I really thought the lower city grind was going to take a long time and was dreading it. However, I did the Lower City rep in a little over 3 evenings. I was already about halfway through honored from the caravan quests I did in the mid 60's.I cleared SL up to Blackheart, but never found a reliable way to down him. You get a little over 1k rep form clearing everything up to Blackheart. It is a fairly quick clear if you don't mess around with Blackheart. I would typically do 4-8 runs in an evening depending on when I got home from work. I also got enough marks/fel armaments to get the paladin exalted with Aldor and 1 of my shaman revered with Aldor (500+ marks and around 100+ fel armaments). I still have a large stockpile of armaments that I'm hanging on to until I get the rest of the shaman closer to exalted.

Of course, the difficulty of the run is determined by your gear and group makeup. I did it with 1 paladin in normal 5 man blue gear and some quest gear. The shamans were all in greens/blues from quest and normal 5 man instances. I had about 350 + spell dmg on the shaman with about 6.4k hp on the shaman. The paladin was at 90% combat avoidance with holy shield up and just under 10k hp. So, my group was not uber by any stretch of the imagination.

The hardest pulls were of course the packs in Blackhearts room. I would start off by killing the acolyte in one of the packs or a shadow priest if there wasn't an acolyte. I dropped 4 grounding totems as I pulled which usually lasted until I had the acolyte dead and was dpsing the shadow priest. I would burn the acolyte hard as he came in not worrying about the shamans pulling agro. Once the mobs were in close, I would drop fire nova x 4, heal, chain lighting, drop magma x 4, heal, chain lighting. Once that initial cycle was done, I would usually have 2 or 3 down and then could just lighting bolt/chain lighting/heal as needed. There were quite a few times a rogue would pop and wreak havoc, but by having the paladin standing in the shaman group with consecrate going, I was usually able to avoid having a shaman die to the rogue. None of these mobs fear and if you keep the deathsworn (melee orcs that cleave) in front of the paladin and the paladin a step or two in front of the shaman, then you don't have to worry about any of the shaman getting cleaved. I don't think I ever had the shaman taking damage from cleave. The shaman only took damage if they pulled agro and from the pulls that had the warlocks in them. Again, grounding totem did a lot to eliminate the threat of the warlocks/imps.