[Kazdane]

After clearing Hodir hard, Steelbreaker, Deconstructor and FL+4, we've spent our first night of trys in Thorim without too much success. We got to phase 3 only once and ended wiping at 65% since we need to make adjustments to our strat there.

The true problem I saw was the tunnel. Our arena team does well normally, but we're having some issues to hit the timer properly through the tunnel, our raid comp was the following:

Tunnel:
1 tank (me), 8 ranged dps (warlock, mages, ele shaman, 1 hunter), 1 healer (druid)

Arena:
1 tank (Prot paladin), 5 healers, 10 dps (melee, hunters and a spriest).

Usually, we take the tunnel this way:

Up to the 1st miniboss: I tank the Iron Guards while ranged burns the healer, then aoe the guards. When the last Iron guard is about to die, I move onto the next group, and finally I pick the first miniboss.

Usually we pull the 1st miniboss with around 1:50-1:40 left on the timer and he dies at the 1:10-1:00 mark.

1st to 2nd miniboss: I pull everything (Thunderclap, Shockwave) and run upstairs, if I time it correctly and don't get snared, most of the time I'll pull the 2nd miniboss with the adds being out of range to get his buff and at around the 55-50 seconds mark.

The second miniboss usually dies at 30-25 seconds left, however, the 4 adds are still up and even if I rush to Thorim, I'll usually hit him with less than 8-6 seconds on the timer as the adds will stun me, snare me, etc.

I'm fairly confident is not a DPS problem given that mostly this same raid cleared Steelbreaker in 3 phases (that being, 2 tank deaths, if that explains it better), Deconstructor and Hodir in around 2:40.

So, any idea on which improvements could we do there or a better strat?

[Hamburglar]

10 dps in the arena sounds a bit excessive. Maybe just keep trying to add people to the hallway group and see what happens. Obviously your guild is solid and your DPS is pretty good so I'd say just maybe add to the hallway group 1 at a time.

[Kazdane]

A small note, slight typo, it's 9 dps in the arena, not 10, but I guess you still stand correct that it may be just too much since they told me that unless they were careless with aggro or not paying attention to evokers, they were waiting for the next wave.

Are there any other tips we can take?

[Xlytol]

Get the spriest into the tunnel and I'd say you are golden

[Fayre]

If you're moving as fast as possible and you're pulling ahead, dpsing as you run, then it's just a matter of stacking DPS in that tunnel until you can move faster still.

We killed Thorim for the first time on hard mode last night. We took 10 DPS (all ranged) down the tunnel and left 8 DPS (7 melee 1 hunter) in the arena. That leaves 2 tanks and 5 healers.

[Dreamwerks]

What we do, for the tunnel, after the first mini boss dies, I charge the next mob, grab the mobs on the stairs and the mages sheep the whirlewinding guys and kill the healers asap as I pull the next mini boss to keep more adds from spawning. Had a hunter go us for the run speed at the end. Just make sure when your going through the tunnel, the dps always have something to attack

[Dreamwerks]

And if you are not MCing adds, you should look into that, makes this fight way tooooo easy.

(EDIT): You said the arena was doing fine then you should have another hunter go with you guys, only makes sense to take away from the group doing good and adding to the group lacking on time -- Also add another tank down in the arena encase one of you gets owned by thorim around 20%-30%, little insurance never hurt :] We had sooo many wipes around the 10-15% mark from tanks getting gibbed by the debuff and the random 10k frost bolt to the face at the same time, third tank sealed the deal for us

[Kazdane]

We've got him down today (just two hours ago), and as you guys said here, the key to reach the hard mode timer was to move more people from the arena to the tunnel, finishing with this setup:

1 tank, 11 dps, 1 healer (tunnel)
1 tank, 7 dps, 5 healers (arena), except tonight, where we were running 1-8-4.

And every time we were getting to Thorim with around 20 seconds to spare.

In phase 3, our biggest problem wasn't either dps or tank survivability, but raid positioning. In some trys we'd wipe at the 50-85% range due to ranged and healers not being careful enough or not paying attention to Lightning Charges and being too spread between eachother.

We solved this last bit sorting the ranged dps in small camps (2-3 dps and 1-2 healers, 4 spots around the room with a maximum of 4 people in each group) and we got our kill (it was rather messy, mind you, since both the OT and me died at around 8%).

As for the tunnel, I went with the method I've seen explained in the forums. Picking just the Iron Guards and leaving the healer to the DPS, as soon as the remaining add is at 60% or below (or both of them at 40% or below) I go ahead and pick the next group, rinse and repeat, picking the 1st miniboss. For the stairs, we kill first the 2 healers and DPS finishes the 2 melee adds while I run upstairs to pick the 2nd boss. Sometimes we were getting an additional add, but we were still comfortably ahead of the timer.

Oh, and in regards to the MC tactic. I didn't really consider it as I wanted to check first if we could pull phase 3 by ourselves; it was our spriest who actually brought it up after checking himself on one try the performance of the add. He liked the Warbringer's DPS and there was no way we would stop him from MC'ing the guy for the whole phase 3.

All in all, thanks for the tips, it's been really helpful for our Thorim's hard mode kill