As an addition to the above post you can socket 1 Void Sphere in your FrR piece and it will put you at either 219 or 220, just enough to push 10% resists off the table completely. Most guilds probably still have a stockpile of void crystals lying around, may as well make use of them.

Can anyone comment on the effectiveness of having a druid in pvp gear tank till 8-10 stacks then have two tanks rotate UBS?

we're having a huge problem with keeping tanks alive, we tried both ways but just doesnt seem to be working (but we also didnt know about the two safe zones, probably going to try it out this sunday.) we got him to 20% at stack 11 wen tanks just fell like flies.

We're not even using a druid in tank gear. We're making our druid pop his own CD's starting at stack 7, he usually runs out around stack 9, then I bubble, disac, taunt (when the ubs CD is almost up). He taunts back after a bit. Then we have 2x pala CDs, 2-3x priest CD's and a warrior tank with all his cooldowns up.

He should die around 13-14 stacks max.

A great dps tip is that the warbringer haste aura is raid wide (no idea since when). The DPS (and healing) becomes quite a bit easier once you have a priest dedicated to MC.

I made this for my guild and think it might help some others out there. While thinking of positions i was too fixed on symmetry and uniform distribution to totally overlook the second safezone on the "left". It obviously would be way better to place the "circle-group" directly in the safezone with 2 MT-healers and one mindcontrolling priest.
brown= MT(s)
red= 2 ranged 1 heal/2 heal 1 mindcontrol
orange= 4 melee
blue=blizzard area
pink=lightning charge cone

Yes.

With the Aura of Celerity being raid wide, does anyone know if it stacks?

When dpsing the arena mobs, there seems to be a stack of the buff for each Warbringer that is alive.

Interesting observation but i dont think you can afford to put 2 priests out the fight unless you plan to run with two shadowpriests or your guild is priest heavy. Bear in mind that the boss gains the buff when the add isnt Mc'd so u wanna think about that. If it stacks 40% extra haste on the boss if your priest isnt mc'in = instant dead tank nothing can heal thru that, even during a non UBS.

Thanks for the positioning post, and thanks for the tanking suggestion, mite give that a shot this week.

EDIT: Does anyone know if thorim is affected by parry mechanics? is it safer to have ur tanks stacked on the current mt just use thunderclap demo shout etc and not atk boss at late stacks?

We even use 4 people in one spot. Admittedly, our kills usually are with 10 people alive in the end (he dies around 14 stacks, tanks start dying at 12. We don't run a DK tank sadly). I haven't seen any 1shots by CL as long as NR aura is up.

It stacks. You can run multiple priests in Frost Resist gear underneath Thorim's platform or by the gate. We didn't get the kill after using two priests (disconnect and some arena issues) but the difference was dramatic vs our one priest attempts.

The largest issue with them is getting enough warbringers for the priests without having the arena run into issues.

Thorim does not get a buff from the Warbringers.

I would highly recommend people to make use of Aura of Celerity in phase 2. We use to kill the boss right around 14 stacks of lightning charge, and since they changed it to a raid wide buff we have consistently (in the past 2 weeks) killed him in 10 to 11 stacks. This is using one priest, I can imagine that it would be a bit quicker if you had multiple priests mind controlling.

The faster kill far outweighs what I call minimal risk and as many of you can recall people typically start dying after 10 stacks. Just have your shadow priests with full frost resistance gear camp directly under Thorims platform or over at the tunnel entrance (we typically have two to three tank healers camp here). I don't think we've had any problems with mind controls breaking and causing mayhem in the raid.

Has anyone run into the problem (hardly a problem as it's beneficial) where he decides he isn't going to cast unbalancing strike? As far as I can tell this typically happens if he decides to cast a spell right as the UBS comes off CD, and because UBS is pretty strict when it goes off, it simply waits until the next opportunity to use it.

Well, it is a problem if you're trying to line up a PW:S or something with the strike landing. Since the patch to make it more consistent, it should be an on-next-melee ability that cannot miss. I can't tell if it's really doing that or not though.

We made use of 2 mind controls this week, and it was wonderful. Phase 1 is hectic, but only to keep the priests alive -- the melee do just fine without the 2 priests as long as they have 40% haste. I have no idea how many charges Thorim reached at kill time but if the tanks weren't watching his health they probably would still have been holding onto cooldowns when he died.