Al'Akir 10H stormlings / tanking

[Fayre]

My guild and I have been working on Al'Akir heroic (10 man) for a couple of raids, and in actual fact are generally coming out of P1 in fairly good shape and managed to get him to 7% on our best attempt... so we're not doing things horribly wrong by any means.

We're using 3 healers, 1 tank and 6 DPS. I am a prot warrior tank.

My question really is around P2. Currently our strategy involves me tanking adds (and Al'Akir) off to the side of the group, while one ranged DPS handles nuking them down to stack Feedback. I usually only have one add up, perhaps two at the start.

This works to a certain extent but I'm concerned on two counts:

- My health is dropping a bit precipitously when I need to go out of melee range to avoid Squall Lines, as the debuff from the adds plus Acid Rain plus Electrocute gets a bit much. I've been using cooldowns and surviving it, but I've also gotten myself killed a few too many times for comfort.
- I've found aggro on the adds (and on Al'Akir himself) to be a bit shaky on some pulls. Mostly because pick up of the adds is a bit interesting with only Heroic Throw / Taunt. I'm concerned this might limit DPS on both.

For those who have done the fight... would I be better off asking our Fury warrior just to "offtank" the adds in a pile outside the group in her DPS spec and kill them? I know that groups successfully use a DK or a ret paladin for this purpose but I can't reliably say we'll have one. My concern about doing this is two fold... she can't reset her stacks of Acid Rain meaning potentially quite high damage on her, and I'm not sure how aggro/pickups will be vs. the healers late on.

Any thoughts or advice from people who've handled this successfully would be welcome.

[klausi]

We use a similar setup, i specc for thunderstruck and gag order on this fight. No problem with survivability whatsoever, i use all four movement cooldowns to greatly reduce the time i spent outside of melee range. I pull the first 2 adds and wait for the third to spawn while aoe'ing all of them down passively. One of our ranged just snipe the lowest and continue to do so until 5-6ish stacks with the assistance of a second ranged if needed, we pop heroism and only afterwards it gets a little messy. Until that point your only competitors for threat are the healers, at that point you'll have to start killing the last two spawning adds ASAP to keep the stack rolling.

[kopcap]

Spec Gag Order, glyph HT and SA.

During the transition to p2, intervene the highest aggro.

After the second stormling spawns, I more or less forget about Al Akir and concentrate on the adds. Whenever a DPS gets high on aggro, they call it and I intervene. Pop shieldwall when the third stormling is up. Try to use TB trinket every time you need to run out.

[Darksend]

Heroic leap can be used to completely bypass the squall lines, not a warrior so I don't know the timing of it. If all else fails just heroic leap to where the gap is and charge back to the boss (feral charge is AMAZING for this fight)

[Fayre]

Yep, being a warrior is a little overpowered on a fight which needs so much mobility

Thanks for your comments guys. I just wanted to double check that what I was doing wasn't totally mad and had been done successfully before!

[Fayre]

Just wanted to come back and say thanks again for the comments. We got him last night Cheers.