This practice, once unheard-of, seems like it might be in the process of becoming standard practice among high-end raiding guilds. There have been two rather prominent examples in just the past week: First, Last Resort soulstoned their raid to get one of the world's first Al'ar kills. Second, Method soulstoned the vast majority of their raid to get the world's second Vashj kill (out of seventeen players with visible buffs in their video, there were fifteen soulstones).

Last Resort's treatment of the soulstoning process is particularly hilarious - they have an alt guild comprised mostly of level 18 warlocks. It seems like such a stable of warlocks would be a great benefit to any raiding guild. Once you have it set up, you would only need five minutes or so of porting, relogging, and summoning to give your entire raid an extra lease on life on those critical kill attempts. On fights where random deaths are both very difficult to avoid and increasingly detrimental to the raid (such as Vashj and Al'ar), mass soulstoning could easily make the difference between a terrible attempt and a kill.

So, with all of this laid out, I have two questions for everyone out there: First, is it worth doing? It's certainly something to consider when going for world firsts, but is this practice something that any rank-and-file guild can make effective use of? Second, should it be permitted? It's not a timesink on the level of consumables, per se (a one-time investment of several hours is required, but that's it), but the practice still reeks a bit of illegitimacy.

I thought there was already a thread on this?


Anyway, even if they did nerf it so that L18s can't apply SS to a L70, the more "dedicated" raider could just level an alt lock to 70.

You can't really nerf it to make it go away when logging out or people would lose it when D/Cing.

Maybe the easiest nerf would be: when you zone into raid zones, active SS buffs are stripped.

I imagine this will get nerfed before 2.1 is live.

When something like this comes up, Blizzard can do one of two things:
a) Balance every encounter assuming the entire raid has a soulstone up.
b) Find a way to nerf it, which will ultimately decrease/limit the Soulstone's intended use.

Wow, I can't believe I missed that thread. Mods please delete/merge, thanks.

Yeesh, how do you get a 100% duplicate thread on such an esoteric topic?