After reading about Faxmonkey vs Onyxia on PTR, I just had to do this myself when the patch came out. It was one of the most intense fight I’ve ever had so far in WoW. I had to time all my shield cooldowns nearly flawlessly in order to survive all of Onyxia’s attacks. Many times I found myself hovering at around 1000 health waiting for the cooldown timers to count down to zero, then I’m back in the fight again.

The spec that I used was an Arcane/Frost Hybrid spec. The original spec that Faxmonkey used was this. I opted for more defensive talents and took [Arctic Winds] over [Arcane Potency].

The most important talents that are required to make this fight possible is:

• [Frost Warding]
• [Magic Absorption]
• [Arcane Shielding]
• [Incanter's Absorption]

This pretty much combines your Health and Mana pool into one, and how successful you are depends on how you manage them both. You pretty much have to keep them both at around the same percentage at all times. If your Health is low and your Mana is still high, you need to manage your shields better. If it is the other way around, you are using too much [Mana Shield].

[Glyph of Evocation] + [Arcane Flows] = 60% HP/Mana Restore every 2 Minutes. An absolute must have in order to kill her.

Here’s a quick summary taken from Faxmonkey:

Ice Barrier + Incanter’s Absorption. Not only does this fuel, directly, my damage (it frequently pushed my +damage above 3k), but it also strengthens my shields themselves. Because shields get an 80% coefficient, the more damage I absorb, the more damage I can absorb.

2 Minute Evocate + Glyph = 60% heal every 2 seconds. Yum!

Frost Warding + Ice Armor + Fire Ward + Torment of the weak. Frost Warding by itself goes from a marginal talent to an *incredible* one in this particular build. Not only does it feed me 1k-1.5k mana every few minutes, but that mana then goes into Mana Shield so I can absorb an extra 1k-1.5k damage. It makes it possible, on a limited extent, to support mana shield. But wait, there’s more! I don’t need mage armor for this — Ice Armor offers a significant reduction in attack speed to melee, so it’s a better choice. Frost Warding increases my armor with Ice Armor thus giving me extra mitigation. But it gets better because of new changes on the PTR, that debuff from Ice armor also triggers Torment of the weak for 12% extra damage dealt. Hurray!

Prismatic Cloak + Mirror Image. Prismatic Cloak gives me a 6% damage reduction, very useful — but it also gives me instant invisibility. Why would I need that you ask? Well, turns out they’ve “fixed” mirror image on the PTR so it no longer immediately takes aggro off of you. Invisibility will fix that problem right up!

You see? It’s all working together in a way that the sum is greater than the parts! It’s a very unique talent build.

The orginal post again can be found HERE.

As you can see, Blizzard has nerfed the amount of gold from all the old raid bosses. You now get 100g less, but it was still worth it for me. If you are up for the challenge, I recommend you give it a try. I think got it after five attempts (two of them I died at 1% Health left). It was a lot of fun. Happy hunting!

Related Posts:

• WotLK: Build 8820 – Mage Glyphs
• WotLK: Build 8770 – Instant Cast Deep Freeze
• My Dual Specs
• WotLK: Alpha Mage Spells
• PTR Patch 3.1.0 – New Mage Glyphs