As I note in the Overview, Looting Faster is the first step to speeding up Molten Core.

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.