If your server is anything like mine, finding groups for Magister’s Terrace can be … challenging, to say the least, since apparently every single tank has gone on holidays this month and the only ones left are kinda Donald-y. But you want your Shattered Sun faction, don’t you, for those tasty recipes and epics? And the dailies just don’t roll your faction rewards in fast enough…

Lo, paladin, find yourself a friendly mage, preferably one who’s as eager for SSO rep as you are so they don’t bitch and moan about how tedious this is going to be.

Then hie thee to Magister’s Terrace, and kill the first four mobs. Over and over again.

1. Set it to normal mode. Do not try this on Heroic unless you are uber.
2. Zone in, pally in tanking gear (with tanking buffs, ie Righteous Fury *ahem*), salv the mage.
3. Take the first pair, making sure the patrol isn’t pathing anywhere nearby.
   • This pair will be 2x Mage Guards. They’re basically melee mobs, although they have an annoying ranged damage/stun attack called Glaive Throw.
   • Sheep one, tank the other. Tank and spank, and the pally should have little risk of dying unless things go pear-shaped.
   • Of note: when they throw their magic dampening field thingy, pull them out of it and tank them a decent way away from it. The field dampens all spell attacks against them, which makes them slow as hell for your mage to kill, and your threat generation drops to almost nothing.
   • Before breaking the sheep, bandage yourself back up to reasonable health. Then kill the second one.
4. Eat and drink back to full health. Don’t bother trying to heal yourself up; your mana pool is tiny and your heals won’t do jack. It’s quicker to just eat as well as drinking.
5. Check out the patrol. There are a number of mobs that can be in the patrol:
   • Warlock: very high dps caster, fire based, with an imp pet. The pet should always be the first thing to die.
   • Magister: frost-based caster, fairly high DPS but manageable.
   • Physician: a melee mob, despite the name, with a poisoned melee attack. Fairly trivial.
   • Mage Guard: same type of mobs as in the first stationary pull. (I think these are potentially in this patrol, although I can’t remember.)
   • Blood Knight: pain in the neck. A paladin mob with a self-heal (or cross-heal if you have another mob up as well) and an aura/dot that does a surprising amount of damage.
6. Tips for dealing with the patrol:
   • Physician + Magister: the easy pair. Sheep the magister, kill the physician, then kill the magister.
   • Some other combo: relatively easy. If the patrol has the blood knight or the warlock, sheep that mob first. If it has both, then read on.
   • Warlock + Blood Knight: the difficult pair. Sheep the warlock, tank the blood knight, kill the imp, then kill the blood knight. The pally should be ready to interrupt the blood knight’s heal with a stun; the mage should be ready to spellsteal the blood knight’s buff as soon as it appears. Once the blood knight is down, bandage and regen some mana – drink a potion if you’ve got some cheap ones (eg Major Combat Mana Potions) on hand. You don’t want to tackle the warlock when you’re already half-dead and low on mana.
   • The reason I suggest this order is: if the warlock breaks sheep early while you’re killing the blood knight, the warlock will get a spell off and do a bit of damage before being resheeped, no big deal. If the blood knight breaks sheep early while you’re killing the warlock, the knight will get a heal off and you’ll have to kill the warlock all over again, which – given how much damage they do – could well be fatal.
7. Zone out. Eat, drink, reset the instance.
8. Perform above steps four more times.

This will net you 240 rep (264 for humans) in about 20-30 minutes, and will use up your five instance resets for the hour. Go make some lunch, do some chores, come back in half an hour, and repeat steps 1-8 again.

I used this to push me over the line to Revered so I could make my healing trinket in time for our first night in Mount Hyjal, since the daily quests were going to reset in the middle of the raid. I used this again today to push me over the line to Exalted so I didn’t have to wait til tonight for a fresh daily reset to get more rep.

Obviously, this is not an awesome way to get to Revered or Exalted SSO by itself. However, a few iterations of this – if it’s in company with a partner you enjoy playing with – can be a fun way to polish some skills and get just that bit of extra rep to reach a particular milestone when you choose, instead of being dependent on being able to get proper Magister’s Terrace groups.