For anyone who’s interested, SpeedUpMC.com won a beta key invite in one of the WoW guide contests. I’ve been enjoying beta and taking lots of random screenshots… you can view them in a very un-pretty format, here:

World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Beta Screenshots

You want to make MC go faster. I know you do. I sure as hell do. My top rogue is developing a drinking habit in there and his wife will kick my ass if it goes long enough for him to get really tanked. My MT falls asleep at the wheel if it goes too long. We hate the place, but people still need their T2 pants, so what can you do? Well, you can speed it up.

We’ve been working on running it fast for a long time now. I think our best time is a bit over two and a half hours, running with all main characters, the onyxia and faire buffs, but not going nuts on potions and flasks or pushing people really hard. 3 hours is a good time. That’s less time than it takes alot of pickup groups to run a 5 or 10 man instance. It gives us time to do Onyxia, or start BWL, or run ZG/AQ20 and get a few bosses down, without going overtime. We’re not the top guild on our server by any means; as I write this, we’re working on downing Nef (update 6/14 — Nef, Skeram, and Bug Trio down; update 8/6 Sartura and Fankriss down :D) , and another guild has already killed C’thun… so you don’t have to be an uberguild to make MC less mind-numbing.

Even a guild starting out can use some of the ideas here to help keep things moving faster. So, let’s get started, shall we?

• An Overview
• Loot Faster!
• Move Faster!
• Kill Faster!
• Kill Less!
• Have Fun!

In case someone stumbles across this who isn’t a WoW junkie…

The online multiplayer video game World of Warcraft is incredibly popular, with more subscribers than any previous MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). In World of Warcraft, you choose to play for one of two factions (Alliance and Horde), and one of 4 races per faction (Dwarf, Gnome, Human, Night elf for Alliance, Orc, Tauren, Troll, Undead Forsaken for the Horde). You can play one of a variety of classes (Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior), which denote your role in the game (Tanks are hard to kill but do little damage, damage dealers die easily but do lots of damage, healers heal, and hybrids can do some of everything), although World of Warcraft is not quite as static in its class/role definitions as many other games, and allows for more flexibility in playstyle.

Your little gnome rogue, or whatever character you choose, makes his way through the expansive world of Azeroth, saving the world from evildoers, doing evil, or just killing yet another 25 boars because some NPC (non-player character) promises you a couple of gold and a new hat to do it for him. It’s a fun game, with lots of things to do, and lots of interesting twists. Progression in the game is measured in levels of experience. It gets progressively harder as you gain levels. The maximum level is 60. At level 60, you have access to the toughest content in the game. And at 60, since you can no longer progress through experience, the only path for progression is your equipment and your gold supply (which is useful mostly in gearing up your alternate characters with better gear than they’d be able to have if they were your first character. This is called “twinking”).

When World of Warcraft began, there was only one incredibly hard location in the game… Molten Core. To do Molten Core, you need a group of 40 experienced and skilled players, who have already wrung the most that they can out of other content. Molten Core dropped the best gear in the game, so it was the only real path of progression. Since the game began, they’ve added Zul’Gurub and The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj for Pre-MC content (These locations require only 20 people, not 40; both are in some ways harder than MC and far more visually appealing, but the gear in MC is generally better). They’ve also added Onyxia’s Lair (a fast dungeon for 40 people; go in, kill 3-4 ‘gateway’ enemies, and then begin an epic encounter with a very angry dragon), Blackwing Lair (the next step up from Molten Core in difficulty and quality of gear), and The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (a dungeon that starts on par with BWL and then becomes harder, mostly contains gear for the less common specialisations). And now they’ve opened the Naxxramas Necropolis, which will remain the hardest thing in the game until the expansion comes out late this year.

But back to Molten Core. Molten Core is an epic experience… you descend into the pit of an active volcano, and make your way down into the planet’s core, facing tougher and tougher enemies until you finally face Ragnaros, a lieutenant of the old gods. But what does this mean? Well, you see a whole bunch of brown rock and red lava and very little visual detail; a bunch of big red giants that look like every other giant in the game except that they’re red, a bunch of rock elementals that look like every other rock elemental in the game, but black; a bunch of fire elementals that, you guessed it, are identical to every other fire elemental in the game, and two headed dogs. Blizzard has some odd fetish for two headed dogs. The bosses are… well, those things I just covered, plus a class of enemy called a Salamander, which is basically a thing with the lower body of a snake and the upper body of a man; these make up half the bosses and their cronies. And Ragnaros, who is pretty cool and different for the most part from everything else in the game… until they cloned him in blue and named him Thunderaan… but he’s just a quest mob that only a few people ever summon, so let’s discount him.

Anyway, there’s your overview. The point of this site is, people do and redo Molten Core every week, and have been for a year and a half now. It stops being cool after a while, and starts to get really tedious. So you don’t want to spend 8-12 hours over 2-3 days in there like you did when you were starting out. You don’t even want to spend 4-8 hours in there like you may be now that it’s “on farm.” You want to get in, get your stuff, and get the hell out, faster. You want to speed up Molten Core.