Al'ar makes me hot...get it?!

Now that I've adapted to life as a Prot Tank it's become a pretty routine and boring job. We stand around and unleash hellacious fury on our keyboards to cause a lot of threat to a comupter image so that it hates us more and doesn't pay attetntion to the 20 people behind me trying to kill it. Occasionally we get some fun extra things to do like interupt heals, and kite a bit, etc. but generally speaking we stand there and take a lot of punishment (like bad stand up comedians).

That is why I look forward to Sunday because that is when our guild raids TK. Unfortunately Sunday seems to be a bad day to raid and a lot of the time we've come up short and so we cannot go. We might have SSC down to a science but TK is still a little shaky and Al'ar is a big part of that.

Al'ar gives the tanks a chance to be fluid and it also requires a lot of communication and teamwork. If one of us isn't paying attention it's usually a wipe.

Phase 1 is pretty basic. We use a two tank rotation on the top (Myself and Maulmorr aka Angry Meatshield) with me starting the fight. We have two Tanks act as add pick up (Slashappy and Silveria, a Prot Tank and Prot Pally respectively) and then hand them off to our Druid Tank (Mooire aka Ferocious Bite). We save the adds in phase 1 to use as a nice head start for phase 2 and barring any mistakes we get through phase 1 without much trouble.

Phase 2 is where the fun begins.

We're still tinkering with how we want to do this phase, but on one of our kills we had the add tanks gather them up and give them to Mooire and let the ranged dps kill them off while the melee stayed on Al'ar. It was a crazy fight but we did kill her.

The two main problems we have are Melt Armor and the Flame Patches. Melt Armor turns the current tank into a giant Marshmallow waiting to be roasted (I like this analogy). The other Al'ar tank has to be faster than the speed of light to taunt Al'ar to him befor the dubuffed tank gets destroyed. Lately me and Maul havent been able to do this. When I had to taunt it on one attempt my Taunt was resisted, my CB was resisted and then my Mocking Blow missed... how cool is that? Then when it was his turn I got dropped immediatly and smelled of burnt marshmallow the rest of the night.

Flame Patches turn anyone who stand in them into Marshmallows, and our guys have a lot of trouble avoiding these. It's also fun when one springs up on the tank who just got the Melt Armor debuff and can't react in time. As a rule we've never done anything about them, but as soon as we get to go back to TK I want to see how it goes when the tanks spell reflect them and 'kill' them. If there aren't many Flame Patches on the ground our dps can't magically find ways to stand in them... right?

So for us to kill Al'ar the main tanks have to be quick to save the debuffed tank, pick up Al'ar quick after Dive Bombs, avoid Flame Patches and stay away from the area where the adds are being held.

The off tanks have to be quick to gather up adds before they play havoc with the DPS, find our Druid tank and let her pick them up AND they get to do all the Main Tank stuff if one of us goes down. (When I was originally an add Tank I got to do that once, and man is it fun to have to pick Al'ar up from across the room with your add still on you)

The add tank has to keep the adds gathered up watch for Flame Patches springing up under her, move the adds out of a Dive Bomb and not die when an add is killed.

The ranged DPS has to be aware of where they are at all times so they don't get killed by the Flame Patches, they have to run away from the Dive Bombs and most importantly they have to make sure not to kill an add during a Dive Bomb because it wont count and DPS fast so the adds don't pile up.

The melee DPS get to stab Al'ar... and watch for flame patches. They have all the fun.

The healers watch everyone doing all that and make sure it doesn't kill them. Of course they also have to avoid the same stuff at the same time. I would not want to be a healer here, but our healers rock and should be worshipped daily. <3

So the whole fight can be summed up rather easily... don't be the marshmallow.

:)