How Things Work: Summoning Stones

November 9th, 2008 by admin

As a player who is relatively new to the dungeon-running scene, the Summoning Stones might be somewhat of a mystery.

The History Of The Meeting / Summoning Stone

Originally, there was no LFG channel and no LFG tool. Players signed themselves up as “looking for group” by stopping by a Meeting Stone located outside a dungeon instance portal, and that Meeting Stone would notify them when others were also looking for a group.

It was terribly inconvenient, and thus the system wasn’t used very much.

At some point, the player population created the LFG channel themselves and proliferated the idea through the World of Warcraft Forums. Eventually Blizzard took the channel over as part of the LFG/LFM tool we know of today.

How The Meeting Stone / Summoning Stone Works

These days, the Meeting Stones are now Summoning Stones which can be used to gather your party together more quickly in order to enter an instance.

With two members of the party at the stone, the rest of the party can be summoned there, provided a few simple requirements are met:

* Player starting the summon is an appropriate level for this dungeon
* Player receiving the summon is an appropriate level for this dungeon

What These Requirements Mean

In short, if a player is too high level for the summoning stone, they cannot START nor RECEIVE a summon, but they can JOIN IN to assist someone else who has started a summon.

And also, if your character is a little on the low side, you might face the same restriction – you cannot start nor receive a summon, either!

This is important information to know if you are halfway across the world and don’t want to hold up your group from starting.

What Determines “Too High/Low” Of Level?

Blizzard specifies appropriate usage ranges of the stones. Unfortunately, as game mechanics have been changed to make leveling through the lower levels faster, these summoning stone values have not been updated to match.

The stone values go roughly along the same lines as the LFG level requirements. Therefore, if you go into the /lfg tool and look at what Dungeons you can select in the drop-down, that should give you a list of stones you are within proper level range for.

Note, however – if you’re at the very bottom or very top end of the range for that dungeon, you may be out of luck.

Make friends with a Warlock and you’ll never have this problem ;)

This article is © WebGrrl Enterprises – visit WoWGrrl’s World of Warcraft blog for more tips and tricks, videos and writings about World of Warcraft.

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