Al'Akir Encounter Guide: Strategy, Abilities, Loot

• This fight has a lot of personal responsibility and ways for you to take avoidable damage. Always prioritize living and be ready with any personal defensive cooldowns if you are hit by anything.
• Save major DPS cooldowns when Al'Akir has high stacks of Feedback.

• Phase one has very high burst damage to anyone that gets hit by any mechanic, be ready to throw a quick heal on these people to prevent deaths.
• Save big healing cooldowns towards the end of phase two to heal through the stacking Acid Rain damage.

• Do not be afraid to use defensive cooldowns early in phase one as there is a ton of raid damage going on here.
• If you are tanking Al'Akir he will attack you with Electrocute whenever you are not in melee range. Quickly return to melee range to prevent this damage from ramping too high and killing you.
• If you are assigned to tanking Stormlings make sure you do not kill them early if they are left with very low health.

Phase one of the fight can be the most difficult as it requires very precise positioning from the entire raid; split the raid up into 8 groups of 3 players each, with 1 group being 4 players. This is to avoid the Lightning Strike from hitting the entire raid, as it will target a random player and bounce for full damage to each additional target hit. On heroic difficulty it will stay in the chosen area, requiring players to temporarily move out of it to other nearby groups, returning to their original location after the cast ends.

Constantly throughout all of phases one and two, Al'Akir will spawn in a Squall Line, sending a wall of cyclones either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the platform. Players will need to be aware of the gaps in these Squall Lines and move through these openings to avoid being hit by the cyclones. If you are hit by the Squall Line, you will lose control of your character for 5 seconds and take a high amount of Nature damage over time.

Al'Akir will frequently use Static Shock, interrupting all nearby enemy casters in his melee range (red zone). Casters should try to stay at range (green zone) as much as possible to avoid being interrupted. He will also constantly summon Ice Storms on the platform, dealing Frost damage along a random path and leaving patches of ice on the ground along their path, slowing all enemies caught in the area. Avoid the Ice Storms and the ice patches they leave behind as the slow will likely cause you to die to the other abilities.

The last ability you will need to deal with in phase one is Wind Burst. This is a 4 second cast that will knockback everyone in the raid and deal high Nature damage. To counter this and prevent being knocked off the edge of the platform, move as close to the boss as you can before the cast finishes. Being knocked off the platform does not guarantee you will die as you will be picked up by the wind and carried back onto the platform, but you will take damage by doing this.

Phase two starts once Al'Akir reach 80% health. He will no longer use Ice Storm or Lightning Strike, allowing you to stack together. He will however continue using Static Shock, meaning casters will need to avoid being in melee range. Al'Akir will also still use Squall Line, requiring you to continue to dodge the tornados. His new ability in this phase is Acid Rain, which deals damage to all enemies, increasing over time the longer he is in this phase. This makes phase two a pure DPS race to reach phase three before the Acid Rain damage overwhelms your healers.

You will also need to deal with the Stormlings that Al'Akir summoners every 20 seconds during this phase. These Stormlings deal AoE damage to all nearby enemies, requiring a second tank to pick them up and tank them away from other players. When a Stormling dies, it will debuff Al'Akir with Feedback, increasing his damage taken by 10% per stack. You need these stacks of Feedback to beat the DPS check of this phase before Acid Rains damage ramps too high. To take full advantage of this, you don't kill the first two adds that spawns, instead get them low health and wait for the third one to spawn. After the third add spawns you can kill the first one to debuff Al'Akir with a stack of Feedback. When the Feedback debuff is about to run out, around 5 seconds remaining, kill the next add to refresh the debuff and apply another stack, further increasing Al'Akirs damage taken. Repeat this process of getting the Stormling add low health, and only killing it when you need to refresh the Feedback debuff. Once you have a few stacks of Feedback on Al'Akir, you will want to use all major DPS cooldowns to burn as much health as possible.

Phase three begins once Al'Akir reaches 25% health. He will then break the platform and cause all players to fly in the air with increased speed from Eye of the Storm, as well as cover the outskirts of the area in a deadly Lightning storm. The raid will need to quickly stack together and fly up as high as you can. Al'Akir will continue to use Wind Burst, trying to knock players back into the Lightning storm, so be sure you are as close to the boss as possible. He will attack random targets with Lightning this phase, and periodically debuff a random player with Lightning Rod. The Lightning Rod target must quickly move out of the group horizontally, they must not move vertically as they will deal Lightning damage to all nearby allies after 5 seconds.

The main ability of this phase is Lightning Cloud, which will summon a deadly cloud at the location of a random player. The entire raid will need to quickly move down together out of this cloud while remaining as high in the air as possible without taking damage from it. You will need to repeat this movement until the boss dies, moving down every 30 seconds or so. If your raid has lower DPS, you can do two clouds at the top of the area, then fly all the way down. When the third Lightning Cloud spawns here at the bottom, move up and wait for the fourth cloud. After the fourth cloud spawns, fly all the way back to the top of the room and repeat this process until Al'Akir dies.

Al'Akir is just one of the two encounters present in the Throne of the Four Winds raid of Cataclysm. If you would like to learn more about the others, please see our other pages for the raid below.