Simple solution.
0) Summon soulstone is now an instant cast spell
1) Every Boss gains a new ability such that when the boss is pulled:
-- All soulstones are removed from every player in the raid
-- All warlocks have the CD on their Soulstone reset to 0.

It then takes the warlocks 2 seconds to re-soulstone someone, and everything except abusing offline warlocks who log in is prevented.

**EDIT
Personally I vote that every cooldown is set to 0 on boss pull because waiting 25 mintues between pulld for bossess balanced about shield-wall (Hi Maexxna and Patchwerk) sucks and frankly it would make learning fights alot easier if you had all your tools on every attempt at a boss.

Uh, how is that a simple solution?

The buff should just fade when you zone. That's the simple solution. I believe there are spells in the game that already act like this.

Find 15 level 70 warlocks who are attuned to the raid instance of your choosing (alts, plus advertising and paying people who aren't running that instance that week), have them zone in, soulstone someone, and zone out. The soulstoned person never leaves the instance, so his buff never fades.

A bit silly? Sure. But almost any "solution" will have loopholes, is my point, unless you really make major changes.

My solution: When a soulstoned player dies, the server does a quick range check. If the warlock who cast the soulstone is within 300 yards, you get a res box, otherwise the stone fizzles.

I can't really think of any loopholes for that one.

I actually like this. More generally, make soulstones instant-cast and remove their cooldown, but make them go away when you enter combat. They retain the same functionality (bit of a buff, actually), but there's no longer any way to abuse them. Brilliant!

The buff should fade when either the warlock or soulstoned player zones in or out of an instance, I think.

This sounds pretty overpowered to me - soulstone a resser every pull for unlimited wipe protection? Imagine how this changes the relative power of soulstone versus DI/reincarnation in a 5 man.

Even having SS for every boss pull would be a pretty big increase in power.

I like the "all cooldowns cleared when a boss is engaged" idea. I hate the sense that we just blew a battle res or shieldwall and thus our next attempt doesn't have quite the same chance to succeed as the previous one. It would mean that wipe protection is always available (DI and reincarnation are also cooldowns that would be cleared) but I've found that we rarely run out of wipe protection anyways (of course we're Horde so 3-4 shammies is common, plus 2-3 warlocks, 1-2 pallies... amounts to about 10 recoveries each hour, minus however many of those are used before the wipe is inevitable).

Edit: Maybe this should apply only to raid bosses. Having your 30 minute cooldowns for every boss in a 5-person would be kind of overpowered... although fun too, so hey, whatever.

Another option - soulstone works exactly as it does now, except that when the soulstoned player dies, the *warlock* gets the popup box offering to res them.

OK, so you could still soulstone a whole raid with some extra level 18s, but you couldn't do it with alts, and the level 18s would have to stay online and pay attention for the whole duration of the raid.

That should put it out of the question for anyone except the seriously deranged.

The clearing of all cooldowns when you engage a boss I think is a big stretch in trying to stop mass soulstoning a raid. I think part of the challenge of the raiding game is making sure you have wipe protection up at all times and knowing when to use your raids longest cooldowns (and not surprisingly most powerful abilities) that will benefit you the most and result in a kill. You also have to take into consideration other skills like recklessness.

I think you would see much faster raid progession overall if the clear all cooldowns before a raid boss is engaged.

Or those with that would buy two accounts for a little edge .

I use SS on a healing class in PvP, so 300 yards would not work if the healer was away with someone else.

Clearing Soulstones when you zone out of/into any instance or when the warlock zones out/it sounds like the best solution to this problem, doesn't it?

A part of that functionality already exists for Earth Shield, which gets removed whenever the guy who has it on zones in/out. Shouldn't be that hard to implement and that's fairly secure against any exploiting, I think.

As has been said many times in this thread, that would mean that you lose the soulstone on any disconnect, and as such it's not an acceptable option. You can afford to do it with Earth Shield because it's not on a 30 minute cooldown.

Well, that's acceptable imo. Disconnecting doesn't happen all that often. And if it does, that raid/guy is screwed in more difficult pve encounters anyway. Might as well screw him a bit more.

And for raid recovery reasons, we got a few guys with not-so-perfect ISPs as well and team bulgaria/russia just doesn't get a SS we need for raid recovery, there's more then one paladin/priest in a raid.
And if the argument is 'all our paladins/priests have ISP issues', it's probably time to swtich to an offline game.

The topic is getting big response now, even from casual gamers. Affenjungs Inc. protested against this technique being used by other raiding guilds an the thread reached 17pages within a very short time. This is just one example.

Seems like it will get part of the neverending casual vs. hardcore discussion. So the chances that Blizzard will fix this problem completely are increasing.

The problem is that there is no real clearcut way to do this, if you use level 70 warlocks as well. To be honest the more I read this topic the more I think that short of a complete overhaul on how dying and using a soulstone works and the application of it there is no way to solve this problem

What about...
Doesn't require redefining raid group sizes, level limitations don't matter, and covers the "oh no, our warlock disconnected during the fight!" problems, and not a problem if you zone in and out.

Sure, it screws you if your warlock disconnects and you bring in someone else for continued attempts, but since you'd only have the soulstone for half an hour maximum after the warlock DC'ed, it's not such a huge problem--especially assuming that you are bringing in the other class because a warlock's soulstone is not strictly necessary.

Just nitpicking here, but if you were raiding with 24/25 people with 24 warlocks logged off in your instance your logic wouldn't prevent this case, and all 24 could be soulstoned. Minor point though.

True, I'm glad you noticed that, I hadn't. Here's a modified version with a potential solution:

I suppose it could be refined somewhat further, but you get the idea.

Statement seems pretty solid, and really, something like that would probably be the best way to fix it. Rather than going through with the soulstone buff fading through zoning or level restrictions, a solid lock on requiring certain logic for the resurrection to be available would probably be better than about anything else.

The only functionality I could see it changing other than the in raid functionality is that of random low levels randomly casting soulstone on their friends for fun, or when someone maybe someone soulstones their friend before they log off so their friend can go farm and be able to rez if they get ganked, but really, something minor like that pales in comparison to fixing the raid issue IMO.

Well if this is applied only for instances (and possibly only raid instances) then it wouldn't even interfere with low level "for fun" soulstone casting, or soulstoning a friend to farm before logging off.

This "nitpick" is a perfect example of why making anything with a huge player base can be so difficult. It's very very hard to have a couple of programmers able to find all the loopholes when millions of people are going to be pounding away on it when it's released. Granted, most of the "obvious" loopholes should be caught, but what is obvious to one isn't necessarily obvious to another.

For the SSing problem, the easiest solution is to have any SS up removed when that person enters combat with a boss. It's not elegant, but it would ensure you can't have more SS then then the number of warlocks in the group. This does cause huge headaches for anyone raiding as now they have to put SS after the boss is engaged which can cause all sorts of problems with initial locations, movement fights, etc. and a single SS can't last through multiple bosses when you're on content that is mostly farm, but you can still wipe to. More than 1 warlock in the raid would mostly get around this though.