Alright guys, together we've analyzed and figured out 4H aggro, Hateful Strike, and countless other enigmas of the raiding game. Now I have a final question, and perhaps the hardest of all.
How does Onyxia's aggro going from Phase 2 --> Phase 3 work? Let's hear your coherent theories that account for everyone's experiences.
At this point, I'll be honest and say I have no goddamned clue. Using KTM, for a while it really looked to me like she just didn't wipe aggro at all on phase 2, and would always go after a warlock (does this sound familiar?) who outaggroed the MT with his consistent dots and damage while she was in the air. But then last night, we had two t3 warlocks basically going all out, well ahead on aggro, and she didn't go after them. Nor after our TF tank. She went after first an alt frost mage with blues/ZG gear who obviously had no DoTs on her and had been doing minimal damage prior. Then she went after a druid, and stuck to the druid for a very long time until a couple of warriors pulled it off at roughly the same time. I'm not sure I can explain both occurrences with one coherent theory. If there is some common-knowledge explanation out there, then I'll feel quite foolish, but it'll be worth it to know an answer for certain.
I've never been able to figure this out perfectly myself, but I have noticed a few things and have a theory:
- The aggro never goes onto a melee. It is always a ranged class or healer she goes to first.
- What aggro she has seems fairly small. If her targets die, the tank is usually within the first 3-4 people to get aggro. If her targets don't die the aggro switch happens generally within 10-15 seconds.
- I've only ever aggroed twice, once as a priest and once as a warlock. When I aggroed on my warlock I had full dots up on her.
- Druids, warlocks, shaman, and priests tend to aggro the most, and tend to hold it longer than mages.
So my theory is that she does wipe aggro, but she does it sometime before she lands. That would mean that any dots up at that time, or any mage unlucky to get off a frostbolt right after, or any healing would build up aggro.
EDIT: To clarify, when I say "sometime before she lands" I mean sometime after phase 2 ends and sometime before she lands on the ground and the tank builds aggro.
Our guild pretty much gave up on any idea involving her threat. Weve tried the idea her aggro never resets during phase 2, but weve had healers get aggro on landing too.
Don't think that it is a premature aggro wipe, as I've never pulled aggro on her as my warlock, and I've had some fairly sizeable shadowbolts land when she is.
"Random" sounds good to me, obviously someone should write a mod for raidleaders to install that tracks who pulls aggro on the transition so we can build up some statistical information.
Here's my best guess, based on tanking her a good number of times, but pretty much speculation.
I believe her aggro list keeps track of threat built up throughout phase 2. However I don't believe that threat is assigned to a particular individual. When she lands the threat value of the number one person is applied to the whole raid. Her first target will be the person who does ANY action that generates even 1 pt of threat just as she lands. The thing that makes this a trick for the tank is he/she now has to overcome the 10% rule to get Ony's attention. The actual amount of threat the tank needs is dependant on how well dmg was spread throughout the raid on phase 2. Such that if one person did the vast majority of the dmg that 10% is a much larger number.
When we used to do ony alot she would consitently go for the shammy who droped totems in the tank spot as she was coming down, we could almsot count on it and he would often tank her until the warrior picked her up. If you look at both dmg meters and KTM for the fight you'll find as a general rule the threat needed by the tank to get her in phase 3 is roughly 10% of the dmg done by you top ranged dpser (fair amount of variation around it though, not enough evidence to be even close to conclusive).
Anyway just my theorycraft. Perhaps someone here can add some insight or explain why it's totally wrong ).
For a while I thought the aggro was linked with the whelpes, everytime I was the only mage aoeing I took aggro on her when landing and kept aggro untill I died and 1 time untill she died Oo.
But tbh I have no clue
Honestly, I think she's just broken horribly. Onyxia was Blizz' first attempt at an aggro wipe, am I correct? I think she wipes aggro at the end of phase two while she's still in the air, and then through some combination of proximity, left over aggro(healing, dots, etc), and just random buggy code she picks the exact people you don't want her to go after.
We used to have a lock keep DoTs on 100% of the time, and then drag her to our MT. Worked sometimes, othertimes it didn't, she'd still go after a mage, or priest or someone completely random. I think we had a rogue grab her at the end of Phase 2 once.
Adding to the eternal question of destiny: What, definitivly, causes Deep Breaths?
For a while I thought the aggro was linked with the whelpes
I have thought of the whelp aggro theory as well.
Although this theory is sort of strange, it may be possible that Onyxia's threat on everyone stays the same on every person in the raid after she goes from phase 1 -> phase 2. During phase 2, any hate that the whelps pick up is transfered to Ony and sticks until phase 3. This could explain why it is more likely for healers to get aggro or people who were AoEing, and not so much tanks or rogues.
Whoever is main tanking Ony on our raids will usually aggro 5-8 whelps during phase 2 and sit there and spam demo shout on them. This was originally just so he would have full rage when she landed and could spam a bunch of threat buliding abilities in a short time. After doing that, the tank never had a problem with picking her up landing in phase 3. However, the few times someone killed the tanks whelps by accident, the aggro was a lot more hit or miss.
This theory holds up pretty well and I haven't found a time where it didn't make sense. I don't really have any hard facts backing it up with KTM though, so you can take it as pure speculation.
One time Onyxia aggroed a priest who was just standing there for 3-4 minutes and doing nothing and he got the initial aggro after landing... but he was standing farthest away from her. I never had her aggro on of the persons standing close to her landing zone.
Maybe its like the charge of Bloodlord Mandokir and she targets the person standing farthest away from her landing zone?
I have to check this next time we do Onyxia.
Honestly, I can't pretend to have a clue what decides phase 2->3 aggro. However, this is an odd observation I can make.
When my raiding group began to get geared we thought it would be "fun", as many others likely do, to start doing short-manned Onyxia. At the time, I was a 5/0/46 specced druid. Because we were usually relatively short on range dps, I would often throw on some damage gear along with a ZHC and go pretty heavy on the wrath spam in phase 2. I don't really feel like I did more healing than in a full 40 man, and I certainly didn't attack the whelps much, just pure wrath spam on Ony. I never had any HoT's up anywhere near to the time where she was landing, and I never cast any heals of any sort after the "Phase 3" announcement.
Every..single..time I wrath spammed as hard as I absolutely could, I would have *very* solid aggro when she landed in phase 3. By solid, I'm talking, I went bear and spun her north and was likely to tank her either until I died. Even when fears would go off (which the warrior would dance out of, or have a ward if we had a dorf) I would regain aggro. I even got BoP'd, and aggro would pop back to me. Note that when I went bear, I wasn't generating any threat, just spinning her facing north and sitting.
In my mind, this kills a straight "phase 2 leftover aggro" theory, because even spamming teh wrathzorz, there's no way I was outaggroing the mages/locks/hunters we happened to have. It also would heavily discount a raid-wide threat level, with aggro being given to the first person to perform a significant action. Perhaps I was just too damned pretty. I think I'll throw my hat in the ring with a "Who's the prettiest?" guess.
Whenever our dps is fast during phase 2, we have relatively fewer problems on the transition and vice versa if dps is slow. But this could just be due to the fact that since we are doing more dps on phase 2, our raid is better geared and experience and better equipped to handle the transition. The few times I have gotten aggro was when I wasn't dpsing Onyxia any at all during phase 2 and only focusing on the whelps. I always dps Onyxia during phase 2 now, and have yet to get aggro again. Wish I had more conclusive evidence, would really be interested in seeing some data on this.
Perhaps the aggro reset is resistable? Perhaps ~5% chance or something, seems somewhat rare for this situation, though usually it is a shaman that has focus in the kills I've done.
One other possibility is that whoever does the first action after the phase 2->3 threat wipe transition gains a significant threat bonus. Having to deal with a non-melee getting this would explain the bouncy nature of her targeting somewhat. I can usually grab her on the way down and pick up primary threat, but as I move her to the north portion of the cave, she gets into melee range with a ranged person who was previously in that 1.1 - 1.3 buffer zone and then it instantly transfers to them, or get hit with a wing buffet and such.
The timing on the threat wipe seems to be right when you see that CTRA warning and not when she lands, so any in the air frostbolts, shadowbolts with dump a huge threat chunk to that mage or warlock. It is so hard to tell what happens unless you get a good combat log collect though.
When she lands she nearly always goes for me, or at least one of the other Warlocks. If I stop all DoT damage, don’t have anything in the air during the decent and don’t break the fear in any way she’ll still eat me in phase 3. In fact these days I just run straight to the tanking spot. Maybe I’m wi-flagged.
Though, if in phase 1 I just melee and ask for GoA for my Succubus, but nuke with all my might in phase 2 she’ll go for somebody else. She seems to be dumping aggro in a weird way and/or at a weird time. Whatever the reason I'm sure it's not working as intended, but they've decided not to change it and do it properly in subsequent encounters (melee can't attack Ayamiss, for example).
It's probably for the best she goes after seemingly random people. It's good for teaching them how to move to the tanks and gives them experience tanking at the same time! That said with the examples you're giving, it just might be completely random.
I'm trying to remember if a melee ever had aggro when she landed -- been a long time since we've done Ony. IIRC, it was almost *always* a mana user who had aggro. But if it has a damage/threat component, then it makes no sense that it would go to healers, as there's simply no way they would be higher on aggro than mages or warlocks, unless there's some multiplier being assigned to healing threat or some other unknown mechanic.
I sometimes wondered if it was bugged that she didn't always actually land at 40%, considering the 65% is always a hard transition from phase 1 to phase 2, and threat would be wiped there, but then continue to pile up until she actually decided to land. Since damage really slows down for most people at that point, but there's still healing to be done... eh, who knows.
Honestly at this point I think it would almost be a shame to figure it out exactly. :) So much lore around it!
Well, we all know that Deep Breath is a myth propagated by the liberal media, but I'm fairly certain that Onyxia aggro going from Phase 2 -> Phase 3 is totally random. I've pulled aggro during the transition when I was FD+Drinking and I had to tank her for the last bit. It's not like Hunters are mad DPS compared to Frost Mages going all out with no worries about a deadzone.
"Totally random" isn't a valid answer really -- it could be a mechanic that selects a random player in the raid and generates X amount of aggro on that player. Then, what value is X?
And if that's the case, then how do you explain situations like what I described, where Onyxia went from one random player who hadn't done much to another random player who hadn't done much, and only later to one of 3 warriors all trying to fight for aggro for nearly 30 seconds? How do you explain warlocks tending, in my experience, to get aggro far more often than others? One particular warlock probably has Onyxia on him 80% of the time she lands whenever he's around, unless he hellfires himself to death late in phase 2 and soulstones up to avoid that. That doesn't seem very random.
There's a mechanic here, and some lines of scripting in her combat script that govern the aggro values of the raid when she lands. That can be reverse-engineered, and that's my aim here.
One time Onyxia aggroed a priest who was just standing there for 3-4 minutes and doing nothing and he got the initial aggro after landing... but he was standing farthest away from her. I never had her aggro on of the persons standing close to her landing zone.
Maybe its like the charge of Bloodlord Mandokir and she targets the person standing farthest away from her landing zone?
I have to check this next time we do Onyxia.
At any rate this would be easily testable. Have the entire raid stand under Onyxia before Phase 3 and have the MT standing at the spot you normally tank her.
Well, if it was a mechanic that selects a random player and stacks a certain amount of aggro on that player, I'd call that pretty random. Regardless, I've never seen the same person get pounded on by Onyxia in Phase 3, it's usually someone who hasn't been selected for instagibbing before. That being said, I've never seen Ony go for the MT, nevermind an offtank, right off the bat of Phase 3. In fact, I think the highest frequency of pulling phase 3 aggro, by class, goes to our Priests. We blame their Dev Plague for it, though.
Just my observations, I don't really have any recorded data so that's pretty much all I can contribute to this thread. :P
The 'whelp aggro during phase 2 is transferred' theory doesn't really work in our experience as we use mages to kill the whelps, while the warlocks are usually her targets, dots up or not, when she lands. We also have the 'one particular warlock' who 80% of the time gets aggro at phase 3 start, even if he disconnects/stands around partway through. The mages, who are aoeing the whelps, and their healers, rarely get Onyxia after them immediately. His imp generally stays parked in phase shift at the MT's position throughout the fight, and I don't remember him hanging out himself there all the time - if it turns out that it's 'farthest away from her' I'll be surprised.
For people wanting to figure it out it shouldn't be that hard. Take a whole bunch of mages and then have only them DPS during phase 2 with absolutely no healing. Report back what happens. After that just keep isolating other elements.
That being said, I've never seen Ony go for the MT, nevermind an offtank, right off the bat of Phase 3. In fact, I think the highest frequency of pulling phase 3 aggro, by class, goes to our Priests.
Here's a theory for you, then. What does the MT/OT do that others tend not to? He's running towards Ony when she lands. Everyone else is getting away from her. Blizzard tends to reuse many of the same templates and there are very, very few bosses that have truly unique aggro mechanics -- most knockbacks are -50%, for example, and so forth. Anyway, when Viscidus reforms, he wipes all aggro on players within roughly a 100yd radius. This was a surprise to many, but we use this to our advantage by having the MT run out when he shatters and wait just outside until he's reformed, such that everyone can reposition and heal freely while Visc is moving to the MT. What if Onyxia has a similar mechanic on landing, where she wipes aggro on players who are within X yards at a certain point as she lands.
Maybe the times when she quickly sticks to the tank occur because everyone or almost everyone got their aggro wiped, and so he can quickly get snap aggro. And the times when she goes after a random healer who has done nothing is because that healer was standing on the other side of the room and thus retained all their aggro from healing earlier in the fight.
11/11/06, 9:58 AM
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