[10/25] Thorim's Arena

Hey guys, I’m posting here looking for advice. I hope to figure out what my guild is doing wrong with this encounter. We aren’t the most hard core guild out there, but we do have some very competent players. We managed to get through every encounter in Ulduar with relative ease up to this one. We actually killed 9 the first week in there while plagued with disconnects and server crashes. Then this week we killed 8 on Tuesday night, started wed night by one shotting Freya, then spending more than 3 hours wiping on Thorim. We went in again last night and spent another 4 hours wiping on him. It’s been a brick wall for us.

Our problem is the arena. We have managed to cut the gauntlet team down to one tank(bear), one healer(paladin), 6 dps, and they can still get to Thorim at the 3min mark. We have been using our mages, locks, ele sham, and boomkin in here.

Our arena team always consists of 3 tanks (paladin, dk, warrior). We have gone back and fourth between 6 and 7 healers in the arena. We run our entire melee group in here plus spriests, hunters and sometimes a lock. We have tried several strats.

1. Stacking everyone but the warrior in the center. The dk and myself(paladin) calling for aoe when we have all the little adds under control. All the while the warrior pulls out the champions who get single target dpsed when we are not aoeing the little ones.

2. Spreading the healers around the room while the dps and tanks sit in the middle and follow the same kill procedure from strat one.

3. Stacking the raid at the door while the 3 tanks take up 3 positions a few yards closer to the center (like an aoe tanking barrier if you will). The plan here was to have our dps warr pull out the evokers and have the melee kill them. The ranged were focusing one champion at a time. The tanks were going to hold the little adds until the gauntlet was complete. Then we would aoe them down after new ones stop spawning.

Our problem for all three strats has been consistent; healers die. I use all four of my ranged abilities every cd to pull any new add I see to me. The dk does the same. It always happens around or before the 2min 30sec mark, we will lose several healers. Its usually our priests. Big heals wearing cloth.

I cant help but blame myself and the dk because it is our job to hold the adds, but we just seem to be overrun.

Night one wws: http://wowwebstats.com/ih4esljd3smue
Night two wws: http://wowwebstats.com/2ybx3qsubgqnu

Any and all advice is welcome.

We've had similar problems, then I read that some guilds have been simply stacking at the center, isolating the champions so ranged can kill them. We haven't had anyone dispelling or spellstealing the heals though, and I think it may be the problem. Does anyone have experiece with this?

We just park 15 people (2 tanks, 5 healers, 8 damage - mostly melee) in the arena with a 10-man (1 tank, 2 healers, 7 damage - mostly ranged) tunnel team. The arena team has an enhancement shaman dedicated to purging and shocking out the healer dwarves, and one of the arena tanks just pulls the champions to him. Otherwise, the group is piled in the center of the room and just fires AE as fast as the stuff spawns (arms warriors can take hits better than priests). Our tunnel crew is usually slower (4-5 minutes) but the arena crew can hold out solidly the entire time.

-Splug

We also have the arena team clump up in the center. Everyone stands on me, and I use every ability I have to hold aggro on everything that spawns. The healers move out after the Commoners spawn, so that they don't get interrupted while healing.

I've solo tanked it 10 and 25, but it works a little better with two. We settled with me picking up everything, and a 2nd tank picking off Champions so that they could be focused a little quicker. Having a ranged attack to use on the big mobs when they spawn was key. Every mob needed to be hit with Avenging Shield, Exorcism, Taunt, or some other attack before it made it to the raid and hit someone else. Having a 2nd tank in the arena also made it easier when Thorim joined, so that I wasn't tanking the boss and any adds left up at the same time.

I was curious to try standing near the hallway and seeing if I could pick up all the adds before they ever reached the healers/raid, but we never did it.

We were surprised with how much trouble this gave us to be honest. Here's what we ended up with and it's very easy and consistent for us now:

1. Two tanks, doesn't matter which.
2. Everyone but healers group up in the very center .
3. One tank is responsible for the adds coming from one hemisphere of the room, and another the other half. This is to ensure we're not taunting each other's mobs, or wasting precious cooldowns on the same mob.
4. Don't waste your taunts or other ranged cooldowns on the Commoners unless there are many on one healer. They are mostly harmless.
5. A DK was helping dropping a DoT on the ground near a druid who tended to get the most healing threat. That helps a lot especially on the Commoners.
6. Disarm the Champions when they whirlwind.
7. DPS really needs to be single targeting and burning down champions anytime one is up, then they can single target the other two scary adds (forgot their names). The should never be doing AoE damage except for those that naturally have it (like Warriors and their WW)

So basically, just stay in the circle and keep your consecrate up while focusing intently on snagging Champions that spawn from your side of the room. DPS main priority is champions. DPS should NOT be AoE'ing for OMG LEET DPS. Grab the caster and the other elite too. But pretty much ignore the Commoners, they die from incidental AoE damage all by themselves without needing to be targeted.

Guillex wrote:As this part of the fight seems to be the same in both raid sizes, I've locked the 10man topic, and have edited the subject title here to encompass both 10 and 25 man raids for this part of Thorim.

Please discuss!

I'll discuss your sexy face!

In all seriousness, my guild is going to be running the 10 version of this soon, and from what I can understand, 1 tank is going to have to take hallway, and another is going to have to take Arena floor. Which is harder? I'm assuming arena from the posts here.

The first night we got to Thorim, we were able to do relatively well while trying to sort out the issues between who was needed where.

The next night we get to him (after the reset) we had a slightly different group with us. We banged our head for an hour against the wall trying to figure out what was different. Finally, we swapped out a few ranged DPS for another melee (TG warrior) and a resto shaman (even tho it put us one healer heavy).

What we did was we positioned the healers at the side of the circle closest to the entrance gate. The melee gathered at the other end closest to Thorim. I stood in the middle spamming consecrate while our bear tank with the rogues coordinated taunts/MDs to pull the Champions to him. They then used a disarm rotation to ensure that the Champions were disarmed whenever possible. We had two warriors that could also assist in this function. The Resto shaman spent the fight purging any healing debuff. The kill order was always Champions and then Evokers. We went from being overwhelmed within three waves to always being about done with the last wave as the new one spawned.

Your arena group really needs to coordinate each person's role so that no one dies. One person dying snowballs the arena team very quickly into a wipe.

Disarms on the champions and spellsteals/dispels for the other stuff. Do eeet.

whoa! Thanks for all the replies.

Disarming the champions is a fantastic idea. Checking the reports it looks like one of our warriors only used disarm once on a champion and none of the other warriors ever used it. We did end up with 3 dismantles. Ill get em doing a rotation next time we are in there.

The stacking in the middle strat had been working the best for us. I guess we will continue that.

We are back in on Sunday, Ill let you know how it goes.

We did me+bear in arena.

Bear tanked whirl-winding mobs, I tanked everything else in the middle. DPS stack in centre, healers outside, but run to middle to unload crap if they get aggro. Bear collected some mobs via who-know-what, I let him keep them.

DPS have to be very careful not to peel. Our magelocks had to learn to modulate when they're doing AoE vs single-target - mobs come in waves, don't be AEing when there's a fresh wave inc.

With only one AE tank, lots of personal responsibility on DPS & healers to be careful about peeling.

Feels about as hard as AE tanking all the adds for Sarth+3 10-man. Hard to tell exactly because I've had under one hour on him. Just checked: 6 tries, 40 minutes. (25-man). Killed him the first time we got through gauntlet phase. P2 is pretty easy.

Most of the difficulty with P1 is getting DPS balance right between the two teams. Both arena and tunnel teams were having difficulties with DPS peeling. Arena also had healer death issues for first couple of attempts till I got my head around how hectic it was and started paying as much attention as I did in Sarth+3. Tunnel team also had "tank death" issues due to stuns. We used a warrior in tunnel, might be best to use a bear next time. Warrior can have whirly-dudes and disarm.

Im hurt you just didn't ask for my advise meng. What we did is have the entire group have their back to the wall while staying grouped up. We also kept as many holy priests in the arena as possible because they can fade and sent the other healers to the gauntlet. Bloodlust on the transition works like a charm as it helps you get the adds down asap, any other questions just hop in Epi's vent.

Edit: The warrior in the arena could help in another area as well. Have him throw Vigilance on you and then he will have taunt off of CD the entire fight. You could also try having a paladin healer in the Arena with RF up and make the warrior have a macro to taunt off of the Pally

I was about to suggest the righteous fury thing as well if you have a healy pally who can sit in the arena for you. Make yourself a macro to cast your righteous defense on him and just spam it every time its off CD, should be enough to keep most adds off of him and having plate should make him a bit less squishy than your priests and druids.

However, I didnt try that when we downed him, we simply had about 5 healers, 2 tanks, and 8 dps in the arena with 2 healers, 1 tank and 7 dps in the hallway. Stuck tanking the arena were me and a warrior, the warrior tossed vigilance on me and pretty well just spam taunted everything he could target while I dropped consecrates around the center of the room and spammed my righteous defense on our highest aggro healer (always seems to be the same priest or druid).

We also had a shammy tossing down earthbind for the aoe entangling roots, which gives tanks some extra reaction time to pick things up before they start wailing on all of your clothies.

We have the melee milling around the center (on the bronze disc area, but not particularly piled on top of each other), and the healers just outside the edge. It's very clear when mobs are heading for them and as long as we're quick about getting them noone should die.

We also leave a shadowpriest in the arena to MC the mobs with the Celerity aura (Evokers I think?) for the entire fight.

Champions that come out are marked and burnt down first so there should never be more than one up at once, plenty of disarms to go around as well. These guys are the only ones who really gib healers, and they're taller than the rest so easy to pick out.


As for the other side of the fight: Don't take excuses from people dying in the gauntlet. Nobody should ever get hit by the giant obvious fireball hallway, or by whirlwind either since the melee are in the arena.

How are you guys doing this in 10 man?

I was in there as the arena tank with a mage/warlock/hunter and priest/druid healer. We sent the other tank and 2 dps and 1 healer into the gauntlet. The first wave we did fine, but after that we'd slowly fall behind and then the mage/warlock would die due to having adds on them. I was tanking in the middle because the one time we tried tanking on one side we got insta-killed by the lightning pillar there being activated (like without time to run away from it). It'd just come to a period of time when I had like 10 stacks of the damage reducing debuff (low blow) and not enough tools to grab mobs from 360 degrees around me.

We also had lots of problems with him throwing his hammer and silencing one person (usually a healer) and slowing down everyone else. I don't really see how you can do this on 10 man with one tank in the arena. What am I missing?