World of Warcraft: The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj
Lore:
The Courtyard for Cthun’s temple, it was walled off a long, long time ago by the great dragon aspects as a away to keep the evil Qiraj, the servants of the Old Gods, from running over Azeroth and killing everyone. Unfortunately, everybody kind of forgot that it’s possible to dig under walls (and some of these bugs have wings…really you guys?), and so from level 20ish on, these guys keep popping up, and at level 60 you finally get to go to the source and kill them.
The Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest involved picking up all the essences of the dragonflight and forcing the door open (with a gaggle of Horde and Alliance troops) to finally end the Qiraj threat and drive Cthun back. But first you’ve got to clear your way to the temple through the ruins of the great city (note: the instance portals are seperate, so you do not actually have to do this).
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Early on in level 80, it was awfully hard to solo through the trash. It’s very densely packed, and you’ll usually end up pulling more than one group by accident if you aren’t very careful. There is one large section in the courtyard, that will completely overwhelm you if you aren’t especially careful.
The boss mechanics aren’t particularily difficult any more. It’s entirely possible to DPS Ossirian down before he even starts his crystal empowerment gimmick these days. They’re not to be taken lightly because they all still hit hard and have a ton of health, but it’s very easy to solo through with a decently geared raiding 80 these days.
Special Features:
Not much to it any more. You can pick up a ton of Cenarian Circle reap in here, and a few old school tier tokens that can be turned in for even more Circle rep if that’s something you’re interested in.
Recommended for Levels: 60-65
Like a lot of what I’ve been doing the past few days, it’s fun for retro-raiders. The tier sets that drop in Ahn’Qiraj are pretty fun looking, though not especially useful. But other than that there’s no real reason to run it, and since it’s a big circular instance with a ton of trash, there’s not much reason to want to run it.
Find a group of about ten people or so, overwhelm everything in there in about an hour, grab your achievement and never come back. There are a lot better ways to get Cenarian Circle rep, and if nothing else, run Temple of Ahn’Qiraj’s first few rooms for a chance at the mounts instead of this mess.