As a preface, I didn't know where to post this - so I apologize for making such a small thread.

The packs of dragonhawks before Al'ar, how do most guilds handle them? Is there a way to make it less chaotic? With all the silencing/knockbacks, it makes single targeting them crazy, but we do that, and it's worked for us. But has anybody tried AOE'ing them? I'm not sure if that's even more suicidal, but there's gotta be an easier way than single target.

How we do it.... we have 2 tanks grab the 2 blood elves and tank them to both sides of the door in the corridor before it. We have another 1-2 tanks grab the hawks and drag them through the corridor to the open room where 2 healers will heal up the tank and be careful, the tanks will keep aggro while the rest of the raid is in the corridor to the sides of the wall until the hawks pass through and nuke down the blood elves then go for the dragonhawks, repeat again.

Once they are all gathered you may AOE/single target as you see fit.

What we do is separate the birds from the blood elves. We have hunters "tank" then blood elves and dps those down first while all the tanks try to gather up the bird into a corner and build agro on as many as they can. After the BEs are dead just AoE the birds. Melee get to have fun being knocked back repeatedly DPSing the birds but no one is ever close to dying.

That being said, I am not sure how valid of a topic this is to make a whole thread about it.

We generally have one or two people tank the humanoids and another person gather up all the dragonhawks in a corner. DPS single targets the humanoids down first, before moving onto AOE what's left. By the time the humanoids are dead, there's still a bit of flying about, but generally aggro stays on the tank. The important thing is that the dragonhawk tank pulls and is given some time with only healing aggro to compete with - things generally spiral out of control if a couple break loose due to DPS starting too early. By the time DPS moves to the dragonhawks, you also have two spare tanks to help out if you still don't have a handle on things.

Thanks for the helpful replies everybody.

And like I said, I wasn't sure where to post this..

If it's an option, a pally tank on the dragonhawks trivializes those packs. We've got one pally that alternates tanking/healing as needed (well geared in each role) and as long as you cleanse the silence we just single target the elves down and then AE the hawks. Note, if you do this, don't be stupid melee ;p I got the amazing idea to corner myself so the knockback spam wouldn't stop me from DPSing, and got machine gun wing-buffeted.
Still, this has been our normal strat recently, it's just super easy. We used to single target and CC as many of the hawks as possible but that took forever to mark them up etc.

You can sheep them. You can Hibernate them.

As long as your mages and druids aren't sleeping, you shouldn't really have a problem.

Or, as mentioned above, a Paladin tank would do the trick as well.

We single target CC all the hawks using MD to pull the first of the packs well back into the hallway (to avoid hawk punts and lock fears pulling the other pack). Mages, locks, druids, and hunters (scare beast + traps) all can take one, free tanks generally picking up anything loose to keep them off healers and to build aggro for when we dps them, with 2-3 tanks picking hawks up as we kill them the dps doesn't have to wait for aggro and it goes quickly enough. We do have a druid/rogue go stealth and mark them, if you are really annoyed by the time this takes you can have them do it while you kill the last hallway pack, especially if your mages are focus targeting their sheeps and don't need marks up to resheep.

Either AOE tank them or CC as many as you can.

We MD pull the birds to a Feral Druid who tanks them with his back in a corner. Archers are tanked away from the birds. Melee and single target DPS kill the archers and casters AoE the birds. I never thought it was too complex.

Prot pally makes these pulls make you want to kill yourself when he isnt around.

Heh, there are exactly 6 Dragonhawks, and 2 Blood Elves, you can put 8 symbols on them and let whoever handle each one individually.

In true madness, we used to use 3 Warriors, 3 Mages, and 2 Warlock to control each one individually. It's not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it's completely neat.

I don't know, it is really not that much of a problem is it? We've always just zerged em, single targeting down the elves with the hawks somewhat corner tanked by whoever can grab em. From there, seed and AE and multishot or whatever works fine and although you'll get knocked all over and some healers will get silenced, it really isn't that bad in the end. I can't imagine the pain of assigning CC is worth it in the end.

We have 2 tanks grab the blood elves, and a druid + paladin + dps warrior grab the birds.
We tank the blood elves next to the door leading to al'ar, and the birds in the narrow area a bit more back.
Everyone is always highly annoyed with the constant knockbacks, but we get them down without much trouble.

It really doesn't even have to be a fully Prot-specced paladin. A 41/20/0 paladin who's picked up some surplus tanking gear along the way should be able to do fine.

All mages sheep a bird, the 2 humanoids are tanked, the remaining birds are dpsed down by the raid. You can use any kind of cc you want on the birds, like traps. But fear is by far the best CC for these guys

Our Prot pally shield pulls the packs when they path near the entrance doorway, backs into the corner (inside the corridor) that's next to the door out, and tanks the entire pull from there. SOMETIMES by the end of the pull one of our warriors has managed to pull the elves off him, but not usually. We wait for 3 consecrates then AE the birds, after that, have the pally run towards the zone line to pull the elves into the corridor. It's a little bit of spike at the beginning, but absolutely doable with a decently geared prot pally.

Same.

I misdirect the entire pack back into the initial hallway (near the last 6 pack), two warriors grab the blood elves, and the other tanks try to hold the birds as well as they can. Then I just tab throw marked one bird at a time for focus fire. Sometimes there's aoe, sometimes there isn't. I don't think we ever considered bothering to CC them.

Since the edges of the doorway into Al'ar's room don't seem to prevent LoS on the archers, what we do is put our two Prot Warrior tanks at the back of that narrow corridor (closer to the TK entrance than to Al'ar), have two Hunters put up simultaneous Misdirects, and have the two tanks duck out of LoS. The archers will charge through towards the tanks, generally going all the way back into the original trash hallway (or, at the very least, quite far into the narrow corridor). They're tanked and single-target killed back there, to prevent concerns about accidentally pulling the other patrolling group.

We single-target tank and CC the dragonhawks, just for simplicity's sake. Generally, it's a combination of tanking, Hibernate, Polymorph, and even traps on occasion. Whatever keeps them under control is best.

A zerg AoE strategy would probably be just as effective, but we find this is more strategic. There's no opportunity anywhere for an accidental double-pull, mass silence of the casters/healers, archers letting loose on healers, or otherwise. Our DPS is high enough that single-target nuking them down isn't all that noticeably slower, either.

Raid target icons bound to your numpad will save you a lot of time, if you choose to mark these up. If your CC is coordinated enough, maybe you don't need them.

We generally mark everything up (stealthed rogue acquires targets for all) and stand well back in the corridor (the room where the last previous group were) so the two archers have to run well in there.

A hunter then pet pulls a pack (poor pet) and the whole pack come rushing down the corridor. Mages sheep one birdie each, archers are tanked and OTs tank the rest of the birds making single-target killing easy.

MD the entire pack to a feral druid / protection paladin (or both if you like redundancy). Have them standing back of the final hallway segment, backs into a nice corner.

Wait until all mobs reach the tank(s). 2 "main-tank-types" (we use our MT/OT for this; doesn't matter, they hit like girls) run past and into the hallway and pick up the archers. All dps focuses these down while the tank(s) build threat on the birds.

Watch healing aggro on the tank(s) that have the birds, cleanse silences, and don't stand in fires. When the archers die, frost nova and nuke the crap out of the birds.

The major issue with these packs is pulling individual birds from the clump and having them run around doing knockback and silence. It's a major pain in the butt. Just get them onto the tank, use PoM/Earth Shield/low-threat-heals to keep them topped up, and win.

Once you've done it successfully a couple of times, it's a walk in the park. The big birds in Al'ar's room are far more of a pain, and even those are easy.

Not sure of whether or not you know this, but if you have the charge target out of line of sight of the birds, they don't charge. Fun times.