[10 M] Stone Guard wiping for 3rd week in a row

[TheWindWalker]

Im posting now on the respective class threads to see if I can get some tips to pass around.

That's actually a very good idea and all power to you cause telling other people in your own guild how to play their class is a very difficult hurdle.

[shokter]

Im posting now on the respective class threads to see if I can get some tips to pass around.

More than fight mechanics it seems your dps need to study up on their respective class ability priorities and likely reforges as well. In addition they should try and research the fight for themselves to see if there are tips and tricks others of their class utilize on that fight. It's nice that you are willing to do the legwork, but it is not efficient. They really should be doing their own research. A glance through a class guide here, or at Icyveins, noxxic, or any other resource out there should take each of them a half hour at most. It will take a little time for them to implement what they've learned, but it will be worth it in spades if you wish to progress at all.

I used to play with folks who didn't do their own homework, and I tried to do it for them. It is hard for it to work that way; you may come off as 'that guy trying to tell everyone else how to play their class'. In addition it isn't fair to you. Trust me, it will be more effective, and they should feel more empowered, if they take it upon themselves to do a little out of game study. A little knowledge will go a long way. You guys are stuck on the first fight of a long tier (don't despair...in my opinion the dogs are harder for a group starting out than the next 3 encounters) and if you want to progress at all they will have to step it up. It isn't hard, but people just need to play their classes the way they are designed, and they can't do that without know-how.

[Manaia]

I'll be honest, I only looked at the WoL to see class composition, but that's almost irrelevant to my suggestions.
My guild at the beginning was having coordination and mobility issues - especially with the Jasper Chains - and we also had three healers (rshaman, rshaman, disc - me)

The solution was simple:
1) Make the lesser of your tanks go dps
2) Establish a single target that all melee/casters will stay on - this never changes
2) Tank tanks two on pull, "OT" "tanks" the third one
3) Taunt swap at ~~33% (the non-dps target)
4) Near the first overload, MT taunts the third one and "OT" starts to dps
5) Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria
6) MT kits them around the room Grobbulus style and all dps follows behind in melee range
A) If Amethyst and Cobalt are up, kiting will be rather quick

This strategy does the following:
1) Nullifies any dangers of Jasper Chains
2) Removes most dangers of Cobalt Mines
3) Increases dps due to...
A) Sticking on the same target
B) Allows cleavers to hit all three instead of just two
4) Three-healing this should be able to survive the burst
A) This may make your disc perform better with more available chances to AoE heal

A downside:
1) Your tank can't handle tanking all three
* Ours was a tankadin with sub ilvl 463 and we were only 5/8 heroic DS (20% buff)
2) Your healers can't handle the load
* Having three healers should be able to, as we did
3) Your "OT" can't "tank" for ~40 seconds
* Have your disc on him to keep absorbs up to help this, they can still tank in their tanking presence/stance/form/buff and swap to a proper presence/stance/form/buff when they're dpsing
4) The taunting can be off, overloads may go at the same time or real close
* This can be scary, but utilizing cooldowns can help, our first attempt on this was horribly timed and we still 1-shot it
5) You will have to learn the "right" way for doing heroics unless you severely over gear it (assuming, as we're only 5/6 right now)

Raid cooldowns for two overloads within a couple seconds:
1) Two Deathknights: Anti-Magic Zone
2) Disc Prist: Power Word: Barrier; Spirit Shell spam
3) Holy Paladin: Aura Mastery (I believe?)
4) Resto Druid: Tranquility (This doesn't mitigate but it can heal up quickly between the two bursts)

[Soullord]

seems one of the quickest ways to do it would be to go 2 healer for this not sure we can pull it off so any pointers while the dps get's used to not stand in the bad?

[TheWindWalker]

seems one of the quickest ways to do it would be to go 2 healer for this not sure we can pull it off so any pointers while the dps get's used to not stand in the bad?

Don't forget that during each dog's build up phase their element (and thus their ability) is much weaker to you. If blue is just starting to build, step in ice bombs. If red is just starting to build, break chains. Don't stand in puddles no matter what and there's little you can do about the green spike barrage.

Keep the dogs (2/1) somewhat horizontal while away from each other so the tanks can easily spot the one they want to taunt from each other. The Offtank should only need a bit of healing here or there (a HoT or two helps) and melee should be very, very aware of floor-based mechanics. If there's puddles or icemines forming, just keep walking the dogs a bit. Also, as I said earlier, Spirit Shell just before an explosion and make sure that if any DPS have healing cooldowns that effect multiple people to pop them just after an explosion (without spirit shell) and keep on DPSing.

[lockedout]

How are people doing 25-35k dps?

---------- Post added 2012-12-14 at 10:55 PM ----------

I'll be honest, I only looked at the WoL to see class composition, but that's almost irrelevant to my suggestions.
My guild at the beginning was having coordination and mobility issues - especially with the Jasper Chains - and we also had three healers (rshaman, rshaman, disc - me)

The solution was simple:
1) Make the lesser of your tanks go dps
2) Establish a single target that all melee/casters will stay on - this never changes
2) Tank tanks two on pull, "OT" "tanks" the third one
3) Taunt swap at ~~33% (the non-dps target)
4) Near the first overload, MT taunts the third one and "OT" starts to dps
5) Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria
6) MT kits them around the room Grobbulus style and all dps follows behind in melee range
A) If Amethyst and Cobalt are up, kiting will be rather quick

This strategy does the following:
1) Nullifies any dangers of Jasper Chains
2) Removes most dangers of Cobalt Mines
3) Increases dps due to...
A) Sticking on the same target
B) Allows cleavers to hit all three instead of just two
4) Three-healing this should be able to survive the burst
A) This may make your disc perform better with more available chances to AoE heal

A downside:
1) Your tank can't handle tanking all three
* Ours was a tankadin with sub ilvl 463 and we were only 5/8 heroic DS (20% buff)
2) Your healers can't handle the load
* Having three healers should be able to, as we did
3) Your "OT" can't "tank" for ~40 seconds
* Have your disc on him to keep absorbs up to help this, they can still tank in their tanking presence/stance/form/buff and swap to a proper presence/stance/form/buff when they're dpsing
4) The taunting can be off, overloads may go at the same time or real close
* This can be scary, but utilizing cooldowns can help, our first attempt on this was horribly timed and we still 1-shot it
5) You will have to learn the "right" way for doing heroics unless you severely over gear it (assuming, as we're only 5/6 right now)

Raid cooldowns for two overloads within a couple seconds:
1) Two Deathknights: Anti-Magic Zone
2) Disc Prist: Power Word: Barrier; Spirit Shell spam
3) Holy Paladin: Aura Mastery (I believe?)
4) Resto Druid: Tranquility (This doesn't mitigate but it can heal up quickly between the two bursts)

I have never heard a worse boss strat. If you want to kill this boss don't do what this guy suggested.

[Squirl]

I have never heard a worse boss strat. If you want to kill this boss don't do what this guy suggested.

lockedout knows all about killing bosses. Still waiting for that Heroic Elite video dooood.

That strat is pretty bad, though. Your raiders just need to l2p; hopefully those posts in class forums will yield some results. Keep using the strat you got to enrage with.

[Manaia]

How are people doing 25-35k dps?

---------- Post added 2012-12-14 at 10:55 PM ----------




I have never heard a worse boss strat. If you want to kill this boss don't do what this guy suggested.

Which part of ANY of your two statements adds to helping the OP? One is berating them and another is berating me with no valuable input.

I'm sorry, can you point out why this is the worst strategy for this encounter? I thought I addressed all the pros and cons of it, perhaps you can point out more cons? Tanking all three together, if your four people (1 tank, 3 healers) can handle it while dealing more damage through cleaves/multi-dotting sounds more efficient than tanking two together, having your four people (2 tanks, 2 healers) handling it, with the constant coordination and target switching.

I never said this was the streamline strategy, I said it was the strategy that my guild used to down the boss when we were having problems.
Or, were you implying that their guild completely sucks and is unable to pull off this strategy. Again, my guild tried the streamlined strategy and were failing due to failing at coordination and this is the strategy I came up with that works wonders for us.

lockedout knows all about killing bosses. Still waiting for that Heroic Elite video dooood.

That strat is pretty bad, though. Your raiders just need to l2p; hopefully those posts in class forums will yield some results. Keep using the strat you got to enrage with.

Can you also explain why having more dps uptime makes the strategy bad?
Regarding the raiders learning to play, is it easier to have the tank and three healers learn a different strategy or the entire raid learning how to play?

I'm trying to provide valuable feedback to him in the form of an alternative suggestion that puts minimal responsibility on the dps while adding another dpser to their damage.

To both lockedout and Squirl, I don't know how far progressed you are or not, but if you're still doing normal I encourage you to step outside of the box and possibly try this strategy before claiming how bad it is. As of now, I have experience with my guild with both the streamlined strategy and this strategy that I thought of...and my strategy worked better. You have only tried the streamlined strategy and can only make assumptions that it's bad because it's not the same way 99% of the raiders do it.

Before you two, and everyone else, just assumes I'm a baddy I want to assure you that we always go with the streamlined version of all boss encounters first. If we're just hitting our heads against the wall, instead of keep trying a method that doesn't work for us we make minor revisions here and there and smooth out what works best for us. Conforming just for the sake of conforming is a terrible idea and keeps people closed minded to alternatives that may improve their game play. Obviously the streamlined strategy isn't working in the three weeks they were attempting this. I don't see any harm in suggesting an alternative strategy.

[Deja Thoris]

The issue here is the most of the players need to learn their classes and to gem / enchant / reforge and flask properly. Direct them to this thread. Make no mistake about it, for their gear level their performance is completely substandard. We aren't talking about tweaks here, its complete l2p. Sounds harsh, but sadly its true.

Class forums and wol parses are helpful here. Bring up one of your dps parses with someone that ranked and look at what they are doing that you aren't.

[Squirl]

[...]

You can see how progressed I am in my sig. It's right there, bro. As for your strat:

1) Make the lesser of your tanks go dps
2) Establish a single target that all melee/casters will stay on - this never changes
3) Tank tanks two on pull, "OT" "tanks" the third one
4) Taunt swap at ~~33% (the non-dps target)
5) Near the first overload, MT taunts the third one and "OT" starts to dps
6) Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria
7) MT kits them around the room Grobbulus style and all dps follows behind in melee range
A) If Amethyst and Cobalt are up, kiting will be rather quick

If they don't have the DPS to do the fight correctly (due to bad play and a poor understanding of class mechanics), what makes you think they'll be able to eat overloads and kill it before they run out of cooldowns and die? Their healers are not the best either, so that's just way too much extra damage. Why are you kiting them too? They stop moving when they use their abilities, so they will get spread out and hurt cleave damage anyway. They move faster than a player, so you won't be able to stay ahead of them too long. If you mean just moving them out of crap so melee have a place to stand, everyone does that already. Additionally, mines and chains will be handled the same way with this strat as they will with any other strat: move out of it and stick together, respectively.

The raiders in OP's logs are not good. That's the entirety of the problem. An alternate, more complicated, more demanding strat is not even close to reasonable answer.

[jetflash]

People are over complicating this, link people to icy-veins for reforges and then have them all use spellflash bitten which blinks the move they need to press for maximum dps rotation. It is idiot proof.

[Manaia]

You can see how progressed I am in my sig. It's right there, bro. As for your strat:



If they don't have the DPS to do the fight correctly (due to bad play and a poor understanding of class mechanics), what makes you think they'll be able to eat overloads and kill it before they run out of cooldowns and die? Their healers are not the best either, so that's just way too much extra damage. Why are you kiting them too? They stop moving when they use their abilities, so they will get spread out and hurt cleave damage anyway. They move faster than a player, so you won't be able to stay ahead of them too long. If you mean just moving them out of crap so melee have a place to stand, everyone does that already. Additionally, mines and chains will be handled the same way with this strat as they will with any other strat: move out of it and stick together, respectively.

The raiders in OP's logs are not good. That's the entirety of the problem. An alternate, more complicated, more demanding strat is not even close to reasonable answer.

Thank you for the reply! I'm sorry I didn't look at your link in your sig, I was kinda in defensive mode there. I do see that you're in a vastly more experienced raiding position that I am and I do appreciate your taking the time to respond.

I'll address your questions as it does appear that I can clear up some of the scariness to it.
1) Kiting was a poorly used term, I apologize for that. I just meant to say treat is as Grobbulus from Naxxramas where you're slowly moving them around the room.
2) Moving them in this fashion does still require DPS to pay attention to where they're standing, but one of the major benefits from this is the Jasper Chain. At least for my guild anyway, ranged and melee kept getting each other killed. Keeping everyone stacked on the butt of the bosses really helped mitigate that damage entirely. Regarding the Cobalt Mines, it helps line them up against the walls rather than spawning underneath range that were scattered throughout the room causing a lot of the floor to be blanketed.
3) The raid cooldowns section I mentioned was just to provide some coverage if the taunting wasn't quite right and energy levels weren't ~0%, 33%, and 66%. If they're roughly spread out like this, healing shouldn't be an issue at all. If they have something like 70%, 85%, and 90% then the first two overloads will be very close to each other. This is what the cooldown options were for.

That being said, when my guild started doing this we were all for the most part ilvl 463. We did not need to pop our cooldowns to protect us during the "oh shit" moments of having overloads close to each other, though they would have been helpful. Using my experience on this, that's what makes me think that they'll be able to eat the overloads before running out of cooldowns. Being in ilvl appropriate gear will allow you to soak the overloads as long as you're at relatively full health.

I do agree, this is a more demanding strat for the tank and healers, though it's severely less demanding on the dps, especially since there's one more. If they're failing on the dps department though it can be a step in the right direction. Obviously, if their tank and healers cannot meet the demands then I wouldn't recommend this at all. Maybe I'm just giving them too much credit since they were doing heroic Dragon Soul.

I also thank you for taking the time to read this as well, I know reading off-the-wall strategies makes most people instantly dismiss the idea of it.

People are over complicating this, link people to icy-veins for reforges and then have them all use spellflash bitten which blinks the move they need to press for maximum dps rotation. It is idiot proof.

Just pointing them to that direction isn't going to automatically make them better. While it's a good resource, you just can't assume that 100% of the raiding player base can read, absorb, and perform on a whim. I'm hoping that if they were doing heroic Dragon Soul then they'd be aware of their online resources to assist in their raiding. I know it's hard to grasp, but let's assume they're at the peek of their individual abilities and not class abilities (I'm pretty sure they aren't), the only way they could improve is to change their strategy as their rotation cannot be improved any more (as they're hypothetically at their individual peek).

[Deleted]

I do find it suprising that your enhancement shaman is topping dps without using flame shock and is reforging away mastery and haste instead of crit as crit is currently the weakest stat for enhancement and hes WAY over hit capped becos he have reforged for hit on some items according to his armoy which is http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...pickins/simple correct ?

EDIT: His non use of flame shock also means he cant use fire nova on the 2 dogs even if its not much it still better then nothing he is also not using chain lightning either during the fight also only a 14% uptime on the searing totem buff which probably means he is forgetting to put the totem down.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Swap your tanks, I'd expect at least 50k dps from the MT on this fight yet I'm seeing him average at 40k while the OT is averaging 7k on a dog that is taking 90% reduced damage. Dogs moving should have VERY small impact on dps, ranged shouldn't need to move much aside from moving out of stuff and your melee are just bad if they can't keep up with the dogs moving.

Going though the dps your enhance shaman is about 7% above where he should be on hit, stacking hit past 7.5% is a waste due to the other stats having higher values.

The hunter is 2% under exp cap and 2% over hit cap, he needs to shuffle that extra hit in to expertise, his gear is fairly poor but that isn't something that can be fixed in 5 minutes.

The ele shaman isn't fully geared for ele so he is suffering from excessive hit that comes with resto gear although he also isn't using lava burst or elemental blast anywhere near as much as he should. He needs to learn how to play ele better, I see no Ascension usage either. It looks almost like he isn't using lava burst outside of the lava flows proc.

The mage logged out nearly naked so I can't assess their gear...

The warrior needs to reforge more out of haste where he can and gem for crit instead of haste, he is in some pretty bad gear so I don't expect him to improve much until he gets more gear.

[jetflash]

I know it's hard to grasp, but let's assume they're at the peek of their individual abilities and not class abilities (I'm pretty sure they aren't), the only way they could improve is to change their strategy as their rotation cannot be improved any more (as they're hypothetically at their individual peek).

Do you even know what Spell Flash is?

"Bitten's SpellFlash modules replace Blizzard's default proc highlighting to flash the button you should press next to achieve maximum dps on a boss fight"

How is that not one of the best solutions to poor players? All that's left to do is tell them what to reforge. Sure they might only hit 80-90% of the true potential of a skilled player with the mod because it doesn't take in account for proper CD stacking, trinket procs, positioning or tricks but it will be enough to get them through MV when they are essentially fully geared from LFR.

[rated]

How are people doing 25-35k dps?

After looking at the warriors armory the answer is: 9 Missing enchants, missing socket in belt, not using extra sockets from BS, not using best quaity gems & is not hit or expertise capped.

The elly shaman is missing 1 enchant and has not put gems in all his sockets (not sure if it was like this on their raid night), he's 5% over hit cap and he's using spirit & haste gems.

The hunter is missing 2 enchants and one extra socket in his belt and correct me if im wrong, but I believe he's way over the hit cap and not expertise capped.

Mean while their best DPS, the enhancement shaman is also missing an enchant, is way over the hit cap (do enhancement shamans really need 16% hit?) and expertise cap as well.

The things I listed above is a pretty good reason why Soullord and his guild are struggling on stone guard so much. You just can't expect to get far when you're bringing people to raids that don't bother to fully enchant their toon, use the best gems & properly maintain their hit/expertise caps. This issue is the raid leaders fault for even considering bringing these people to raids and accepting this kind of low standard. Maybe they're a casual guild or close friends or something, which is fine and all, but wiping on stone guard constantly and not progressing every week is not fun at all either.

Before you even consider strategies on how to defeat this boss, the raid leader needs to talk to his raiders to get their toons in order and actually come to raids prepared.

[Manaia]

Do you even know what Spell Flash is?

"Bitten's SpellFlash modules replace Blizzard's default proc highlighting to flash the button you should press next to achieve maximum dps on a boss fight"

How is that not one of the best solutions to poor players? All that's left to do is tell them what to reforge. Sure they might only hit 80-90% of the true potential of a skilled player with the mod because it doesn't take in account for proper CD stacking, trinket procs, positioning or tricks but it will be enough to get them through MV when they are essentially fully geared from LFR.

So now they're staring at their pretty flashy icons and dying to Cobalt Mines and Jasper Chains because they're not paying attention.
You're still assuming that just because you point them to icy-veins and have them install and AddOn that tells them their rotation that they're going to be godly players. There are learning curves involved. While they can be helpful tools, I doubt it'll resolve the issue within the first 10 minutes of reading/downloading. This is why I gave a hypothetical example IF they were at the peek of their performance.

You had said it was idiot proof, I was simply pointing out that it isn't.
I think we can both agree though that it can be a very useful tool for people to use though.

[TheWindWalker]

The things I listed above is a pretty good reason why Soullord and his guild are struggling on stone guard so much. You just can't expect to get far when you're bringing people to raids that don't bother to fully enchant their toon

It's perfectly possible to have no enchants and be terribly gemmed (as long as you hit/exp cap) and still pull 50-60k DPS on those dogs in 463 gear. Especially for that Ele Shaman and Warrior. If they all had their best gems, best enchants (and I mean spending >15k gold for all the good stuff) they'd probably still be doing under 50k dps on a regular basis with their behavior in combat. The Ele shaman just blows my mind because that's what I mained until I switched at HoF. I even used "the wrong stat weights" and was annihilating the charts compared to these guys.

That tangent aside, this looks more like a "on the spot" alt run than a main run considering how much they simply didn't do.

[rated]

It's perfectly possible to have no enchants and be terribly gemmed (as long as you hit/exp cap) and still pull 50-60k DPS on those dogs in 463 gear. Especially for that Ele Shaman and Warrior. If they all had their best gems, best enchants (and I mean spending >15k gold for all the good stuff) they'd probably still be doing under 50k dps on a regular basis with their behavior in combat. The Ele shaman just blows my mind because that's what I mained until I switched at HoF. I even used "the wrong stat weights" and was annihilating the charts compared to these guys.

That tangent aside, this looks more like a "on the spot" alt run than a main run considering how much they simply didn't do.

Yeah it's clearly a L2P issue a long with general laziness in not maintaining your toon. Coming to raids properly gem, enchanted and stuff is really easy to accomplish so to see a raid where all the DPS don't care to even do this will make it hard to down any bosses regardless of the strategy you try.

I'm sure you're capable of pulling decent DPS with shit gems, enchants etc, but clearly the people in this raid aren't on your level.

[Deleted]

Most have been said so im not gonna comment on that(other than in 463 gear i had almost twice the dps of your nr1 ><).
I noticed one saying you have people dying to cobalt mines, this might happen because you get a lot of mines but are "unlucky" getting the cobalt active so you cant explode them safely. Both your mage and priest (maybe others, as im not familiar with all classes) can explode the bombs outside of cobalt being active with iceblock/priest 90% reduction thing. Though as mage you need to be kinda fast on iceblock after stepping into the mine, as there is like a 1s delay before exploding after stepping into the mine, so step in->iceblock(make sure you dont have GCD running when you step in)