5-tanking A'lar Phase 1

Last week, Band of Thorns went into The Eye for the first time. As a guild policy, we generally don't skip bosses, so last Monday we tried our hand at A'lar for the first time. Now, having read the strategy on bosskillers, which recommended 1 add-tank, and 3 A'lar tanks in Phase 1, I wondered why people don't suggest having 5 tanks instead. Well, after downing A'lar last week (and again this past Friday), I now know why. When you run 5 tanks on A'lar, phase 1 is easily the most boring tanking job in the entire game.

Now before people have any ideas that we raid-stacked for 5 tanks, please understand that BoT has 3 prot warriors, 3 feral druids, and 2 prot pallies who regularly raid. These days we generally have the ferals occupy dps slots, but all of us are capable of main tank duty when appropriate *cough*Tidewalker*cough*.

Anyway, back to A'lar...

To those who are unfamiliar with the fight, after a few trash pulls, you'll find A'lar in a circular room with two levels. A'lar has two phases, one in the air and another on the ground. For the most part I'll be talking about phase 1. There are 4 positions on the upper level of the room that he will go to in a clockwise direction. If there is no one in melee range of him, he will cast a flame buffet that hits everyone in the raid for 2000/second, so there has to be a tank ready to pick him up when he moves to a new spot. A'lar never aggroes on ranged during this phase, and melee don't dps on A'lar, so threat is absolutely a non-issue. Occasionally A'lar will fly into the center of the room and start casting a "flame quill" on the raised portions of the room (where the tanks normally are). Any tanks that get caught by the quill are insta-gibbed, so tanks have to jump down, then run back up immediately after to tank A'lar before he flame buffets the raid to death.

Sooo ... the key to phase 1 is tank coordination. Labeling positions A thru D. At the start of the fight:

A - Tank 1
B - Tank 2
C - Tank 3
D - empty

Once A'lar moves from A, Tank 1 has to move.

A - empty
B - Tank 2
C - Tank 3
D - Tank 1

And the leapfrog goes so on and so forth. That's with three A'lar tanks. Now compare this with having 4 A'lar tanks.

3 A'lar tanks = amazing coordination between tanks as they leapfrog between tanking positions
4 A'lar tanks = 90 seconds of looking at A'lar from far away + 30 seconds of looking at A'lar up close

The only break in monotony was when A'lar would occasionally fly up to the center of the room to flame quill the raised area of the room. As the person who assigned tanking duties I made it a point to assign myself to a tank position nearest the ramp heading upwards to give myself something to do.

Seriously, this past Friday when we downed A'lar again, I actually went ahead and alt-tabbed out to read the guild forums, only checking back in every 10 seconds to see if a flame quill was coming.

So anyway, we 1-shot phase 1 A'lar, then wiped around 4 more times during Phase 2 before we downed him. I have to say, Phase 2 is way more fun. :D