We usually have me tanking the adds, so Avenger's Shield has the adds locked down (barring misses) immediately. However, the helpful Hunters tended to try to just get aggro on the adds and pull them to me, where I could immediately taunt them - this should be pretty possible with the Druid as well, and very useful. He could just grab one add, pull the add to the tank spot, and have the Hunters pull the other one to the tanking spot.

We just DPS'ed the adds with melee on Al'ar. Yes, you can definitely carry around twelve+ adds, but it's a massive pain in the ass (especially with flame patches). Killing the adds gives you a simple one-minute cycle. All of our kills were at least a minute ahead of the enrage timer - we only ever fell behind on wipes where we would lose a few people, then hemorrhage steadily. To be honest, offtanking the adds would have been harder for us, simply because it makes the pickup much more complicated than it really needs to be.

I have a question about al'ars adds. We succesfully killed al'ar last week pretty handilly after only a few attempts, but this week we've been running into the enrage timer nearly every attempt with 5-10% left. The way I understand the fight, if you can kill the adds quickly enough to not have them build up on the add tank, there souldn't be a problem with the enrage timer since the adds will do more than enough damage to kill al'ar. Somone in our guild mentioned that the 3% is taken from al'ars current remaining health instead of a fixed number so they deal less and less damage as the fight goes on, so you still have to do some damage to al'ar directly. I spose it's possible that the fight works like this but I don't see why blizzard would design the encouner to work like that. It's been mentioned in this thread that the damage from the adds is not dealt when al'ar is in meteor form, which i think is our problem since we were missing several of our better ranged dps people...but anyways, is the damage the embers deal to al'ar a fixed number or does it diminish as her health decreases?

Killing the adds early enough that we usually have about 5 seconds of DPS time between the last add dying and Al'ar starting Meteor, with 2-3 full-time DPS on Al'ar, puts us well ahead of the enrage timer. You should be fine if you can manage to have the ranged DPS killing all of the adds with melee on Al'ar.

Your guildmate is wrong, the adds definitely do not subtract from Al'ar's current health. The effect past 10% would be negligible if that were the case.

Definitely not. We had a skin-of-our-teeth kill last night with about 6 people left standing, and we got the last ~4% of Al'ar down by killing two adds with no dps on Al'ar.

We have a blanket rule that at 20% we stop DPS on adds, and just burn Al'ar to keep things simple down the stretch. However, when she is in the air for a meteor I'll pick an add and DPS it until she comes back down, usually, I can kill two adds this way and it makes the fight finish off a bit smoother.

We do the same, thankfully the adds now despawn... On one pre-patch enrage timer pushing kill, I had about 8 adds on me when Al'ar finally died. I ended up using 2 soulstones after his death just trying to deal with the adds.

Our kills lately have been going quite smoothly, we usually save the 4-5 adds after Al'ar hits 45ish% (killing them halfway or so) in P1 and kill them immediately entering P2. For these, dps assists the add-tank (me) with his back against the wall until they are dead. After that, it's my job, and the hunters help, to pick up the adds after meteor. I constantly move them around near a wall, trying to stay out of flame patches and meteors, while an offtank taunts one off me, back up to a wall, and dps kills it. Once your dps gets to the point where you can kill 2 adds in one meteor cycle, the fight becomes a lot easier.

I would agree, but only to an extent. There are distinct benefits to having 0-2 adds up at all times. Healing demands are greatly lessened on the add tank, and picking up adds is much simpler and almost foolproof. Running around and trying to grab adds is a nightmare for your offtank. The fight is a lot easier to control if you can kill the adds and DPS Al'ar.

It's also very possible to assign specific people to DPS Al'ar full-time. Our melee are all full-time on Al'ar in phase 2 because it greatly benefits their DPS and they'd be a drain on raid resources anyways, considering how quickly adds die.

Sure, if you're having problems with the enrage timer, you can certainly go ahead and offtank adds. On the other hand, our raids certainly don't have exceptional DPS, we're currently running with two Paladins and three Shamans and learned him with three Paladins and two Shamans, and we're still far ahead of the enrage timer. I honestly see the enrage on that fight as a non-issue, unless you have DPS dying, much like Fathom-Lord Karathress. We have not had any "good" attempts lost to the enrage. Every attempt where we were anywhere near the enrage, at least two people died no more than a minute into p2, and we normally had 4-5 deaths.

Of course, if you're killing adds, like Denogran says:
The fight is extremely easy if you can kill the two adds in the meteor cycle without devoting all of your DPS'ers to doing so. This doesn't take exceptional gear, or amazing skill, from anyone. Honestly, I spent the entire last fight as the add offtank watching Family Guy and no one noticed.

I would only recommend offtanking adds, especially trying to offtank adds for the entire fight, if you have serious DPS issues and you have a very strong tanking corps. Even then, you're going to need better DPS to do other fights, so why not work on it at the same time?

Yeah, we kept rogues and shadow priests on A'lar the whole time while the rest of ranged took out the adds. We had an unfortunate amount of adds die while A'lar was vanished, though. For next week that shouldn't be a problem, since there will be a 2nd tank on the 2nd add and DPS will be able to unload on it as soon as the first add is dead (a few of our earlier tries were blown by DPS pulling aggro on the add and killing it in the middle of a group of people, so DPS were being very careful about that).

We only had 2 Rogues for melee, so what we did was have Warlocks dot up adds in Phase 2 then go back to DPS'ing Al'ar. This combined with the 2 Rogues and the tank was more than enough to ensure the adds went down.

I think it's just important to understand that each raid group is unique, and to find a strategy that works for it.

This is how we do it. However we have a paladin tank so he has very little problem holding aggro on both adds. Also we use 3 tanks on Al'ar for taunting off the melt armour tank so we have a little bit less DPS but never have had a problem with enrage. We also do not save any adds from P1 > P2. Lastly, we also use an enhance shaman, so he is on Al'ar full time in P2 also.

One thing that happened to us last time though (on target for our fastest ever clear too >.<) was that if you tank the adds in the doorway spot (either side of the door you enter to reach Al'ars room has 2 niches, we used to use these for the tanking spot) its possible for Al'ar to evade if he meteors your add tank. I think what happened was Al'ar was inside the wall and so it counted as if we tried to leave the room. So just be wary of this, it was a very frustrating 15% reset!

Hi all!,

it'd be really great if one of the moderators could change the "Al'Ar" in the name of this thread to "Alar" so the Search function works Thanks a lot in advance!

Thanks a lot to everyone for the information in this thread! We're gonna head for serious raid tries on Al'ar and I'm sure the info here will help speeding it up a lot!

I've got a couple of questions for which I couldn't find answer in the thread so far though. I'm thinking on going with the detonate route, not because I'm worried about DPS, but about people dying to Flame Patches. Wowwiki states that the phase 1 adds don't hurt Al'ar anymore during Phase 2. Can anyone please confirm if that's true or not?

Also, can anyone confirm if the Meteor damage does in fact get splitted (or lessened) between everyone that it hits like the Meteors in AQ or Arcatraz?

Thanks a lot in advance!

I think that the one phase 1 add we ever saved up actually did hurt Al'ar, but I'm not certain. Honestly, though, flame patches aren't a big deal if people react to them. The only time I've ever really seen problems with it is flame patch under a tank with melt armor or a bunch of adds, one of which is about to explode.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way any more.

You could also have meant having a bit of DPS on the adds so that you didn't have the full compliment. I apologize for the misinterpretation, though.

(1) If the thread gets renamed per the above poster's request, take out the nonsense about fire resist which long ago stopped being part of the discussion as it's totally irrelevant to fighting Al'ar.

(2) You can't split the meteor damage. You can definitely wipe the raid trying though.

Thanks a lot for the responses!

I'm gonna try during our Al'ar tries (tomorrow most likely) to drag adds to Phase 2 so I can confirm or deny this myself. Wish us luck!

I don't necessarily agree that it is irrelevant. We use a Prot Pally wearing a significant amount of FR + significant shield block value, round up all the adds from P1 (since tanking them is pretty trivial with high block value), and then we chain detonate at the start of P2 (single target). Vast majority of the time our tank resists the fire damage explosion, when she does not, we let her get topped off before we detonate the next one. It's worked well for us, one-shotted Al'ar last night using this approach.

Cloud, forgive me, it's irrelevant for 20-25 people in your raid, depending.

That said, if you read the first zillion posts, the discussion was about raid-wise FR in this fight, which is a guarantee wipe strat.

And really, the thread is not about whether you should have 0-5 tanks in FR, though if people want to discuss it that's fair game.

The thread is largely about -- since the pre-actually-anyone-fighting Al'ar phase of the thread -- how to defeat Al'ar.

And everyone knows -- as do all strats posted -- that you don't put people in FR. In fact, it's among the first few words at wowwiki. Thus the title is very misleading, even if you use a paladin in FR.

For what it's worth, we did this with 3 warriors and 1 druid last week, none of whom was in any FR gear at all as far as I know.

I can now confirm that the adds from Phase 1 do indeed hurt Al'ar when detonated in Phase 2.

We went last night for 1,5 hours of serious tries and after 4 tries she was down to 15%, with the first two lost to a Fire Quill and a bad Melt Armor rotation.

We were using the "blow up the teddy bear" approach with melee withering the adds to 10%, but we didn't drag all the adds from Phase 1 as it was hard to keep the bear up through 10 of them without gimping the healing somewhere else (with our raid config of 7 healers). Something that I noticed when we started dragging adds from 50% Phase 1 only is that you might end up with only 4 adds if you get a couple a Fire Quills in the last 20% and then the idea of blowing up a Soulstone and complicating the transition for 12% damage doesn't sound that nice.

A problem that we had was that he would "die" in Phase 1 right after a platform swap, and then the melee would have to rush down the last add real fast before the Seed AOE could start. The time it takes that last add to reach the bear plus the time needed to rush it down would add a bit of uneasiness to the beginning of Phase 2. Is people using the AOE detonate tactic delaying the end of Phase 1 or controlling this in any form?

How do you guys collect the adds after every Meteor? Our last try was very solid, with everyone in full control of the situation and the "chaos factor" gone already, but the add tanks (we use 2) would have trouble to grab their newly spawned Embers while still staying in a safe place (as to not blow up people when one of the Embers dies to the ranged DPS). This is only a problem for us because our adds do not die (but are close to dying) before the next Meteor most of the time. Do you pull the adds to the tanks? Call for a DPS stop at every Meteor until the tank is back against the wall?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Personally, I cheat and use Avenger's Shield to pick up each set of adds after Meteor. When I'm unable to, the Hunters do their best to grab aggro on the adds and bring them over to the tanking spot, where I taunt them onto me. DPS should hold off until the adds are in the tanking spot, though ours rarely do. The DPS gain in that case comes at too great a risk of pulling aggro.

Having one designated healer (Paladin with Righteous Fury works well) heal people from the damage dealt by Meteor is a fairly good way of getting the adds into a predictable for your add tanks. Then just set it up so that when adds are in a certain position, DPS can open on them.

In our case it's slightly different, I usually grab the adds with Avenger's Shield, a Feral Druid grabs one of the adds off me (Mostly because we've had it happen before in which DPS killed both adds at the same time, which is not pretty if you're not in FR), and then me and the Feral Druid move to separate spots near the doorway where you enter Al'ar's room, DPS knows that once the adds are in position there they can open up.

Obviously if you don't have a Prot Paladin, I'd suggest having a Holy Paladin with Righteous Fury up heal the Meteor damage, give him a nice easily identifiable raid target icon over his head, and tell your add tank(s) to taunt them off him and take them to some pre-designated spot. Mostly this works because there's a a few seconds gap between the adds spawning and Al'ar himself becoming active again, so in the meantime the general healing your other healers would otherwise be doing isn't an issue yet.

Ditto. Also, if you have two hunters you can get 2/3 of the meteors misdirected to your tank. Since Al'ar is tauntable, this is a much better use of their cooldowns.

Just wanted to say "Thank you!" to the EJ community for the info in this thread (and all others too).

We downed Al'ar yesterday at the 1st try of the night, with a full 3 hour raid of tries on Sunday, including the mandatory 1% wipe.

I can now confirm some points that rose questions for me when I originally started to follow the thread:

* Phase 1 Embers damage Al'ar in Phase 2 when they die.
* Embers dying when Al'ar is in the middle of a Meteor DO damage her.
* Al'ar _very_ often bugs during Phase 1, getting stuck at tanking position 1 (leftmost if facing from the entrance). She would stay there when she's supposed to move to the next spot and spawn an Ember as if she'd moved. The fight does not break and continues normally afterwards though, so don't worry when this happens to you.
* Embers in Phase 2 seem to spawn with starting aggro on the person that was targeted by the Meteor. It's very low threat though and the first heal after this will normally pull them both.

I'd like to add for guilds trying Al'ar now without a lot of experience....

(1) I see no reason to bring Phase 1 embers into Phase 2. I know people do it. I know there is some hypothetical shortening of Phase 2 by doing it. It seems rather unneccessary, causes there to be a lot more moving parts, and should be avoided if you are learning Al'Ar. Just kill the adds as they spawn throughout the fight.

(2) I've never seen Al'ar bug as okkita mentioned, albeit we've only killed her a few times. This bug, such as it is, may be rare but sounds pretty unimportant either way. If you had your druthers, you'd always want Al'ar to stay on P1 and or always go there after quilling because you could just stack your best tank there. In reality, the firebird will move.