The Stone Guard: A WoW Raid Boss Ruined by One Mechanic

While I overall enjoyed Mists of Pandaria, the fourth expansion of World of Warcraft, I also believe that the first raid tier was one of the least enjoyable ones. Part of the reasons was that the first boss encountered in the raid tier, the Stone Guard, was difficult for all the wrong reasons, not unlike Razorgore from Blackwing Lair.

Basic Abilities

The encounter is a "council" style encounter, in which you fight four quilent(basically lions) statues- or three if you're doing the encounter in 10-man difficulty. All of the quilen share a health pool, so it doesn't matter which one you target, although doing a "cleave" rotation can do a bit more damage of the quilen are grouped together. Each quilen guardian has different color and unique ability

• The Amethyst(purple) Guardian has the ability to create purple puddles that cause damage every second to anyone who stands in them. As the saying goes, "don't stand in the fire"; they only cause a problem in conjunction with Cobalt and Jasper's movement-impairing abilities.
• The Cobalt(blue) Guardian has the ability to lay mines. If someone detonates them, they will take damage and everyone will be rooted for a few seconds.
• The Jade(green) Guardian does raid-wide damage.
• The Jasper(red) Guardian has the most troublesome ability. It chains players together, and standing more than 10 yards apart will cause damage to each player, but eventually will break the chains.

The abilities are simple enough. The Jasper Guardian's chains caused me trouble as a melee DPS, especially when the person I was chained to moved away from the boss. That said, it's simple enough to break the chains when the Jasper Guardian is overloading, but that's one of the few good things I can say about that mechanic.

Overload and Petrification

Now for the main challenge in the fight. The quilen begin the fight in a state of Solid Stone, which reduces damage by 90%, as long as they are not within 12 yards of another guardian. Grouping two or more together will cause the guardians to take normal damage, but they will also gain energy. Once they reach full energy, they will cast Overload, dealing massive raid-wide damage. One Overload can be recovered from, but two consecutive Overloads will lead to a wipe unless your group is strong enough to make the encounter trivially easy.

As hard as it may be to believe, you actually have to let the Overloads go off to deal with the Petrification mechanic. One guardian will slowly petrify the raid over time, gradually slowing their movement speed until they are petrified, which basically results in a wipe. However, when a guardian is casting Petrification, its abilities do 90% less damage... including Overload, which also interrupts the petrification process. Your goal is to make sure that the only Overloads that go off are from the Guardians that are petrifying the raid.

That's easier said than done, because of how the encounter works. First, the guardians only gain energy when they're close to another guardian, which means that at least one guardian besides the one that is petrifying the raid will be gaining energy at any given time. The second is that since the recommended number of tanks per raid is two in a 10-man raid, and three in a 25-man raid, there will always be one more guardian than there are tanks. This means that one tank will have to hold two guardians at once, and must ensure that 1)one of them is the one that the raid needs to Overload next and 2)that the other one doesn't Overload first.

As a result, the tank swap ends up being rather complicated. Both the tanks must ensure that the petrifying guardian is gaining energy, and that none of the others will outpace it. This can lead to a few different situations; assume that the Amethyst Guardian is petrifying, and Cobalt and Jasper are also present.

If Amethyst has the highest energy, then the raid doesn't need to do anything- just have both tanks hold their respective Guardians, with the third guardian at a safe distance from the other two, and hope that the guardian paired with Amethyst is the one that will petrify next.

If Amethyst has the second highest energy, while Cobalt has the highest, the situation is precarious, but easy to recover from. If Cobalt is the one on its own, then all the raid needs to do is keep it away from Amethyst and Jade. If Jade is the one on its own, then the tank with Jade needs to pick up Amethyst and take it away before Cobalt gains too  much energy. If Amethyst is the one on its own, then its tank will need to pick up Jade and take it away as quickly as possible.

If Amethyst has the lowest energy, then the raid is behind the 8-ball, so to speak. The raid will have to pair Amethyst with Jade, then switch Jade with Cobalt before Jade Overloads, but this situation will almost certainly result in an overload.

If this sounds complicated, then it should be easy to understand what the problem is. If it sounds simple, then please understand that, like other raid mechanics that require coordination, it's much harder to pull off when the person you're doing it with is someone you haven't played with much. 

Most other tank swap mechanics are far simpler. They often involve a debuff- usually a damage over time effect or a damage-increasing debuff- placed on a tank, and after the debuff stacks high enough, the other tank taunts the boss and gains threat, allowing the other tank's debuff stacks to drop off in time to take over for the other tank. Not all the tanks can do that well- for example, if the tank that's dropping stacks accidentally gains threat and gets another debuff stack, at least one of the tanks will probably die- but these taunt stack mechanics are easier for raid teams that haven't played together much or pickup groups.

When I attempted the Stone Guard during Mists of Pandaria, many of the tanks I grouped with couldn't quite figure out the tank swap, resulting in unwanted Overloads and the raid wiping many times. While the Petrification is the mechanic that the raid has to build its strategy around, it isn't the primary problem, since my raids almost never ran afoul of it. In Looking for Raid, in which Overload's damage is half of what it is in Normal, it's possible to stack all three guardians on top of each other and burn them down, using healing cooldowns and AoE heals to survive the Overloads. Essentially, Overload is the main reason the raid has to go through so much trouble to manage the guardians' energy, and if that mechanic is trivialized, so is the encounter as a whole.

Conclusion

Like with Razorgore, part of the problem is that the Stone Guard is the first boss of Mogu'shan Vaults, after a fight with quilen trash mobs, and the first true challenge for raiders in Pandaria; at least Classic raids faced Razorgore after clearing Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair. It's also more difficult in some ways than the subsequent encounters with Feng and Gara'jal, and the problem is that it shouldn't have to be. First bosses should be reasonably challenging but still ease players into the raid, and having needlessly complex mechanics is not the ideal way to achieve this goal.