Yes, I'm aware there's a 120 page thread with all the answers in the universe contained within. I'm hoping that this is sufficently useful, relevent, and discourse-prone to merit its own topic. I will edit this post to reflect replies.

We don't spend a lot of time raiding, and one cunning fellow observed that 40% of one raid night is spent just one on clear of post-Curator trash. We don't have a lot of raid nights, so it didn't take a Ph.D in economics to figure out maybe it was time to cost cut. We spent 2.5 hours, two nights. Extending a night is not really an option, nor is opening up another night. Our third raid night is Gruul's Lair. That's all the time I have to work with - between 8 and 10 hours (there's some flex, but it's not dependable)

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, we don't care about any loot besides tier 4 helms, but the shortcuts must be repeatable (that is, Shade of Aran is, most likely, on the to-kill list, in the event wipes and or time constraints make returning after a reset a necessity).

-- Edit: I'm going to cut this to what seems to be time savings, with measured risk. Dig through the thread for pros, cons, myths, alternatives, and higher risk possibilities.

A) Moroes; Theatre: Go up the stairs, you only need to pull one pack (and "pathers", patrolling mobs), and then hug left to get into Moroes. After Moroes, mirror what you did to go right off the stairs - You can avoid EVERY RETAINER PACK, even on the way to Theatre. If it needs saying, you don't need to pull any of the audience.

B) Backdoor or philanthropists: This is an agree-to-disagree thing. The money is nice, but you do save time, especially if people don't die, and it's a good break time. Also, you don't have Midnight's repair, so this is a time to have anyone death-prone to go take a port and then you quickly summon them back when you get to the front door. Obviously, if you're on a PVP server, the front door may not be so copesetic.

1 hour to Curator.

C) In the circular room before Aran, you can hug a wall (left or right) and skip a few packs. LoSing the exploding blobs, or fear/deathcoiling them reduces the amount of healing and consequently, downtime.

D) Kill Aran (?) - While, by definition, this takes more time then skipping, it provides a breakpoint, and doesn't cost any time besides the actual fight itself.

E) Druid+stealther+warlock: Druid and stealther sneak to Ythyar (Consortium vendor near Chess event), warlock hellfire-suicides within battle rez range on an "earlier" ledge, summon the raid across. This lacks repeatability (ie., the cost is high if you wipe without recovery on Prince, but is very cunning) - followup Just validating what mek said, the break is great, rogues getting to stealth and help is great, and the break this allows is great. We had enough time to wipe twice on Prince (shhh) and still get in a third attempt (kill) with this.[/i]

F) Chess event, required. Blitz strategies work, if you really want to cut this down.

G) Prince Malchezaar.

You have to kill Moroes to start the opera event. Winning opera unlocks the back door.

You can skip the pair of golems, hug left. The drawback is you need to pull the pats into the corner below the ramp leading up to the blob room, or the defense mode that has 7 in it will pull them down.

skillcoil the blobs so they don't asplode.

Weapon chain/dps warrior tank. I'd be interested to hear anything else that speeds up this room as well. We have managed to pull 2 at once and been fine.

There really isn't much. We do a straight-to-Prince clear on a main raid night, filling in the optional bosses at a group's leisure.

You don't have to clear much to get to Moroes. Then clear around the right wall to Opera. After Opera, run (or Atiesh) out and run in the side door. Nothing of note is skippable from there on in, though. You can walk right past the first 2x Watchman pull after Curator, I guess.

Stuns work perfectly well; you just a War/Rog/Pal to be ready each time.

Feral Druid without a weapon equipped.

Wrong, we sometimes skip maiden and the side door sill opens. My guess would be it's linked to the opera event.

Skipping trash in Kara is really not an option unless you can physically run past it without it aggroing. Using a hunter to pull and FD or a rogue to vanish or whatever just might work in some places but my feeling is that it would be too risky and unreliable to be worthwhile.

Besides that, there's really no point. When we started Kara the trash was admittedly pretty painful, particularly pre Aran. But having cleared it many times now it's really not so bad - once everyone knows what they're doing it's easily possible to clear the whole instance within 4 hours even allowing for a few silly wipes. Skipping trash would be more effort than it's worth in my opinion.

The gimmick tends to be... Stack DPS. Once it's pure farm status it takes maybe 4 hours to do a full clear plus any wipes, so there's no reason to skip much of it. The only part we skip is the Opera -> Side Door trash.

I take off my weapon and chain-pull the Thieves in block gear, works pretty well. Sometimes I forget to let the debuff fall off and the rogues whine at me, but they still die pretty quickly

Bear tank unequips weapon or warrior uses weapon chain or anything else that makes you disarm immune. We clear that room in ~3 minutes as I chain pull. I've tanked 3 at once before (the rogue had a J.Lo-style ass) although that gets dicey even with 3 healers.

In general use 2 healers and 6-7 DPS wherever you can. The speed boost is immense, especially if you are used to 3-healer groups. It requires paying attention, but hey, your people probably aren't around to be noobs.

I thought the Thief's disarm deaggro'd even if you were immune to disarm?

Did they change that?

I can't be absolutely sure on the immunity business. I know *for sure* that if you have no weapon equipped that it will not deaggro you. Our prot tank will take off his weapon and punch them until he has enough aggro (if there is no bear on the premises.)

You can skip the ethereals, but it requires druid + other stealther + warlock. The stealthers sneak past everything to the friendly Ethereal vendor, warlock dies on the other side of the "gap" next to said vendor (across from a bridge close to Aran's room), and you can brez him across to summon the rest of the raid. (You can technically do this without a warlock, just a druid to brez a rezzer across, but then you'd need everyone else to die to some neatly-pulled Illhoof trash) This provides the added benefit of giving the raid a ~5min break while the stunt is performed, which they can use to repair/eat/go-potty.

Golems, I think, aren't the big time sink in the whole thing. A plan that's "kill 6 arcane golems", I think, will half the clearing time. Hugging left, unless I'm confused, is going to get us either fish, or only one golem in savings - not the big time sink, and since the ledge is important ("Alright, everyone go together, now!"), I think that's worth being safe over.

I think leaping after Curator will save you MImmune mana fish packs, which for most raids, will be a significant time savings.

We've been clearing the place for awhile, the trash isn't painful, but it is time consuming. There's been separate threads on that, so it's a dead horse for discussion. I edited above, but mentioning again - we have a 2.5 hour raid night. Giving up 1.5 hours worth of beginning loot to reduce Kara from a 2 night clear to a 1 night clear, even if it writes off a fair amount of loot, is going to open up a lot of 25's time (doubling, actually).

Chain pulling isn't the level we're at, but it's incredibly close (semantics argument close). Stacking melee DPS isn't an option either - while we could recruit 10 more rogues (let's say), we tend to have exactly the right number of everything other times, which means sitting rogues (dps wars, enh shaman, whichever) except for Curator->Aran.

Actually, that's exactly what we're around to be. Healing tends to be fairly thankless, and fairly stressful, I'm not sure this wouldn't be compounding those issues (which are, yes, the subject of another thread) by making someone go from 0.3 share to 0.5 share in task needed. I will be mulling over this... 2/2/6, though.

Genius, sir, genius.

They don't deaggro if you have a weapon chain. Always been like that, at least on live servers.

This fits what we've seen too, our MT has a backup weapon with a chain that's just used for these pulls. Rock-solid aggro the whole time. Although our rogues keep getting disarmed, it seems to search for the next non-immune target to hit when the MT is immune.

Don't tank them, just CC/stun/interrupt them while maximizing DPS.

Dunno about other people, but I like the opera -> backdoor clear because of the easy ~190g

Yeah, I can understand porting outside if you have an Atiesh in the raid, but if you don't it seems silly to run all the way out the front door (navigating through the unkilled ballroom packs) and then around and up to the side entrances, when it would take you only a few minutes more to just clear through the philanthropists and put 11-12g in everyone's pocket.

Also, this may be too obvious to mention, but just in case: Don't kill the opera audience. Instead, after killing the fourth and fifth ushers, hug right to the ramp leading down to the orchestra pit.

I don't know if this is considered an exploit or clever use of game mechanics, but at the trash before curator, you can pull the arcanemobs without the manashield. If a hunter pulls, then feigns, then pulls again, the mobs will have cooldown on their manashield and die in 3 hits. This certainly speeds up the clearing time for those packs(not that they are the worst though).

Don't think this was mentioned, but you can fear them as well. Just time the fear to hit right before they start casting their explosion and they get feared and never explode. I just start chain casting fear below 30%.


This may be obvious, but how do people clear to Moroes (assuming you're not skipping Attumen). We always kill Attumen and then backtrack and go through the ballroom. The only time we did the pulls past Attumen was our very first week in Karazhan back in January and it seemed slow/painful compared to the Ballroom trash to Moroes. How do the two paths compare?

Also, how much of the ballroom trash do you guys skip? I keep reading "hug the right wall", but we usually just clear the whole room.

You have to clear 2 AoE packs in the ballroom itself, and 2 pats. Hug the left wall going into moroes' room (avoiding another pat on the way), and then just hug the right wall all the way around to the stairs once you're done with Moroes.

Could be considered an exploit, but:

I usually have the group skip Maiden and just take her down when we have a spare 30 minutes or so (same goes for Nightbane).

Assuming you mean the two packs at the top of the stairs, you only have to do the one on the left.