Herioc Al'Akir - The bane of my life

[Blonk]

25-man is incomparably harder than 10-man, but that's besides the point.

We got the kill rather quickly in about 2 hours from our first pull (we went as a fun night on an off-day from 25s), and this was even our first time pulling the boss on hard mode, even before our 25-man kill. If anything's going to stop you from killing the boss it's frustration and repeat errors. Also, you don't need an obscene amount of stack resets (though it helps) or four healers.

What we went with ~
(tank) Paladin
(heal) Druid
(heal) Paladin
(heal) Shaman
DK
DK
Hunter
Moonkin
Arcane Mage

Here's a diagram for P1 positioning.


Red indicates the tank
Purple indicates a healer
Green indicates DPS
The numbers 1-3 in each of the segments represents the danger level. Areas labeled 3 being most dangerous, and 1 being least dangerous. You'll want to put all of your least-mobile people (such as melee) and stand-still healers in 1 spots, and highly-mobile people (such as hunters) and movement-enabled healers in 3 spots.

For P1 you'll want to isolate the tank as well as his healer in the spot next to him. When a fork lightning appears, have one person move from it and the other person stay inside of it. This will lessen the chance of spreading forks to 4-people groups. If a fork happens to spawn on a healer group and the double dps group he is also responsible for, don't be afraid to use cooldowns. They will be back up before the fight gets hectic again in P2.

For P2, group up on the tank healer's spot and regenerate mana. The beginning of P2 is very relaxed. You'll want to get out of the phase with everyone at roughly 18 stacks in 10-man, 19 at the absolute highest. At this point, the raid will be taking more damage than you could heal bomb back up. Though our group had many stack-resetting classes, this wasn't very necessary as we were transitioning before we even hit a 15 stack. Let the tank take the adds and dedicate one of your ranged to handle adds full time for debuff juggling. We used our hunter for this. Make sure the person is vocal as there are times where they'll need a bit more burst to beat the timer.

For P3, you will group up at the head and go top-top-top, bottom-bottom-bottom, top-top-top, bottom-bottom-bottom (rinse and repeat). Once you get into phase 3, just don't do anything stupid and it's a guaranteed kill. Nothing at all changes with the exception of cloud spawn rates and damage output.

[Trispec]

You guys dont even have heroic omnotron or nef down and you are working on alakir?


Makes no sense to me, even though alakir 10man is a joke

Even on 10 man it is far from a joke, especially if your gear isn't all BiS, which from what I gather here it isn't. Honestly you are going to be slamming your dick in a door for a while before you get it down. Best tips you can get, 3 heal it, have a dps dk tank stormlings to get them out of the raid. Never have the tank on the stormlings.

[jyn]

People saying we are trying to wrong boss is fair enough, but to outright say we aren't good enough is a different matter.

And why do you think they are saying it's the wrong boss?
Just saying...

[Deleted]

And why do you think they are saying it's the wrong boss?
Just saying...

Inexperienced, doing it in the wrong order would also probably mean we havn't collected enough gear yet?

Like i said, if you dont have anything constructive to post, please don't waste your time bashing us.

Thank you Blonk that is a lot of help, especially with the diagram showing the more dangerous areas. As for P2 it's me that is in charge of killing the adds, and i ask for help from the other hunter if i feel that i'm falling behind. With regards to healing P1, do you have 1 healer dedicated to the tank and then the other 2 healers in charge of themselves and 3 dps?

[elitistniceguy]

edit: answered

[Blonk]

Inexperienced, doing it in the wrong order would also probably mean we havn't collected enough gear yet?

Like i said, if you dont have anything constructive to post, please don't waste your time bashing us.

Thank you Blonk that is a lot of help, especially with the diagram showing the more dangerous areas. As for P2 it's me that is in charge of killing the adds, and i ask for help from the other hunter if i feel that i'm falling behind. With regards to healing P1, do you have 1 healer dedicated to the tank and then the other 2 healers in charge of themselves and 3 dps?

In theory, yes, but not quite in reality. The healers are evenly spaced depending on the amount of damage could potentially be done to people around them. The tank healer is more isolated because tanks take more damage than anyone else. I can just about guarantee, though, that the 3-spot healer to the left of the tank will be dealing with two forks that the 1-spot healer on the top needs to assist him with leaving the 2-spot tank healer also in charge of the two DPS to the right of him. It's a very dynamic phase, or "RNG" as people that like excuses put it.

[Deleted]

I haven't all 3 of the pages yet so I apologize if I cover something that's already been said.

My guild did this fight recently in a similar position as you (10m, undergeared). I think at the time we only had 1 healer with more than 1-2 heroic pieces, so my experience might vary from others, but I found it way too difficult and unstable to try and 3 heal P1. I'm sure it's doable, but unless your healers are godlike, if they're undergeared for an end-boss then you'll likely see quit a few wipes in between every successful P1. Ynglestok posted a diagram in the 4th post on page that's more or less what we went with and it worked well enough to get many consecutive P2s. I don't know if you have anyone capable of specing healing for the fight - your spriest should be since they use the same gear, if he/she is capable of playing the heal specs well.

One thing that my guild had issues with is P2 fuck-ups on adds, if you're gonna 3 heal it's probably better to have your DK tank them since he can drop stacks and won't be electrocuted. Then he would be the main DPS and you would be the one helping out. It's important to emphasize how well you gotta play in that phase though, if you (or the DK I guess) mess up even once and the stacks drop then boom, back to wiping on P1 until you get easy RNG lightnings again. Phase 2s are too precious to mess a lot of them up on this fight.

Also we only had 4 people to reset stacks, you have 3. Not a big difference, our DPS pushed it at around 18 stacks of Acid Rain which after a little practice was fairly easy to heal through. We didn't even use Tranquility or all of our other CDs. We had an arcane mage solo most of the add damage with occasional help from a hunter.

[Deleted]

Maybe if you weren't 4/13 heroic you would know some bosses are harder then others. /sigh

Get off your high horse, you only killed Cho'gall and Sinestra last week. /sigh
But I guess Al'Akir is pretty doable for a 6/13, 10 man guild, since it's really quite easy, and as long as you have 10 half decent players who can stay alive through phase 1, I'm sure you can get a kill pretty quickly.

A side note; If you use Ynglestok's picture for placement, Be weary of the 8 o'clock position (if you look picture, the tank position being 6 o'clock) is by far the hardest place to be. Have your dps with the most mobility there, it's really quite tricky at times with tornados crossing, ice patches and windbursts all at the same time.

edit: didn't see Blonk's post, sums up what I said alot better

[Deleted]

Yeah i think we may go back to 4 healing it, the spriest was originally a main spec healer until the guild was formed and we asked him to go shadow.

I think on average we were able to achieve more P2 attempts when we were 4 healing. Although our healers are very good, changing to 4 could help with any potential bad rng or individual mistakes

[Blonk]

Yeah i think we may go back to 4 healing it, the spriest was originally a main spec healer until the guild was formed and we asked him to go shadow.

I think on average we were able to achieve more P2 attempts when we were 4 healing. Although our healers are very good, changing to 4 could help with any potential bad rng or individual mistakes

Four healing will make phase 1 easier and phase 2 harder, keep that in mind. Only 4-heal it if the other 5 DPS can average a steady 22k or higher.

[Deleted]

Yeah i think we may go back to 4 healing it, the spriest was originally a main spec healer until the guild was formed and we asked him to go shadow.

I think on average we were able to achieve more P2 attempts when we were 4 healing. Although our healers are very good, changing to 4 could help with any potential bad rng or individual mistakes

Good luck, the only downside to 4 healing it is not making the Acid Rain soft enrage in P2. But I think your DPS should be able to handle it, with a 4 heal strat you can both have tank or DK take Stormlings, either works. If the DK is on it though make sure he's the main DPSer, don't waste too much of the hunter DPS on helping unless it's truly needed.

You're aiming to get him transitioned at ~18-19 stacks of Acid Rain. More is doable if you Tranquility for it, but if you're consistently getting to 18 stacks and you're never even close to transition the you just don't have the DPS.

Also you probably already know this, but our spriest didn't during attempts so I guess it's worth mentioning just in case, your priests can Life Grip people out of tornadoes. Also you can Heroic Leap/Disengage through them if timed right, your feet have to hit the ground before the tornado reaches you starting point. There's actually some really cool Disengage tricks you can do with Tornado/Wind Bursts that might make your life a lot easier.

[Ruchika]

4 heal it.

Dont listen to Logbc, he's so bad he doesnt even know what destro is! But yeah, 4 heals on 10m or 11 heals on 25m = ohheyicanstoprammingmy____inacardoornowyayayayayayayayay!

I have felt the pain of H Al'akir and I have made it through.

[superficial]

we 4 healed it on 10 man. You should be able to kill it the first time you make it to p2 with everyone alive.