Al'ar and his adds

[Seiher]

So last night was my first venture into The Eye after a couple of our regular tanks didn't show up for raid. I took about a month break from this game at around the time we started raiding SSC so I wasn't exactly well geared for the T5 raids. In the last few weeks I've been gearing up for them and have made huge strides in that department.

So back to the story, since some of out tanks didn't show up I was asked to come and tank in the Eye. After clearing the trash we settled on having me tank the adds that Alar spawns every so often. The way we would handle this is:

- I would stand near the door where you enter Al'ar's room.
- When Al'ar would spawn an add, it would go after a healer (for us it was always this one Pally healer which made this easy.)
- As the add would make it's way down I would taunt, then AS to keep him as he made his way to me. They are rather fast so AS would go off around the time he would get to me. This is also good because DPS on the adds has to be FAST because you will most likely have to run up and get anoter one after the first one dies.
- After you have the add start backing up to the wall on the left or right of the main entrance. When the add is at 3% have all melee back out except a rogue with Cloak of shadows up and burn the add down. The add will then explode and knock you back against the wall.

****VERY IMPORTANT****
Al'ar, around the time of the 3rd or 4th add will Do Flame quill. If you are tanking an add against the wall it is very important that everyone cut DPS on the add and you move it to the area that has the lighter color tiles. If you are in the dark color tiles when flame quill goes off, you're dead.

So just rinse and repeat this process till Al'ar dies....or does he? Pesky Phoenix.

Phase 2 is different from Phase 1 in that Al'ar is in the center of the room and every once-in-awhile will fly up ad drop a meteor that spawns 2 adds. The good thing about this is that when they spawn they will ALWAYS go as a pair towards whoever has aggro. This makes it easy for us to AS them for quick control then DPS. The way we did this was we would wait till I called for DPS (when I was sure they weren't getting away from me) and range DPS would burn the 2 of them down. Rinse and repeat. As a fail-safe, we had a DPS warrior at the ready if my taunt or AS missed one of the adds. in the time

Overall this was a fun time for me. We didn't end up getting Al'ar down last night because DPS was dying to the ring of fires that Al'ar leaves after meteor, but we were able to sustain our process in Phase 2. When the adds spawn I would AS them very quickly and DPS was able to take them down a good 10-20 seconds before the 2nd pair spawed. With the few DPS we had left, we actually sustained this for about a good 5 mins. After that the trash respawned and I had to go because I work in the morning. =(

Just thought I'd share my experience with everyone.

[PsiVen]

We found that killing some adds while offtanking others made it difficult to round them all up quickly. Changing the strategy to offtanking all of the adds took us from 20-30% wipes to a smooth kill. Many guilds do it either way, but I think the use of a prot paladin favors this way.

Here's what we did:
One prot warrior helping me with the adds, and 1 DPS warrior wearing a shield on roundup duty. I taunt off the warrior when he gets a lot since I can more reliably block lots of them, and I don't have to worry about trying pick up adds and tank the others at the same time. We left 2 tanks on Al'ar.
Our video shows some of that (add tank healer pov).

[Lorath]

Very nice vid Psi, thx for sharing. Mini-lol at the 2 mins of fluff before the actual fight
Saw you holding lots of adds for a long period of time, looked pretty solid.

[Jensaarai]

ooo I heard Marrakesh in the video intro I pressed because I was bored...downloading this and watching later

[Nemcova]

My guild are just did our first night of alar attempts. it went ok.. down to 40% phase 2.

but we were killing the adds.. they are thinking of tanking all the adds instead of taking them down.

Now here is something, how many adds were you tanking?

Im holy for the guild right now, but they know im a prot paladin at heart.. so they are considering having me be the add tank.

how many should i have on me at a time?

[PsiVen]

If you have 450+ block value and solid other stats you can tank them all. One of our MTs died on Al'ar last night and I had to take all of the other add tank's embers so that he could help on the rotation. I don't recommend holding ALL of them though, you should have 2 tanks on the adds.

You'd want to be prot for Solarian too if you're going there next.

[Nemcova]

Well, currently im holy spec'd to raid.. and i was messing around with my various tanking sets.. and i was at 429 block value with no buffs and holy spec'd. sooo it brought up another question

how is the shield value talents calculated?

do i take my 429 and multiply it by 1.30? or do i look at my shield (shield of impen) and take that bare value and multiply it by 1.30 and THEN add all my bonuses?

i dont look TOO TOO deeply into theorycraft.. but i dont wanna spec 50g just to find out

oh.. and about solarian... what role does a prot paladin fill there? ive been trying to convince my guild to have me as the full time prot paladin on the raiding roster.. but they have been resisting it.. i mean.. if i can convince them that im absolutely needed for 2 bosses in the eye.. i think they'll let me stay prot all the time instead of speccing out to holy.

[adese]

how is the shield value talents calculated?

do i take my 429 and multiply it by 1.30? or do i look at my shield (shield of impen) and take that bare value and multiply it by 1.30 and THEN add all my bonuses?

According to WowWiki, use the following to compute your block value if you have 3/3 Shield Specialization:

Code: Select all

X = [(Shield block value * 1.3) + ((Strength / 20) - 1)]

I've used this a couple of times to figure out what my block value is (sure would be nice if they added it to the UI like they did with the rest of the stats), and it seemed to match up with what I was seeing in-game.

[PsiVen]

On Solarian you tank waves of adds, kinda like Tidewalker but with less emphasis on damage taken and more on threat so you can kill them in 10 seconds flat.

[Lore]

We generally use a warrior/druid AOE taunt rotation on solarian =\ AOE can have the adds dead before the taunt wears off, and there's always enough warriors and druids around to have one every time

[PsiVen]

Perhaps, but I doubt that warrior/druid is putting out 200+ DPS per target

[Fridmarr]

We found that killing some adds while offtanking others made it difficult to round them all up quickly. Changing the strategy to offtanking all of the adds took us from 20-30% wipes to a smooth kill. Many guilds do it either way, but I think the use of a prot paladin favors this way.

Here's what we did:
One prot warrior helping me with the adds, and 1 DPS warrior wearing a shield on roundup duty. I taunt off the warrior when he gets a lot since I can more reliably block lots of them, and I don't have to worry about trying pick up adds and tank the others at the same time. We left 2 tanks on Al'ar.
Our video shows some of that (add tank healer pov).

So you are talking about phase 2 here right? In phase 1 you killed the adds?

[Enkindu]

Hi!
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Stormscale&n=Enkindu
Before I begin: yes, I don't have the gear really required for this encounter, but alas I was forced into it (and actually had to get in the tank rotation during Phase 1 on our last 2 guild attempts because our warrior had an emergency issue to deal with. Luckily, this wasn't too hard and only ate 1 CB and only had 3 Debfuffs stacked because I can't charge..but it was alright) and A'lar apparently liked me so much that he stopped doing platform rotations during both attempts (the last attempt, he skipped 3 bigwigs timers on platform changes just to make some boss lovin at me!) and sucessfully lead him down from 33% to 0% in phase 1.

but anyway: my main beef is the add tanking during Phase 2:

I tried different tactics:
1) Avenging shield the mob, then taunt...No effect. the damn birds went straight after the Shadow priest (who was only focusing dpsing A'lar)
2) Consecrate where they pop then taunt..no effect. Still went after another shaman healer..
3) chasing the fuckers and HoJ'ing them and then taunt /consecrate/Judge..nope..it actually took 2 more taunts after which to finally peel ONE of the damned birds back onto myself, and eventually wiping the raid

My main question is:
what am I doing wrong? How can I improve this? are there any addons/macros ect that could help me get those fucking birds onto me in a faster and more effecient fashion and stick to me like glue? Do I need more spell damage / spell hit? Anything that is remotely helpful and any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated and welcomed!

Thanks!

P.S: what is a good balance of FR gear vs Mitigation for those adds?

[Lore]

Perhaps, but I doubt that warrior/druid is putting out 200+ DPS per target

There's nothing to stop me from consecrating while they AOE taunt

On the Al'ar subject, we tend to use the "kill the adds" strategy. Keep in mind that each add that dies does 2-3% damage to Al'ar as well, so it's not really any lost DPS time. I don't wear any FR while tanking them, I've never found it necessary.

[Gideon]

No FR, but I strap on all the +damage I own. This is the fight that really spurred me to get off my ass and start working on a decent threat set.