Onyxia Wipe

Even if you don't play World of Warcraft, you've probably heard of Onyxia by way of this wonderful audio clip of raiding group getting PWND by the encounter, while the raid leader shouts things like, "THAT'S F**KING 50 DKP MINUS!"

We took on Onyxia last night and wiped.  Slowly.  We ran down to her lair with 22 players (the nominal raid size is 40) to see if we could get atara her tier 2 headgear.  We were badly positioned going into phase 2 of the fight, though, and more than half the party got killed by her flame breath.  By the time they got to phase 3, we had a warrior, a couple of warlocks, a couple of hunters, a shadow priest and three shaman left standing.  They chipped away at her while their own numbers dwindled to six (the warrior, two hunters, two shaman, and the shadow priest).  The six of them managed to keep grinding away at her for over ten minutes, and likely would have taken her down if one of them had not been feared into one of the whelp caves.  They got her down to 4%.

Afterwards the shadow priest lamented, "I burned through six mana pots keeping the warrior up."

We ran back to our bodies and slapped her down easily on our second attempt, but I think we all agree that it would have been much cooler if the valiant little group had managed to finish her on the first try.  atara's headpiece didn't drop, but I got a nice little mana-regen trinket.

Computer annoyances

The new(ish) hard disk in atara's computer has been making alarming sounds lately, and she's been experiencing frequent crashes that appear to be linked to video-related.  I suspected the problem was one of heat dissipation, so we lifted the cover off her computer to make sure all of the fans were spinning in a proper, fan-like manner.  Within seconds of lifting off the cover, the fan on her video card spun down from "desperate scream" to "placid whir".  She had one more video crash after that, but otherwise things settled down a bit.  The drive, however, is still very noisy.

Working under the assumption that the heat has already damaged her HD, I've ordered a new 250g SATA2 drive to replace her current one (and she gets the fun of doing a clean install of XP, and all of her applications).  With luck the new drive will be here tomorrow or the next day, and we can get it up and running before her current drive dies.  Experience tells me that once a drive starts making those alarming scraping sounds, the clock is running...