Running Battle for Azeroth content for transmog and other, lesser reasons in patch 9.1.5

In World of Warcraft patch 9.1.5 Battle for Azeroth raid instances were all placed on Legacy Loot, which means that when they are killed — rather than using the personal loot system and thus potentially dropping nothing at all — these raids will now drop an assortment of gear when killed, not limited to or restricted to pieces that your character would usually have on their loot table. In some cases, this will mean you’ll end up with an item you can’t even equip, like a two handed staff for your Demon Hunter or a fist weapon on your Paladin, but at least you can vendor that. Meanwhile, if you’re a transmog farmer, it means your chances of getting new items from boss kills goes up, especially if you’re soloing because if the boss in question normally drops six or so items across the entire raid, now they’ll be dropping all six of those items for you.

So that’s pretty great. However, it should be pointed out that the reason the Legacy Loot system usually waits for two expansions to pass before it includes an expansion’s raids is that it often takes two expansions before these older raids are easily soloable. Just because BFA is now friendlier to loot farmers trying to get their transmog on doesn’t mean it’s actually all that much easier to solo, especially for classes or specs that aren’t dealing out massive damage, or mitigating incoming damage, or healing through the substantial amounts of pain that these fights can deal. Depending on your character’s class, spec, and current gear, you may not actually be able to go as far soloing Battle for Azeroth raids now as you will be able to by the end of Shadowlands.

So let’s talk about Legacy Loot, farming older raids, and you.

How to queue for Battle for Azeroth LFR

At least one thing is very easy in patch 9.1.5, and that’s queueing for the LFR difficulty of these yesterday’s raids. Both the Horde and Alliance get a single NPC that allows you to queue for all the various LFR wings for the entire expansion — no having to go find a specific NPC for a specific LFR raid, which is a big time saver in my opinion.

Horde players seek out Eppu, in the Great Seal in Dazar’alor. She’s just hanging out, not particularly hard to find, just look for the big Tortollan standing around the Great Seal like she knows what she’s doing.  Meanwhile, for Alliance players, the NPC in question is tucked away into the Boralus inn — you’re looking for Kiku, just to the side of the door as you walk into the inn, next to the bar. Each of these NPCs will have a list of each wing from LFR from Uldir to the Crucible of Storms to the Battle for Dazar’alor through Azshara’s Palace and right up to the last wing of Ny’alotha itself. Just pick one and go.

It’s really that easy. Well, to queue up, anyway.

For Normal/Heroic/Mythic difficulties, you have to go to the raid entrances

Saddle up if you’re in for other difficulty levels, because you’re going to have to do some traveling. There’s no handy NPC letting you queue up for these, you need to travel to them.

The entrance to Uldir is in Nazmir — on the image above, it’s the green swirly raid portal directly atop the word of in  Heart of Darkness. If you have flying, you can just fly right up to the raid portal, but otherwise you’re going to have to ride a ground mount through a whole lot of hostile Blood Trolls to get there and descend to the floor of the marsh surrounding the structure.

For the Crucible of Storms raid entrance, head to Stormsong. Find the Shrine of the Storm off the coast of the zone, then head south on that large island until you find what I am forced to describe as a great big Cthulhu head on the map. The raid entrance is the green swirly portal visible there inside Cthulhu-head’s face tentacles.

The Battle for Dazar’alor raid portals are the easiest ones to find — just go to your capital city, be it Dazar’alor or Boralus, and open your map. Horde players, look for the green swirly on your map north of the city across from Tal’Gurub, while Alliance players, you’re looking for the green swirly smack dab in the middle of Boralus’s docks.

The only raid that doesn’t have a great map marker is Azshara’s Eternal Palace, but it’s simple to navigate to in Nazjatar — head all the way north of the zone till you hit the Gate of the Queen, then submerge yourself in the big whirlpool there in order to get pulled underwater to the raid entrance.

As for Ny’alotha, this one’s a little trickier, because the raid entrance switches zones every week, going to wherever the major N’Zoth Assault is that week. So check both the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria and Uldum in Kalimdor — it’s going to be in one of those two zones.

How soloable are these?

Well, it’s not impossible — some really dedicated players were soloing some of these raids before Shadowlands even came out — but for most players, there’s either a lot of damage to heal through or mitigate, or a lot of health to whittle down. Some specific fights, like M.O.T.H.E.R. in Uldir, are a real pain with just one player due to the mechanics. You might be better off getting a few people together if you want to try and clear these right now, but as Shadowlands continues and our gear gets better, who knows? You’re probably still going to need your legendary cloak from the end of Battle for Azeroth to do Ny’alotha, especially on higher difficulties, in my opinion.

But Battle for Azeroth has some really excellent transmog options and some cool mounts, like the Glacial Tidestone and the Ny’alotha Allseer, so it’s definitely worth doing. For right now, unless you’re very well geared, you might want to consider bringing friends.