PROBLEM: Render times were taking very long and decreasing quality was not something I wanted to do.
SOLUTION: Breaking up the pyro and Geo into 2 separate ROPs! This allowed me to set samples accordingly for the pyro and for the geo. This still took lots of time to render, but was overall faster. As a bonus I also used the Arnold NOICE denoiser to denoise my beauty and AOVs that I would need for comping.