[10H] The Stone Guard

[Winkle]

Thanks for the tips, also more practice just naturally helped.

My HPS on this fight is insane, 40k HPS+ and 100kDPS for good measure

[stevos]

I had another look at our logs for this fight, don't tend to look at healing / dps tend to only focus on damage taken, and seems I topped the meters by some distance with just over 151k dps and 50k HPS, only being beaten by the MT healer.

Didn't even look at the meters during the encounter.

Amusing, if a little silly.

[PsiVen]

Any tips for dog control (with reagrds energy)?

The method we employed, and ended up being very effective, was having one tank (MT) assigned to two dogs for the entire fight.

The MT would always have the petrified dog and whichever of the other two had lower energy while the OT would always have the higher of the two that weren't petrified. Often times this required a swap. Whenever the single dog became petrified the OT would taunt the dog that hadn't just overloaded and the MT would taunt the newly petrified solo dog.

This insured that no dog ever overloaded when it wasn't supposed to, the only draw back was that occasionally we would see a very short Cobalt (or Jasper) petrification so wouldn't have a whole lot of time to mine sweep (or break chains).

This also helped boost tank dps significantly since the tank who was at higher vengeance, the MT, never had to dps a dog that had Solid Stone.

Paladins are EXTREMELY strong on this encounter. I was the MT for our kill and ended up doubling or nearly doubling the DPS of any single DPS and I also topped the healing meters. Not only that but I took approximately equal damage to our Druid OT who was only tanking one dog and who had a signifcantly higher Ilvl (I was at 469 he was at 480 with a BMAH belt and a few lucky Galleon drops). The ShoR buff is crazy good against Rend Flesh.

While I agree, there are similar parses from every other tank spec (even a Guardian is up there at 40th); the tank swap method you describe is the main reason for the high Vengeance. I feel like SoI must scale from the Tile buff, but then I don't know how much higher my Vengeance really gets here. Seems nuts.

Amusingly, the #1 DPS parse is a Brewmaster who appears to have stacked up 100 tiles and piled up all three dogs to Heroism at the end.

[Auracle]

Hey all,

Managed to down this this past weekend without too much trouble, thanks in no small part to lack of Jasper this week (hooray?).

Much of the advice in this thread was helpful, some stuff we found crucial on our attempts:

2 tanks
3 heals
5 dps

Tiles - stacked this to around 100, with our 2 melee DPS only doing one set of crystal-debuffs after each reset, leaving ranged to continue to stack until ~ 100.

Overloads - We found having a 'bad' overload was generally a wipe. Consequently we biased letting the tanks do whatever was needed not to have a bad overload. If we ever DID get one, we CD'd the hell out of it ASAP. On our kill attempt we had no bad overloads, but on prior attempts we were able to occasionally survive one or two with quick use of strong CDs.

Crystals - At the start and in particular after tile-resets, we used Devo aura Cds during the first few seconds of crystal-debuffs, since we had DPs clicking whatever was nearest, and not just the petrified crystal. Damage from the debuff is quite high at the outset and we found it helpful to take the edge off.

Nothing spercial with positioning or tank-specific strats. We started by trying the '2 dogs always on one tank' strat but found that over time the tanks had an easier time being able to organize the dogs without constant cross-taunting. Since not getting 'bad' overloads was a key point for us, we left them to it and I think that's what bought us the fight.

-Auracle

[Winkle]

I think cross taunting should generally be avoided since obviously as the dogs cross they are still both charging.

[daishan]

On normal we cross taunted was quite good once we got it right, I got to do silly dps and healing with 2 dogs the whole fight.
For heroic we switched to single taunting, I think if both tanks are confident that they can always get cross taunting perfect without cluttering up vent it's probably the optimal way, but I think single taunting is less prone to mistakes.

[Gab]

While I agree, there are similar parses from every other tank spec (even a Guardian is up there at 40th); the tank swap method you describe is the main reason for the high Vengeance. I feel like SoI must scale from the Tile buff, but then I don't know how much higher my Vengeance really gets here. Seems nuts.

Amusingly, the #1 DPS parse is a Brewmaster who appears to have stacked up 100 tiles and piled up all three dogs to Heroism at the end.

From a DPS perspective all the tanks can have similar effectiveness. I was mainly referring to our ShoR buff vs the bleeds (damage taken) and our raid healing as the reason why we have an edge tanking two dogs.

[Darielle]

From a DPS perspective all the tanks can have similar effectiveness. I was mainly referring to our ShoR buff vs the bleeds (damage taken) and our raid healing as the reason why we have an edge tanking two dogs.

The self healing someone like a Druid can pump out is hilariously strong, and this is the type of fight where self healing is just as strong as damage reduction (no burst at all, just pure dot damage and weakish melee hits slowly ticking away). More, the way Druids work they get additional Rage from crits to multiple mobs so the healing you're seeing your Druid put out to one mob will go up immensely if you did put them on 2 Dogs.

A Druid who specs Nature's Vigil could easily match the raid healing that a Paladin could; it would just be as burst instead of spread out (which should be better - you could time it around the parts with the highest chaos, that may be when Cobalt hasn't been chosen for a while, etc.).

Warriors are a little bit out of luck when it comes to raid healing support, but their mitigation on this is hilarious because of Revenge Scaling. Similarly, Monks on this fight are flat out hilarious; this fight plays into their strengths so hard.

Paladins aren't all that strong on the two dogs, it just looks pretty if your comparison point is "That other tank on the other dog" because it'll look like taking less damage and healing more. It's more a case where Paladins are limited to be on the single dogs to actually make use of Battle Insight.

[Rokh]

I know a lot of people might be having trouble with the energy management on heroic when they first start this fight, so I’ll try and save you a little headache by going over the very simple 2-rule method I use for my guild while tanking this… So simple in fact that you don’t even have to watch the energy after the first 10 seconds.

On the pull, the 1-dog tank watches the energy of the non-glowing dog being held by the 2-dog tank. When that dog reaches 60+ energy, the 1-dog tank taunts the glow-dog. (yea I call them glow-dogs)

Set-up should be complete and you will have 1-dog tank with a dog at about 60-65, and the 2-dog tank at who the hell cares (see how simple this is already)

Rule 1 – If the 2-dog tank has a glowing dog, do nothing.
Rule 2 – If the 1-dog tank has a glowing dog, taunt the dog that was previously glowing.

Now you will never have dog problems, and you can blame all the problems on your dps and healers.
I recommend the 1-dog tank keep the glowing dog targeted, so after the explosion he can taunt quick if his dog becomes the next glow-dog.

Hope this makes the fight a bit less stressful.

[frontallobe]

Some stuff we did that helped.

Used different vent channel for tanks
Used a 3rd tank to avoid chains perpetually running tiles
3 healers
Rolling raid walls as needed
Never breaking chains - just group up
Don't go too crazy breaking cobalt mines as the tanks can avoid them

Also ended up doing a quick video with my healer and I narrating some things that worked for us. Certainly not for the HM team clearing 6/6 but may be helpful to those trying to get it down now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBwY2vA ... ature=plcp

[Winkle]

One further tip, for weeks with Jasper chains its easier if you run with 9/someone dies. You'll then always have 1 person without chains who can light up tiles without issue.

[Rhiannon]

Slightly less sacrificial and referred to earlier in the post above yours, just have a third player spec tank so you get two tile runners always free.

[Gab]

One further tip, for weeks with Jasper chains its easier if you run with 9/someone dies. You'll then always have 1 person without chains who can light up tiles without issue.

Isn't there a max of number of chains (3 on 10 man)? So if you run with 10/someone doesn't die you have 2 runners instead of 1.

Edit: It was my understanding that some groups used a 3rd tank just for easier tiles. If it's a tank it doesn't really matter if the crystal buff doesn't match the current petrification and a tank can pretty much just run through pools/traps with some cds and a HoF.