Hmm, you're right, there aren't any crushing blows on me in any boss fight. Heck, even with the trash I don't see a crushing blow. Thats huge for druid tanking, and makes mob attack speed less of a factor for warrior/pallie tanking.
I noticed the pet take a hit, but didn't think too much about it. The hit was only half power due to pet talents, so it might not be too big of a deal as long as the pet wasn't the one being targeted. Actually, looking at the damage and healing, imp. LotP and spirit bond was almost enough healing to heal through the AEs, Marchuk had very little other healing. And considering that Marchuk was 30-40% of Dokcha's damage, it would be much preferred if he could stay in melee without problems.
However, if the pet was targeted then he was drawing fire to the big clump of melee, which means he should be out of melee range. Preferably standing either next to the hunter (with a slightly higher chance of pet+hunter getting hit) or on stay away from everyone, but requiring maintenance to avoid the lightning storms (do pets get hit with the lightning storms? I couldn't see a single hit). We can try one run with the Marchuk parked in the corner and see if anything at all hits. I suspect that if the eagles won't hit pets, then the static disruption won't either, in which case having a pet in melee isn't a problem as long as the pet doesn't suck up much healing.
Looking at it again, the electrical storm in both raid logs has only hit players, not pets. Parking a pet in the corner and seeing if the static disruption hits the pet would be an interesting experiment next time we have too many melee.
Side note: Having the tank hit with the static disruption debuff isn't good, since the boss also does a call lightning attack that is affected by the debuff. I'm thinking we may want to have the main tank stand at max melee range in front of the boss and all the melee DPS stand at max melee range behind the boss, in the hope that that is far enough away that the tank won't get hit with the AE. I'm not sure on the exact range involved here, so that might not be enough and the debuff might be unavoidable.
Note 2: If we want to collapse a bit sooner to avoid timer issues, we could tank him against the back wall and designate a ranged person just a bit outside static disruption range as the collapse point. That way the range collapses early, and any static disruption only hits the ranged instead of hitting everyone. Then the melee runs to the ranged clump when the storm starts. This isn't as optimal as collapsing on the tank, but seems like it would be a lot more predictable. We could also designate healers as being the ones to collapse on or closest to that point, which means healing before and after collapse shouldn't be as big of an issue, since the healers wouldn't have to stop casting to run across the platform.
rough diagram (Tank, Boss, Ranged, Melee, Healer, and * is the healer everyone collapses on):
Code:
________________
| T |
| R B R |
| M |
| H H |
| * |
| R R |
_______ ______