After killing Karathress, our guild was able to pick up a quest from Seer Olum. He spawned in the spot where Karathress stands. He gives a quest called The Secret Compromised which tells you to go to the Warden's Cage to talk to Akama. After a cutscene with a conversation between Seer Olum and Akama, Akama talks to Illidan. Illidan then tells Akama to kill Al'ar. Akama then gives you the quest Ruse of the Ashtongue which requires you to kill Al'ar wearing the Ashtongue Cowl. The Ashtongue Cowl gives you the appearance of an Ashtongue while in Tempest Keep. Upon using the Ashtongue Cowl in Tempest Keep, a buff called Ashtongue Ruse is applied to you giving you the appearance of an Ashtongue. The buff lasts through death but is removed when zoning. Screenshots of the conversation and what wearing the Ashtongue Cowl looks like:

1 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002439.jpg
2 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002452.jpg
3 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002527.jpg
4 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002548.jpg
5 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002611.jpg
6 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002657.jpg
7 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002739.jpg
8 http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_002810.jpg
Ashtongue Ruse: http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...307_004429.jpg

So you have to have 25 people looking like a Broken when you kill Al'ar. Fun!

The question now of course is, and I doubt anyone can answer this yet, what happens after killing Al'ar? There were some rumours about having to kill the first boss in Hyjal, apparently it was mentioned in a US magazine.

Also you have to do the Ata'Mal Terrace quest before talking to the guy behind karathress.

Yea, that was irritating, that guy better respawn tomorrow.

Anyone know if you can keep the instance open (ssc) to let ppl pick up the quest?

After you release the Seer, he will despawn in about 5 minutes, maybe less.

It's possible that a soft reset will put him back in his cage and you can release him again, but I'd have to check.

I just zoned back into our SSC to check (this was a few hours after the raid had ended) and the NPC was not there. Seems like they thought of that one already.

Are you certain of this? Being attuned to TK has nothing to do with it?

We had a few members unable to get the quest who are attuned to TK, so no it is certainly the Ata'mal Terrace quest chain.

Hyjal requiring a drop from vashj and kael (5/6 kills for the entire raid?) to attune and then killing the boss would make the black temple an extremely executive club!

The devs did mention that they liked how attunements seperated guilds though..

The entire raid group can now loot vials instead of 4-5 dropping.

Honestly I dont know what the big problem with attunements is, its like if Naxx required you to kill Skeram, Nef and Satura. They dont want people bypassing content like 80 % of the guild just skipped AQ after Fankriss to go in Naxx. If you do the intended progression the attunement is effortless, if you want to skip everything and just get tier 6 gear without doing heroics, Karazan etc. you just cant ride on other efforts anymore.

It's difficult, sure, but not unreasonable. Any guild who stands a serious chance of progressing through Black Temple is going to be farming the previous instances to gear up; they'll be killing Karathress, Al'ar and eventually the first boss of Hyjal in the natural course of progression.

This has been debated to the bone during the Everquest PoTime era, the gist of the problem is that by having extremely linear raid progression you will encounter difficulties when attrition will kick in. For normal guild progression it's OK, but say you have to recruit 4-5 people after 6 months (which is quite a low attrition rate nowadays for most endgame guilds), you are miles ahead of 90% of your server in term of gear progression and raid attunement progression.
The gear gap is OK, enough gear would be disenchanted on farm status content so that your new recruits will be able to get acceptable and fast upgrading gear quickly, but say access to your farm-status content has pre-requirement in SSC which you have left behind 6 month ago... Can you see the problem facing endgame guilds ?
This means that your recruitment pool is effectively limited to 10% of the server and that is bad for guild stability.
This problem only gets worse (although on a longer timeframe) for 2nd wave of raiding guilds, those that have maybe 4 raids a week, it is worse because they won't be able to muster the raidforce necessary to attune their new recruits without effectively halting their progression raids...

I know skipping content looks bad from a hcg point of view, but you have to be pragmatic here and take attrition into account, otherwise you will face massive difficulties and the means to overcome it decreases the level of fun you're rightfully expect to get from the game.

This is solved with the scrolls from the last bosses introduced this patch.

I think it's been mentioned elsewhere, but could you please elaborate on these scrolls and what they do?

You need to clear SSC + The Eye to enter hyjal !

Off the end bosses of SSC/Eye drop a scroll to attune a player to said instance.

I don't think anyone has killed Vashj yet on live to verify, but it's theorized that this spell comes from a drop off her. Presumably, it's an item you can loot from Vashj, and use it on someone to instantly attune them to SSC. It's also assumed that Kael will have a similar drop, based on this spell.

Grants the target unlimited access to the raid zone. BoP item, where you can give the target attunment, Vashj for SSC, Kael for TK etc. So a guild that kills Vashj can attune one person per kill.

It's not a theory, it's actually true. Many people can confirm from PTR DT'd Vashj kills.

Here is the Vashj one:

Apparently Curse just killed Al'Ar and got a quest to kill Rage Winterchill in Hyjal for the next step