2 Priests = 2 Shackles which is nice for a lot of the trash and Moroes of course not necessary but we've got more priests than paladins so thats how our groups are at the moment.

Double Rogues is also always good for DPS and interrupts. I think DW Fury DPS btw needs a buff at the moment its kinda low.

Is he actually optional? I ask because I'm not sure I'll be able to field a warlock and I can't imagine dealing with him under 40% w/o one.

As for Maulgar as long as you have a tank decked out in the best blues and flasked you can kill him. Your healers could easily be below 70, but depending on your strategy you will need a balanced spread of level 70 dps.

I'm thinking about bringing some sapphiron frost resist and heal tanking them, until one of the warlocks in the guild shows an interest in being keyed. Say.. any warlocks looking for a guild? >.>

But yes, you can run right past illhoof and aran, if you so please. I havn't really explored beyond there, but I don't think you 'have' to kill netherspite either.

However, each of these bosses controls some trash respawns. I'm not sure if the entire library is connected to aran or not, but killing illhood only stops a small room from respawning. Library trash is on a 2 hour respawn, which isn't so bad.. considering it was a 45 minute respawn in beta.

If you have a warlock with a soulstone, it's quite possible to recover from an aran wipe. However, if you have a warlock, you're probably not going to need to worry about that.

Aran isn't to bad, adds only last 90 seconds, we had a druid Cycloning one with a Rogue on it as well
others just kept dpsing/kicking with a lock banish+fearing, the rest was healed through. We had 2 rogues and 2 mages so his casting dps was pretty much nil.

Prince is pretty simple encounter, getting unlucky on infernals can suck and the bug after u wipe to him isnt much fun either. Should down him today depending on comp.

Netherspite seems allot harder then prince, its probably just getting a strat though, he doesnt seem very random.

Is there something wrong with the Chess event or is it really just that easy? On our first run through Karazhan after calling the raid after downing the Curator one of our Rogues and two Druids scouted around and we managed to easily do the Chess event.

If it's meant to be free loot I don't understand why the doorway doesn't open until it's complete.

Does anyone know the location of the Bone Fragment in the Medivh/Karazhan quest chain?

We had half the raid scouting the hills around Dead Wind Pass for about 30 minutes with no joy. The quest is listed under 'Dead Wind Pass' in my quest log, but I'm starting to believe the fragment is actually found inside the instance.

Just found out that the Bone Fragment can't be looted whilst in a raid, which explain's why we had problems finding it :D

Has anyone else had problems with the chess event bugging out? We found that after running it a second time for fun, the 'Game In Session' buff never dissapeared, making the clear to Malchezaar quite painful as we where all pacified by it whilst near the game room :(


Also, has anyone found anyway to avoid the 10 minute corpse run for Malchezaar/Netherspite, other than having wipe protection (which seems pretty ineffective anyway). We have no attuned warlocks and paladin's DI can only cover so many wipes. Can't see any sign of the much talked about flight point at the top of the tower, guess thats not implemented yet or never gonna be implemented.

Lol, we had the problem with the bone fragment aswell, till we realised it wasnt a raid quest....

Yeh breeze we had that problem, soft reset is the only way to fix it.

I've been top damage by a lot on every fight I dps on on in Karazhan as Fury MHing [Drakefist Hammer]. No idea where you're getting the idea fury DPS needs a buff. Granted, the rogues arent using equivalent MH yet, but I still expect to be competitive, if a bit lower once they have good MH weapons. Which is fine for a class that can tank.

Well, there you go: Aran isn't too bad with a warlock. Without one, on the otherhand(which is entirely possible in a 10-person dungeon - not everyone knows warlocks), he's incredibly difficult. Our best attempt was a 5% wipe tonight, with me heal tanking all of them as a protection paladin in frost resist gear(pretty much all of it being of Frost Protection for the stamina/frost mix).

It's honestly very frustrating to see an encounter simplified to the extent Aran is by a warlock, since most guilds typically only have 2-3(and unfortunately one of ours re-rolled a priest :/). That and the random flame wreath triggers with no one moving are the only complaints I have about the encounter.

Make sure your paladins aren't using Divine Shield or Rogues using Cloak of Shadows. The way Flame Wreath works is it detects the removal/addition of the Flame Wreath aura. The Flame Wreath Aura is applied by being within 5 yds of the center of the Flame Wreath point. Now if you use Divine Shield or Cloak of Shadows while inside the Flame Wreath this pushes the Aura off you triggering the effect and the same occurs if they were cast before Flame Wreath is down and they wear off while in the middle of one.

What this does mean is you can use Divine Shield to be able to run through a Flame Wreath as long as you aren't in the middle of it when it wears off.

Also, don't rez into one which triggers it as well (had a priest pop a soulstone at like 10% one time and set it off though we hadn't been sure before then).

They were just something that Blizzard thought would be nice, but could never actually get to work. The main problem is probably that the gryphon would have to fly through the instance portal, which I assume isn't possible.

It's really the major flaw in the instance right now, and it's irritating. Karazhan would be 100% perfect if completing the chess event or killing the Shade of Aran unlocked an option with one of the servants at the entrance to teleport directly there. Like AQ40. They learned that running back to C'Thun on a wipe was unfun and painful and fixed it. Why does wiping to Prince or Aran/Netherspite require a run of similar length? :(

Yeah, I wrote a long, angry post about the issue on the R&D forums last night after a cascade of bugs completely ruined our night (and then forum login problems ate it!). First we had two people decide to play the friendly chess game while they waited for some others, and apparently the "friendly" game is broken and cannot be completed, even by killing the entire opposing team. This left the entire chess area silenced, which was especially a hassle because some of us died in there from the flesh beast pull in the next room - so we all had to run back, and then have a rogue sprint-pull the flesh beasts to the room BEFORE the chess room and kill them there - then we got silenced in a room ABOVE the chess room and wiped again because of it. We got a few shots at the prince before we had to run back and hit respawns, cleared to him, and then he was bugged to be unattackable, so we called it for the night.

Fast respawns suck. Running back to unrecoverable encounters when you wipe sucks. The combination of the two is very quickly making me hate an instance that has all the makings of the best instance in the game so far otherwise.

Got into Karazhan for the first time on Saturday. We were working on Aran last night. This is a guild that stopped Naxx at Patchwerk. We were tired of farming consumables and decided that with the expansion coming a few months down the road we wanted to have some fun. Now, I look at my gear and I actually replaced T3 bracers with a quest reward green with more stam, defense, and avoidance. So much for that T3. For tanking, level 70 instance blues are vital.

We're working with a full Prot main tank and a fury/prot off tank (me). We went with 3 healers up to Opera event (2 pallies, priest/druid). Then we found that, when buffed, Romulo can basically instantly do 11-12k in damage on the tank. Called night one there. Next day, we came in and beat it. We would read 4 sentences of boss info and just run in and see what happened. On Curator we found we needed to stack ranged DPS. Then we found our gear wasn't good enough so we broke out some consumables. Illhoof we didn't know existed, but we walked in flasked from Curator, and he didn't last long. We did a couple runs at Aran and called it a night. The run back is starting to get long.

As for impressions, I enjoy the instance. Trash mobs that hit like bosses still seem like fun. Trash mobs that respawn every half hour (Curator Room) are annoying. While Aran owned us in the face hard (best attempt just under 50%, only 2-3 attempts), he was still fun. The most annoying thing really is the run back. I hope we try the chess event tonight while working on Aran if it is possible to bypass him to do it.

It is. The Chess event is free epics. If you kill Curator but don't do Illhoof and Chess during that timer, you're throwing away free loot.

Also is it me, or is Moroes harder than most of the rest of the zone? That Garotte is brutal. After him, it wasn't until Aran that I thought we met another boss of comparable difficulty.

Huntsman, Maiden, Illhoof, and chess are all pretty much free loot, from what I can tell - we beat all of them on our first pull. Moroes is pretty rough, and Aran is difficult, though his difficulty varies widely based on your class makeup. Warlock >>>>>>>>> No warlock

I can agree with Andrise (having been guilded with him too) - but I've seen some sickly dps out of fury warriors and really question this whole omg we were nerfed QQ thing...

Maybe most fury warriros just *suck* and couldn't adapt - but really, I see *0* issues.

Can someone please explain the chess event to me. Being a big chess nerd I'd love to know how that works and if you can actually play chess. Wow Wikki and the likes are not providing enough insight for me.

It's like Battle Chess or Archon or whatever, with loose chess-based rules. You start the event by having one person control the king of your side of the board by talking to him. The other 9 people in your raid can control pieces by talking to them once the event starts. When you are controlling a piece, you can do things with it via a pet bar. Pieces can move, but only according to (roughly) chess rules -- pawns can only move forward, the king can move one square in any direction, etc. Each piece can attack adjacent enemies (melee) and has special abilities on cooldowns. The bishops on each side are healers, the queens are ranged nukers, rooks are AoE casters, pawns are melee, and knights are stronger melee, I think.

Basically you win by killing the enemy king.

Once you figure out how it works, mechanics-wise, it's very easy. It is incredibly creative and a lot of fun though.

I like to think of Moroes and the Curator as the "gatekeeper" mobs of the zone, as Vael was for many guilds.

Simply put, they strain your raid to give forth their best effort.

R+J does this too, but none of the other opera encounters does this. It's really retarded. Even if your dispel both self-buffs, they can still instagib your tank if you get a bit unlucky.

But Attumen, Maiden, Illhoof, and the Chess Event are free loots.

After you learn the ins and outs of Netherspite and Shade you should never wipe on them again.

Prince Malchezzar is a bit of a gear check but still it's mostly dependent on your tank's gear.

I don't have much to say about Nightbane - he's beatable, but I think right now the only guilds that are beating him are using consumables a bunch. Nightbane hits damn hard. Also, it's a little harder for Horde w/o Fear Ward...

We're on Aran having used a priest for maybe 2 bosses, a warlock for maybe 2 bosses, a druid for a couple bosses, and 2 paladins all the time. Moroes was hard, but we had people solo'ing the adds after a couple pulls. Paladin fears open up the fight in the beginning. We didn't have the priest at this time, so we killed 3 adds and chain feared/frost nova'ed the third. The secret? Dwarves. 2 Dwarf warriors, 1 dwarf hunter, 2 ice block mages, 2 paladins. You can stoneform out of the garrote. We had horrible add control in the beginning, but the garrote was rarely a problem. Also, having 2 tanks on Moroes when you have a second available makes his stun/gouge moot. We found the Romulo/Julianne event much more difficult mostly with Romulo buffing and 3 shotting the tank.