Gear question regarding A'lar

[Dimetrius]

Greetings. No this is not about FR

We're doing A'lar for the first time and I'm looking at the spare pieces of gear I have lying around to see if I can maximize my add-tanking capabilities.

I currently use
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30124 with the threat enchant.
I was thinking of switching to
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28518 with either threat enchant or glove reinforcements. Gemwise I'm torn between spelldamage or avoidance.

The other thing I'm torn about is my shield. The options I have available are
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=34676
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=34675 (current shield)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28606

And last, I was thinking of replacing my
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33516 with
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28502

What are your thoughts? Any tips?

[Thanehand]

Depends on how you're doing it..

The way we do alar is:

P1, 2 or 3 tanks up top, Pally down the bottom. Hunter pulls the add from the top each time, genning a lot of threat on it if he can, Pally taunts it off him. If that fails, Hunter FDs in Consc.
This gives the pally a reasonable start over the melee dps..

P2. The 2/3 tanks tank alar in the center, with the hunters pulling the two adds to teh pally tank each time. The pally just stands in one place with consc up, aoe tanking all the adds. The dps just nuke alar. (get Debuff Alarm from WoWace to help with Flame Patches while aoetanking)

This means, effectively, that the pally doesn't really need to gen much aggro... Therefore I stack Block value and avoidance to help the healers in P2 as much as possible. Otherwise Pally tank dead=wipe.

Avoidance, Block rating/value, armour and stm are your friends. Spelldamage weapon + 40SD should be all the threat you need.

[Holyfuri]

It does depend on how you do A'lar. Usually when we did him I was the add tank and responsible for pulling my own adds as well.

P1. Holy pally throws up RF. His heal aggro pulls down the adds immediately, I load up an avenger's shield as it heads down the ramp to grab it. If it misses judge righteousness, and if all else fails taunt. If all that fails the holy pally has the best chance of staying alive with an add on him. It minimizes chance of catastrophe, imo.

P2. I wait for A'lar to meteor, and immediately avenger's shield. This picks up both adds, and ranged dps nukes them as soon as they get to my consecrate.

Using this method I usually throw fire resist aura up and focus on high threat. Because I am the one picking everything up, the higher my threat the faster the adds die. It worked perfectly for us. Different groups do it different ways though. I personally never liked block value/rating for adds becaues I always had to much trouble going oom from them never doing any damage to me.