Almost had Alar

Previously in the week we had zoned in and killed Void Reaver (No T5 shoulders for me yet!) and I picked up a pair of tanking bracers. Compared to my current badge bracers I’m not yet sure which ones I like more yet (I still have to slap a stam enchant on the new ones).

Since many in the guild feel we will be stuck at Vashj for a while the officers decided it was time to progress in TK. It was decided it was time to go learn the Alar fight. After the attempts we made I have don’t have a lot to say about him except. Damn you Alar! /shakes fist. You rotten Mot$er F*#ker piece of Sh#$. WHY WONT YOU JUST DIE! Sunday night we went into TK to learn the Alar fight. Several times we had him down to 4% but no luck in getting that killing blow. This is one of the hardest bosses I have yet to see on the 25 man content. When I say “hard” I guess I mean one of the hardest for the tanks, I suppose from a ranged dps point of view this is actually pretty easy for them. I have read several places this fight is all about tank coordination and add control, the rest is cake. As a tank you stand above the room on platforms to tank Alar. There is 4 platforms and he will go from platform to platform around the room. You must have a tank at that platform or he will start doing a fire buffet on the whole raid. The fire buffet is much like Mag’s fire spell and will quickly wipe the raid if left alone. Since we had 5 tanks in the raid (3 prot warriors/2 feral druids) that left us with 3 guys to cover the 4 top platforms and 2 druids to cover the adds on the bottom. That seemed to work out pretty well, with the 3 tanks at the top working in a rotation of covering the platforms. As a platform tank you have to remember to stand on the lip of the platform so the healers below have LOS on you or you will die ( I constantly worry about doing something to accidently fall off).

Me waiting at platform 4 ready to dodge quills or to tank him at my platform.

Me tanking standing on the "Lip" to get raid heals.

I myself caused one wipe which sucks, I hate doing that but it was my first time attempting Alar and even though I had watched the video it really didn’t prepare me enough for working the “quills”. In phase 1 Alar will fly up to the ceiling and start spinning in a circle raining down quills of fire. If you are hit by one of these its instant death. The good news is that they will only fall as far as the upper platforms. When he does this all the tanks have to jump down to the floor to avoid the quill death, which I did just fine and was never hit. The problem is that after he is shooting the quills he instantly flies to platform 1 or 4. The reason that sucks is that he gets to the platform and finds no tank there to tank him, since all the tanks are back down on the bottom level to avoid the quills. As soon as Alar is done with the quills the tank has to immediately begin running up the ramp toward his platform and then charge the rest of the way to get to alar to stop the fire buffet. One the wipe I caused I didn’t reach alar fast enough letting him get about 3 flame buffets off. Mistake quickly learned and I can now get back up to alar with only 1 flame buffet getting out (1 is good , 2 is normal). As a guild we have phase 1 down to a science now, no problems, no deaths. Tanks know their rotations, druid tanks handle their adds (we did have a problem with druid tanks for a while but that has also been fixed). Phase 2 is where we still have a problem losing people, which causes us to hit the enrage timer (usually around 4% left, which happened about 4 times Sunday night). Alar has several abilities which I won’t really explain here since this isn’t a “how to” post, but it seems like our dps had problems avoiding the fire and running away from the exploding mobs. Tank wise Phase 2 is easier than phase 1 and you just have to keep up a steady tank rotation on alar to avoid “molten armor” which gets your tanks 2 shot. Also while tanking Alar prot warriors can do what is termed “sweeping” which I found to be quite fun. Pop Spell reflect and go stand in a fire patch. You reflect the fire back onto itself which then puts out the flames. Your reflect does not wear off since the fire patch is technically a channeled spell and is what a prot warrior should be during while you have the “molten armor” debuff on you. Once we can get the dps to be a little more coordinated in handling phase 2 instead of running around screaming like their dick is on fire I think we will stop having people die and have more dps output allowing us to beat the timer.

Alar phase 2 ground phase

Alar's adds which have to be killed. (I shoudlnt have been tanking these but they were loose. Killing these adds takes off 3% of Alar's life and dps should focus on burning these guys down)

I am looking forward to this weeks raid schedule, im hoping we down a massive amount of farm bosses then leading to progession kills in TK and maybe some shots at vashj.