[10/25] Thorim's Arena

[Maddok]

Belloc Wrote: Want easy-mode arena? Stick two rogues with imp. fan of knives (even just one point) in there and have them spamming it. Shouldn't see any casts getting off and things will die fast.

Thank you for posting that suggestion!

[Threatco]

Belloc Wrote: Want easy-mode arena? Stick two rogues with imp. fan of knives (even just one point) in there and have them spamming it. Shouldn't see any casts getting off and things will die fast.

Thank you for posting that suggestion!

Just wow wish I had thought of that.

My tip that made us go from wiping to success is make sure mages spell steal the evokers shield.

[Tiandelin]

We actually tried the warbringer MC during phase 1 again with some interesting results. We do the phase by stacking everyone up in the center, so initially we just had the priest stand under Thorim's balcony so that he wouldn't get stormhammered too often. That didn't work, since standing under the balcony apparently really does make you an aggro magnet. Everything promptly pounced him despite our tanks' best efforts, and it seemed all for naught.

Then we had him move to the top of the stairs, and everything completely ignored him. He was able to MC mobs without issue aside from a taunt whenever it broke. Hurrah for celerity.

In any case, I'm wondering if anyone's managed to use the odd under-the-balcony-aggro phenomenon to their advantage. I vaguely recall us putting tanks under there early on, but it didn't seem to work for whatever reason. Not that it's necessary, and it does sound like it might be questionable to use, but I'm curious about how it works.

[PsiVen]

It's all proximity aggro. Anyone standing outside the center circle will attract every mob before they get to the middle. I'm not sure why the top of the stairs is a dead zone, but it seems to work well. As long as they move to a safe spot after P1 (which I think that area is?) they should be good.

As amh mentions, Celerity stacks. I definitely recommend using two for hardmode, as it makes P2 the easy part of the fight.

[amh]

As long as they move to a safe spot after P1 (which I think that area is?) they should be good.

It is on normal-mode. On hard-mode you need to be half-way between the top step and the boss (assuming he´s tanked in the dead centre) to avoid Blizzard as well. It´s just enough room to avoid Blizzard + lightning charge and still not chain CL to the melee.



Green dot marks the spot :) On normal, anywhere between the two middle dotted lines is good.

There is one more safe-spot, but I´m not entirely sure where. It might be by the entrance somewhere.

This post by Azisa (middle of the page) goes into more detail, and the video is quite good: http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=21918

[culhag]

We've killed Thorim on 25-man 2 times already but it wasn't pretty and we couldn't kill him for the past two weeks, so I'm looking for advice because I think we must be doing something wrong.

We have :
8 people in the gauntlet (1 tank, 2 heals, 5 dps)
usually 3 tanks in the arena (2 aoe tank, 1 keeping the champions away)
2 dps with interrupts focusing on evokers
melee focus on warbringers
ranged focus on champions

everyone stacks in the circle

The problem is that we're always getting overrun in the arena. Ranged dps are complaining that they're slowed down or interrupted by commoners too much. Melee (usually around 4 people) generally don't kill the warbringers fast enough.

My general opinion is that it's our dps that are not good enough but maybe rethinking that strategy could help too.

Any help is welcome.

[Maddok]

We tend to send most (all?) of our ranged with the gauntlet group, but then again we tend to be melee heavy so we have a ton of "cleave" dps and our elemental shaman hangs out with the arena group.

When learning this fight we did tank assignments like this.

Gauntlet: Warrior and DK (DK is usually dps in 25s but is my OT in my 10 man)
Arena: Myself and our Bear.

We have since switched it up and the warrior solo tanks the gauntlet and the DK is back to dps.

With Improved fan of knives and a pally and a druid spamming aoe attacks, especially with a pally healer stacked in there with RF up, means everything makes as bee line for the center.

[Corman]

Thread full of win.
Brought 21 pts from this thread to our RL after smashing our head on Thorim.
Two-shotted him right after that, with the first attempt all the way down to 30 percent but I ran out of offtanks...

[iwillpunishu]

Would love to read the 21 points Corman....any chance you can copy and paste?

[Nikachelle]

Doing Thorim's arena really made me question my ability to tank complete chaos. Once I got the hang of it was much better of course, but it took a while to get there. But goddamn... that was an unpleasant experience. Took a cumulative 6 hours of wiping to finally get the perfect group dynamic. I'm not overly confident that we'll be able to repeat it with ease either.

BTW, I have absolutely no idea how a purely ten man geared group could ever do this (Ulduar 10). The better part of our raid had at the very least 50% Naxx 25 man gear and we were still getting thrashed.

[Threatco]

1) Fan of knives
2) Spell steal evokers
3) mind control warbringers
4) mindcontroller can find a safe spot


Any other big points I am missing?

[ack]

Here's the WWS of our last Thorim attempts. We can't seem to agree on what is causing problems in the arena. Any help with it is much appreciated.

http://wowwebstats.com/z66w1e2go3vda

We actually downed Thorim once a while back but ever since then we couldn't repeat the kill.

The main problem is getting overran in the arena. The raid leader don't believe DPS is a problem and believe tank aggro issue is preventing the dpsers from killing the mobs. We usually have myself and another tank in the arena, either a warrior or druid depending on who shows. We have everyone grouped up in the center of the circle. Admittedly our last attempt we ran with about 23 people, but being undermanned was something the rl don't seem to concerned with also. We target champions first and leave the rogues to deal with evokers.

[Tiandelin]

Here's the WWS of our last Thorim attempts. We can't seem to agree on what is causing problems in the arena. Any help with it is much appreciated.

http://wowwebstats.com/z66w1e2go3vda

We actually downed Thorim once a while back but ever since then we couldn't repeat the kill.

The main problem is getting overran in the arena. The raid leader don't believe DPS is a problem and believe tank aggro issue is preventing the dpsers from killing the mobs. We usually have myself and another tank in the arena, either a warrior or druid depending on who shows. We have everyone grouped up in the center of the circle. Admittedly our last attempt we ran with about 23 people, but being undermanned was something the rl don't seem to concerned with also. We target champions first and leave the rogues to deal with evokers.

Looking through that report, I see a few key things that could help you:

1) For the love of god, get those champions out of the middle. They are whirlwinding and slaughtering people like crazy. You have a warrior tanking in there with you, what's he there for? Have him pull champions out of the group while you pick up everything else. Most of the initial deaths you've having are directly attributable to this. I guarantee that you'll have a much, much smoother time with this fight if your whole arena team isn't taking surprise 10k hits. This is probably the best thing you can do to help yourselves.

2) There's a lot of healing from evokers' runic mending, even before people started dying. Your rogues are on the evokers, but they only occasionally managed to stop heals (I see 7 times over the entire night). If kick cooldown is an issue, tell them to ignore runic lightning and just focus on runic mending, because the latter will cause you to fall behind. Also, see the comments above about rogues with improved throwing just spamming FoK. It really does help a lot.

3) Nobody was dispelling the evokers' runic shields (except a few shield slams from the warrior tank and a couple mass dispels). These absorb huge amounts of damage and will also cause you to fall behind. The easiest way to deal with them is to assign a shaman or priest to them for purge/dispel. We usually have a resto shaman handle this since we often don't have an enhancement shaman handy, and our arena priests are typically busy with warbringers these days.

4) Though not quite as much as champions, warbringers still hurt. There were some attempts where a warbringer wasn't picked up promptly and it started going to town on healers, with predictable results. Since the other tank will be picking up champions (if you followed my suggestion in #1 above), you should focus on taunting/exorcising/etc any incoming warbringers to keep them from piledriving someone into the ground before your aoe picks them up. Evokers are lowest priority for tanking since they really don't do much damage themselves. Even rogues can "tank" them just fine.

Seriously though, don't let champions whirlwind the group. They're tearing you apart.

[Belloc]

Are the champions being disarmed? I haven't tanked in the arena, but I've been under the impression that a disarmed champion doesn't do much damage, even when whirlwinding.

[ack]

We didn't want to tank the champion away due to his charge. It was thought better off healing through whirlwind damage rather than having the charge kill a healer. We don't disarm the champions either, the specific reasons why we don't I'm not sure, but probably because we don't have the warriors and we want the rogues to concentrate on the evokers. We only have one dps warrior on our raid roster and he leaves early before we get to Thorim usually. Last attempt was the first time we had a warrior tank in the arena in a long while as well.

Pretty sure the rogues were interrupting the evokers. None of our rogues are speced for improved FoK though. We may be depending too much on the rogues to interrupt the evokers and not have anyone else help with dispelling the heals and shield.

Thanks for all the suggestions. It will be something I will bring up when we attempt Thorim again tonight.