Written by mek

Introduction

This used to be the easiest hardmode, now it’s probably Hodir due to the significant nerfs that encounter received. That being said this is still a good place to test your raid out before attempting the significantly harder Freya and Mimiron hardmodes. It’s a 2 Phase fight, your first challenge is to trigger the hardmode by defeating the tunnel “gauntlet” before Sif despawns. The second part is the fight with Thorim himself with Sif up and disrupting your raid (she can be a major pain). This is a good all around fight, you need strong tanks, good dps and capable healers. There’s also a couple of good checks of how much people are paying attention to what is going on around them, all in all not a bad boss with plenty of elements.

Abilities

All of the abilities of all of the trash mobs before the boss are not going to be referenced here, it will just be the abilities of Thorim and Sif.

-Thorim-

Chain Lightning – The classic chain lightning ability that we have all seen many times before. The first hit does around 5k damage and it will arc to nearby players if standing too close. In a recent change this was capped at 6 targets but since it’s a 50% increase per jump this still means certain death for a couple of players.
Lightning Charge – An orb at the side of the room is activated, Thorim draws power from this orb sending out a bolt of lightning that does around 20k damage in a cone between boss and orb. Everytime this is casted Throim gains another stack of the Lightning Charge buff on himself. Each charge grants 15% physical damage and attack speed, additionally he was also do 10% more nature damage. Roughly a 10 second cooldown.
Unbalancing Strike – A 200% weapon damage hit that also reduces defense by 200 for 15 seconds, this one can hurt.

-Sif-

Frostbolt – This is an approximately 12k damage frostbolt that she spams on single targets when she isn’t otherwise occupied. She also does a Frostbolt Volley which hits every target in the room with the same attack every 10-15 seconds.
Frost Nova – She teleports to a random location in the room and then casts the nova (2.5 sec cast). It is sometimes possible to move away from her intime when she is casting this. Does around 14k damage and also snares all targets it hits.
Blizzard – A blizzard that moves clockwise around the outside of the room, it causes 4.5k damage per tick. You should always try and predict this coming for you and move in advance, if it spawns on you and you are in trouble then call for Freedom and run anti-clockwise out of it.

Preparation and Positioning

-Raid Setup-

With regards to tanking there’s actually two options. The fight is completely doable with just two tanks, but if you want a little bit of extra security then you can use 3 tanks. The main reason for this 3rd tank is that toward the end of the fight when he is hitting very hard and fast, your other two tanks can die in a heartbeat and this leaves one tank that can pop their cooldowns and tank out the last few percent. It’s really down to how you feel your own raid performs and what is required, we actually usually use 3 tanks to avoid a stupid wipe due to tanks getting RNG’d (Kungen failing). If you feel that you need more than 3 tanks you are doing something wrong.

Healing wise you are really just looking for balance. A good setup would be the standard Ensidia healing setup for ulduar which is 2 Druids, 2 Priests (one disc), 1 Shaman and 1 Paladin. This offers you all the possible utility and plenty of healing and dispelling power for the fight. You really should not need more than 6 healers here, if you do then you should probably not also be using 3 tanks or your dps is really going to start to suffer.
When deciding your dps for this fight it’s actually very well balanced. Melee will always be able to do the most damage on this fight since they have to move the least and when they do move they can still do maximum dps. Casters on the other hand will have to move a lot more and will be significantly more limited in the amount they can do. What stops you from stacking melee is the nature of the chain lightning attack, you really do not want more than 6 melee dps’ers (2 camps of 3) or you are going to most likely start losing melee to the chain lightning on a regular basis.The other deciding factor would be that you can’t use melee in the tunnel gauntlet since it is best with casters or hunters. Six melee along with a good mix of ranged is a decent setup on this boss.

-Positioning and Assignments-

Phase 1:
For the first phase you are going to be splitting your raid in two. One half will take the tunnel gauntlet to activate hardmode and the rest of the raid will remain in the main room. The encounter has been designed with taking ranged/caster dps through the tunnel and more melee/phsyical oriented classes in the main room. This is yet another reason to have a good balance of classes in your raid for this fight. An example setup for going through the tunnel would be 2x Warlock, 2x Mage, 2x Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman + 1 caster/ranged (can be anything, even hunter). You will also need to take 1 tank and 2-3 healers along (3 is recommended). At least one healer should be a paladin to freedom the tank if they get snared.
In the main room just have the rest of your dps/healers and other tank(s). It’s simple to just pack everyone in the middle of the room to avoid issues with aggro onto healers pulling mobs away from tanks. This room is very simple as long as people are careful not to rip off tanks.

Phase 2:
The positioning here is a key part of the fight, if you can manage it well then it will make things a lot easier. The first thing is that you need what’s known as a melee triangle. This means that you have your tanks on one spot which dictates the position of the boss, that would then be the top of the triangle. Your two melee groups then need to be at max range behind each of his legs, forming the bottom part of the triangle. Assign 3 melee to each leg and try to become comfortable with adjusting positioning according to tanks and also the Lightning Charge. The Tank can turn the boss directly facing east and should never have to move for Lightning Charge (safe spot, shown in screen). Melee positioning themselves incorrectly has a high chance of leading to deaths from Chain Lightning.

http://www.ensidia.com/media/upload/bossguides/thorim1.jpg

The rest of the raid should be evenly spread around the room, with healers in 6 even spots so that you don’t leave an area without a healer. Make sure that you are not too packed in one area because this will generate problems with Chain Lightning. Things will get chaotic with a lot of moving around to avoid Blizzard and Lightning Charge so be prepared to adapt according to what happens in the fight.

With the healing assignments you really just want to make sure that your Shaman and probably Paladin are focused heavily on the tank along with a lot of hots. This section of the guides is tricky for me because we run very very loose healing assignments. Just don’t have your holy priests or resto druids on pure tank assignements and you should be fine.

The Fight

-Phase 1-

In the Gauntlet it’s all about speed, you obviously want to get to Thorim before the hardmode timer expires. Kill off the Acolytes first and make sure that they do not cast any heals, if they get renews up on the other mobs, make sure it gets dispelled. The Golem at the end of the room will be casting with either his right or left hand. If the fire is on the right as you look at him then all players must move to the left side to avoid it and vice versa. There isn’t really any trick to the gauntlet you just have to burn through it, don’t cc and keep your tank moving at fullspeed. Once you get the hang of it you will find it goes pretty quickly, but if you feel you need more damage and the main room is running smoothly then put another person into the gauntlet.

Up in the main room it’s very simple, the evokers heal so make sure they are quickly killed off. Everyone that is in the room should stand in the middle but the Champions do a whirlwind attack so it’s best to tank them a little bit out of the camp. Just AoE and watch your aggro and this event is also reasonably simple, the real fight starts when this part is over! There is one final note and this is an optional strategy. If you want to do the mind control strategy which will be mentioned later then you need to leave a Warbringer mob alive.

-Phase 2-

Get quickly into the positions as stated earlier in the guide. If you still have any trash mobs left up, be sure to kill them off quickly (except the Warbringer if you are keeping it). Once in position immediately start getting damage out onto Thorim, it’s really good to pop Bloodlust about 20-30 seconds into this phase because everyone is still alive and you will probably have a few random deaths through the fight. Many guilds change tank everytime he does Unbalancing Strike, you can do this if you want but we really never saw the need to do so. Infact a tank can solo tank this entire fight and never die if you time your cooldowns correctly. If you do not have this level of gear on your tanks however, it is advised that you taunt the boss with another tank when Unbalancing Strike hits. You need excellent communication when doing this however since your healers need to react quickly. Apart from this the tanking is all about positioning, there have been some safe spots from Lightning Charge but to my knowledge they have been fixed (could be wrong). The melee always need to adjust to the position of the tanks in order to make sure there are no deaths from Chain Lightning.

The job for the ranged is going to be a little more hectic. You need to move a lot further to avoid each Lightning Charge and you also need to move to avoid the Blizzard. Watch for the Blizzard all the time, unless it spawns on you there is no reason it should catch you. If it does spawn on you then call for Hand of Freedom and run anti-clockwise out of it, trying to run out of it the direction it is moving will get you nowhere. Make sure that frost nova’s are dispelled throughout the fight so that people do not get caught in bad places, try and avoid it if you can (she always does it after a blink). The biggest problem with all the moving in this fight is that it often means that people can get packed up too much in one area, there are two solutions to this. Firstly when you see people running away from a Blizzard towards your assigned position then you should try and move around a bit also, to give them space. Essentially this causes the entire raid to rotate slightly away from the Blizzard. The second solution is that rather than spread out entirely and just ending up chaining together, try and stand on top of one other person. Chain Lightning on 2 people is no problem and it actually generates a huge amount of extra space when you do this. Sometimes people will get gibbed on this fight by nova+bolt and there’s just not a lot you can do about it.

The healing and survival of this fight can be a little tricky. Assigned tank healing is always good but the most important thing is actually how you use your cooldowns at the end of the fight. The incoming tank damage gets extremely strong and the chance of getting gibbed is high. You need to rotate how you use your defensive cooldowns so that the tank has something when they are about to get hit by unbalancing strike. This means the cooldowns of the tanks, Divine Sacrifice, Guardian Spirit, Pain Suppression etc. Make sure you have an order for who does what and don’t leave your tank to die without using absolutely everything to save them.

Lastly I will mention the mind controlling. You have the option to mind control a Warbringer and then use it do cast an aura that gives the raid 20% haste. This is obviously a great buff and if you are comfortable doing this without it being a distraction then you should do it. I have heard of people wearing frost resistance for this so you can tank the Blizzard. If you feel that you can complete the Gauntlet or your healing will be lacking on the mind controller then this is not a bad option. You can also simply release the mob if the player needs to move from Blizzard or Lightning Charge. The key thing here is that you have the tanks watching out and if they are not tanking they pickup the mob if it goes loose. Good communication needed here again but if you can do this it will give you a huge damage buff to your raid.

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Tags: ensidia, thorim, ulduar, world-of-warcraft, wotlk, wotlk-guide, wow, wow-guide, wrath-of-the-lich-king