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.

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)

I don't think many guilds do this anyway and only on fights it really matters. I doubt any guild out there bothers with soul stoning 25 people for every first kill. That just sounds absurd.

Once more guilds start doing this (which I doubt many will) I'm sure Blizzard will put a maximum level on the lower soulstones. But then again, what stops you from just paying random warlocks to sit in Netherstorm and soulstone every 30 minutes?

Smart use of game mechanics :P

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.

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?

Yep, and battleshout/commanding shout. Pretty simple fix.


EDIT: the simple fact that this is possible makes me a little sick.

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.