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 the 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 Poisons. 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’ Requiem:

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!