whelp-spawning tail attack. It ultimately took 57 minutes to whittle down the dragon’s 1.8 million HP, and every second of that required Gendisarray and Shiftus’ complete attention - one wrong move, one poorly timed spell and it would have all been over. The pair very likely set a record of being the first to defeat Onyxia with just two players in vanilla/Classic. You might think this isn’t just a huge feat when there are videos of players successfully soloing the boss, but those all come from Wrath of the Lich King and later, when our characters pushed level 80 instead of 60 with much stronger gear and more abilities. Now, when will we bring C’thun down a notch or two?
