The Horde Onyxia Attunement Really Sucks

If you raided as Horde in Vanilla or Classic, you're probably going "duh, no shit", but I've got to say that as someone who didn't, working my way through that quest chain over the course of the last few weeks has certainly been... something.

I technically did it once before, back in late Wrath when I was working on my Loremaster achievement, but at that point it was soloable (I think?) so it wasn't quite the same. Yet I noted even then that it was "tedious and annoying". (Real shame that YouTube's removal of annotations broke Wowcrendor's epic recreation of the quest in interactive video form.)

Doing it at level though, with all the grouping requirements intact (and on era, where getting groups for anything other than whatever raids your guild has set up that week is extra tough) - that was something else entirely. I used to think that the Alliance version with its repeat visits to BRD and the inclusion of Jail Break was pretty demanding, but that quest chain has nothing on its Horde equivalent. At least people have various incentives to go back to BRD for other reasons.

On Horde side, things start relatively innocuous with a quest from the Badlands that basically asks you to do a full run of Lower Blackrock Spire. There's some demand for that, but compared to BRD the loot's a bit naff to be honest, so there's less interest than in BRD.

Then Thrall asks you to do Upper Blackrock Spire and kill Rend. This is immediately a big step up, as it's a ten-man and one with an annoying key quest of its own. My experience with this on era has been that there are always alts that need it for one reason or another, but nobody wants to be the one to deal with the hassle of putting the group together. Good thing I'm confident enough about what's needed at this point that this hasn't stopped me...

Anyway, you kill Rend, give everyone in Orgrimmar a nice world buff, and then get sent to seek out Rexxar. This step became the stuff of legends due to the fact that Rexxar's pathing takes him through no fewer than three zones, meaning that it can require quite a time-consuming ride to even find and talk to him. (I'll admit though that I was lucky in this regard as he was always pretty close to Shadowprey Village when I went to look for him.)

Rexxar sends you to a gnome called Myranda the Hag in Western Plaguelands (the same one that makes your Scarlet Crusade disguise for the Tyrion Fordring quest chain) and she asks you to go back to UBRS and kill the dragonspawn there as their eyes are needed for her illusion spell. I'm not sure if you can do this in a single run if nobody else is on the quest or whether it requires multiple runs regardless, but fortunately the eyes also drop in Blackwing Lair (even though that's not specified in the quest) and I got all of mine after two runs of that place.

With your newly acquired disguise, you chat to the dragon Emberstrife (the same one you have to mind-control to make the UBRS key) and he tells you to kill three elite dragons of enemy flights residing in different corners of the world. This is probably the worst part of the chain simply because it has no other purpose than for this attunement, so you need to find a bunch of people who are on the exact same step as you at the exact same time, or ask someone else for help who'll basically have to donate their time at zero benefit to them. The dragons are sufficiently tough that you can't solo them at level sixty either, not even with great gear.

Anyway, this was the step on which I probably stalled the longest, because nobody was responding on Discord when I asked whether anyone else needed the quest, and I just hated the thought of asking people to come help me just for the sake of it. The other night I finally gave in and popped the question anyway, and I felt very touched by how many people were happy to help. I was kind of lucky with my timing as well, as people were talking about Onyxia for some other reason just as I logged in, so it was easy to turn that into a segue: "Speaking of Onyxia..."

Anyway, while I really appreciated the help, the insanely long time it took to complete this step made me feel pretty guilty to be honest. My hearthstone came off cooldown twice just doing this quest, which means that it took over two hours! Not only do you have to swap continents again to get all three dragons, one of them is at the back of a cave full of elites (I'd completely forgotten about that part), and once you're finally ready to hand in to Emberstrife, he gives you a fourth quest to kill another elite dragon in the Wetlands. Why he couldn't give you that one at the same time as the other three and required that extra step of coming back to talk to him again, I have no idea.

So you travel to the Wetlands, kill a red dragon there, go back to Emberstrife again, then back to Rexxar again, and then Rexxar asks you to run UBRS again, for what must be your third or fourth time at this point, and it's only after this that you earn your very own Drakefire Amulet.

In a nutshell, this quest requires you to run LBRS once, UBRS multiple times, requires the killing of four different elite outdoor enemies, and makes you hop back and forth between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms no less than eleven times, and that's without even getting into the considerable amount of cross-continent travel time that's also required. For a single-boss raid that requires attunement on every single character, this is absolute insanity, and I'll admit that this sort of attunement is not something I miss in later iterations of WoW.

I'm glad it's done now for my hunter, but the thought of having to do it again on my next character to sixty makes me quake in my boots a little to be honest. At least there'll be less pressure when it comes to getting an alt attuned as opposed to attuning your very first character (on that server and faction).