Soloing Karazhan's Chess Event for Fun, Profit, Transmog Loot, and The Chance at an Abyssal Pet

Thanks to some recent nerfs, the Chess Event - the puzzle-like encounter toward the end of Karazhan, is now easily soloable.

Karazhan was the introductory raid of Burning Crusade. It was designed for ten level 70 people. As such, it's very easy to get through the whole thing. I just took my level 86 Troll Mage up through the place and had very few problems (I got to about 50% health on Curator, but otherwise things were very smooth.)

After climbing through the tower, you'll eventually come to the Chess Event - the final encounter before Malchezzar.

The thing that makes the Chess Event difficult is that it's one of those encounters that does not scale with your own player power. This was an encounter designed for several people having control of several pieces, and with just the one of you, you're going to need to jump from piece to piece in order to make it.

To break things down:

You begin the encounter by controlling your side's "King" piece. For Alliance, this is King Llane (Varian's dad.) For Horde, it's Blackhand the Destroyer (the Horde's first Warchief, and a brute puppet of Gul'dan's.)

Controlling a piece will give you access to four commands.

Two are movement commands: You can move to a space if it is accessible, or you can turn to face a particular direction. Because pieces will auto-attack enemy pieces directly in front of them, this is actually relevant.

When you wish to control a different piece, you must cancel out of your current one and then wait several seconds for a debuff to fall off while you run to the piece you want to use. Usually you'll get to it before the debuff is gone, and the option to control the piece in the dialogue window will not show up, so let that thing fall before you click.

Your opponent is a kind of ghost/memory of Medivh (the guy whose tower you're in.) Because he's magic and mean, he will occasionally cheat. There are two ways he does this. The less worrisome one is that he'll occasionally buff all his pieces to do twice as much damage. The far more dangerous move he'll use is setting fires underneath your pieces - usually both your King and your "Queen," which is a Conjurer for Alliance or a Warlock for Horde.

So strategy:

As soon as you have control, drop out of the king and move the pawns in front of your king and queen forward, to grant you maneuvering room if Medivh puts fire down.

From here, get in the queen. Both of them have an AoE DoT (Rain of Fire for Alliance, Poison Cloud for Horde.) Try to hit the enemy king with this. The queen is the key to winning here, so if there's an enemy pawn or something attacking it, you can take some time away to protect your queen.

When the fires appear, immediately move your king and queen out of it. When you're in your king, hit heroism/bloodlust, then get back in the queen asap.

Depending on luck, the enemy king will hopefully be in range of your queen's main nuke spell. Try to keep your dot on him, but every other cooldown you should use the nuke.

So far, I've done this three times, and I've won every time.

From there, all you have to do is fight past a couple Fleshbeasts and climb all the way up the spiral staircase and you'll get to Malchezaar, who, like everything else here that you get to fight yourself, is a pushover.