10man Heroic Al'Akir, tips?

[vizzle]

Hi, my guild is 7/13HM 10man, so we're not horrible. We've been working on heroic Al'Akir 10man for the last 2-3 weeks, but we've only had 1 P3 attempt. It just seems so RNG that we get through phase 1 with all 10 people alive, because if one side of the platform gets too much shit on it it's very likely at least one person is going to die. Our p1 strat currently is everyone has their own spot on the platform, about 15yards away from the person on their left and right, so we're equally spread out around the circle. But I think it's just ridiculous when 2 lightning patches spawn next to each other, dumb mechanic.

Another problem we have is actually getting out of phase 2 and into phase 3, because we just get overwhelmed by the Acid Rain damage, getting about 16-17 stacks of it when we wipe (we have 4 people who can drop stacks, so 6 people are taking this damage). No, the Static debuff stacks on Al'Akir aren't falling off, so I guess our dps just isn't pushing it hard enough? We're 4 healing it right now, but it seems that we have to 4 heal because of our p1 strat.

Questions to people who have done this on 10man heroic:

*How many stacks of Acid Rain do you have when you end p2?
*Did you 3heal/6dps or 4heal/5dps? And did you have the MT tanking the stormlings or a plate dps?
*Was p3 hard for you?

And if you can leave any other good helpful tips/advice that'd be great, thanks

[Tokens]

Hey vizzle,

The ecounter definately heavily relies on RNG in P1 to get right. We spent a total of 102 attemps getting it down, only making it safely into P2 about 15 times and P3 2 times.

- We ran in it with 4 healers and 2 people to reset their stacks (Rogue and Holy Paladin).
- We spread around in a circle around the boss with the tank tanking him near the 'landing point' on the platform. This is how we position it from that point on (from right, clockwise to the left): Tank, Healer, DPS, Healer, DPS, DPS, Healer, DPS, DPS, Healer. Equal spread. The left side of the platform (from where you stand when your tanking him) will always be the worst spot as the ice seems to go in that direction (and spawn from the tank) 90% of the time. Resto druids excel there I guess.
- We always have the one being targeted by the lightning just tank it with heals from a nearby healer. It only ticks for about 12k so that's no problem. We do everything we can to avoid clumping.
- As soon as we hit P2 the tank runs in a halfcircle to the back so that the DPS can just keep nuking while the healers move (to maximize P2 DPS and to reduce the amount of stacks you get).
- P2 we use 2 ranged on the adds (one of them fulltime).
- Tank tanks both the adds and the boss. We kill the first add as soon as the third add spawns. He will tank two adds for about 1 minute. After that he'll tank 1 mob at the time (due to timer getting tighter and tighter).
- P3 is selfexplanatory (downx3 upx3). The healing isnt intensive and it's very predictable. We still had a few deaths but mostly due to fails. Important thing is that healers have the mana to top people off after a windburst and you win. We killed it the second time we got into P3.

We had about 16 stacks when we took him into P2. I've seen videos of people getting 19 stacks (albeit with more than 2 people to reset their stacks).

The fight is horribly designed in the first phase and it's a huge motivational killer. I'm not looking forward to farming that boss :-) On a sidenote Ascendant Council was, in my opinion, a lot easier.

- Tokens of Questionable Ethics (Doomhammer)