In Nax people used World Buffs to get around very hard encounters. Now in addition to world buffs there seems to be a new trend:



The way it works atm, there's nothing that stops you from having 25 lvl 18 warlocks outside an instance and SS up the whole raid. Given that all current difficult encounters (and that's probably going to stay like that) involve either massive adds or aoe or both and your raid usually slowly breaks down after losing single people, having everyone SSed is obviously a gigantic advantage.
It simplifies all the fights that are slowly wearing your raid down if you don't handle the various raid dmg/add spawns correctly.

Now first of all don't get me wrong here, this is not intended as a flame.
I'm not blaming guilds that used it for Al'ar (and possibly Vashj? dunno yet). The fights are horribly untuned and while at least Al'ar is doable the normal way, we might use more then our normal amount of SSs as well cause we are just getting increasingly frustrated (also with ourself, but that's another issue). I'm just complaining about a game mechanic that needs to be fixed Blizzard-wise imho.

My point is that these SSs from lvl 18 locks don't function like world buffs. My guild never used a world buff for nax because we didn't think it was worth spending the time farming them and more importantly we didn't want to have a random fuckup/disconnect and let everything go to hell.

But low level Warlocks are a totally different thing. You summon them in front of the raiding instance (alright, TK is a bad example, but there will be more instances and summoning WILL be possible there) and just use 25 SSs every 30 minutes.

Now even after pushing any moral barriers aside, is this what we want to see in future end game raiding? I surely don't want this to happen. But the reality is that if nothing is done to fix this, we are going to see a lot of Soulstones in wow raiding in the future. If you look at my lock above, I used 12 hours to level him up to lvl 18. I spend at least 1 hour of that standing idle around doing RL stuff and then I also leveld Tailoring, Cooking and First Aid somewhat, just don't ask me why. There was 0 powerlevling involved, I just wanted to see the BE starting area anyway. Also it was the first time I did any quests in the BE area. So that can be done much faster surely.

I for once really don't want to write in my recruiting posts 'Must have a lvl 18 Warlock to xfer along or level it up.'. I hope other people share that view.

Since there are 4-5 levels of the soulstone spell, it would be trivial for Blizzard to change the spell so there is a level range. I'm sure if it starts becoming a heavily exploited thing they will do it.

FWIW the best place to keep all these level 18 warlocks is Shattrah, a mage can port an entire alt raid over to there.

What evidence is there of a "trend" to do this? The only guild you cite doing it seems to be your own.

www.lrguild.org .

And I'm sure there are more.

A number of references (some sorta sideways) in the latter pages of the Al'ar thread (Fire Resist for Alar the Phoenix God)

Nihilum's Al'ar video, and others. It's been done by various parties for special occasions such as Sapp and Kel kills back in pre-TBC days as well. It's something that most guilds aren't going to bother with, but on some fights giving all of your raid members a second life is a pretty big deal.

We haven't used it yet. I still wanted to see how much effort it is. And your comment shows that you don't really follow high end raiding very much. Out of the 5 Al'ar kills, at least 2 or 3 used it, maybe 4. The Method Vashjy vid is not yet released, but my guess is they had mass SSs as well to fight the MC.

I'd say it's a clever use of game mechanics... we used like 2-3 alts on Loatheb to help make healthstones, and just chucked a couple of extra soulstones after getting all the world buffs done. Like world buffs, it's an extra edge at the cost of extra effort.

Of course, if encounters started getting designed with the train of thought that it's becoming a norm... we'd have a problem.

Assuming it starts getting out of hand, and isn't what Blizzard wants raiding to become, a simple fix would be to make Soulstones vanish on zoning, or a quick check if the soulstone buff's caster is in the same zone at the time of the soulstone receiver's death.

Soulstones being removed on zoning would be a pretty easy fix.

Aren't there some buffs (Paladin greater blessings, Mage Amp/Dampen Magic) that are automatically removed if whoever casted the buff leaves the party? Might be easier to just put soulstones in this group of spells.

What's stopping people from filling a raid with 15 alt locks tho?

Removing soulstones on zoning would be the best thing to do.

I'm sure this will be changed so you can only soulstone party members, but it's just another trick in a long line of raiding quirks... nobody's to blame for taking advantage of existing mechanics, that's how you play to win. Of course, if it's not fixed in 2.1 it will become even more important, as our consumable crutches disappear... which would be unfortunate.

Good point... what's to stop them from filling a raid with 15 lvl 70 alt locks, even... not quite so simple a fix after all.

edit: yes, removing SS on zoning should do the trick.

Yeah well what's to stop them from zoning in the 15 level 70 warlocks that they found, having them soulstone someone and then doing a rotation until everyone is soulstoned???

This is getting a bit ridiculous, and while it is a pretty big deal, I'm sure it's not used to the scale people think and, like everyone is saying, if it becomes a big problem then it will be fixed.

Well it wouldn't be very easy to find 15 level 70 warlocks that are attuned to TK though

In all seriousness, while I personally agree that in some cases, such an approach may indeed trivialize an encounter, soulstones by themselves will not give you kill, if you don't already have the fight under some sort of control. It's also too much of a hassle to repeat such an "operation" for every hard boss, every single time, I seriously doubt any guild will be willing to go through all that trouble in the long run. Unless of course the boss is broken (out of whack) by default and you need to minimize the luck element.

For Al'ar specifically, there are just so many things left out to luck that can go wrong and lead to a wipe no matter how good you play. If I remember correctly we had some extra soulstones for our kill but since only 2-3 people died, it turned out we could easily do without them. Fact is, if the game mechanics allow people to use certain "life saving" abilities on any given encounter, then you can bet that they will utilize whatever its out there to do it. At the very least for the first kill. This is not something new either. It has already been done pre TBC on numerous occasions, in Naxxramas. Whether or not is "morally" wrong is an entirely different discussion.

On a related theme, do any of you ever have a 3rd or 4th paladin sitting outside to give the raid that 3rd/4th blessing?

Just like Earthshield gets removed on zone so you cant ES an entire raid in the same way, SS being stripped on zone would solve this issue, as it woul dbe too time-consuming/difficult to use anything other than low-level warlocks to do this.

For 25 man raids as alliance we normally we always have 3 paladins in the raid (and less druids/shaman). The 3 core blessings are huge and paladin single target healing longevity pretty hax right now. I guess horde guilds would have more healing shaman/druids as a hangover from the pre paladin days. 2/3 of our core druids are feral, 1/3 of our core shaman are enhancement and 2/3 priests were shadow (might be 1/3 now).

Anyway with 3 paladins:
Melee dps = Might, Kings, Salv
Healers = Wisdom, Kings, Salv
Caster dps = Wisdom, Kings, Salv
Hunters = Wisdom, Might, Kings
Tank = Light, Kings, Might or Sanctuary (if someone has it)

Adding a 4th paladin buffing outside the instance would only add Light to dps which generally the paladin's aren't healing. You'd normally have paladins focusing on healing the tanks (no aoe heal, no hots, best single target healing efficiency).

If you only take 2 paladins to 25 man raids then a 3rd paladin outside buffing would be a significant benefit. It just depends how long it might take you to get from the entry of the instance to the pull spot eg: Getting a 15min buff and takeing 6min to get back to the pull spot and ready is gonna be a bit meh, you'd never do it for any farm mode boss.

I miss 40 man raids and 5-6 paladins, every buff under the sun for everyone. I'll never forget a horde priest's astonishment 1st time playing alliance, playing a friends character in bwl.. "OMG wtf are all these buffs, EZ MODE ALLIANCE WOW just wow."

Back when Razorgore was first buffed after the BWL release, my guild had everyone level a lock alt up to soulstone someone for him. But even after we had 40 warlock alts leveled up for it, we only ever used it for Razorgore the first 3-4 kills. Everyone's alts just rotted after that really.

Last time I was Resto, I accidently discovered I was able to Earth Shield multiple people by logging in and out. Though it would be tedious to Earth Shield the entire raid, for... say a guild that's stuck on Aran, I can imagine it being used.

To everyone saying that "its to tedious or to much work" for it to become viable and big, remember long ago when flasking anything but your tank was considered "tedious and to much work"?

This gives an edge, and as long as encounters become increasingly hard people will use whatever edge avaliable in order to win.

Anything that will give people an edge while fighting for a world-first will be used. Tedious or not. How tedious is it to run an entire raid through DM North for those buffs? In fact, having baby locks on standby isn't nearly as time-consuming as gathering every world buff.

As long as blizzard refrains from balancing around this, it won't affect me. But the whole thing is starting to resemble car races where after the rules were made to state you can only have x-amount of gallons of fueltank capacity, drivers would install yards and yards of extra fuel line so they could still carry more petrol than the next guy.

Guilds on our server did this in Naxxramas. For what it is worth, my strat for Al'ar indicate we'd need to do this, or change strategy entirely.
Its obviously stupid. Like blessings, these should go away once the warlock casting it disbands.