Thorim
 

We are currently having real problems with Thorim (25). We have killed pretty much everything so far in about a solid hour of tries, we reached Thorim and can't seem to make any sort of progress on it. We have tried an array of different tactics including:

3 DPS, 1 Tank, 2 Healers in the gauntlet
4 DPS, 1 Tank, 2 healers
5 DPS, 1 tank, 2 healers

Almost all the DPS in the gauntlet, healers and tanks upstairs.

Mind controlling, sheeping, fearing upstairs. Different balances of healers etc. etc.

None of these seem to get us anywhere as the arena wipes between engaging the first mini-boss and engaging the second mini-boss and at best when we manage to get to the 2nd, the arena has a good few dead. The times we get near the 2nd mini boss seem to be luck.

It almost seems to be so hard that we are missing a vital part of the fight, everything else has been challenging but we made clear progress and start improving and eventually get a kill. At the moment we are seeing nothing improving no matter how many times we attempt it, nor what different tactics we use.

All tactics/guides we have found seem to put very little emphasis on balancing the raid and I don't know whether or not this these are referring to the PTR - it would make sense to us if they were. Anyway, just looking for any advice to help us with this encounter.

By the sound of it, your problem is fairly simple. You don't have enough DPS in the gauntlet and you're getting overrun with adds in the arena because you're taking too long to clear it. A single tank and two healers should be plenty so I'd look closely at both how many DPS you're sending into the gauntlet and how you're splitting your DPS classes, particularly as you say that you're still struggling with lots of DPS in the gauntlet.

Since it's full of mobs with interrupts and stuns, the arena really isn't very friendly to casters. Likewise, mobs in the gauntlet, especially the second mini-boss, actively discourage players from stacking on top of one another. Therefore, casters -> gauntlet, melee -> arena seems a natural way of splitting the raid. Assuming you're running with 3 tanks, 6 healers and 16 DPS or 3 tanks, 7 healers and 15 DPS, you'll want a fairly even caster-melee - and thus gauntlet-arena - split. That said, given that the boss proper isn't exactly melee friendly, I'd suggest taking more casters and leaving a couple in the arena to just suck it up.

This really shouldn't be the most difficult part of the fight so if it's still not working, I'd take a more detailed look at what you're actually doing in the gauntlet as nothing in there should be holding you up significantly.

The way we did the gauntlet was to use 2 healer, 1 tank, 8-9 dps (all of our ranged dps). We don't sheep/fear/mind-control.. any mobs there. Regarding the arena we used 2 tanks, 3-4 healers, remaining dps.

The gauntlet isn't really too bad. Make sure that nobody gets hit by the fire, everyone is staying at max range from the adds (because of the stun-whirlwind) and kill acolytes first (heal). Once you reach the second mini-boss, watch out for the debuff. It will immobilize the player and he will explode after some seconds. Everybody should move away from the one who got the debuff.

On a sidenote, as soon as the second mini boss has been killed and the door opens, hug the wall. You don't want to run directly through the 2 circles on the way to Thorim otherwise you will get trapped in it for several seconds.

make sure in arena everyone spreads out, and kill the healing/shielding guys single target

We're having this same problem too OP. We have been running 7 players in the gauntlet:

1 Tank
1 OT (DPS feral in Bear Form.)
2 Healers
2 Melee
1 Warlock

The rest of the raid waits in the arena and fights off the adds. At first we thought it would be a good idea to stack DPS in the Gauntlet, but it didn't work. We had so much DPS with 10 people (1tank, 1ot, 2heals, 6dps) that we finished the entire thing in less than a minute. This caused Siff, the female mob that stands beside Thorim, to enter the fight and add a LOT of raid damage. We later found out that you have to wait for Siff to leave before engaging Thorim, otherwise the fight becomes a hard-mode.

So our problem is clear. Siff leaves after 3 minutes. Our gauntlet with 3.5 dpsers is arriving at 2:50 and waiting for her to leave before aggroing Thorim.

The rest of the raid is dead in the arena by this point.

We have an absurd amount of people in the arena but we are still incapable of living for longer than 2mins30seconds.

We've put over six hours of attempts into this and have made no progress. Thorim has not once landed without the entire arena being dead. It feels like we are missing a fundamental aspect of the fight.

Here, watch this video:

YouTube - Thorim

They somehow survive the arena with only 12 people. (13 are in the gauntlet in this video's PoV, but it doesn't show HOW the arena is staying alive??)

Please help :(

We have tried with a lot of different set-ups in the gauntlet and arena, what seems to be the problem is actually having any composition of people in the arena survive for much more than 3 minutes, which is what would be needed to not activate the hard mode. Meaning if we went and zerged the gauntlet, we would still have to survive 3 minutes in the arena which is something we simply can't do right now.

The actual DPS in the gauntlet doesn't seem bad, and we do it fairly swiftly with nobody dying but I don't think we have ever got to the 3 minute mark before the arena is being overrun.

We have tried spreading out, staying together, single target certain mobs, mass dispels, chain spell stealing, AoE, mind control none of them seem to have any effect on the arena wipe at about 3 minutes.

Yep, pretty much identical to our problem. We have put nearly 4 hours into it and have just not seen the slightest bit of progress on it.

Thorim has two abilities which he uses on the arena team in P1. Do you know about these? I'm asking because we had no trouble at all with this in 10 man with two melee, one hunter, one tank and one healer

As far as I know there is little more to it than spreading out and moving away from the orb that he charges.

Has anyone done this fight on hard mode since the recent hotfix? I have some questions that would be better answered via PM.

For the Arena; I'm going to really stress that the Champions get picked up as soon as they hit the floor. They have the potential to completely devastate anybody that isn't a tank. As for the other adds in the arena, you can have the plate/mail dps help round em up for a second while the Champions are being dealt with.

Like others have said, have the healers separated in to separate quadrants of the arena as to avoid having all of them get his hammer and obviously move from the lightning pillars when they activate. Then after that it is just coordinating your dps in the gauntlet and in the arena to minimize the time of damage. Hope that helps

Thank you for the help from Varuk, despite deleting your post, it was very helpful.

We stuck all the melee in the arena, as well as a shadow priest and two hunters. We split them into two groups, one for the left and one for the right hand side of the room with the ranged in each corner. The champions on each side were nuked, then the evokers (one of which was MCed for the whole fight). The rest of the casters took the gauntlet, cleaned up everything there. Worked great.

Thorim Chain Lightning
 

Has anyone figured out a good way to deal with the chain lightining in phase 2 with Thorim? We ran a melee heavy group last night and got destroyed by the chain lightining,

On our 3rd raid evening in ulduar we reached Thorim. For an hour we were simply getting zerged in the arena so we decided to review our tactic.

What we did first:

- Hallway: 1 tank (warrior) + 3 healers + mix of melee & ranged for the hallway
- Arena: 2 tanks (warrior+druid) + 4 healers + rest of dps (mostly aoe)

What we changed:

- Hallway: People were reporting the first miniboss in the hallway was very melee unfriendly so we decided to put every caster (except spriests) in the hallway.
- Arena: We added a DK to the tanks which made arena much much more easyer. I think you could leave the druid out and let DK+warrior do the job. The key to succeed in arena is to mark the Envokers and focus on them while interrupting their heals. With 2 spriest & every melee in the arena we had sufficient aoe to keep up with the waves.

Important part in arena: move away from the charged pillars, really important to spread out.

As for the chain lightning: we had the same problem on our kill, sometimes instagibbing 5 melee so only thing i can think of for the next reset is spread out. Thorim has a large hitbox.

Hope this helps a bit.

We had a melee heavy group too, we just had 3 of them stand away and not do any DPS. I don't see any other way to do it.

Split the melee into a diamond formation around the boss, similar to KT. If your raid is not melee heavy 2 groups (+tanks in front) will be better, but don't have more then 3 characters per group. Each group stands on top of each other, and far enough away from the others.

This is not absolutely required as it is possible to brute-force heal chain lightening with a lot of AOE healing, but this way is considerably easier.