You'd be surprised about the melee damage, actually. We've killed them twice so far, both doing Sacrolash first, and looking at both WWS parses (
First,
Second) the melee took around the same damage as anyone else in the raid. I completely agree about Sacrolash first being more controlled as well, the only random factor is Shadowfury (and some ranged DPS deciding to jihad the raid :\), which isn't usually that big of a deal and is why all of our healers were wearing PVP trinkets.