Dungeons and Raids

Finding a group

You do not have to shout in chat to fill a party. Open the Dungeon Finder to see the runs it queues for, pick the ones you would go to, choose the role you will play, and join the queue. The finder builds a full group with the right mix of tank, healer, and damage, then offers it to everyone at once, and you are grouped the moment the party accepts. The list is not only five-player runs: the ten-player raid queues here too, at both difficulties, though the finder never checks whether you have earned your way in, so the door itself can still turn you back. Not every run in the realm is on its list, so glance at it before you count on it for a particular dungeon. One thing it does not do is move you: the finder forms the group and points you at the entrance, and everybody still travels to the door on their own feet.

Your role choices come from your class before you specialize, and from your active specialization once you have one, so a healer queues as a healer. Past the level talents open at, the finder wants you to have chosen a specialization before it will give you a role at all. Each run on the list also carries its own level band, tighter than the door itself, and every member of a queued party has to sit inside it: the finder will not seat a character the group would have to carry.

A formed group is offered for a short window, so answer promptly. Let the offer lapse or turn it down and the finder holds you out of the queue for a moment before you can rejoin, which keeps a half-answered group from stalling everyone else.

Prefer to pick your own company? A party leader can post the group on the premade board instead, tagged with what the run is for: a first run, a quest run, a full clear, a learning run, or a fast one. Other players apply and the leader decides who comes along. There is no free-form advertisement text, only the tags, and one entry on the list is board-only, offered for a posting rather than an automatic queue.

Heroic mode

Every five-player dungeon, and the raid itself, has a heroic version waiting past the level cap. The same halls, remade for a geared endgame party: everything hits harder, nothing can be outrun on foot, and the bosses shrug off stuns and snares entirely. Outgrow the normal versions first; heroic assumes you have.

Choose the difficulty before your group claims the instance: type /dungeon heroic, or pick Set Dungeon Difficulty on your own portrait menu. On your own you set it yourself; in a group only the leader can, and the choice covers everyone and locks in at the door, so a run stays what it was claimed as.

Heroic Marks and upgraded spoils

Heroic bosses drop the loot you know, upgraded and tagged Heroic on the tooltip, and the final boss of each run adds epics found nowhere else. That last kill also leaves Heroic Marks for every participant: a currency spent with Quartermaster Vex in Highwatch, whose counter is a shelf of rings and pendants that nothing but proof of the heroic depths will buy.

Normal dungeons can be run all day. Heroic asks patience: the final boss kill locks everyone in the run to one heroic clear of that dungeon per day, and the raid keeps a daily lockout for each difficulty. On a live realm every daily lockout clears together at the realm's own nightly reset hour, so a clear taken just before that hour and one taken just after fall on two different days; play offline in your browser instead and a lockout simply runs out a day after your own kill. A cleared five-player run stays open to its own party for corpse runs and loot, so nobody is locked away from what they earned there. The raid is stricter: once its kill locks you the door stays shut until the reset, and the only way back through it is a corpse run by someone who fell in the very run that locked them, so a living raider who walks out has walked out for the day. Collect your spoils before you leave the arena. Every one of these lockouts belongs to the character that earned it, so a clear on your main leaves your other characters free.

Resetting your instances

Switch difficulty while your group still holds claimed runs and the old claims linger for a while before clearing on their own. The party leader can let them go at once instead: choose Reset All Instances on their own portrait menu, or type /dungeon reset. A reset works only after the difficulty has actually been changed, only while nobody, living or fallen, remains inside, only once every corpse in there has been looted clean, and a short cooldown separates one reset from the next. Arrive at the door on the wrong difficulty and the game says so before the run starts. The raid resets the same way, its own lockout and corpse-return rules still standing on top.

The Drowned Temple, a little deeper

The temple has its own legend, older than the cult you chase elsewhere. On the shore of the Glimmermere, a tarn that drinks the moonlight and gives back the drowned, a lone watcher keeps a gate of pale light. Beneath the surface, a stair of cold stone runs down to it. The folk who sank there did not drown by misadventure: they were the Pale Choir, who went under in worship and never stopped singing. The old wardens scratched a single warning into the rocks before the water took them, a prayer to something they called the Drowned Moon, with a steadier hand adding two words beneath it: it only sleeps.

A door the dead were meant to keep shut

High on the peaks, away from the main fight, lies a colder mystery. Old graves bear a crown no record remembers, and the dead who guard them once served a forgotten king. Read their stones, gather the keystones they kept, and you can unseal a tomb that three loyal souls died to hold closed, the optional trial that opens the realm to its ten-player raid for those who follow the clues to the end.