Speed Up Molten Core!

[Squirllz]

I found this off a random website, it said "Click here for MC Tips" and here is what I found; Pretty useful

You’ve been doing Molten Core forever. Someone still needs Netherwind Pants, so you keep going, every week. You’ve resorted to drinking to ease the pain of WoW’s first raid instance. Why spend any longer there than you have to?
Fortunately, there are ways to speed up MC. The entire instance has been done in just over an hour, but that’s an intense, high-stress experience. Most folks would be happy to get it done in 3 or so, without alot of stress.
A couple of cautions:

• If you’re just starting out, don’t skip any mobs. The teamwork experience you receive from the killing, and the potential for Fiery/Lava cores, Core Leather, and BoE epics are vital. Materials from Molten Core help you progress in Molten Core; but they’ll also continue to fund your guild as you run through Blackwing Lair and higher.
• Initially, you will wipe doing this. Repeatedly. It will slow things down. You must make certain your guild understands that you’re investing time and repair bills now in order to save even more later. It will also make you much more effective players.
• This is not really a guide for beginners. While a raid at any stage can benefit from some of the advice in here, if you’re just starting out in Molten Core and need strategies, read http://conquest.teamgbu.com/strats/moltencore/why.php. While it’s incomplete and some of it is dated, and I flat out disagree with some parts, it gives you some starting points. Your strategy has to adapt to your guild; not the other way around.

There are 4 basic keys to speeding up a Molten Core run:

1. Loot Faster
2. Move Faster
3. Kill More
4. Kill Less

LOOT FASTER
Basically, there are two parts to this suggestion:

• Free-For-All Trash
• Masterloot Bosses

Use Free-For-All loot on all trash. You’ll never have to yell “loot the damned dog” again. Suggest that people leave the green/blue/purple stuff on the corpses for officers to loot, and make sure at least one of your officers is checking everything (a rogue is a good choice since they’re on top of the mob when it dies anyway). If a non-officer picks it up, they can either give it to an officer at the next resting point, or just mail it to the guild bank. It mostly depends on how much you trust you guildies, particularly newer recruits. Don’t sweat it too much if someone forgets to turn in an essence of earth or fire here and there. You’ll get more.
On bosses, though, Free-For-All is a waste of time. The only reason I’d ever consider it is if your guild was burned by the Master Loot bug and is touchy about it; or if there’s some political nonsense you have to deal with about ‘guild trust’ that requires you to use Free-For-All. But this isn’t a site about making your guild happy… it’s a site about making MC go faster! We have bars to hop after this! So Master Loot it is!
Switch to Master Loot before bosses who do not have adds. On bosses with adds that can have drops, such as Lucifron and Gehennas, leave it on FFA until the adds are dead, then switch.
The Master Looter should be a healer who is specced entirely for healing — your lowest DPS person. Preferably an officer, of course, but that’s your choice as a GM. As soon as the boss dies, everyone but the ML who is not ressing or being ressed should move on to the next set of trash and start pulling, with no stopping at all. The ML can then begin the process of distributing loot according to your guild’s loot system.
One side note of some importance — Gold. Most bosses drop gold. If you loot the gold when people are out of range, they don’t get it. If you loot the gold when people are dead, but in range, they don’t get it. Someday, maybe Blizzard will fix this nonsense, but for now, your options are limited. You can keep everyone paid up by waiting around for all the resses… you can wait until everyone is ressed but have 2/3 of the raid miss out on the gold… or you can loot before the resses go up and the dead folks miss out on the gold. For maximum speed and minimum hassle, I suggest the latter, with one addition. Loot the gold, and have the ML jot down a note with how much gold went out and who was dead and missed it. The guild bank can mail them the same amount after the instance is finished. It can seem like a small thing, but people can be very touchy if they feel they’ve been screwed out of gold.
The Master Looter should distribute the loot as quickly as possible. Members should be focusing on doing DPS, not whether or not they want that Seal of the Archmagus. Encourage your members to know which bosses drop which items, and more importantly, which items they are interested in receiving. Let them make up their mind before they have 39 other people waiting on them. Pointing that out helps. Sometimes.
And that’s all there is to it, really. Free For All speeds up the trash; Master Loot lets 39 people continue to DPS while only one person has to stand around at the boss. What’s next? Moving Faster




MOVE FASTER
So you’ve learned to Speed Up MC by Looting Faster… and that’s great. But wow, look how much time gets wasted elsewhere. How many times have you heard this stuff? “Buff up, guys” “Can we get buffs?” “Alright, everyone stop and buff” “the healers need mana” “AFK, I need to shave my ferret” “BRB phone” “I need to take my sister to my mom’s house, BRB”
And so on… and so on… and so on. Time it sometime. It’s ridiculous. Or better yet… fix it!
Follow some simple rules to Move Faster:

• Start Immediately
• Buff as you go
• Don’t wait for mana
• Pull Faster, AKA “Screw ‘Comfortable’”
• No Flippin’ AFKs

Make it a point that the guild should be in the zone on time and ready to go. If you set your start time to 7 and you never start til 7:15, change the start time to 7:15. If it becomes 7:30 instead, kick some asses. Have clearly published times when you begin invites and when you expect people to be sitting there in MC making funny faces at the Molten Giants.
As soon as you have enough people zoned into MC to do the trash (say, 18-20 people including 2 tanks), pull the giants, and keep going as people trickle in. Certainly, you move faster with 40 people, but you don’t move at all sitting around not killing anything while you wait for 40. Start fast and let your speed ramp up.
Do not omit buffs while trying to shave time off. Buffs make you go faster. But don’t stop the flow of the instance to buff. Buff on trash. The buffers do not need their entire mana pools for any trash fights. (Some of them will probably bitch about this. Ignore them. They need to readjust their comfort levels.) They can buff while you fight trash. Mana-expensive buffs can be done over the course of multiple trash pulls. Always keep everyone buffed with the best buffs for their role. When someone dies and is ressed, they should be fully buffed before their health reaches 100%.
Molten Core is not a five man instance with a single healer. You do not need to wait for your healers to get their mana back. They will probably throw a fit when you start this, but they’ll get over it. The most important thing is this: casters tend to plop down immediately after a mob dies and start drinking wherever they were standing. This must stop. They cannot do this. When the mob dies, the casters must move to the next kill zone before drinking. Then they can sit down and drink at their leisure. They can continue to drink as the mob is being killed. Should a heal be needed, one or more of them can jump up and heal while the rest continue drinking.
Never stand around waiting. If you’re standing around waiting at any time during the MC run, something is wrong. Your tanks should almost never be out of combat for the entire course of the run (before bosses, maybe before double molten destroyer pulls and lava packs depending on mana levels and so on).
You need to have a hyperactive hunter chain pulling everything as fast as your raid can handle it. In the early parts of the instance, the next mob should be pulled when the first one is at approximately 40-50%, so it will be there just as the first mob dies. Your hunter should be pulling with Distracting Shot. It generates 600 threat, slightly more than two uses of the warrior’s Sunder Armor ability. A tank can taunt the mob, transferring two sunders worth of threat to the tank, and allowing your DPS to immediately begin attacking the mob without waiting for your tank to build up a threat buffer.
Note: It has been suggested by some hunters on the WoW Hunter Forums that Aimed Shot + Autoshot + Distracting Shot is the best combo to pull — Aimed Shot is a 3 second cast, and can be immediately followed by autoshot and distracting shot. While this would undoubtedly generate even more threat and probably won’t increase the time to pull, I’m not really sure its’ necessary. I’d only suggest it if you really want to do it, or if you’ve been having problems with people stealing aggro early after trying with Distracting Shot only.
This is an incredibly important position. Your MC performance rests very heavily on your hunter’s judgement on when to pull and what to pull. Your puller must understand that he has a much more important job than showing up high on the damage meter. He should consider wearing additional +hit gear in order to avoid any missed Distracting Shots. It may be best to have two hunters share this task and switch between it at 15-20 minute intervals. This is also a very high stress task for your warriors. I suggest having a pool of 3-4 tanks and letting them switch out at similar intervals to the hunters. It’s not necessary, of course, but it may help keep things moving faster and reduce the occasional boneheaded wipes when a tired tank or hunter hits the wrong button.
Finally, you may have an issue with AFK people. A few here and there are fine, but make sure they do three things:

• Flag AFK
• Tell an officer and make sure the officer acknowledges. Include estimated time away.
• /follow a caster and tell them (so they know not to accidently lose their new companion)

If someone is going to be AFK an extended period, they should exit the instance and make room for someone else. If someone is AFK frequently, they should not be in the raid group. How you handle it is your decision. AFK people do not contribute to DPS or to healing, and do not help you Speed Up MC… so they have no place on this website.
So now you’re moving faster between mobs… but you need to make the mobs die more quickly. Kill Faster!


KILL FASTER
By Looting Faster and Moving Faster, you’ve managed to speed up Molten Core considerably, I’m sure. But there are still all those pesky mobs standing between you and Ragnaros, and you can’t skip them all. So, Kill Faster!
The keys to killing faster are simple:

• Everyone fights
• Debuff mobs
• Keep buffed
• Use consumables
• Good group setup

Everyone, even your holiest holy priest or your healbot pally wearing cloth and using a healer offhand, should be doing DPS any time they are not casting a healing spell. Seriously. It doesn’t matter if they top out at 40 or 50 dps and someone else is doing ten times that. But they should wear higher damage gear on trash when heavy healing is not needed. Have your druids in cat or oomkin, your pallies/shammies smacking mobs with their weapons, your priests smiting, using Shadow Word: Pain, even wanding for the pure healing specs who need to save their mana for heals. Make it very clear that any time a heal is not being cast, they should be doing some kind of damage to the mob. Every little bit adds up.
You should have, at minimum, 3 warlocks casting the following curses on all trash: Curse of Elements,Curse of Shadow, Curse of Recklessness. Druids should keep Faerie Fire on the mobs as well. These spells increase both magical and physical damage, making everyone’s abilities more effective and making the mob die faster.
One spell that can slow everything down is Banish. Warlocks have two ranks of Banish; one lasts longer than the other. Your warlocks should have them both out, and know which to use, when. For example, if your banish breaks, but the raid will be ready for your mob very soon, don’t use the long banish. If your raid is constantly sitting around waiting for banish to break, switch to the shorter banish rank and let someone tank it for a couple of seconds if need be. Setting up banish priorities in advance helps too… Warlock 1 & 2 on anything to the right/back; warlock 3 & 4 on anything to the left/front is usualy enough preparation to handle all the lava packs without much hassle.
Tanks should at all times be under the effect of the Gift of Arthas potion. This very inexpensive pot can significantly increase your overall damage, which helps speed up MC. It’s like a Hemo Rogue in a bottle. And speaking of Hemo rogues, you should consider that as well. If you don’t have one already, ask your lowest DPS rogue to consider speccing Hemo. It’s a build which does not allow the rogue to do huge DPS in a raid environment like a combat rogue, but constant use of the Hemorrhage skill will significantly increase the overall damage of the raid. They also tell me it’s good for PvP, but this isn’t SpeedUpAV, after all.
It also helps to avoid useless debuffs. Have your rogue alts ditch their Barman Shanker, tell the hunters not to stack low damage DoTs, the non-balance druids can use wrath or starfire instead of moonfire…. This stuff is more important on bosses though, trash typically dies too fast for it to matter as much.
When reading about moving faster through MC, we mentioned that buffs should be kept up at all times; it should be reiterated here. You do more damage buffed than unbuffed; tanks take less damage buffed than unbuffed, which causes less downtime.
For the Alliance members, if your raid group can be relied upon to show up on time to an appointed place and quickly and efficiently move on to the raid location, you should strongly consider hanging an Onyxia/Nefarian head before your MC run, if one is not already up. The buff will speed things up considerably. Also, if the Darkmoon Faire is up in Elwynn forest, you should definitely visit and pick up appropriate buffs (10% damage increase for most; 10% stamina for the tanks, 10% int or spi for the healers). This is less useful for the Horde since Orgrimmar is considerably farther from Blackrock Mountain, and I don’t believe they have any fast way of getting to Elwynn for the faire buff (and the one for the horde is all the way over in thunder bluff for some reason). I don’t play horde, so I’ll let you folks be the judge of the best methods there. (I’m told that the horde set their hearthstones to Kargath and have a mage port them to Orgrimmar for the Ony buff, or Thunder Bluff for the faire buff and then fly to Org for the Ony buff before hearthing to Kargath. Sounds like alot of work.)
Consumables also speed up MC considerably. Casters can use Wizard Oil to increase their damage; melee DPS can use Sharpening Stones or Weightstones or Posions. Potions and Elixirs can also be used, but are a bit more expensive and do not last through death. Help provide them for your most effective players, but don’t insist on them unless you’re pushing hard to set a guild record… save them for content you really need the extra help on. One note for the druids out there — only Elemental Sharpening Stones work in cat form, and they tend to be expensive to make. Sorry
Finally, you’re only as good as the group you’re in. Set up groups effectively to maximize DPS. This will change based on your raid makeup, but here are a few pointers:

• Warriors’ Battleshout affects Warriors, Rogues, and Feral Druids
• Hunters’ Trueshot Aura affects Warriors, Rogues, Hunters, and Feral Druids
• Paladins’ Blessing of Might doesn’t affect hunters. Don’t waste their time with it.
• Druids’ Leader of the Pack affects Warriors, Rogues, Hunter, and Feral Druids
• Hunters have the hardest time getting crit and derive the greatest benefit from it.

A typical group setup for Fates' Reqium

1. Warrior Tank, Warlock (improved imp), Paladin (improved dev aura is a plus), Priest, Resto Druid
2. Same as group 1
3. whatever’s left after 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8; typically a combination of pally/priest/mage/warrior
4. see 3
5. 4 hunters, 1 feral druid
6. 4 highest DPS casters, 1 moonkin
7. 1 DPS warrior, 3 rogues, 1 feral druid
8. same as 7

An alternative we occasionally use is putting 2-3 tanks in group 1 with a paladin and a warlock, and sometimes adding to that all remaining warriors in group 2 with a pally and lock; we do the first for ragnaros and the second for large parts of Blackwing Lair. Basically, arrange your groups to maximize DPS potential, but don’t get tied to a given setup, it may need to change based on the encounter.
Horde guilds will probably want to make dedicated healing groups as well to take advantage of Mana Tide.
Other than that, it’s all about making sure that your players are constantly doing their thing, balls to the wall, no goofing off or playing autoattack spec. I don’t typically focus on DamageMeters much, but one view on it that I do use frequently is the DPSmeter, set to show the total DPS of the raid at the bottom. I find calling out this number on occasion helps motivate the raid group, and using it as a comparison point between different fights can help you get a good overview of how well the raid is focusing, whether buffs are up as needed, etc. If one set of giants garners 6500 DPS and another identical set garners only 4200, you may want to give a quick look at the raid and see what changed. It’s not a truly accurate number, but it’s fairly consistant if you’re always in the same position relative to everyone else.
This is the one section that will continually improve as your gear does. Obviously, the more damage you can do, the faster you will kill. It’s kinda fun to track your overall raid DPS for given encounters over time and see how it increases gradually as your players get upgrades… particularly seeing noticable increases when key players get key upgrades.
Now, killing faster is great… but what speeds up MC more than killing faster? Not killing at all. Skip mobs. Kill Less!


KILL LESS
Skipping mobs is a huge time saver. There are alot of mobs in MC that can be skipped if your raid is careful. I’ll point out a few, here, but the best thing to do is have your hunter/puller try them all himself. He may need a few resses here and there at the beginning, and you may want to spot him some gold for repairs, but having that information drilled into his head (here’s an Map (LINK:http://conquest.teamgbu.com/strats/m...Large_Mobs.jpg)for reference) is much more valuable than reading it on here.
Only one group of imps in the imp caves need to be killed — the ones on the right side before Lucifron’s room.
Several of the mobs in the first room can be skipped, particularly if you’re coming back into MC after having killed Magmadar and Garr already and have no worries about patrols chaining them.
Most of the mobs around Gehennas can be skipped. (some will need to be cleared on the way back to get Ragnaros if you don’t get them now) Just clear along the wall, then pull him. Note that he’s a fair amount harder this way because he targets his AoE more effectively when people are bunched together in this more narrow location. You can do it.
Some of the stuff between Gehennas and Garr can be skipped. You could probably, if you felt daring, even skip clearing Garr’s room except for the pats. Depends on how comfortable you are with fighting Baron and Shazzrah. I like having Garr’s big open room for those two, so we clear it. If you’re just clearing to Garr and stopping for the night, I probably wouldn’t bother clearing his room completely.
We typicaly clear out garr’s room, then clear all the trash before Geddon and Shazzrah, and then kill Garr/Geddon/Shazzrah all in a row. I’m not sure how much time that actually saves, but it helps the raid keep its focus, you’re not changing from trash mode to boss mode and back.
All the stuff by Shaz can be skipped, most guilds that fight him in Garr’s room do this by default already.
You can probably skip the trash on the right side of Sulf’s room, and if you do the “aoe the priests” strategy, you probably should. We havent tried that one yet, so we just kill ‘em all and spread them out nice and far apart.
You can skip all the lava packs in golemagg’s room. Just kill the stuff along the near wall, and pull him to the entrance to his room. One plus to this is that if things get ugly for some reason, you can actually reset him like a ZG boss by having everyone back up the ramp a bit. You can also pull Golemagg from the bridge behind him, if you’re willing to deal with all his adds at once as well. I don’t think you save any time this way; you’re killing the same mobs… but I have to admit it’s pretty darn cool watching Golemagg charge through his room and up and around to come and get you on that narrow little bridge.
Of course, as I noted in the Overview, this is for experienced guilds who’ve been doing MC forever and don’t really need the extra money drops from MC can bring to the guild bank or the extra fire resist gear mats.
So there you go. You have the basis for making your Molten Core runs take less time.

Have Fun
-Squirllz

[Glynbeard]

all i can say is wow..... and u da man!

[Squirllz]

Thank you thank you, but like I said not my guide, but still took me forever to type that out!

[Hercules]

cool thing ty for sharing

[Nezdragon]

Great guide, my guild just got Rag down to 20% on our fourth try, I'm sure this would make things much faster and easier!

+rep for j00!!!

BTW, the original site is http://speedupmc.com/

[Squirllz]

Hehe yay you found the original site, thanks I totally forgot it >_>
Anyways have fun in MC!

[Nezdragon]

Hehe yay you found the original site, thanks I totally forgot it >_>
Anyways have fun in MC!

Selecting random phrase in the guide and googling it FTW!