Tanking Al'ar

While technically the first boss of Tempest Keep, Al'ar is by far the most difficult T5 encounter aside from the two (former) gatekeepers (Vashj and Kael'thas). Many guilds will, quite sensibly, save him until they have downed 5/6 SSC plus Void Reaver and Solarian in TK - the lessons learned in those battles help make Al'ar's learning curve bearable. While ostensively a GTFO encounter, Al'ar is actually a test of a guild's tanks; all four tanks need to be quick on their feet, situationally aware, and communicate well.

Preparation
You will want to wear your best mitigation gear for this fight, as there is the potential to suffer a tonne of damage. Do not, under any circumstances, be misled into thinking that fire resistance gear is required - it's not - if you wear it, you'll be gimping yourself.

For consumables, your battle elixir should be an Elixir of Major Agility, however your guardian elixir will depend on the job you have been assigned in phase two. If you are an Al'ar tank, quaff an Elixir of Major Fortitude to give you a bit more of a buffer. On the other hand, if you are an add tank (and you follow the strategy I outline below) then drink an Earthen Elixir instead.... you'll be taking a lot of tiny hits, and the damage reduction will add up in a massive way. Your food of choice, as always, should be a Warp Burger.

Special note: If you are on add duty, ensure that your do not have Thorns for phase one - the last thing you want to do is kill any of your targets before phase two. Also, a warlock's Soulstone is highly beneficial, for reasons that will become clear.

Phase One
Phase one of the encounter consists of Al'ar moving between four platforms in a predictable fashion. The platforms are usually designated with the numbers one through four - Que Sera Sera calls the western-most platform "one". Al'ar always move from one to two to three to four, and then back to one where the cycle repeats. After moving from one platform to another he will spawn an Ember of Al'ar, which must be picked up by a tank. Any time he moves from platform one or four he has a chance to fly into the middle of the room, where he will launch a Flame Quill attack that devastates anyone foolish enough to be standing on the platforms or ramps. After the Flame Quill Al'ar will randomly choose platform one or four to return to, and the cycle starts all over again.

During this phase three tanks will cover the upper platforms and tank Al'ar, while the fourth will deal with the embers that spawn.

(Waiting to tank in phase one - click to enlarge)

Platform Tanking in Phase One

If you are on platform duty, simply pick up your assigned platform, and wait for the big bird to come to you. When combat starts hit Enrage, since the rage that you gain will not decay. Make sure that you are close to the edge, because if Al'ar does not feel that he is being tanked (and he is a finicky bird) he will start casting Flame Buffet, which quickly wipes the raid. Also, the closer to the edge you are, the more chance that you will be in line of sight of your healer. Always a good thing.

As Al'ar draws near, hit him with a Faerie Fire, queue up a Maul, and let rip with a Demoralizing Roar. Just tank him as you would any other boss, keeping your debuffs up, and after half a minute he will move away. Now make your way to then next open platform, keeping in mind that platforms one and four must always have a tank for recovering from Flame Quill.

When Al'ar quills - usually after the fifth transition - jump off your platform, shifting into cat form as you fall to minimize the damage you take. If you were on platform one or four, shift back into bear form and get ready to run up the ramp after the quill has gone off. If he's coming your way, re-target the bird, and Feral Charge into melee as soon as you are within range to do so. Make sure to adjust your positioning for line of sight, and resume tanking as normal. Continue like this until the Phoenix god dies... and prepare for phase two.

(A pile of adds at the end of phase one - click to enlarge)

Ember Tanking in Phase One

If you have been assigned to handling the embers of Al'ar in phase one, then your job is much more fun. Every time Al'ar transitions to a new platform an Ember will spawn - if he was on platforms one or two the ember will (usually) come down the west ramp, while embers that spawn at platforms three and four move to the east ramp.

It is your job to pick each new ember up, and get it nearly - but not quite - dead. The reason for not killing them is simple: when an Ember of Al'ar dies, Al'ar suffers damage equal to 3% of his starting health - phase two is by far the more difficult of the two in this encounter, thus saving the embers and only killing them in phase two will shorten the fight.

The easiest way to grab a freshly spawned ember is to target it, stand at the bottom of the ramp it will come down, and queue up a Maul. As the mob gets in melee range, nail it with a Mangle and then proceed to tank it as usual. If an ember gets away, take note of who it is targeting and do not Feral Charge until it is close to them - otherwise you may end up stranded far away from the ember if it changes targets and bolts off in a different direction.

As stated, your goal is to reduce each ember's health to as little as possible; melee DPS will help you with this - our rogues cut off their damage at 15% - but the most delicate part of whittling down the Embers is up to you - aim for 3% health or less on each using Mangles, Mauls, and normal melee attacks. It may be advisable to avoid Lacerate while tanking embers due to the bleed effect - but if you're careful it doesn't matter.

By the end of phase one you should have between five and seven Embers of Al'ar beating on you - continually shift targets to keep them all alive while Al'ar resurrects, or stop auto-attacking all together if they are all too fragile to risk another hit.

Phase Two
Phase two starts with a bang. As soon as Al'ar is reborn, everyone should clear the area around the add tank, and the raid leader should call for massive AOE on the pile of embers. Depending on how even the health of the adds are, the add tank may be blown aside when the first one dies (and thus live), or may be ripped apart as the entire stack detonates at once. If you are the tank, try to keep one of the embers at 1% and the rest around 3% - but always try to get a Soulstone just in case.

Like phase one, there are two different tanking roles in phase two: actually tanking Al'ar, and manging the Embers of Al'ar that spawn every time the big bird uses his Dive Bomb ability (30 second cooldown). Two tanks should be assigned to each job.

Boss Tanking in Phase Two

If you are assigned to tank Al'ar (an assignment best left to protection Warriors in my opinion) then you need to be extremely aware of both your surroundings and the abilities that the boss uses. First and foremost, Al'ar always needs to have a tank on him or (like in phase one) he will start casting Flame Buffet which will wipe the raid in seconds. Use Feral Charge to engage him when he is reborn, and then every time he reappears after dive bombing the raid.

Once in melee with Al'ar, tank more or less as normal, but keep your eyes peeled for the Melt Armor debuff being applied to your tanking partner. The second you see the debuff hit the other tank, mash Growl and taunt the bird off of him. If Growl is resisted, blow your Challenging Roar, and then Growl again as soon as the cooldown is up. Not even the best tank can survive with their armor reduced by 80%, so speed is crucial.

The other thing to watch out for is the Flame Patches that spawn on random raid members - they do massive damage, so run out if you find yourself in one. If you notice one or more flame patches too close to Al'ar, you will want to reposition the boss so that the melee group is not at risk. Further, listen for general calls to move to a completely different area of the room if things get too hot for the ranged DPS and healers.

Ember Tanking in Phase Two

Feral Druids and Protection Paladins excel at tanking the Embers of Al'ar during phase two of the encounter. Our ability to quickly pick up and hold a large number of targets makes us ideal add tanks.

Two embers spawn immediately following Al'ar's Dive Bomb attack (every 30s) and will usually aggro on a healer. Prior to a dive bomb, the add tanks should spread out in order to give both a decent chance to be close to the (random) spawn point. When you see the ground blacken, head in that direction but keep your distance - if you get too close you will be blown across the room as Al'ar respawns, which will make it difficult to grab the incoming embers.

(Proper positioning in phase two... spread out! Click to enlarge)

Target an Ember, queue up a Maul, and paint it with a Faerie Fire as you run towards it. If you are first to reach the embers (the usually head in the same direction), then start Swiping to aggro both of them. Back towards a wall, and continue to build aggro.

If your tanking partner acquires both of the Embers before you arrive, then randomly Growl one of them off, and make your way to the opposite side of the room, avoiding any flame patches on your way.

(Vak and Karthis managing the embers - click to enlarge)

As the fight progresses, keep the embers dived equally between yourself and your tanking partner, and work at whittling one of your adds down in case it's needed to get a little bit of extra damage on Al'ar.

The more embers you have, the more difficult it is to pick up freshly spawned adds. You will frequently get stunned by your entourage as you run towards the new addition, and Swipe will be less effective at holding all of them as the target pool becomes too large. If DPS is on their game, then Al'ar should die between four and six dive bombs - any more and the damage the add tanks are sustaining will begin to overwhelm the healers.

(One dead bird - click to enlarge)

Conclusion
Al'ar is a great test for a guild's tanks - all of them have to be quick on their toes, and extremely aware of their surroundings. It's also one hell of a fun fight, not to mention a visual feast. After a bit of practice you should be able to fill any of the possible roles, although as a feral Druid you will be best utilized in an ember tanking capacity.

Where is the Bear (ep5)

Sometimes you need to just sit down and watch there world go by for a little while.....

(click to enlarge)

So.... where is the bear?

More on Nurturing Instinct

A few days ago I took a look at the changes to the Nurturing Instinct talent, and concluded that if you had some spare talent points lying around it would certainly be worth a look. In fact, I plan on speccing into Nurturing Instinct (NI) for a couple of weeks as a test drive.

To help flesh out the finer details of the talent, reader Tasmyn, of Shadowsong realm, has done a bit of research with his Druid toon, and posted the results on his blog. He concludes:

1. The healing from HoTs is calculated at each tick, and if you switch to Cat form while affected by a HoT, NI will increase the healing done to you.
2. NI does indeed increase the healing done to you in Cat form from ILotP by 10%/20%, but not by 50%/100% of your agility (only the second part of the talent applies here).

Check out his blog for the methodology used and a more in depth discussion of the issue.

Progression or Dogma?

Among other interesting twists, Patch 2.4 lifted the attunement requirements for the Karazhan, Mount Hyjal, and Black Temple raid zones. For most guilds this came as a big 'ho hum', but for the subset of guilds on the cusp of defeating T5 content and moving into T6 content, it presented a difficult choice.

Que Sera Sera is currently 6/6 in SSC, having successfully downed Lady Vashj, and 3/4 in TK with a couple of weeks of solid attempts on Kael'thas. We have been in this position for nearly a month and a half after flying through the "farm" T5 bosses. Given another 2-3 weeks Kael'thas could be ours, but therein lies the quandary.

Do we, as a guild, avoid killing any T6 content until we have completed T5, or do we abandon T5 now that the gates have been flung open to us by the game designers, or do we do something in between?

After a lot of debate, multiple forum postings, and an informal poll of the membership we still managed to flip-flop - not once, but twice - before settling on our final position. First we were leaving T5 behind forever, then we were going to down Kael before attempting T6, and now we are going to focus on Mount Hyjal while still working on Kael'thas in the background.

The pressure to avoid T6 content was not insignificant. Since the first 2-3 bosses of both MH and BT are considered to be "reward bosses", many people see killing them out of order to be cheap, and the epics they cough up to be "welfare epics" (on par with PvP rewards) if Kael'thas has not first been mastered. In fact, we're taking some heat for this on our guild recruitment thread (WoW forums) for downing Rage Winterchill this week. Some of our members also see not killing Kael'thas as a failure of the guild, despite the fact that he is arguably the third hardest boss in the pre-2.4 raiding scene. In addition, the skills needed to master Kael are crucial for later parts of the game - so perhaps by not downing him immediately we are hurting ourselves?

On the other hand, it was impossible to ignore the lagging raid sign-ups, and the audible stress in some of our raids in the final week before 2.4 hit. A lot of people had been running the same content 3+ times per week for nearly four months, and it was becoming more of a chore than a fun pastime. And in fact, once we hit Mount Hyjal the excitement and energy was palpable - people were eating it up, and loving every second of the raid, even as we wiped learning the waves. I do not remember the last raid we had like that - perhaps it was the night that Vashj died, and we first attempted Kael'thas.

So what do you think of our decision? Did Que Sera Sera cop out, and are we receiving welfare epics by hitting T6 content with Kael'thas unkilled? Or are we just recognizing the new reality of raiding, and pushing forward in order to challenge more advanced content on the progression
curve instead of lagging behind longer than necessary. I'd love to hear your thoughts, positive or negative - I'm sure some other guild officers are struggling with exactly this sort of decision.

The New Nuturing Instinct

In patch 2.4 the Nurturing Instinct talent was modified to make it more applicable to feral Druids. For those unfamiliar with the talent, at 2/2 it reads:

Increases your healing spells by up to 100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 20% while in Cat form.

With this change in mind, Blighty of Bloodhoof server sent me the following question:

I'm debating respecing into the new Nurturing Instinct talent. I think most feral builds end up with 3 iffy points - I have mine in Brutal Impact and Nature's Grasp. Other's take Primal Tenacity.

I currently have 511 or so agility in my lame kitty gear, and around 400 in my tanking set. Many of the 25-man fights with multiple tanks seem to involve me tanking something and then switching to cat form to finish out the fight. Having an extra +511 healing seems like it may make it worth while to do a quick switch to caster form and toss off some heals (maybe a Tranquility) on the way to DPS. With a mace from Kara and the CE offhand I'd be looking at over 1000 +healing, so my feral heals may no longer feel like sticking band-aids on severed limbs. The added bonus of +20% to incoming heals in cat form (I believe it affects ILotP) is also a nice plus, as so many fights involve unavoidable damage these days.

I don't think this new version of the talent is a big win, but it may be enough to get me to give up my Brutal Impact (primarily used for solo/farming). Any thoughts?

Interesting question, and definitely one worth mulling over. While I agree that the last few points in any feral Druid tank's build are very much personal preference, do not mistake Primal Tenacity for anything except what it is: a core feral tank talent. 3/3 in this talent will help ensure that you are able to do your ability as well as possible against mobs that fear and stun - the last thing you want is to be unable to control your toon, and subsequently lose a few squishies in the ensuing mayhem.

On the other hand, one of the talents that a lot of bear tanks fritter away their remaining points away in is Savage Fury. This selection increases kitty Mangle damage, but that's about it. When engaging in cat form DPS, Mangle is only used when the debuff is down, and most of our energy is focused on spamming Shred from behind our target. These two points may be reallocated to Nurturing Instinct with very little loss to overall damage.

The increase in healing received is certainly worth a second look, especially for end game raiding Druids. Splash damage is a constant feature in almost all fights, and melee usually takes the brunt of it. As such, raid healers are working overtime keeping our feline butts alive while we scratch and claw away. 20% more healing would help them out quite a bit.

In the end, I think that the choice is still going to come down to playstyle. If you are often forced into a DPS roll but like to shift out of kitty form to pop off some quick heals (maybe swapping your weapons along the way) then Nurturing Instinct may be the best choice for you. However, if you suffer from a bit of raid tunnel vision and just DPS your way to victory (or else main tank most fights), then the points may be wasted.

Feral Healing FTW?

As many of my readers have probably noticed, I loathe PvP in World of Warcraft. It destroys my soul. I play on a care bear server for a reason, and I avoid battlegrounds any arenas as much as possible - simply put, they make me hate playing, and turn something I love into a chore.

Unfortunately for me, sporting at least one piece of PvP gear is nearly a requirement for end game PvE feral Druids if they want to wear decent gear. The resilience that even a single piece of PvP gear affords allows you to attain crit immunity fairly rapidly, and grants you some flexibility in your choice of equipment. Personally speaking, I snagged the Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers a few months ago and gemmed them for the socket bonus. The PvP grind sucked, but the item made it slightly more bearable.

Now I'm staring another large PvP purchase in the face - this time the Medallion of the Alliance, which is nearly a requirement for all raiders serious about killing Archimonde on Mount Hyjal. Lovely.

Thankfully I have discovered that, although feral PvP is akin to stabbing myself repeatedly in the eye, if I bolt on my healing gear (and I have a nice set thanks to some sane guild loot rules) it can actually be somewhat bearable (*cough*) and even.... get this.... fun. Now don't get me wrong here, I'd avoid the battlegrounds if I could, however I take my PvE seriously so the sacrifice is worth it. Besides, at least if I start healing - without respeccing resto - I find it somewhat enjoyable.

(Healing up after a skirmish - click to enlarge)

When I enter a battleground I bring my entire wardrobe with me: kitty dps gear, threat gear, raid boss tanking gear, and healing gear. I start in healing gear, and latch on to a group of people going after an objective; I have faith in other people's ability to find trouble. In Warsong Gulch this means I'll usually be following a flag tank in - so I switch to kitty form and stealth in after him. People usually lock onto a single target and don't notice a healer joining the fray - so when shenanigans start - and they always do - I can jump into caster form and heal my little brains out.

I don't pretend to be a good healer, but I think I know the basics.... Resto4life has been on my reading list for ages. I toss out HoTs galore, and try to avoid standing still and casting unless someone's hit points nosedive. A funny thing happens when healing - and I've been told this is common - instead of watching the middle of my screen like I do 99% of the time, all of my focus goes to my Grid unitframes, and I play by staring at the little boxes and switching targets that way, and only rarely glancing up to see where the action is moving to. (Particularly when someone I'm trying to heal gets out of range.)

Of course, sometimes I'm better off switching to kitty or bear form and tearing faces off - ClosetGnome allows me to rapidly change gear, and assuming I heal up after doing so I'll sometimes be able to kill a lone flag carrier, or slow up a defender long enough to make a difference. 90% of the time though I'll be healing.

So how does a feral specced battlegrounds healer do? Not badly:

(click to enlarge)

I've finished in the top three almost every time I've played like this, even outhealing pure healers from time to time. Who ever said baers am not for haelz...... ?

Where is the Bear (ep4)

Mmmmm..... lunch. A little too much for one bear to eat though. Maybe I ought to set up a date with an admirer?

(click to enlarge)

So..... where is the bear?