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Opening a general lessons learned thread following our first excursion into a new raid. Feels like its been a looong time .

- Trash: first pack utilizes the petrify mechanic of the Stone Guard boss. They MUST be pulled separately or they'll petrify the raid before we can kill either. Pulled separately, they can be burned down just in time. Great gear check right out the door - if you can't kill one before you get petrified, your raid's not geared enough. Also a gentle gear check. Petrify does not count as a death - it just resets the patrol instead of wiping the raid.

- Stone Guard: Great first boss imo. Really keeps tanks on their toes. Once you get the swapping rhythm going, its fairly simple conceptually. Tuning is still very tight however, and a single mistake in execution will likely lead to a wipe. Also the encounter will stay fresh for a long time as the exact combination of dogs will vary the encounter from week to week.

One quick clarification: the snare effect (moving slower) is not a result of a dog ability (pools/mines/shards/chains), but comes from the global petrification spell. If we are overloading them correctly, we should not be getting too many stacks of petrify, but you can still expect to be moving at 1/2 speed or worse right before an overload. This sucked for pools, I imagine it will be much worse with chains. If you class has any movement tricks, keep them handy, they may save your life.

- Feng the Accursed: Critically dependent on tanks using an encounter specific button. Kinda like Ultraxion, but all the pressure's on Dorian .
Phase 1: Shroud of Reversal tank must interrupt epicenter with lightening fists. Supposedly, its possible to stop them all. Again, pressure's on Dorian. I vote for him to stay Shroud of Reversal tank for the foreseeable future as experience in this field can only be gained at the cost of painful raid wipes.
Phase 2: Did some more research on draw flames, and it does not appear like there's any way to cheat our way out of it. Nullification barrier can cancel every other one (recommendation is 2nd and 4th) which means healers must be prepared to deal with 2 full draw flames. Lets brainstorm some global cooldown rotations that might help. Remember, the raid damage is not from the draw flames cast, its from the period that follows when he has stacks of the flame buff.

Positioning for phase 2 - suggestions seem to be to keep him where he's at (edge of the room) and to have the flames be deposited at the center/back of the room. Folks were good about not getting caught in the traveling flames, so I don't think that's a problem.

I think this is our gear check to overcome. Phase 2 lasts from 66%-33%, or roughly 50 million HP in 10 man normal. He casts draw flame every 30 seconds, and we should aim to close this phase in 4 draws (maximum 150 seconds). This requires a raid dps of 333k... If we assume 3 healers, and count tanks as dps (333k/7), that's still asking at least 50k dps from everyone (sustained throughout the 2 minutes).

Correction on my previous post: Phase 3 has worse raid dmg than phase 2... So global defensive cooldowns should ideally be saved for that. Sounds like healers will need to heal through the flames by themselves.

We having fun yet?

I'm having fun.

I enjoyed Stone Guard as a boss, though the tanks have to do most of the work--everyone else just has to follow the two most basic commandments of "don't stand in the sparkles" and "do your job". Now that we've beaten it once, I imagine it won't be too much of a problem in the future(with the same two tanks, anyways).

For Feng, since the raid damage really ramps up in phases 2 and 3, we need to focus on getting through phase 1 with the healers in the best shape we can. While it's technically possible to interrupt every Epicenter with Lightning Fist, unless the timing works out perfectly I believe it's hard to do(or so I've heard, since I'm not a tank and haven't tried it myself ). For the ones we can't interrupt, it'd be good to have everyone run into the Nullification Barrier, not just the melee--rally at the center of the room, perhaps?

As far as getting to the required DPS, reforge/gem/enchant is a bigger part of that than I think people realize. It certainly was for me; I recently(a day or so before the raid) did a lot of reforging and enchanting, and I was amazed at how much my DPS went up. Gear up as much as you can, but don't forget the little details! We were getting close enough that with a bit more I think we'll down Feng.

I'll probably be hitting up the target dummies to clean up my rotations, myself. Gotta figure out how exactly to work in Feint every 5 seconds so I can help the healers out in Phase 2 Feng.

For feng it is theoretically possible for me to stop every single epicenter, the problem is sometimes it doesn't line up correctly. The cooldown is super tight and if he lightning fists too early it may not be up when I need it. I think I might be able to clean that up by giving him a bit more time on the cast before he starts epicenter. I was stunning him immediately every time, and found that the times I wasn't able steal lightning fist the cooldown was just barely under. I'm not 100% sure on that so it may take some fiddling, to get it perfect. So yeah no pressure. I'm trying to get better in phase 2 when it comes to stealing wildspark since it'll give us a bit more dps and every bit counts.

As for dogs, once we got into the rhythm of the fight it wasn't too bad. I think the biggest snafu is when the first dog to overload is the lone dog, it makes the stack much more difficult to manage. But once the energy gaining chain is established it's not too difficult, it just requires a lot of attention on position for Hung and I, but that's nothing we aren't already used to. I've actually read that when the chains ability is up it's better to not break the chains if the pairing is decent. i.e. melee dps with melee dps, or ranged with healers. And only to break chains that are unideal melee dps with healers. Since we haven't seen that dog yet this is all conjecture at the moment.

Overall it was a good foray into the raid and we made good progression on the bosses. Remember Horseman is up right now and it'll help fill a few slots you may be missing.

Addendum to Feng, in LFR the abilities are still there, so it's good Shroud of Reversal practice, since the other tank is always going to stand in lightning fist anyways. I purposely picked up that crystal in my first LFR to get a feel for it. Since the damage isn't as extreme even if you miss it's not gonna kill you. Getting wild spark is still really hard, because you have to target it on someone who is more then likely running away from the raid. As for the abilities in phase 3 it's pretty easy. Ideally in lfr to make it easier steal epicenter since it does crap tons of damage to the boss and not to much to the raid.