All of the attunement quests you’ll need to raid in Burning Crusade Classic

Attunements — the lengthy quest chains that allowed access to dungeons and raids — were a major part of the vanilla World of Warcraft experience, and were faithfully recreated for WoW Classic. But when Burning Crusade came around, attunements became far more complex, and that, too, will be faithfully reproduced when Burning Crusade Classic goes live.

If you love these twisty quest chains, you’ll have a lot of fun because Burning Crusade was their peak. But love them or hate them, most players will need a little help getting through them. So what will you need to get attuned when Burning Crusade Classic goes live later this year?

Going into step-by-step details is a far longer topic than we have space for, but let’s look at a general overview of what you can expect from Burning Crusade’s attunement chains — just enough to get your characters on their way to running the game’s biggest, baddest raids.

Update 4/15/2021: Over the life of the original Burning Crusade, Blizzard relaxed some of the attunement requirements. Burning Crusade Classic will mirror that through its Phases. We don’t have a specific schedule as of yet, but we will make a reasonable guess based upon when those attunements were removed from the original game.

You’ll also be able to work on the attunements before the raids are open.  Most of the long quest chains will be in from Phase 1. You’ll be able to start the Black Temple attunement for killing A’lar once The Eye aka Tempest Keep opens in Phase 2, which should be months before the Black Temple opens in Phase 3.

Karazhan

What is it? 10-player Tier 4 raid

Where is it? Deadwind Pass

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase One

How will the attunement change? Karazhan will have the attunement requirement removed in a later phase, but one person in the group will still heed to have The Masters Key — meaning someone in your group must have done the attunement quest chain. During the original Burning Crusade this requirement was relaxed when 2.4.0 went live. This would correspond to Phase 5 in Burning Crusade Classic.

Your key to Karazhan, the first 10-man raid in World of Warcraft, required a long and involved quest chain. Your journey starts in Deadwind Pass near the entrance to Karazhan itself. This will lead you to the Alterac Mountains and then to Khadgar in Shattrath in Outlands. Oh, but we are just getting started, youngling.

Khadgar needs you to reassemble a key he broke into three parts:

• Shadow Labyrinth: Part one of the key is in the Shadow Labyrinth dungeon, which you can’t run until you’ve completed the Sethekk Halls dungeon.
• Steamvaults: The second part is in the Steamvaults, though you only need to do a section of the dungeon to get the key.
• Arcatraz: The final part is in the Arcatraz. Like Shadow Labs, Arcatraz had its own attunement chain which involved open-world group quests and completing the other Tempest Keep dungeons (Mechanar and Botanica). Arcatraz was considered by many to be one of the more difficult 5-mans when Burning Crusade was live. Fortunately, like Steamvaults, you only need to do a bit of the dungeon to get the key.

Congratulations, you now have the Apprentice’s Key!

You think that will unlock Karazhan? Ha, ha, ha. No, not so fast my friend. Now you need the Master’s Key, and for that, you need to talk to Medivh himself:

• The Black Morass: Medivh is in the Black Morass dungeon in the Caverns of Time. But you couldn’t run The Black Morass until you completed an escort quest inside the other Caverns of Time dungeon: Old Hillsbrad Foothills.

The final boss of The Black Morass, Aeonus, was a giant gear check. If you could defeat him, Medivh would give you The Master’s Key. Once you had that, you could enter Karazhan.

But of course, to do the 10 -man raid, you’d need nine other keyed players. Every single member of your raid needed to be attuned, individually. One of my constant jobs as a main tank for our guild was tanking Black Morass runs to get our new recruits keyed for Karazhan.

Gruul’s Lair

What is it? 25-player Tier 4 raid

Where is it? Blade’s Edge Mountains

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase One

No attunement.

Magtheridon’s Lair

What is it? 25-player Tier 4 raid

Where is it? Hellfire Peninsula

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase One

No attunement.

Serpentshrine Cavern

What is it? 25-player Tier 5 raid

Where is it? Zangarmarsh

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase Two

Prerequisites: Attunement to Karazhan plus you need to have your Heroic keys for Cenarion Expedition, the Lower City, and either Honor Hold for Alliance players or Thrallmar for Horde players. Heroic keys require Revered reputation with the various factions.

How will the attunement change? The attunement for Serpentshrine Cavern was removed about a month after Black Temple went live. This would correspond to sometime during Phase 3. The reputation required for the Heroic keys changed from Revered to Honored when Zul’Aman went live which would be Phase 4.

You’ll need to run The Slave Pens on Heroic difficulty. At the time, Heroics varied in difficulty but on average were about on par with the difficulty of the early Cataclysm Heroics, or Mythic+ in modern World of Warcraft. Heroic Slave Pens had a special quest-giving NPC not found in the normal version.

He needs two signets: an Earthen Signet and a Blazing Signet.

• Earthen Signet: Kill Gruul the Dragonkiller, conveniently hanging out in Gruul’s Lair, a Tier 4 (Burning Crusade Classic Phase One) 25-man raid.
• Blazing Signet: Kill Nightbane, an optional boss in Karazhan. To summon Nightbane, you’ll needed the Blackened Urn.
  • To get your Blackened Urn you need:
    • Honored with the The Violet Eye faction
    • Kill the first four bosses of Karazhan
    • Do quests outside of the raid in Netherstorm
    • Complete a run of Sethekk Halls Heroic
    • Complete a run of Shattered Halls Heroic

Once you have your Blackened Urn, return to Karazhan and kill Nightbane. Boom, Signets collected! You return to the quest giver in Heroic Slave Pens and he’ll cast the spell to attune you to Serpentshrine Cavern.

The Eye (Tempest Keep)

What is it? 25-player Tier 5 raid

Where is it? Netherstorm

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase Two

Prerequisites: Heroic key for the Sha’tar. This requires Revered reputation with them.

How will the attunement change? The attunement for The Eye was removed about a month after Black Temple went live. This would correspond to sometime during Phase 3. The reputation required for the Heroic keys changed from Revered to Honored when Zul’Aman went live which would be Phase 4.

Few refereed to The Eye as “The Eye” during Burning Crusade. It was usually just called Tempest Keep, even though Tempest Keep itself included The Eye 25-man raid and the three 5-man Tempest Keep dungeons: The Arcatraz, The Botanica, and The Mechanar. The dungeons were called by shortened versions of their names (Arc, Bot, and Mech) and Tempest Keep (TK) became the colloquial name for The Eye.

Attunement for The Eye started with yet another long quest chain: The Cipher of Damnation in Shadowmoon Valley. The chain doesn’t require any instances, but it does require you to kill several elite mobs which you’ll want a group for. There’s no faction tagging in Burning Crusade, so if your specific group doesn’t tag the elite first, you won’t get credit.

Once you finish The Cipher of Damnation, you need to:

• Complete a run of Heroic Shattered Halls Heroic on a timer
• Complete a run of Heroic Steamvault
• Complete a run of Heroic Shadow Labyrinth
• Complete a run ofHeroic Arcatraz while ensuring a special NPC, our now well-known friend, Millhosue Manastorm, doesn’t die
• Finally, you’ll kill Magtheridon, conveniently hanging out in Magtheridon’s Lair, a Tier 4 (Burning Crusade Classic Phase One) 25-man Raid in Hellfire Peninsula. Fortunately, the only thing you have to before you can run Magtheridon’s Lair is to be Level 70.

Mount Hyjal

What is it? 25-player Tier 6 raid

Where is it? Caverns of Time

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase Three

Prerequisites: Attunment to Serpenshrine Cavern, attunement to The Eye, Revered reputation with the Keepers of Time faction

How will the attunement change? Unlikely to change.

Attuning yourself to Mount Hyjal required you to collect two Vials of Eternity:

• One vial dropped from the final boss of The Eye, Kael’thas Sunstrider
• The other vial dropped from the final boss of Serpentshrine Cavern, Lady Vashj

Black Temple

What is it? 25-player Tier 6 raid

Where is it? Shadowmoon Valley

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase Three

Prerequisites: Attunement to Serpenshrine Cavern, attunement to The Eye, attunement to Mount Hyjal, Revered reputation with the Keepers of Time faction

How will the attunement change? Unlikely to change.

Black Temple attunement was relatively simple… as long as you were in a raid group and had already completed the lengthy quest chains that required you to get all of your other raid attunements. You needed to pick up quest from an NPC in Serpentshrine Cavern, which simply required you to loot an item from Rage Winterchill, the first boss of Mount Hyjal.

Sunwell Plateau

What is it? 25-player Tier 6 raid

Where is it? Isle of Quel’Danas

When will it arrive in Classic? Phase Five

Prerequisites: None

Sunwell has no attunement, but the final three bosses were time-gated and released in succession three weeks after the raid opened. Blizzard has not said if they will do this in Burning Crusade Classic, but it seems likely they’ll aim to recreate the original experience. Sunwell Plateau’s bosses were a step up in difficulty when Burning Crusade was live. Even the trash in that raid was brutal. Basically, you could go in there as soon as you hit 70, but you wouldn’t get very far.

Attunements were your main level cap content in TBC

Attunements became a big part of your journey once you hit the new level cap. In Burning Crusade, we didn’t have many daily quests — at least not until the final patch content, which will be part of Phase 5 in Burning Crusade Classic. We didn’t have any World Quests. End game was running dungeons, working on rep, and doing those attunement quests so you could jump into raids. When we weren’t working on our Netherwing rep, we ran dungeons for gear and did quests to attune our characters so we could get into the raid game.

If you need more details on these quest chains, Wowhead has an excellent step-by-step guide to getting attuned to everything one.

Good luck, future raiders!

Originally published 3/17/2021, updated 4/15/2021