Stonecore : The bane of the noobs.

Haven't had any problems with that place (yes I'm talking heroic).

The big problem with stonecore? Retards that either leave at the start or mid-way.

Big deal, a wipe can happen, ohnoez end of the world. Learn by doing, instead of /leaving everytime you make a mistake.

That is all.

I love when people leave part-way through. When I queue as a tank and they are at Corborus or better yet Ozruk, I love it. That much closer to my trinket at the end, which won't drop.

I switched off as soon as you said the word 'noobs'. My god I hate that word!

Blizz should make it so anyone who types the word 'noob' more than 10 times in game automatically gets given that title to wear for a week as a debuff :)

Having not done it myself, I now understand much better why people might want to eliminate it from their list of random dungeons. Thanks for the info.

The problem, though, Elmouth, is that people like you make learning by doing near impossible for people unfamiliar with the dungeon. Most of the randoms that I have run dungeons with are perfectly content to stick around for wipes as long as they are armed with the information to get progressively better.

Instead, though, there’s always one guy in the group who adopts this holier-than-thou attitude and starts berating and belittling people who don’t instantly get the mechanics. The fact that someone is unfamiliar with the fights doesn’t automatically make them a newb. Yelling without constructive feedback is part of the reason so many people hate that dungeon.

Stonecore's major problem is that 2 fights require coordination and movement, with one requiring knowing how big the stupid hit box is. Corborus can kill you even if you aren't on the rumble, and the transition from underground to above ground is very tricky, as some of the adds are still up and he does the crystal shards almost immediately. I like the drake fight a lot, but the hit box on him sucks majorly.

Ozruk is another fun fight, but again, requires coordination and movement. I am also convinced that Elementium Bulwark is on a longer cooldown than his paralyze and shatter (that may just be my imagination) which makes the fight harder.

Azil is a good fight. I like it, and my one issue is being fixed by making her bigger so she's easier to see through the void zones and all the adds.

"Stonecore : The bane of the noobs."

...and apparently the fodder for the trolls.

Hrm... I never found the bosses in Stonecore were the bits that hurt - they tend to go down relatively easily (I'm a tank, and yes, the first couple of tries on Orzuk were a pain, but since then they've been fine). This isn't to say "ooh, I'm so imba" - I struggle a lot more on some other bosses: the first and 3rd in Grim Batol, the first in SFK (pre-upcoming-nerf), the first in ToTT, the third(? the fire armor one) in BRC etc.

Anyhoo, the reason I've always tended to dislike the Stonecore is pretty simple - the packs before Orzuk are a bit of a pain in the arse. It's not something nerfable, imho, just a bit of an annoyance compared with a lot of other trash in the game...

Yes, the LoS mechanic is silly, and yes Orzuk can be tricky, but I'd say they're a lot less cockblocky than a lot of other heroic bosses.

Ahh yes, Corborus. A.k.a. "Slinky's Revenge", a.k.a. "I Will NOT Go Downstairs! Alone OR in Pairs!!"

I've only gone here twice, partly because nobody else seems to want to go. I think this guy's currently ahead of me about 15-0. Probably just gonna wait til the nerfs at this point.

While his attitude is terrible, his sentiment is spot-on. Stonecore is nowhere near as hard as any raid content. Everyone is over-reacting.

The cast time on Thrashing Charge is not nearly as severe as you make it out to be. I have in fact run COMPLETELY THROUGH the dust cloud before, so the claim that moving in the wrong direction kills you is patently false. The adds being able to daze you is indeed annoying, but if people would stop running around like crazy people and just stand on your tank like you're supposed to during add fights, you will be fine.

Slabhide's LoS needs to be fixed, but saying "Those spikes should not spawn inside of Slabhide's hitbox at all" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the fight. THEY DON'T. If he is standing on a spike during the AoE, it's because your tank put him there after he came down.

Ozruk is similarly not difficult. He is difficult the first time, yes, but saying "the mechanics are set up in a way that they might not fully understand why they died" is, again, misleading. You have a combat log. Blizzard quite generously shows you every single thing that happens to you. All you have to do is look at it. EVERY buff/debuff you get in this game has a tooltip. Read them. If you see a new debuff you've never seen before, read it. It's okay if you die while reading it. Reading the debuff will ensure you understand it and NEVER wipe from it again. One death is worth that. Reading the debuffs will keep you alive. The Paralyze debuff says right on the tooltip that taking damage removes it. Both of the boss' buffs tell you that you will take a DoT from them. Blizzard did everything bt make a raid warning telling you "HIT OZRUK NOW".

For high priestess, you didn't even mention the single most important aspect of that fight: interrupts. If the force grasp isn't interrupted, you're going to wipe. Either the tank will die from too much damage, the healer will go OOM from healing all that damage, or the adds will eat someone while the tank is held in the air. Calling it the easiest fight in the instance assumes that your group is better than you have made them out to be through your previous diatribe. Interrupting casts is as critical to successful dungeons as reading debuffs and moving out of bad stuff.

Finally, this is what bothers me most: "Unless they're clairvoyant, they are going to die learning this fight."

...? Of course they are. Is it your expectation that you should be able to approach every fight in the game without ever seeing it and simply one-shot it with no deaths? This may have been mentioned before, but we're not in Wrath anymore. You will actually need to pay attention to things like debuffs, cast times, etc. As to the claim of this being more difficult than raiding, I ask you this. If you hadn't watched a video of Magmaw or Halfus or Omnotron or Maloriak being killed with a nice little explanation of all his abilities, would you still think that?

Truthfully from a pug standpoint, I don't even like REGULAR Stonecore. While leveling I don't discover it. "Do we target Milhouse? Do we target the guys that change? Why didn't anyone cc them! who was supposed to interupt them!"

Then they inevitably try to weave between the mobs in the big room and the simple little watchers never seem to be watched. It's just an irritating instance for me.

It's a shame they are removing the "need to discover" requirement for randoms. I guess they didn't want people abusing it to leave out dungeons that they hated. :)

(Side note, I like Blackrock, and the air place, but the Uldum place is too long, it shoulda been two dungeons IMO.)

I would even venture to say that group composition is part of the problem in being placed in H Stonecore from a RDF. As a spriest it grouped with other melee dps it was a feat in itself for me to be able to get those pesky crystals down fast enough with my broken aoe.

(for those who don't know, 2 problems in that fight when the only ranged is spriest:
1. Mind sear [until patch 4.0.6 arrives] is horribly weak, and in a fight where ranged needs to burst-aoe adds, this is very bad.
2. The second I do any damage to the crystals surrounding my mind sear focus, they all head towards me, while the focused one still heads towards the tank/healer, ensuring that the surrounding crystals get hit by far less searing pulses. Yay for 1 full-health add blowing up on tank and me running away from 6 half-health adds!!)

The biggest kicker for me when tanking Ozruk is my incredibly strong charge reflex after shatter.

Charging after shatter is a big no no unless you want your whole group to take the hit from his frontal AoE, but unless you know his cast sequence and timers, you're probably going to have to face that problem once too.

The day when charge doesn't make you charge through a mob and spin it around I will eat my own hat in joy.

Also, because you're forced to run as soon as he hits banish, I find myself contantly dragging him ever so slightly closer to the adds on the other side of the tunnel, and having a messy couple of seconds where he's facing the group as I try and coax him back the other way.

Stonecore is certainly annoying, but it's got nothing on the last encounter in Grim Batol in terms of fake difficulty from fight mechanics.

I've loved Heroic Stonecore ever since my PuG group wiped about 25 times on Ozruk. I learned the true meaning of satisfaction that day.

I wish Stonecore could stay how it is. It may be really hard, but we'll get there eventually, and when we do, we'll be better players for it.

The Slabhide LOS is definitely buggy as well. There was one time when both the tank and I ran to LOS behind the same pillar. We were standing directly on top of each other and I didn't take any damage at all, but he was killed by the AoE. We were NOT standing in Slabhide's hitbox and there was no way the tank should have been taking damage. But he died and we wiped because of buggy mechanics.

All I know is I did Stonecore (normal) with my Arcane Mage at lvl83 for the first time and NY first dungeon for about 6 months since ICC and the whole instance made me feel alive. Thanks to blink and the various boss mechanics.

@Xaklo - I know exactly what you mean. Most of the time when I've gotten Heroic Stonecore (full guild runs, mind you), we've had either one or zero ranged dps. We have a hunter who flat out HATES the instance because he's usually the only ranged and trying to dps and run around and juggle his focus level enough to multi-shot the adds is nigh impossible. If he still had mana and volley, it'd be easy but instead we just wind up wiping over and over.

The fact that melee classes cannot handle the spawning crystal adds (short of dragging them over multiple consecrates or something like that) makes the fight very non-melee-friendly. I understand that Blizzard doesn't want all-melee or all-ranged groups instances but this is a bit insane.

Heilig, I normally think you make good comments, but that was possibly too elitist even for my elitist self.

The thing that really got me is when you said 'Slabhide's LoS needs to be fixed, but saying "Those spikes should not spawn inside of Slabhide's hitbox at all" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the fight. THEY DON'T. If he is standing on a spike during the AoE, it's because your tank put him there after he came down'

And the thing about the combat log. Seriously, even most high-end raiders don't parse combat logs. In the better guilds I've been in, the raid leaders and officers will look at death logs on recount to see how and why people died. The average WoW player (even with recount) probably doesn't even know that thing exists in it, or if they did, they wouldn't know how to use it.

This is a heroic 5-man dungeon. There have definitely been 5-man's in the past that have reached raid-level difficulty. I actually don't have a problem with that that, but the difficulty level shouldn't be such that you need to parse combat logs and death logs to see where you messed up or why you died, just to complete the encounter.

@cassey

"Ozruk is another fun fight, but again, requires coordination and movement. I am also convinced that Elementium Bulwark is on a longer cooldown than his paralyze and shatter (that may just be my imagination) which makes the fight harder."

it is

if you get a hunter (run in and melee for bleed or get paralyse damage)
and a dk that wont run out

it can be a LONG fight - and it becomes very obvious once the bulwark starts casting AFTER paralyse