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Usual disclaimer: If you don’t play, you probably don’t wanna read this, you’ll both be bored and lose whatever respect for me as a person with an actual life that you may have had to date.

What is Onyxia? She is a dragon that sits in a location in World of Warcraft that has absolutely nothing else whatsoever of interest for several gaming areas in all directions; I’m surprised they didn’t just plunk her right down outside the Exodar or Silvermoon (in-game joke, sorry! ). Before the last two game expansions came out, she was one of the ultimate end-game content bosses with a 40-man raid setting. If you’ve ever played an MMORPG and tried even getting a 25-man raid both (a) going in the first place period and (b) the majority of the players on task instead of wandering off to pee, eat or talk trash on the game chat channels, you know that getting a 40-man raid to a similar state requires that you personally, if you’re leading it, are channeling some kind of gamer nerd deity to achieve success.

The last WoW patch installed a set of new end-game Onyxia raids, both 10-man and 25-man. My guild made our first serious attempt on 25-man Onyxia last night, with predictable results (wipe…wipe…wipe…wipe…wipe…wipe…and one more wipe! followed by general mutiny due to full bladders, hunger, boredom, running out of of gold for any more armor repairs, personality conflicts, etc.). While we were all chatting between attempts, though, a few fellow guildies mentioned a very funny YouTube video entitled “Onyxia Raid Wipe” that was apparently put out during the old 40-man raid time frame. I had not seen or heard of it, so I thought during my lunch break today I’d check it out.

Okay, it is pretty funny, I admit, even with the abundance of sexist symbolism. However, I’m getting pretty numb to that, given that the majority of male players can’t even remember that Onyxia is supposed to be female…interestingly enough, every female player has no trouble using the correct pronoun–mostly I find it interesting because it’s so clearly an unconscious mechanism on both sides. As in, female players find it quite natural that one of the toughest end-game bosses is female, as natural as they find it when it’s male, but male players automatically assign the male pronoun to any really bad-ass boss that isn’t actually sporting large and visible tits because, you know, he is synonymous with bad-ass. Even if a big part of the boss encounter involves the boss’s eggs and offspring, which would normally be a huge reminder that the boss is in fact, female.

So without further ado, here’s the vid. Enjoy! (And again, if any non-gamers have lasted this far into the post, I’ve included a quick glossary of terms below the embedded video to clear up what the heck the narrator–and while the animation is artificially added, the narrator is actually the raid leader, on Ventrilo, during the raid run–is talking about.)

1. It’s a 40-man raid, which WoW automatically divides into 8 groups of 5 players each in the raid interface screen. For encounters requiring people to move to different locations around the boss, it’s convenient to use these groups to designate that.
2. Onyxia lairs in a cave, and she has laid eggs in little antechambers off the cave which periodically hatch a large group of whelps that come out and try to pwn the raid and therefore must be killed off before they achieve that ignoble goal. Also, if you somehow end up physically IN the whelp cave, you will die pretty fast, and if you end up there at the wrong time, you will cause an avalance of whelps that will probably wipe the whole raid.
3. “Dps” means “damage per second” and refers to the attacks made by the players who have chosen to focus their character skills on causing damage (as opposed to taking damage, like a tank, or healing damage, like a healer).
4. “Getting aggro” means that you’re drawing the boss’s and/or the lesser bad guys’ attention, which you only want to do if you’re a tank, because only they can survive the heavy damage drawing such attention causes. Tanks draw and keep aggro with a variety of techniques, but if you are a dps and you don’t regulate the damage you’re doing or you stand too close to an “add,” or lesser bad guy, or you’re a healer and you’re standing too close to the boss while you heal a tank before the tank is done drawing aggro–you can suddenly find yourself with all the aggro, shortly prior to suddenly finding yourself dead.
5. “DKP” stands for “dragon kill points;” it’s a system of rewards that the harder-core raiding guilds use to decide who gets the nifty loot that the boss drops after you kill him, her or it. Generally people don’t get docked DKP for doing dumb shit–it’s usually accumulated by showing up to raids on time, signing up to be an available alternative to a raid member, etc and docked by being a no-show.
6. Most end-game bosses, such as Onyxia, have more than one “phase” to their encounter–they do one thing for a while, then switch to some other tactic, then often switch to a third tactic, which requires the raid party to plan strategies for each one, which is what the raid leader is going on about here.
7. “Dot” stands for “damage over time;” it refers to the attacks that dps players make that cause, well, damage over time to the boss (for example, doing 5000 points of damage to her over 10 seconds as opposed to just instantly doing 5000 points of damage to her all at once).

*If for some reason you don’t play and you actually slogged your way through this post anyway, a “wipe” is when every player in a particular raid dies. Owch!