Stupid fight. There are so many things wrong with Al'ar that I don't really know where to begin whining about them. First off, Al'ar is fire immune, so all our mages have to respec to put out useful damage (heavy fire is the standard raiding build). Half our destruction locks have to worry about replacing their Spellfire gear as well.
The first phase of the fight is downright tedious. Al'ar pretty much flies in a big circle and yawns at your tanks for about 5 minutes while your rogues sit in a corner and kill trivial low-health spawns that he sends at them. Tanks spend a good two thirds of the phase just standing there, but we can't space out and go read forums or something, since Al'ar has an ability that insta-gibs anyone that stands on the upper platforms if you don't react in a second or two.
Two and a half million HP later, Al'ar dies, and is reborn as a gigantic land-bound phoenix with the world's smallest hitbox. Seriously, if you're not standing within about a yard of his dead center you can't attack him. On many bosses this would be fine, but Al'ar has huge Void Zone-esque ground effects, and he charges around a lot, and you have to taunt him a lot. But wait, it gets even better, when Al'ar stands on the big window in the middle of the room (you can see it in the screenshot), you can't see his targeting circle at all, so it gets even harder to target him. So as melee or a tank you spend most of the fight standing directly underneath a giant bird wondering why you're not attacking him.
Add in some occasional one-shot charges, and a bunch of irritating targeting issues (he can be annoying to target after he uses his meteor ability) and you have the Al'ar fight. At least he doesn't have an aggro wipe, something that tends to be a huge annoyance on most other bosses. So there's that. That's the one thing keeping Al'ar from being one of the worst bosses in the game.