A Study Of N00bs

[KiloVictor]

You can easily single pull your way through that room all the way up to the actual Barov encounter but as far as I know Barov and the two stationary guards to either side of him are linked.

They aren't actually linked, but their spawn points are within range of each other for social aggro transfer. So if you directly aggro one, the others will pick up on it and aggro as well, but they don't explicitly share an aggro list as linked mobs do.

However, if you indirectly aggro one, that aggro is not transferred socially. As far as we've been able to determine, social aggro transfer only cascades to nearby mobs if they are explicitly linked.

The only thing that I can think of is that you are somehow pulling the patroller at a specific point in his patrol that is splitting one of Alexei's guards from his pull.  If you have found a way to do this then you've found a way around the encounter and kudos; but you are not beating the encounter as the intended tough encounter that I am talking about.
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Sorry, thought that part was more clear in my post. That's exactly it, if you get the timing right when you aggro the patrol, you get direct aggro on the patrol and social aggro on one guard. That leaves you the named mob + the other guard for the last pull. We slang those as "prox pulls", meaning any pull using indirect aggro to bring fewer mobs than you'd get if you aggroed the mobs directly.

Personally, I don't consider that to be working around the encounter. I think it's designed that way deliberately and splitting the pull is totally legitimate strategy -- it's a simple timing pull, similar to tons of other pulls in the game where timing a mob that wanders a few feet from it's spawn point can make for an easy split. It doesn't even require any fancy hunter skills to make the split.

All of the other minibosses in Strat are fairly trivial encounters, and yet Lord Alexei is arguably more difficult than Gandling if you tackle him with both his adds. That doesn't seem logical, so I think Blizzard left those guards splittable deliberately. It makes the encounter feasible for some oddball groups, and that fits in with their stated plan of having all sorts of groups as viable options.

If the designers want you to get an entire set of mobs as a single pull, they can explicitly link the mobs so that they behave as a single unit - they've gone back and done that in the past where encounters were not working as designed, e.g. with Lucifron after Conquest demonstrated he could be split from his adds. Given that they've reworked Scholomance a few times now and it remains the same, I've concluded it's working as intended.

Of course, that's coming from somebody who thinks the whole raison d'etre of the hunter class is to split-pull anything and everything that can possibly be split. :shuriken:

In the end it's your $15/month, so if you don't think it's a legit tactic, play it the way you see fit. :)

Kv