We've had 2 strategies to deal with the the bee-lining.

A bit about how we do it: we don't have an AE side. Both sides get an even cut of every class, and everything is done single target.

The easier startegy to execute, but harder to implement is to kill them faster than they spawn. It means a lot less healing from the healers in general, and therefor less aggro. As soon as you have 2 coloured kin up at a time, the raid DTS doubles.

The harder one to execute, but easier to implement is to have the MA on each side tag the mob quickly as it spawns (well inside the tunnel, before it's visible), then have a warrior sunder it a couple times to hold it. A warrior sundering reduces the damage done and you're constantly just getting them down just in time to even make it to phase 2, but it lends itself to consistency as long as your MA and warrior never get greedy and try to do DPS instead of their responsibility.

And the biggest thing is to ignore kin that get away. If you chase it down, it just cascades the effect. Let the kin get to where it's going and let the healer it's on move to get the kin into splash damage range of the raid.

My impression of drakonid aggro was always that they started with built-up hate from before they spawned, but it takes them until they walk out of the hole to figure out who that is. If you can hit them with a melee attack before that happens, they will more or less forget about who their previous target was (typically a healer on the other side of the room). The way we do it is simply to have all of the melee spamming AE skills (WW/Cleave/Sweeping Strikes/whatever rogues have) in the doorway, with two assists on each side.

We usually have a single priest/druid that starts healing a warlock at very low health in the beginning. All of Nefarian's shadowbolts are directed at him until he turns into the dragon form. We have another priest or druid assigned as back-up in case the first one gets silenced. We also use single target, split DPS on the two sides with 3-4 warriors picking up the drakonids.

Most of the drakonids head for the priest/druid that's spamming heals but they usually end up dying before they reach him. We don't use any AoE for phase 1 at all and most of our healers, especially shamans end up doing a lot of damage and minimal healing on phase 1.

Yes, this is exactly how we do Nef.

Edit: Actually, not precisely. We have 8 in the middle with the aggro-magnet killing chromatics and any stray drakonids that slip past. Then 16 on each side focus-firing the small drakonids only.

That does sound like a very cool strategy. I'll try to bring that idea up on our attempts tonight.

Yeah, we did this tonight and it helped a huge amount. We can now get Nef to phase 2 pretty consistently. Now to get that damned transition down.

Anyway, thanks a lot guys.