Becs, what you suggest is what we thought would be our best bet and in what we have been trying to do when we tank the panthers on the sides.  It's hard to know what everyone is doing in this fight since the side fights aren't even seen by the main group dps-ing the boss.   The people you can't see in this fight are sort of out of sight out of mind since each person has to be focused on their job.

Believe me, the warriors were taunting/hitting everything they could and the shaman were laying every totem they could think of. Still the panthers that slipped by, and eventually when a side tank died and their panters were released upon the raid were causing major problems.  It's good you suggested this though just so people can get a better idea of what we are doing.

If we do side tank the panthers and we have a shaman or two for the side tank magma totem rank 1 help light up the panthers as they stealthed by for the tank to hit em, and stoneskin and healing stream helped mitigate some damage on the tank so I didn't have to heal as much and could pull less aggro.  The problem that I encounter in my role is as soon as I have to start healing my shaman heals pull aggro quickly and I have no way to reduce it.  The tank quickly goes down once I get too many panthers on me and can't keep the casts going on him.  I'm going to keep grace of air for the agility on my tank as well so the increased agil will help him take less damage with an extra dodge or two hopefully.

I noticed the side-tanks tried to dual wield to hit faster and hopefully get more strikes in on the panthers that were stealthing by.  Did this work better?  The reason was so that fewer panthers would slip by in between swings of a single weapon right?  Maybe a pot that increased armor for the side tanks to offset not having a shield on would help reduce more damage and save your healers from healing as much?

I checked and there's one pot that will increase armor by 450 for an hour, and one that increases it by 2000 for 2 minutes.  Both of those seem to have some problems in our fight.  One doesn't offer enough to make much of a difference and one doesn't last long enough.  OK, enough of my rambling, we'll get her somehow.