Herioc Al'Akir - The bane of my life

[Deleted]

My guild and I have been progressing since we formed in late April and are currently 6/13. With the team that we have and after some consideration we thought we would give Al'Akir a bash before 4.2 hits. After a good few raids of banging my head against a brick wall I was wondering if you kind people could perhaps shed some light on anything that we may be doing wrong. We are not consistently getting through P1, sometimes due to individual mistakes and sometimes because of nasty lightning placement. When we do manage to get into P2 our biggest problem seems to be tank deaths.

Our group consists of:

Tank - Feral Druid

Healers - Resto Shaman, Resto Druid, Holy Priest

Dps - MM hunter x2, Rogue, Frost dk, Spriest, Ret Paladin (or arms warrior)


This is how we place our raid around Al'Akir -




If there is lightning one one of the positions with 2 people, we have one of the people assigned to run 1 spot to the right, and then run back when it is over. The biggest problem with this is that sometimes lightning appears again on their new spot and this usually results in a death. If we do manage to get into P2 we have the Tank controlling the stormlings as well as the boss while rotating cds, and we have one of our MM hunters (me - Kestalia) bring them down 1 by 1 for the buff. The problem I have had a couple of times is the adds being pulled out of my range while the tank is dodging windwalls and the buff dropped off.

It is getting to the point now where I think that we must be missing something obvious, and was wondering if you guys had any tips or advice for us?

This is the WoL report for our latest night of wipes: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-pw6h91ygcf6pwtox/

Thanks in advance

[Jeslis]

((Note: didnt look at logs---

First off, I think your crazy for trying alakir at 6/13 .. but to each his own.

That said; regarding the lightening, when a 2person spot gets it, 1 person moves to the X (right or left), if that NEXT spot gets lightening next, the person standing there moves. Eventually it'll clear and you can get back.. but thats all about personal survivability, personal cooldowns, or external raid cooldowns on call.

Regarding your tank deaths in phase 2. Our current workaround on this is that the stormlings are *tanked* by a ret paladin who flips on Righteous fury in P2. They dont melee, and just apply a +25% nature dmg taken aura per each add.. Our method prevents the tank from getting gibbed by the bosses channel when he runs out of melee range to dodge tornadoes. And the ret can bubble the stacks of rain//utilize glyphed DIvine Protection to mitigate massive amounts of damage. He semi solo's them down, and we have a shadowpriest or boomie dot them when they spawn to assist with getting them lower.

But yea.. having the *tank* tank the adds in p2 is a big nono. Its way to much additional dmg. This might be possible with a cooldown used every time the tank runs out.. or never having more then 2 adds on the tank and just doing 1-2-3 stacks on boss then reset them and restart.. but that would prolong the phase a very long time.

[Slickx]

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

[isei]

Our tank has been tanking the adds in p2, we use an external (hand of sac, guardian spirit, ams, bh trinket, ibf, vb, etc) everytime there is a bad windwall where he has to run out and get electrocuted.

As for the lightning in p1, i don't recommend having 2 ppl stack up on one spot. Just have everyone spread around evenly the boss. The lightning always targets a person to be in the center of it so if it happens to chain 2 people, the person on the edge moves out of it and the person in the middle stays there and heals (or receives heals).

Probably the most important thing with p1 is the knowledge of how to use your defensive cd's as there is always bad RNG and you just have to adapt and deal with it. Don't be afraid to use your costly mana spells to keep people alive, your resto shaman will ensure that you have 100% mana before p2 gets intense.

You can watch our vid from my healer pov:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v_itZViYvQ

As you can see the feral druid pops his barkskin survival unnecessarily early and only has survival instincts up but the mage to the right of him iceblocks and I flash of light spam to keep things stable.

[Deleted]

We used something more similar to this:

(yes we were a little range heavy that night, but it doesnt matter tbh)

This way, if 2 people get chained, one of them is litteraly on the edge.
Our DPS was good enough to do this with 4 healers, and it does make p1 alot easier.
After an hour or so, we consistently got to p2, where the only trouble was finding a good way to stack the adds.
We had the tank grab them, although a DK/ret pala DPS is probably alot better at this (since the aura increases the channel damage, and kills tanks without cooldowns)
When he had aggro, we had 1-2 DPS get the adds to around 40% and 5 seconds before the buff ran out, everyone timed a big fat nuke spell at them. (Arcane mages are good for quickly killing aswell)
We had shadowpriests help healers out with hymn of hope, aswell as divine hymn.

While progressing we got him to 29% with 3 lost stacks, trust me, its a really big difference, even losing it once may or may not be able to wipe you (depending on your DPS of course)

[Wilderness]

We worked on it for a while with 4 heals but ultimately didn't like that setup and switching to 3 heals worked out better for us. For some guilds 4 healing does work best though, so for the OP if you have been doing 3 or 4 heals you may want to try the other way.

We use the same type of set-up that Ynglestok in that we have all 10 players spread out around the platform with no stacks of 2. People need to move side to side a bit more when someone gets lightning so everyone needs to have some raid awareness to adjust their position as others have to move but doing it that way worked better for us. P1 seems like horrible RNG until everyone just learns the fight well, we wiped on it A LOT (to the point that we actually stopped for a few weeks and went and killed Nef/Cho'gall before coming back) but now that we all know what we are doing P1 is pretty easy.

P2 we have our Frost DK tank the adds. It helps a lot to keep the extra damage off the tank, the tank can then just worry about getting through the tornado's. In addition a DK is great for the adds because AMS helps a lot, and deathgrip is great for grabbing adds out of the group quickly. When we do it that way the DK solo's the first 3 or so adds, killing them at the right time, and then I (mage) help him get the others down appropriately, which frees up everyone else to just burn the boss. Do not necessarily wipe it or freak out if you lose your stacks as it is absolutely still killable. In our first kill we were concentrating so much on getting the adds down correctly that we realized that the boss was at 28% and we hadn't used Bloodlust so we just saved it and used it in P3. In our kill last night we lost the stacks at 3, but stacked it up to 3 again and lusted then and had no problems getting the kill. So it is definitely still doable, at least if you lose them earlier on, so keep going and at the very least you'll get more P2 practice. We needed a few P3 attempts to get that down, mostly because normal was so easy that we never really figured out how to move correctly and just brute forced through it.

[Deleted]

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

I know it may be slightly crazy to do it in this order, but having heard that heroic Al'Akir 10 man isn't especially difficult, we wanted to try our hand at an end boss before 4.2 hit and people seemed to agree that Al'Akir was the easiest choice. Perhaps that was our first mistake.

We thought about having our ret paladin tank the adds off to the side, but we weren't sure if our dps was going to allow that. I think i prefer your positioning, having to only move very slightly will also amount to more dps uptime in P1.

In terms of testing ourselves against an end boss before 4.2 hits, should we have perhaps gone to nef instead? It wasn't a case of wanting to get 7-8/13, we just wanted more of a test and a bit of fun before 4.2

[Deleted]

I'd also like to suggest that you ask either the Dk, the ret (or the arms warrior) to tank the adds in p2. They "tank" in dps gear & spec, so dps loss shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Positioning in your image looks fine, yes it's a pain when lightning hits one of the spades with 2 people on, then spawns again to the spade that one of them ran to. Just make sure people move quickly, use any short term CD's to keep themselves alive and are aware of who will be moving in this case. We set it up so this was less of a risk, take your north position with 2 people, we set it up so one of them was assigned to run anticlockwise onto the healer to their right. However we also told the healer that if lightning appeared to his left, he need to get to the right hand side of his spade, so if the lightning followed the runner then the healer just needed to take a step or 2 to the right to get out of it so he could heal the runner.

[Deleted]

If your dps is decent, do it with 4 healers. We are 13/13 hc in 25 man and are on a break til firelands. The other day we did 10 man alakir with off-speccers and trials it was no problem. We had significantly lower dps and were missing a lot of buffs but the dps was no problem with 4 healers.

Edit: Use a blood dk for tanking so he can get the stormlings out of the raid quickly!

[Deleted]

I'd also like to suggest that you ask either the Dk, the ret (or the arms warrior) to tank the adds in p2. They "tank" in dps gear & spec, so dps loss shouldn't be too much of an issue.

This is something we have considered, and we also thought about 4 man healing it like Davoo2080 suggests, but i'm concerned that the combination of the 2 will lower our dps to the point that the kill will still be impossible

[Deleted]

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

This.

But to me it looks like you just need to fine tune your tactics. I can't see how avoiding lightning is hard in 10-man, and having the tank take on both Al'Akir and the stormlings does not sound like a very proficient solution given the debuff applied by the adds. Like someone else already said, use your DK/Ret paladin to tank 'em instead. The rest is all about practise, survival and.... ow wait it's 10-man. Just zerg it and smile as he dies.

[oatmealpoet]

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

Yes, because there is a set in stone order that you MUST kill the bosses. /sigh

[Deleted]

I didn't read all the comments.

But make sure you get 3 adds before u start off killing them. Assign a healer to cover the tank full time, this lets the others do more raid healing with just a hot on the tank. Don't be affraid to pop cooldowns and fast heals in p1. Most cds are only 3 minutes and will be ready for the brutal part of p2. Don't make mistakes (squall lines, though u can grib these) and don't lose the stack (kill early if you're unsure on timing, it's the reason you have multiple adds). Also if you're assigned to add killing don't worry about their debuff hitting u super much, it's more important that you don't lose the stack, as it's almost impossible to kill if you lose the stack half way.

[Slickx]

Yes, because there is a set in stone order that you MUST kill the bosses. /sigh

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

[Deleted]

We used 4 healers too, which make P1 both more predictable and more painful (longer).
I would recommend not stacking two players on top of each other and instead spreading the group in 10.
When one person is hit by lightning, you heal through it. If two persons are, the one on the side moves outside of it and then takes back his place.
Don't let stacks drop in P2 and use CDs at the end of it (since 17 debuffs hurt a lot) and BL at the right moment for your group (depending on your heals and dps).
P3 is a formality.

That being said, I would definetly try another boss if I were at 6/13 (I found Nef, Cho'gall and V&T much easier than Al'Akir 10HM)

[Valamivan]

We're trying this as well, though we are beyond the issues in P1, we can make it to P2 consistently. However, P2 gives us pain I never seen. At 50-45%, with ~10 stacks of rain on the raid the damage is just too much, healers are all oom and we wipe. We only have 2-3 people who could use immunity, which is probably not ideal, but still - what can you do against that nasty damage?

[Aleysia]

If you're one-tanking, I would really suggest 4 healers because the tank is going to be taking massive amounts of damage. You'll have to survive to 14-18 stacks of acid rain depending on your dps, in order to push P3 with a 5-dps setup.

4-healing also makes the lightning in P1 less of an issue. We actually have 6 solo players, and 2 groups of 2, spread out around the platform. As long as one person moves when a group of 2 is tanking a lightning, the healing is a non-issue, even if we get bad RNG with lightning placement.

As for being out of range to kill adds, that's a problem you'll have to fix, not sure why that's even an issue to start with. Your tank shouldn't be a max range from your ranged/heals group, maybe only 20 yards or so.

[oatmealpoet]

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

Some bosses are harder then others? Mind = blown.

[cleotaurus]

I like the comments about how 10m alakir is such a joke. It is very constructive and helps solve the problems of the OP.

4 healing is probably your best bet unless you are well geared. 3 healing requires very good dps to push to p3 before you get more than 15 stacks of acid rain, after which it becomes pretty much unhealable for 3 healers. It's probably easier to have your MT tank the adds, though as you said early on 3 adds on the tank + electrocute is unhealable, so you need to stack cooldowns. Since 4 heals requires us to stack up 3 adds before killing, we ultimately had the tank pick up the first two and offtanked the 3rd by a dk (the dks add was also the last one for us to kill). The adds do melee, contrary to what someone else wrote above, and tanking them with a dps class rather than your tank will result in additional damage - but this method will keep the damage spread early on when the tank can get get insta gibbed by electrocute. Later on it is always more healing efficient for the tank to pick up the adds.

P1 an even spread is better than having any sort of stack - whenever the stacked players got lightning the time it takes to move out will bring both players very low. With an even spread you will often have lightning hit two players but one of them will always be on an outside edge and can move out quickly in one or two ticks. If you have players still dying to the mechanics, stress the importance of watching the wind blast cooldowns, where the squall lines are at the moment, and planning ahead for both. Place the players who fail the most and/or the classes with the least abilities to help with mobility in the back opposite the tank, since that is generally the easiest area.

[Deleted]

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

Ohh snap man!