Onineko Storms Onward! 10/10N 2/10H

Pew pew! Welcome all present and future Oninekians that are attracted to the guild by my hilarious words and welcome to this installment of the Shadowlands era of Roak Poasts and our second of Castle Nathria progression.

It’s been a big week for Onineko having cleared normal and reclaimed our realm-first-for-one-boss-because-all-the-good-guilds-were-in-heroic title! What’s that? Onineko is a realm first guild? Why yes, yes we are.

Is it coincidence that less than 24 hours after Turtle assumed GM responsibilities that Onineko sees itself leading the server (on one normal boss)? We’ll investigate this more in a future Roak Poast titled “Turtle: The Doom of Onineko?” (working title).

Moving right along. The first target of the week The Council of Blood are the true heroes of this expansion. While most of Revendreth, and in fact the Shadowlands entirety are miserable and clinging to the last drops of anima they have left. The Council holds lavish parties to spread cheer and joy amongst those more deserving of special treatment, the upper echelon of Revendreth high society.

In order to attend one of these banquets, one must be acquainted with the proper etiquette. So as always, Roak is here to help you mingle with the best and show your disdain for the peasant class.

• Waitstaff and servants should always be looked down upon and beaten (preferably as priority dps targets).
• Melee should not stand in front or behind Stavros, lest they cop a faceful of his cloak as he majestically whips it to the side.
• Interrupting others is rude, but Baroness Frieda has a tendency to ramble often, interrupt her as necessary.
• The right outfit is critical, ilevel 180+.
• Come prepared with your finest dancing shoes – and don’t fuck it up!

Blizzard have outdone themselves with a ludicrous but still somehow amusing and fun mechanic.

7/7 Roaks

Fail of the Fight: From the logs it appears Malvana did not have a good time on this boss. Dead after 30 seconds and 3rd highest on damage taken.

Continuing on in normal, the next target is Sludgefist. Sludgefist is patchwerk.

0/7 Roaks.

Fail of the Fight: This is an easy one to pick. 23 seconds into the fight Dirbs and Facey died. We then proceeded to beat the boss with a few seconds left on the soft enrage. If I recall discord last night, I believe it was entirely Facey’s fault, but given the complete lack of healing as per logs, I think we can chalk this fail up entirely on the healers.

Onwards to the pointy end of the instance, the Stone Legion Generals were next up on the list. The premise of this fight is simple, fight General 1. Then fight General 2. Then fight General 1&2.

But don’t be fooled by a dungeon journal full of mechanics and seven minutes worth of FatBoss video. This fight is a joke and even after you ignore Facey’s spiel describing the boss in favour of talking to Lic about bowel movements, you can still one-shot this boss.

1/7 Roaks

Fail of the Fight: I wasn’t sure to award this trophy or not, but the oldest man in Onineko – Calt, did the heroic(?) deed of taking his meteor out all by himself (within the first 30 seconds) and sacrificing his life for the good of the team, would we have been able to 1-shot this boss while taking that extra damage split between 20 raiders? I guess we’ll never know.

Calt, I salute you!

Finally we arrive at the ultimate boss of Castle Nathria, the big wig, the head honcho, the guy we all hate but secretly want to be. The Grand Sire of the Venthyr faction. Denathrius.

After the raid seemed to stall in the last two underwhelming bosses, Blizzard finishes strong with one of the most complex and fun boss encounters since arguably Mists of Pandaria. Phase 1 starts in the room you find Denathrius in. The only ability that matters is a frontal cone he does periodically, which in addition to reducing a stack of a debuff you get when the encounter starts (important for later), spawns an add for each person hit. Once he’s done that a couple of times, he’ll poop on the floor and make part of the room unusable.

Unfortunately, years of training Oninekians to not stand in the shit finally clicked into place, with the side effect of scrambling the brains of your average raider and despite being told repeatedly that they need to stack in the cone, it seems most of our raiders still struggled with that (looking at you Red team).

Once we managed to fluke our way through phase one, phase two is where it starts to ramp up. Denathrius’ sword shows up and starts cutting cunts up, while the big boss himself starts shooting massive cones that need to be directed into adds while we also periodically will get sucked into the boss and forced to run through a mirror to escape who knows what. This phase lasts for another 30% of his hp, before the final push begins and damn, this is where shit gets real.

Denathrius begins by limiting the room size to just the inner portion of the map. He then teases the group by doing a knockback that will almost certainly send at least one member of your raid off the edge. Most (all?) of the phase two mechanics continue and periodically Denathrius will poop again, reducing the amount of room you have to work with, even further.

Cutting it close doesn’t quite describe it as we were on the last bit of safe ground before the master bit the bucket (and got eaten by his sword or something?). All in all, an epic final encounter that I can’t wait to see in heroic mode.

7/7 Roaks

Fail of the Fight: Literally everybody in red team with the exception of (and this hurts to say) Demonsoon. You all sucked hard at stacking on your tank.

While that was the end of normal. Onineko wasn’t done for the week. Across both nights we added two heroic bosses to our list (though technically Shriekwing was killed first last Sunday). More excitingly than Shriekwing who I really have nothing further to add from normal, was the Hunstman Altimor kill we secured in the dying minutes of last night’s raid.

Huntsman, previously referred to as Goldilocks and the three doggos gets a real difficulty buff in Heroic and was nigh impossible in our attempts late last week. That all changed last night, when, from start to finish (including trash) we knocked this bloke off and all his pets in three attempts, a huge step towards greatness and the potential this guild has but is never capable of accessing. I’d go into more details but I feel this poast has dragged on long enough, enjoy some pictures instead!

6/7 Roaks

Fail(s) of the Fight(s): Speaking with some of my colleagues, the heroic fails go to none other than Angryperson for his inability to follow cooldown priorities and directions! Though this is not new behaviour from Angry, hearing Ez shout on Discord was new and totally worth it. Keep it up Angry!

Peace & Love,
– Roak