When World of Warcraft first released in 2004, players around the world were collectively learning how to deal with the most difficult parts of the sprawling world inside this MMORPG. Now however, players have access to so much information that parts of World of Warcraft Classic’s previously difficult content can be trivialized, as demonstrated when a group of raiders took down Onyxia, daughter of Deathwing, sister of Negarian, all while strutting around in the nude.
The group achieved the goal on July 9, and watching the video shows off an impressive amount of theory crafting. To start, not a single player had any gear, be it weapons, armor, rings, or trinkets. However, buffs were widely used. A quick look at the video reveals world buffs, potions, flasks, food buffs, and a few others as well. Next, the composition relied primarily on casters, as a Mage is far less impacted by the absence of a weapon compared to any melee class.
This also made it possible to maintain damage output during phase two of the fight, when Onyxia is flying and melee cannot attack anyways. However, what about threat? How on earth is a tank expected to generate enough threat without their weapons while casters fling their spells?
Here is where much of the theorycrafting comes in. As u/zhangboyin explains in his Reddit post, “Paladins (or warriors for that matter) can't really generate threat in a reasonable time without a weapon/shield (or +SP from gear), so I had the mages start the fight with a rank 1 Frostbolt (minimal damage) and as soon as they hit, our pally tank could cast greater blessing of kings on the mages.”
The result was an instantaneous and large amount of threat generated by the Paladin tank, all without ever hitting Onyxia herself.
From there, the obvious question would be how a naked Paladin manages to take any hits from Onyxia without dying immediately. This was a bit more difficult, as zhangboyin explained that “He's deep in protection tree with some holy talents…he's flasked with world buffs…he had FR aura, the 83 from UBRS, 15 from juju, 25 from DMF, and improved MOTW…we were aggressively healing him and we knew he could take 1-2 hits from her without going down.”
The video is impressive, but it also demonstrates the incredible power of available buffs. When asked if the same feat could be done without all of those flasks, potions, world buffs, and more, zhangboyin was pretty clear, “Unbuffed and no consumes would be impossible simply because whoever is tanking (pet, paladin, bear) would not be able to survive one hit from Ony.”
The coordination of players now over Discord and through add ons mean that the application of Onyxia’s and other world buffs is easy to accomplish. This allow guilds to raid at power levels that are far higher than in the original game, and for a naked Onyxia raid to succeed.
With this achievement now complete, we wonder what other raids players might attempt to complete in a similar fashion.