The Stone Guard

[Peelyon 416]

Yup what Sneakyferret said!

As long as you have protection from the guardian any of its abilities will essentially become trivial.

[Krazyito 521]

Yup what Sneakyferret said!

As long as you have protection from the guardian any of its abilities will essentially become trivial.

Well while that's true, technically Guest_Matt is correct, there is a typo in the guide and the damage type is either Arcane or Frost.

Regardless, in the actual encounter the colors match up and reduce their respective damage.

[Guest Krynsa]

We struggled with unprotected booms all night, I felt like we are either taunting too often or not often enough. We had a pull near the end where we had the Jade guy at 98 energy and we just let him sit on our OT and the other two just went off back and forth, it worked semi well, not sure if thats a strong strategy in the long term, just curious in 10 man how often you folks with successful kills are swapping?

[Peelyon 416]

Can I just check?

EU

Week 1 - Jade / Cobalt / Amethyst

Week 2 - Jasper / Cobalt / Amethyst

Found having 3 mechanics that required movement / awareness a lot harder than the previous week!

What rotations have the US had?

[Cohumulone 3]

The chance for epics from world bosses is so small that depending on them for gearing up is futile at best. The curious part on Blizzard is this...

WotLK entry Blues = ilvl 200

WotLK entry Raids = ilvl 213

Cata entry Blues = ilvl 346

Cata entry Raids = ilvl 359

MoP entry Blues = ilvl 463

MoP entry Raids = ilvl 489

Not sure if intended, but that's twice as big a jump in ilvl,

Keep in mind that this expansion comes with another stepping stone via LFR. There's your 13 ilvl's of difference.

[Guest Guest]

We're running into a solid brick wall with this fight. Both tanks at iLvl 469 due to a lucky hand with world boss drops, the rest around 461-463.

It's basically unhealable. At about 60% Boss Health all three healers are out of mana. I (holy priest) am spamming greater heal on the OT, 150k+ crits and tank hp just keeps falling and falling. Same for heal pally on MT. Our grouphealing shamy has to help out all the time wich burns through his mana too.

Three evenings, four hours each, and most of the time we don't even reach 60% boss health.

I don't know what's wrong. Group dmg is ok, but the tanks aren't healable at all.

p.s. found grammar errors ? english isn't my first language. feel free to quote and correct them.

[Peelyon 416]

Keep in mind that this expansion comes with another stepping stone via LFR. There's your 13 ilvl's of difference.

Yes the profession crafted / certain world drop epics and LFR gear 476s seem to help boost up a little. Perhaps will make the first few weeks a little more challenging for those who generally progress slower on nomral content

[Yopa 1]

Is there a guide available on heroic (here or elsewhere) and how to deal with the new mechanics?

[Vlad 411]

We're running into a solid brick wall with this fight. Both tanks at iLvl 469 due to a lucky hand with world boss drops, the rest around 461-463.

It's basically unhealable. At about 60% Boss Health all three healers are out of mana. I (holy priest) am spamming greater heal on the OT, 150k+ crits and tank hp just keeps falling and falling. Same for heal pally on MT. Our grouphealing shamy has to help out all the time wich burns through his mana too.

Three evenings, four hours each, and most of the time we don't even reach 60% boss health.

I don't know what's wrong. Group dmg is ok, but the tanks aren't healable at all.

p.s. found grammar errors ? english isn't my first language. feel free to quote and correct them.

Assuming that your tanks aren't standing in void zones, all I can assume is that they aren't using their defensive cooldowns and abilities properly (or at all). Do you have a worldoflogs of one of your raid nights?

Yes, the tank damage is pretty high, but it shouldn't run everyone out of mana at 60%.

Is there a guide available on heroic (here or elsewhere) and how to deal with the new mechanics?

We are going to start updating our guides with heroic mode details/strategy. The Stone Guard will be the first one to receive such an update :)

[Yopa 1]

We're running into a solid brick wall with this fight. Both tanks at iLvl 469 due to a lucky hand with world boss drops, the rest around 461-463.

It's basically unhealable. At about 60% Boss Health all three healers are out of mana. I (holy priest) am spamming greater heal on the OT, 150k+ crits and tank hp just keeps falling and falling. Same for heal pally on MT. Our grouphealing shamy has to help out all the time wich burns through his mana too.

Hi - I play a resto shaman, and here's a few tips.

I would propose you try having your resto shaman on one of the tanks. At least, that is how we do it (Shaman, Pala, Monk). Earth shield, riptide, healing stream totem and healing wave (or GHW / Surge if needed) should, combined with around 50% mastery help a lot on the tanks. Remember, resto shamans heals get more powerfull the lower the target is, due to the mastery bonus, so you pick a dead tank up to full health with 2 casts.

For 10 man i would strongly recommend your shaman to spec into the Unleashed Fury talent, and keep it as active on the tank he's healing as possible. It will boost direct cast with 80% and helps conserve mana.

[Guest puddinpop]

the guide for 10 man seems to imply that the tanks should be swapping adds and the main tank will always have 2 adds. If you trust both your tanks to be able to handle 2 adds at once and not get stomped, there is a much simpler way to handle the taunting

Start of fight

- Tank1 has two mobs and Tank2 has one.

- Assume one of Tank1 adds starts petrifying (if not, then the guy tanking the single petrifying add just taunts one of the others over to him)

- when those two adds get close to 50%, Tank2 taunts the PETRIFYING add

- Now Tank2 has the petrifying add at 50% and an add at 0% and Tank1 has one add at 50%

- When the petrifying add explodes, tank2 will now have one at 0% and one at 50% and tank1 will still have one at 50%

- one of the 50% mobs will start to petrify. if it's the one on tank2, it's already next to a mob that just exploded and is at 0% so you don't have to do anything. If it's the mob on tank1, he just taunts over the one that just exploded since it's at 0%.

- Repeat

Basically, once that rotation is setup, only one tank has to ever taunt at a time, you don't have to organize simultaneous taunts. And on top of that, it's the tank with only one add that ever has to taunt and he doesn't have to do it that often (every other explosion). It makes it way easier for the tanks as only one is every taunting, leff often, and it will be obvious which one to taunt. The only people slightly inconvenienced are melee and anyone chained to them as they will have to move a bit more. But that is way more than offset by having zero bad explosions.

[Vlad 411]

the guide for 10 man seems to imply that the tanks should be swapping adds and the main tank will always have 2 adds. If you trust both your tanks to be able to handle 2 adds at once and not get stomped, there is a much simpler way to handle the taunting

Start of fight

- Tank1 has two mobs and Tank2 has one.

- Assume one of Tank1 adds starts petrifying (if not, then the guy tanking the single petrifying add just taunts one of the others over to him)

- when those two adds get close to 50%, Tank2 taunts the PETRIFYING add

- Now Tank2 has the petrifying add at 50% and an add at 0% and Tank1 has one add at 50%

- When the petrifying add explodes, tank2 will now have one at 0% and one at 50% and tank1 will still have one at 50%

- one of the 50% mobs will start to petrify. if it's the one on tank2, it's already next to a mob that just exploded and is at 0% so you don't have to do anything. If it's the mob on tank1, he just taunts over the one that just exploded since it's at 0%.

- Repeat

Basically, once that rotation is setup, only one tank has to ever taunt at a time, you don't have to organize simultaneous taunts. And on top of that, it's the tank with only one add that ever has to taunt and he doesn't have to do it that often (every other explosion). It makes it way easier for the tanks as only one is every taunting, leff often, and it will be obvious which one to taunt. The only people slightly inconvenienced are melee and anyone chained to them as they will have to move a bit more. But that is way more than offset by having zero bad explosions.

The strategy we suggest is not meant to restrictively imply that the same tank always has to have 2 adds, and the other always 1. Main tank and off-tank, in this situation and in my intention mean more "the tank with the petrifying add" and "the tank with the solid stone add". The main-tank/off-tank roles have been gone from wow raiding for more than 2 expansions now, with minor exceptions.

So, back to my point, it's not meant to be restrictive. We put forth the goals that your raid needs to accomplish (avoid non-petrified overloads, etc), but each raid can (and should!) come up with their personalized implementation.

Hopefully, your comment will serve to offer a viable means of execution for some 10-man raids. Thank you.

[Cohumulone 3]

We're running into a solid brick wall with this fight. Both tanks at iLvl 469 due to a lucky hand with world boss drops, the rest around 461-463.

It's basically unhealable.

Something to remember is that a lot of the tank damage is in the form of that bleed that is unavoidable. Mitigation stats and CD's are almost useless on these guards. It's ALL about DMG reduction CD's and slef-healing. As a bear, for example, I'm not using Savage Defense even once on this fight. Instead, it's all about Stam Stacking so I have more vengeance for stronger Frenzied Regeneration. I can stack mastery and dodge all day for the other fights but for this one, they're wasted.

In short: I recemmend you encouraging your tanks to only use their resources on any self-healing abilities.

Basically, once that rotation is setup, only one tank has to ever taunt at a time, you don't have to organize simultaneous taunts. And on top of that, it's the tank with only one add that ever has to taunt and he doesn't have to do it that often (every other explosion). It makes it way easier for the tanks as only one is every taunting, leff often, and it will be obvious which one to taunt. The only people slightly inconvenienced are melee and anyone chained to them as they will have to move a bit more. But that is way more than offset by having zero bad explosions.

In theory, this is by far my favorite strategy. The problem we ran into at first went from trusting your two tanks to taunt swap to trusting your whole raid to move with the petrifying mob. They'll need to stay with it if your stacking for Chains.

Edited October 13, 2012 by Cohumulone

[Krazyito 521]

Something to remember is that a lot of the tank damage is in the form of that bleed that is unavoidable. Mitigation stats and CD's are almost useless on these guards. It's ALL about DMG reduction CD's and slef-healing. As a bear, for example, I'm not using Savage Defense even once on this fight. Instead, it's all about Stam Stacking so I have more vengeance for stronger Frenzied Regeneration. I can stack mastery and dodge all day for the other fights but for this one, they're wasted.

I think, vengeance does not interact with stam the same way it did in cataclysm as you are inferring. Its based off base attack power and incoming damage and if what I'm saying is true, then crit/hit/exp would be better for generating more rage to use FR.

The strategy we suggest is not meant to restrictively imply that the same tank always has to have 2 adds, and the other always 1. Main tank and off-tank, in this situation and in my intention mean more "the tank with the petrifying add" and "the tank with the solid stone add". The main-tank/off-tank roles have been gone from wow raiding for more than 2 expansions now, with minor exceptions.

So, back to my point, it's not meant to be restrictive. We put forth the goals that your raid needs to accomplish (avoid non-petrified overloads, etc), but each raid can (and should!) come up with their personalized implementation.

Hopefully, your comment will serve to offer a viable means of execution for some 10-man raids. Thank you.

I would like to point a couple things out with this. First, Vlad, I know the guide is infering both strategies, but I would like to say a few things about the one tank, 2 adds, strategy. While true, doing the one taunt strategy makes taunting significantly easier and have better control over the bosses energy bar, you also need to think about if one of your tanks can do significantly more damage then the other in a normal tanking situation. (Warriors/DKs in particular).

Here are a couple advantages to having ONE tank with both adds for the duration of the fight.

• Vengeance: When one tank has both adds for the whole fight, his vengeance is always high and never goes down too much. When you have tanks switching between 1-2 adds each, the vengeance spreads between the 2 of them and has ramp up time each time they begin tanking 2 adds. Having one tank keeping high vengeance especially the tank that knows how to do a lot of damage while tanking, will do more damage then having the vengeance spread between the two tanks.
• DPS movement: When you force your DPS to move back and forth (mainly melee) between the two tanks, then its an overall loss of DPS. Having to move will sometimes mess up rotations or slip up, which could be avoided by them only having to move because of the other mechanics the boss is throwing out. A product of this is also you will have more room to avoid the various boss abilities

Lastly, both these strategies work. Some work better for some groups then others, which means you should pick one, try it, and if it works keep it. I just want to point out that having only one tank with both bosses the whole fight, is not necessarily a bad thing. And IMO, it is much easier to coordinate two people taunting (or in my case three) then having all our melee (up to 7-9 people) to move around 3 points in the room and I also trust our Warrior/Pally tank to do more damage then my inexperienced self. Edited October 15, 2012 by krazyito65

[Stoove 347]

After our first week of raiding in MoP, we're having problems with the Chains. We had the combination Jasper, Amethyst, Cobalt. The combination of the Mines and Chains meant that after a while things started getting tricky on correct positioning. We're quite melee heavy in 10-man though, which means our casters (healers included) have to move about a lot if we stack for the chains.

One of the most unclear things (in general) was whether the Chains dropped off after 30s or not (the majority of the raid watched the Fatboss video), which caused a lot of problems.

[Sneakyferret 12]

I was the tank for our group so this might not be viable, but i believe for melee heavy groups, they had Range and Healers stack up with the melee group so all of them would be moving together, that way they could ignore the chains until it was Jasper's turn to petrify, and have one that is not chained pop all mines when its cobalt's turn to petrify. This of course meant we did not have to deal with void zones because we did not have them during that week, So it might not be that effective with them.

The chains drop at 15 stacks, otherwise they will stay on the entire encounter.

Edited October 16, 2012 by Sneakyferret

[Vlad 411]

After our first week of raiding in MoP, we're having problems with the Chains. We had the combination Jasper, Amethyst, Cobalt. The combination of the Mines and Chains meant that after a while things started getting tricky on correct positioning. We're quite melee heavy in 10-man though, which means our casters (healers included) have to move about a lot if we stack for the chains.

One of the most unclear things (in general) was whether the Chains dropped off after 30s or not (the majority of the raid watched the Fatboss video), which caused a lot of problems.

Unless it has been stealthily changed, the chains should not drop off after any length of time.

[Stoove 347]

Unless it has been stealthily changed, the chains should not drop off after any length of time.

This was what I suspected, but the Fatboss video guide (for live, which the majority of my raid watched) claims that it drops off after 30s even when stacked.

[Guest Howgie]

I think, vengeance does not interact with stam the same way it did in cataclysm as you are inferring. Its based off base attack power and incoming damage and if what I'm saying is true, then crit/hit/exp would be better for generating more rage to use FR.

I would like to point a couple things out with this. First, Vlad, I know the guide is infering both strategies, but I would like to say a few things about the one tank, 2 adds, strategy. While true, doing the one taunt strategy makes taunting significantly easier and have better control over the bosses energy bar, you also need to think about if one of your tanks can do significantly more damage then the other in a normal tanking situation. (Warriors/DKs in particular).

Here are a couple advantages to having ONE tank with both adds for the duration of the fight.

• Vengeance: When one tank has both adds for the whole fight, his vengeance is always high and never goes down too much. When you have tanks switching between 1-2 adds each, the vengeance spreads between the 2 of them and has ramp up time each time they begin tanking 2 adds. Having one tank keeping high vengeance especially the tank that knows how to do a lot of damage while tanking, will do more damage then having the vengeance spread between the two tanks.

• DPS movement: When you force your DPS to move back and forth (mainly melee) between the two tanks, then its an overall loss of DPS. Having to move will sometimes mess up rotations or slip up, which could be avoided by them only having to move because of the other mechanics the boss is throwing out. A product of this is also you will have more room to avoid the various boss abilities

Lastly, both these strategies work. Some work better for some groups then others, which means you should pick one, try it, and if it works keep it. I just want to point out that having only one tank with both bosses the whole fight, is not necessarily a bad thing. And IMO, it is much easier to coordinate two people taunting (or in my case three) then having all our melee (up to 7-9 people) to move around 3 points in the room and I also trust our Warrior/Pally tank to do more damage then my inexperienced self.

These have been exactly our thoughts after we tried the "one tank taunt only" strat for a few pulls.

Me as a warrior tanking two adds all the time topped the dps meters in nearly all tries after we switched to the double taunt strat (due to high vengeance). The whole fight got a lot less chaotic, but good communication between the two tanks is mandatory. Melee DPS had a lot more time to actually do damage because of less movement (movement was especially complicated due to mines and pools all over the place).

What I noticed was that I got far less damage than our druid off-tank although I had two mobs beating me all the time. We have the same gear level and I consider him a good tank knowing what to do and when to mitigate damage...

Good discussion, keep it up.

-Howgie

[Guest Guest]

Hello. I apologize if this was asked and answered somewhere else, but is their an eta on the guides for the heroic version of these encounters? Our guild plans to attempt heroic stone guard this week and it seems a useful guide is hard to find anywhere. Any information would be great, thanks! (And great guides so far, were very helpful!)

[Guest Jorge]

A minor note about the Cobalt Mines and Cobalt Overload/Petrification. The related damage and buffers are Arcane, not Frost. This caused a great deal of confusion when looking through combat logs. Reference.

[Guest Guest]

Here are a couple advantages to having ONE tank with both adds for the duration of the fight.

• Vengeance: When one tank has both adds for the whole fight, his vengeance is always high and never goes down too much. When you have tanks switching between 1-2 adds each, the vengeance spreads between the 2 of them and has ramp up time each time they begin tanking 2 adds. Having one tank keeping high vengeance especially the tank that knows how to do a lot of damage while tanking, will do more damage then having the vengeance spread between the two tanks.

• DPS movement: When you force your DPS to move back and forth (mainly melee) between the two tanks, then its an overall loss of DPS. Having to move will sometimes mess up rotations or slip up, which could be avoided by them only having to move because of the other mechanics the boss is throwing out. A product of this is also you will have more room to avoid the various boss abilities

Lastly, both these strategies work. Some work better for some groups then others, which means you should pick one, try it, and if it works keep it. I just want to point out that having only one tank with both bosses the whole fight, is not necessarily a bad thing. And IMO, it is much easier to coordinate two people taunting (or in my case three) then having all our melee (up to 7-9 people) to move around 3 points in the room and I also trust our Warrior/Pally tank to do more damage then my inexperienced self.

Reasonable points. Of course it's always whatever works best for your group. My suggestion was more for 10 man, our group has only one melee ( and the unlucky person chained to him ), and the ranged are never in the area between the two tanks so there's really not much for them to avoid as they move from one tank to the other. But it definitely shifts a lot of the coordination required from the tanks to whatever melee you have.

With a permanent MT and the double swap method, we were having issues with the swaps not being smooth and the three bosses getting jumbled up and having lots more time where all 3 bosses were gaining energy which meant more overloads, and we were occasionally getting bad explosions and stressing the healers. It just got simpler with only one taunter per swap and fewer swaps. We weren't too worried about tank dps as both do similar 2 target dps. They may not get to rank on World of Logs... we get one at 50k and one at 40 instead of one at 95 and one at 8 or whatever, but for us having slightly lower total dps and a slightly longer fight was offset by the much smoother energy management and no bad overloads.

[Vlad 411]

Hello. I apologize if this was asked and answered somewhere else, but is their an eta on the guides for the heroic version of these encounters? Our guild plans to attempt heroic stone guard this week and it seems a useful guide is hard to find anywhere. Any information would be great, thanks! (And great guides so far, were very helpful!)

Done, added heroic mode to the guide. Thank you for your compliments :)

[Guest Delayed]

I don't know if anyone has mentionned it so far, but something written in the strat is WRONG.

The petrifying boss reduces daage taken by the raid from his school of magic.

=> if the cobalt guardian is petrifying, you take reduced damage from cobalt traps

=> Jasper guardian petrifing => You take 90% reduced damage from chains

Therefore, you should pay attention to which guardian and reat accordingly !

=> When the cobalt is petrifying, trigger cobalt traps

=> When jasper is petrifying, get the chained players to move away from each other. When jasper isn't petrifying, get them to be closed to each other in order to minimise the damage !

[Vlad 411]

I don't know if anyone has mentionned it so far, but something written in the strat is WRONG.

The petrifying boss reduces daage taken by the raid from his school of magic.

=> if the cobalt guardian is petrifying, you take reduced damage from cobalt traps

=> Jasper guardian petrifing => You take 90% reduced damage from chains

Therefore, you should pay attention to which guardian and reat accordingly !

=> When the cobalt is petrifying, trigger cobalt traps

=> When jasper is petrifying, get the chained players to move away from each other. When jasper isn't petrifying, get them to be closed to each other in order to minimise the damage !

Thank you for your comment. Both of these aspects are mentioned (sections 6.3.2 and 6.3.3). I also don't believe that we mention something to the contrary anywhere else. But if there is such a thing in the guide, please feel free to point it out so we can correct it :)