Originally Posted by
Lore
What's up guys, and welcome to the Mogu'shan Vaults raid guide. My name is Lore, and today I'll be walking you through the 10-man normal version of the Stone Guard encounter. A lot of this information will still be relevant to the 25-man version, however there are some key differences between the two that will result in some strategy changes.
Stone Guard is a council-style fight consisting of 4 possible Quilien guardians - Jade, Cobalt, Jasper, and Amethyst. On 10-man, only three of these will be active. Which three you get will be randomly chosen when you first enter the instance and remain that way for the rest of the week. In this kill, we had the Jade, Jasper, and Amethyst guardians.
Each guardian has one unique ability, most of which are pretty simple to deal with. The Amethyst guardian will create small purple puddles on the ground beneath random raid members. They deal a significant amount of damage, but are pretty small and easy enough to just move away from.
We didn't have the Cobalt guardian in this pull, but his ability ends up being somewhat similar. He'll create cobalt mines on random players, which have a 3-second arming time. Once they're armed, anyone standing near one will detonate it, which causes a fairly substantial amount of damage and roots them in place. Again, you'll just want to stay away from these. If you find yourselves running out of space, however, you can have a designated player use a survivability cooldown, such as Divine Shield, and trigger them manually.
The Jade guardian's ability is pretty straightforward -- every 10 seconds, he casts an AOE damage pulse. It's not a ton of damage, at least not on normal mode, so you'll just need to heal through it.
The Jasper guardian's ability is a little more complicated. He'll link two players together with a Jasper Chain. If those players are more than 10 yards away from each other, they'll take increasing Fire damage the longer they're apart. Now, the chains can be broken by spending a total of 15 seconds apart from each other -- it doesn't have to be all at once, just a total of 15 seconds. However, as long as those players are together, the chains deal no damage at all. We found it easiest to just have the chained players stick together and not worry so much about breaking the chains.
The main mechanics of the Stone Guard encounter are Petrification and Overload. Right after the fight begins, a random guardian will start to petrify. You'll see a warning in the middle of the screen, and that guardian will also start to glow a bit. You'll see an extra meter, either as its own bar near the middle of your screen, or possibly as part of an addon. In this video, it's the grey bar at the bottom of my unit frame, underneath my mana. As that bar fills, you'll take less and less damage from that Guardian's abilities -- so for example, when Jasper is petrifying, that'd be a good time to break Jasper Chains. However, if that meter fills, everyone in the raid will be completely paralyzed, which means a wipe.
To avoid this, you need to abuse the Overload mechanic. Each Guardian has an energy bar of their own. That energy bar will fill as long as they're within 10 yards of another guardian -- so as you can see here, the one guardian off by himself is currently not gaining energy, while the two that are together are. Once that meter fills, the guardian will overload, which interrupts their petrification, but also deals a massive amount of damage to the raid.
So, you need to get the guardian that's currently petrifying to overload. Due to the petrification, the AOE damage will be much more manageable, and it'll cancel the petrification process. The trick is to get ONLY the petrifying guardian to overload. To do this, you'll need your tanks to do some fancy juggling. On the pull, one tank will take two of the guardians will the other holds one by himself. Make sure one of the two guardians being tanked together is the one petrifying -- you may need to swap targets around a bit on the pull to achieve this. Also, make sure both tanks are far enough apart that the guardian by itself isn't gaining any energy.
Once the petrifying guardian is at 50 energy, the tank who's currently holding 1 guardian should taunt him over. He'll now be holding two guardians -- the one who's petrifying, which should be at around 50 energy, and another guardian who should have close to none. Meanwhile, the guardian left on the other tank should also stop gaining energy. Eventually, the petrifying guardian will reach full energy, overload, and his energy will be reset, leaving you with two guardians at about half energy and one at 0.
From here it's just a matter of juggling them around to make sure that you always have the Petrifying guardian being tanked alongside the guardian with the lowest energy, which would obviously be the one that just reset. If that happens to be the two that are already being tanked together, great! Nothing to worry about. If the guardian by himself starts to petrify, that tank should just taunt the low-energy guardian over to him. Remember, that's the one that just reset. Just keep that in mind, and it's really not too difficult once you get the hang of it.
Now, obviously that's going to get quite a bit more complicated in 25-man, but the basic principle is the same -- you want the Petrifying guardian and the low-energy guardian being tanked together, and the other two guardians off by themselves. The easiest way to manage that is to just use three tanks. It'll take a good deal more coordination, and communication will be extremely important, but it's still very much doable.
Healers and DPS have a much more straightforward job -- just stay out of things, deal damage, and keep people alive. Remember, the guardians have a shared health pool, so make use of cleaves and multi-dotting as much as possible.
Otherwise, that pretty much sums it up! It's basically the same encounter from start to finish. There's no phase changes or new abilities to worry about -- if you can get through one overload, you can kill em. It's just a matter of getting the motions down, learning to juggle, and staying out of things.
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