The moment Onyxia took flight, the raid descended into chaos.
None of them had experienced Phase 2 before. For a few seconds, nobody knew what to do. Some froze in place. Others started chasing her around the room.
"She can actually fly? What the hell are melee supposed to do now?"
The melee players instinctively assumed that once Onyxia was airborne, they couldn't reach her at all, so most of them simply stood there.
"What else? Pull out your ranged weapons and make do."
"My ranged weapon skill is barely in the double digits. I miss every shot. What's the point?"
"This raid hates melee. Blizzard might as well give us wings too."
A few melee players actually tried shooting Onyxia. With ranged weapon skills that low, nearly every shot missed.
"Whelps! Both sides!"
Onyxian Whelps began pouring out from both pits, sending the players nearby into a panic.
"David, Night, take one side each. Gather the whelps in the middle and let the Mages AoE them down."
With ten Mages, burning the whelps should have been easy.
Getting them all together was another matter.
The players being chased kept fighting back, scattering threat everywhere and making the whelps impossible to gather cleanly. David and Night had no chance of picking them all up. Several broke loose and chased players all over the chamber, turning an already messy fight into complete chaos.
Gabryell shook his head.
If they couldn't even control the whelps, Onyxia herself was the least of their problems.
David and Night grabbed as many as they could and dragged them toward the middle.
"Mages, AoE!"
Gabryell dropped Blizzard.
The other Mages immediately switched targets and started burning down the pack.
"Melee, clean up the loose whelps."
He wasn't going to let the melee stand around doing nothing. Since they still hadn't realized that some of their abilities could reach Onyxia while she was airborne, they could at least deal with the whelps chasing people around.
"I'm dead!"
Two whelps were chewing on BigHealsShortLegs. They burned through his shield and dropped him to half health. Before he could use Desperate Prayer, one of Onyxia's Fireballs slammed into him and finished him off.
"Watch the Fireballs! They splash!"
Gabryell saw the death notification but deliberately left the targeting mechanic unexplained.
Later testing would show that Onyxia's Phase 2 Fireballs had an important relationship with threat. Getting hit could wipe a player's threat, which mattered enormously when she landed for Phase 3.
David had already taken one earlier. Susie had been standing beside him, so both of them had eaten the splash damage. The fight had been so chaotic that nobody noticed.
BigHealsShortLegs dying finally got everyone's attention.
The Fireballs hit hard enough on their own, and anyone standing too close to the target could get caught in the blast. With the raid still clumped in places, every cast sent multiple health bars crashing downward.
Healing pressure spiked.
Gabryell checked the raid frames.
Several healers were already running dangerously low on mana.
"I can't take this anymore!"
Hugo had a pack of whelps chasing him and finally gave up trying to outrun them.
Feign Death.
Great.
Someone had already burned a threat drop.
At this point, though, threat management was falling apart anyway. Players were scattered across the chamber, whelps were everywhere, and half the raid barely understood what Onyxia was doing.
Then there was Deep Breath.
Players had spent years arguing over what triggered it.
Positioning.
Threat.
Raid spread.
Damage.
DoTs.
Fireballs.
Everyone seemed to have a theory.
Years later, Jeff Kaplan would describe the trigger as completely random.
That didn't stop players from searching for patterns.
The reality was annoying enough on its own: the longer Onyxia stayed in the air, the more opportunities she had to use Deep Breath.
And sometimes RNG simply hated you.
Gabryell had once seen her do it three times in a row.
Random or not, that kind of luck felt personal.
Three Deep Breaths back-to-back was the sort of RNG that made you wonder whether someone at Blizzard had a grudge against your raid.
"Any second now."
Gabryell looked up, watching Onyxia's position and facing carefully.
The raid was spread all over the room. Whelps had dragged several players far from where they should have been, and the whole air phase had turned into a mess.
Then the emote appeared.
Onyxia takes in a deep breath...
There it was.
Gabryell immediately moved sideways toward the right wall, getting out of the breath's path.
There were no boss-alert addons to scream a warning for them.
If they missed the emote and failed to react to Onyxia's movement, they were on their own.
The rest of the raid had never seen Deep Breath before.
They had no idea what was coming.
"Whelps are dead!"
The last stray whelp went down.
For a brief moment, everyone thought the fight was finally starting to stabilize.
"Back on Onyxia!"
The raid turned toward her.
Then a wall of fire tore across the chamber.
Anyone caught in its path disappeared almost instantly.
"What the hell?! How did I die?"
"Me too!"
"What the hell was that? I just got deleted!"
Within seconds, almost every raid frame turned gray.
More than ninety-five percent of the raid was dead.
Gabryell stood safely off to the side and watched the destruction.
Then he noticed an Ice Block sitting in the middle of the breath's path.
He smiled.
"Damn, Coldhands actually reacted in time."
The first tick had hit him, and he had instinctively slammed Ice Block, immuning the rest of the breath.
The few other players still alive hadn't reacted at all.
They were simply lucky enough to have been standing outside the path.
"Wipe it."
Gabryell took his hands off the keyboard.
With more than ninety-five percent of the raid dead, there was no reason to drag the pull out.
Better to die fast and start the corpse run.