Once Al'ar begins a Flame Buffet cast, he will finish it regardless of what you do to him in the intervening time. This is why you get so many single Flame Buffets but very few double casts (at least, we rarely get double casts). Even with some DPS down we're able to stay on target...basically, if you notice yourself neck-and-neck with the Berserk timer or behind, switch from killing both adds to killing one. After the one add is dead, burn Al'ar until he goes up to Meteor. Kill the second add during the Meteor phase (where he's in the air), since you often are doing zero damage to anything during this time.

It should be noted that this is more dangerous in that DPSing the add takes focus away from spacing and survival...but neither should be a problem anyway if you're understanding the fight. Honestly, in a perfect world we'd just kill 2 adds quickly and use that extra time to burn Al'ar, but people find creative ways to die and often you have to make up ground.

If you kill an add while Al'ar is a ball of fire, it does not reduce his health. That's a lot of damage to give up, so it's advisable to be very careful with your timing. If you can't kill two adds per phase, you should either OT one permanently, or kill it right after Al'ar lands again (though this can be dangerous when you combine explosion damage with the nigh-inevitable Flame Buffet).

We just kill the adds as they spawn, in phase one, there is nothing else to do for the melees and in phase two some ranged can handle both spawns in time. Just let your tanks keep them with the back to a ramp (not to a wall, they will be kicked higher there!) and let your melee, remaining ranged (~5-6 should be enough for the adds) hurt alar. The adds aren't 73 if i remember correctly, so they won't resist that much and have lower regular armor, but alar with fearie fire, 5 sunders and as a stationary target is better for our melees (and noone expect the tank won't get hurt by an explosion during that phase).

We use 4 tanks, one in phase one for the adds, two in phase two.

You don't use melee on Al'ar in phase 1? Why?

First, how is Flame Patch on melee / Al'ar MT any different than on melee / Spawn(s) OT? Neither scenario lends to less players in position to eat a Patch. In fact, I would argue, your melee could be put in the position of taking Flame Patch tick(s) followed by a Spawn explosion, if melee is put on Spawns.

Killing Spawns can NOT add raid DPS, unless you're pulling off some crazy / dangerous strategy of OTing Spawns next to Al'ar for AoE (Re: Hydross with two spawns). Such a strategy would be much more dangerous -- unnecessary -- than simply OTing all the Spawns for the duration of Phase 2. I would simply not warrant such a strategy, for the loss of control and safety (presented by other strategies) and so very little in return from 3-npc AoE.

Without an AoE strategy, DPS staying on Al'ar will always be higher than DPS switching between Al'ar, Spawns, and again Al'ar. That's mathematics, and reality will never catch or match mathematics.

Good point on the meteor thing, but killing the adds in general seems like an issue of control to me. Al'ar doesn't have a ton of HP and from what others (notably Quigon) have said it's very fast to burn him down directly, assuming you can effectively offtank/heal the adds. You're buying more direct DPS on Al'ar at the cost of more chaos...and honestly, reducing the chaos is the only compelling reason to deal with the adds at all. Two adds have 170k combined HP, which is 7% of the boss's 2.3M HP for ~5% damage to Al'ar. That doesn't take into account DPS lost to waiting for control/solid aggro on the adds, or to re-positioning your DPS to kill them. You're selling your DPS at 70 cents on the dollar at best, which is okay because you're controlling the fight more completely.

In the end, I'd prefer to drop 2 adds with ranged (stick melee on Al'ar), use any extra time to DPS the boss and rinse/repeat for 8 minutes. But shit happens, and the fight has enough negotiable elements that if you make the right calls you can stay ahead of and even gain ground on the Berserk timer, even with 4-5 DPS dead.

edit: To answer Gurgthock's question about melee in Phase 1, we don't trust them to keep themselves alive :P In phase 2 they're on Al'ar full time.

Just tank/dps the adds where they spawn, then move at 20% and the ranged finish. Unless your melee are using the walk key, they should get plenty of dps time during p1. Sure you spend a lot of time running around, but you dps a LOT more than you do standing around waiting for adds to be pulled/tanked down below

To use 16% spell miss on bosses as a reason to leave casters on lower level adds is crazy...your casters should be maxing out their spell hit....it's the easiest way to increase DPS until you get up to the hit cap. But, ranged on adds for p2 is a no-brainer for us...it just has nothing to do with spell hit, but rather the fact that ranged have to finish the adds anyway lest the melee take explosions. It's also easier for ranged to position themselves for minimal movement if they're not chasing al'ar around the room and killing adds in a predictable spot.

Also, I'd just like to register my complaint about Al'ar's hit box being stupidly small in p2 (after he meteors once). That combined with the no-warning flame patch makes meleeing pretty damn annoying for this fight.

That only maximise our chance that one melee, addicted to deal 0.01% more damage will die in a fire quill. Or the offtank will get grilled after a knockback. We have a lot of wipes through ssc/te because someone isn't paying 110% attention, and that's why we try to minimize their chance to do so.

%spellhit is a problem for all those tailoring caster out there, i guess 9-10% spellhit is the average of our mages/warlocks.

And finally, we would need a ranged dps to stay back, helping and finishing the sons. That's a dps less for bringing Al'ar himself down. Well, that's after all to complicated for us, i think.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. He doesn't suffer the damage immediately, but will lose the 3% as soon as he respawns from the meteor.

As a side note, we had him despawn at 1% the other day when he decided to meteor an offtank who had his back to the cubbies near the door. Apparently, Al'ar decided that the floor texture there was outside of his room and leashed, causing him to respawn.

Got our first hour at this fight today.

Will be into phase 2 every time as soon as we solve one problem: Quills where he leaves from position 1 (westmost) and heads to position 4 (eastmost).

We use two tanks, one handling positions 1 and 3, the other handling 2 and 4. A Quill leaving position 4 is easy; the tanks are already in the right spot. A Quill after 3 is also easy, as the 1/3 tank is heading from 3 to 1 along the floor as soon as Al'ar leaves 3, regardless of whether he's Quilling or not. The tricky ones are Quills leaving 1 or 2, where the tank waiting and 2 or 3 has to stay in position if Al'ar doesn't Quill, or run all the way across to 4 or 1 if he does.

Our tank waiting at position 2 simply does not make it to position 4 in time (never got to test 3->1; didn't see that Quill at all today).


Anyone else have this issue? Will practice make us recognize the Quills fast enough to get there in time? Anything we can do to make it more reliable?

EDIT: Also, is Quill after 2 or 3 even possible?

Just use 3 tanks on Al'ar during phase1, it makes it really easy. Plus you're better off with 4 tanks anyways for phase2, and one tank can handle phase1 adds easily.

I'm a 2/4 tank, and coming from 2 going to 4 after a quill sucks. We just yell at one of our add tanks to cover 4 until I can get there, and we maybe take one tick. When I'm at 2, then move to 4 after a quill, but A'ar goes 1, I just burn a swiftness pot to get to 2 in time.

I had issues with jumping off the balcony in time for quills as well. I had to hesitate when he'd quill from 4 ("is he quilling or going 1?") but after a couple tries, the other tank noiced that he flies a little higher and I can tell the difference and react faster.

We're having an interesting issue with the pull....It's just annoying. Sometimes, for no discernable reason, he Flame Buffets on the pull. We shoot it, he flies down to the MT, one flame buffet, done. Sometimes, he doesn't. As far as I can tell, our MT is standing in the exact same place. Is it because he might be on the slim white border on the edge of the second level?

How many tanks are you using for phase 2? If you use the standard four why don't you simply have three tanks for Al'ar and one for adds in phase 1?

You can always try to use Shadowfiend if your tank isn't making it in time. It "tanks" suprisingly well(must have some insane dodge bonus or something) and can save you from quite a few buffets in phase 1. Of course, 6 minutes cooldown is long, but it's just for those emergencies.
And my own question now - if you keep meelee on Al'ar in phase 2, how do you avoid flame patches there? His hitbox is so small, that they basically all get in one spot, making it hard to notice if it's flame patch there - and chances of it spawning is much higher with so many people in one spot. Even with fast reaction, it seems to me like 2 ticks are pretty much unavoidable.

Having a healer always stand at max Intervene range helps as well as the aforementioned sprint pot.

Going back to the original reason for this topic. Has anyone had any success or use any fire resist on this fight in current form? Does it help any on the flame patches? I'm wondering if it would be worth it for people with lower hitpoints to use say 2 or 3 pieces of high FR. If they could hit about 200 FR (including a paladin in group for free 70 FR with aura) would that be helpful or just no use.

I was messing around testing last night with around 200 FR and didn't seem to notice any resisted damage from flame patch. I was not running my Eavesdrop to go back and look at log unfortunately so couldn't check to be sure, just watching SCT.

This fight is causing us more trouble than I think it should be. We save all adds from phase 1 and kill them off immediately during the first round of phase 2 with ranged. So Al'ar is normally about 80-85% for first meteor. We then offtank all the rest of the embers during phase 2 and burn Al'ar which is how we got our first kill. Eventually we lose too many to patches which leeds to adds getting a bit out of hand or we lose a tank because of dead healers etc. Has anyone found FR helpful at all for this fight?

(The reason we do not kill both adds each round is because it never seemed controlled fast enough in the attempts we was trying that method. We'd be waiting on tanks to get them picked up and in position way too long with dps doing next to nothing during that period or overaggroing the embers to the middle of the raid. Along with occasional add not dead by the time another 2 spawn so a tank would be chasing down a new add with a 10% add in tow, aka disaster waiting to happen.)

Yes the hitbox thing is unbelievably stupid.

Flame patch has a graphic before it hits, but it's pretty much impossible to see with all the melee stacked and the effect graphics spam. We have melee on him p2, and we just stay awake and run out. Someone might die occasionally but it's not really a problem if that's your only problem.

When we wipe, it's not from losing 1 melee, it's to something stupid like LOS on a tank or SUM BARES IS TRY 2 B 2 perfect with the charge after quill to avoid buffets and ending up taking a quill hit + crushings and dying.

We modified our morogrim strategy for phase 2. I run in full fire resist (365 w/ aura) and tank all the adds in p1. As each add comes down our locks tab off and DoT up each add (adds are 20% going into p2 which we then ae). In p2 our pally spams a lifetapping lock to grab both adds which another warrior and I peel off and we range dps down.

I'd really like some kind of graphics to indicate where a flame patch is going to land, if your computer gets a small hiccup as it spawns you're dead meat. You need to be quite fast not to get killed.

We took our first serious tries sunday night with one of our bears on vacation, and one of our bears out for most of the raid. We had 4 tanks in phase 2, but one was an alt, and one was a terribly geared warrior who we had to use due to lack of regular raiders online. We were using 2 up top, and it was going just fine, I just had to use a speed pot occasionally.

With both of our bears back this week, we'll be doing exactly what you described.

I still don't know why Al'Ar sometimes flame buffets on the pull. /shrug

Finally got him down last night using 5 tanks, 2 on adds in phase 2, killing both adds. Had about 2 minutes left on the enrage timer, although an unlucky flame patch led to an add tank death at like ~5% and the kill itself was hairy.

This is probably my least favorite encounter I've ever done in WoW. It definitely seems far more difficult than anything in SSC/TK sans the final encounters.

Can anyone with experience offtanking/healing OT in this encounter confirm that the adds do about 2500 unmitigated damage(not really sure exactly how much that would come out being on a tank). That damage figure is according to Bosskillers.