Many thanks to Jasyla for helping me test the strategy below.
Recently, with the introduction of changes from Blizzard that have made older raids more friendly to solo adventurers, as well as the addition of pet drops from twelve of the bosses in those raids, a number of hardy souls are venturing into old content. The dungeons folks are heading into aren’t limited to just those that drop pets, however. I’ve seen a number of tweets mentioning attempts to solo Karazhan over the past few weeks. One of the common themes in those tweets is that the chess event is still difficult to solo, even if the rest of the instance is a cakewalk. A few people have noted they stop there, not continuing on to Prince Malchezaar. Since I’ve had some success soloing the event, I decided to put this guide together to help out.
Before I go on, I’ll mention that this event has a healthy dose of RNG. You can execute the strategy I’ll lay out flawlessly, and still run into issues. However, I’ve found that when I use this strategy, I win more often than I lose. And when you lose, you’re just kicked out of the piece you’re in and the pieces respawn a few seconds later, so there’s no corpse run involved. Also, as you’re learning to execute the strategy I’ll put out there, you may not be going as quickly as you can, so you may fail more often. Don’t give up! It’s actually pretty simple, and you’ll be able to reliably solo it in no time.
With that in mind, let’s review the basics of the encounter.