Mysticknight's Stone Guards Guide

[Mysticknight]

Hello everyone, Just completed Sweet Victory's 10man Normal Guide to doing Mogu'Shan Vaults-The Stone Guards Guide 10M written Guide I will also be writing up a 25man Version of this Guide, and release the 10M video guide soon. If I get good feedback I'll release more guides to all the encounters.





Here is the link to the guide.
http://sweetvictory-thrall.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8770837&gid=223701


Mysticknight

[PsiVen]

When the inactive guardian on the off-tank is nearly full energy, you will need need have the tanks stack on each other and then taunt swap and then split them up again.

Not sure what you mean by this. When the inactive guardian is alone on the OT at near-full energy, it should be left alone until it becomes the active guardian. No swaps are necessary as long as the ones on the MT are activating. The only way it would be a problem is if you had something like this:

OT
1 - 99 Energy

MT
2 - 50 Energy (active)
3 - 60 Energy

But this would be impossible, because it would imply that #2 was the most recent to explode and thus it cannot be active now.

[Tebin]

I tried swapping the off-adds to keep the active add on one tank and found it to be really fiddley. Is there actually a justification for keeping an MT/OT?

[Auracle]

I'll toss in some tidbits that we found on our maiden kill.

We left control of the Dogs entirely to the discretion of the tanks, with tanks ~ 20 yards apart and cross taunting any time they needed to ensure the correct dog was gaining energy. The general (and obvious, I guess?) priority was to taunt the highest energy dog AWAY from the pair, and the required dog TO the pair. Simple in theory, a bit of a mess in practice but it only took a few attempts so I'm sure it will become smoother with practice.

Whomever you have assigned to Overload -> Debuff management, it's important that they let the raid know in advance when a non-beneficial Overload is about to occur, so that healers can prepare and CDs can be used. I think that on normal mode at leas,t it's reasonable to expect this situation to arise now and then (it happened 3x on our kill attempt).

This is of course entirely anecdotal but we found that the 'RNG' regarding which Dog would be next to apply the debuff, tended to favor whichever dog was either currently highest energy, or 2nd in line. I suspect this is simply a random occurence and that it is in fact completely random, but I'll be watching closely on future attempts.

Regarding fire chains, we found their damage to be the most punitive throughout the fight. They never chain to tanks however, and once chained we never saw a dps or healer receive another chain while the existing one was active. based on this observation we decided to go the 'cheap' route and simply not bother clearing chains, which worked very well. While it may seem counter-intuitive on such a movement heavy fight, the distance before damage occurs is fairly forgiving.

In the future we will be pushing for a mixed strat, with DPS and heals clearing chains piecemeal over the fight. I haven't looked at heroic mode yet but I'm guessing that leaving the chains around will not be a good idea, so best to start practicing

[daishan]

We didn't have the chains this week, I'm assuming the best way to brake them is to wait until you have the petrification that will negate the damage. We were getting a little over run with ice traps so when we had the cobalt petrification up we had everyone that could take a trap next to no damage from them, HoF'ing someone would be best then they can just run through a load and won't need a dispel.

[Auracle]

Yeah makes complete sense.

Definitely going to try that HoF mine-sweeper trick with the Cobalt mines, sounds hilarious.

[Sagara]

Quick thought - why bother breaking Jasper chains? Do they deal damage when the players are close enough? Why not just have the players team up and break only the really annoying chains?

[Mysticknight]

When the inactive guardian on the off-tank is nearly full energy, you will need need have the tanks stack on each other and then taunt swap and then split them up again.

Not sure what you mean by this. When the inactive guardian is alone on the OT at near-full energy, it should be left alone until it becomes the active guardian. No swaps are necessary as long as the ones on the MT are activating. The only way it would be a problem is if you had something like this:

OT
1 - 99 Energy

MT
2 - 50 Energy (active)
3 - 60 Energy

But this would be impossible, because it would imply that #2 was the most recent to explode and thus it cannot be active now.

lets say the inactive is 98%, and then it becomes active, what we did was we had both tank stack together to make sure it wouldn't reach 100% while its on its own, you could just taut one off the other tank but it might not reach it before it blows in time. so we found it easier to just stack together let it blow up and then split it up again.

[Auracle]

@ Sagara: Yeah that's exactly what we did (didn't break the chains at all), as mentioned in my post above (sorry for wall of text ).

I'm thinking that it's a bad idea to get in the habit of doing so however, since heroic appears to incorporate a great deal more movement.

What I'll be doing with my guys this weekend is having them clear the chains during Jasper Petrification (assuming we have Jasper this week).

I am not sure if we are going to try heroic or not, but if we do I'll post what I find

[Hespherus]

Next time post all the tactics here. I dont want to go to an external website, thats why we have these forums.

[Volitaire]

So we did this last week with success but this week we are having tons of problems with it. Last week we had Jade, Jasper and Amnethist, this week we have Jade, Jasper, Cobalt. We are able to handle the ice traps without much issue when cobalt is active but we are having a lot of issue with un-protected overloads. We are starting the fight with 2 on the left and 1 on the right. At 40 energy we swap the two inactive to give the active on the left with the uncharged inactive. This works just fine but we keep ending up with situations where we have two that are overloading almost simultaneously. I am thinking that we just maybe need to swap the inactives again if we can get a good separation between the energy sets. Any advice here?

[PsiVen]

The rationale for keeping two adds on the same tank the whole fight is that it increases your DPS efficiency; the raid should be focused around one area, as they can't just stand in between the bosses and switch targets easily. The downside is that you get some minor energy buildup which decreases the average length of Petrification slightly. That's not really a big deal for Overload damage, but it can be bad if you need to clear out Cobalt Mines and only have 5 seconds to do it safely.

lets say the inactive is 98%, and then it becomes active, what we did was we had both tank stack together to make sure it wouldn't reach 100% while its on its own, you could just taut one off the other tank but it might not reach it before it blows in time. so we found it easier to just stack together let it blow up and then split it up again.

One add cannot "blow on its own" as it's the grouping that causes their energy to increase. If it did happen it wouldn't be an issue; the active add Overloading is exactly what you want to happen. Stacking all three adds together causes a lot of unwanted energy buildup.

[degre]

When the inactive guardian on the off-tank is nearly full energy, you will need need have the tanks stack on each other and then taunt swap and then split them up again.

Not sure what you mean by this. When the inactive guardian is alone on the OT at near-full energy, it should be left alone until it becomes the active guardian. No swaps are necessary as long as the ones on the MT are activating. The only way it would be a problem is if you had something like this:

OT
1 - 99 Energy

MT
2 - 50 Energy (active)
3 - 60 Energy

But this would be impossible, because it would imply that #2 was the most recent to explode and thus it cannot be active now.

lets say the inactive is 98%, and then it becomes active, what we did was we had both tank stack together to make sure it wouldn't reach 100% while its on its own, you could just taut one off the other tank but it might not reach it before it blows in time. so we found it easier to just stack together let it blow up and then split it up again.

You never want your tanks to stack, never.

The Stone Guards raise in energy when are within range and drop energy when alone, so you want the tanks to stay close enough that the raid doesn't have to move much but far enough that their adds are never in range. Keep those dogs out and the add alone will go down to a level easier to manage.

In 25 we had sometimes an inactive dog go boom due to bad tank management, but if you do it right, even if by chance you have one inactive explode just a pop a raid CD and you'll be fine.

[PsiVen]

10M dogs do not regenerate energy, but they don't need to. If the dog with too much energy is the one on the OT you simply never have to swap or get near each other until it activates and is safe to blow up.

[Darielle]

I tried swapping the off-adds to keep the active add on one tank and found it to be really fiddley. Is there actually a justification for keeping an MT/OT?

If MT/OT refers to who tanks one Guard and who tanks two, you just want the one that scales better with multiple mobs on top of them. A Paladin could be justifiable given free cleave damage, Warriors with Revenge get some hilarious returns out of tanking two monsters, Druids do as well because splash crits = Rage. It's easier to keep the one guy having two except for emergencies because it means your raid can fold around there, damage dealers don't have to move or swap targets, you have a set "zone" for aoe healing and other effects to be put down etc.

Depending on whether you want dps or survivability, put the tank that you want to get X out of on the two.

Alternately, just /roll for it. It doesn't make that much difference, and aside from maybe who initiates the swaps, the two roles have nothing different. It's not like the tank taking two is actually going to take that much more damage (because most of the damage is Rend Flesh).