Nerub’ar Palace is the first raid in World of Warcraft’s upcoming The War Within expansion

During BlizzCon 2023 we’ve learned that the first raid in the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within, will be the Nerub’ar Palace. It wouldn’t be a new WoW expansion without exactly eight dungeons (four for leveling and four for max level) and a new raid, after all!

As we learned on the The War Within: What’s Next panel, this new raid takes features the Nerubians as the major antagonists, and will have a total of eight bosses. It will be the culmination of the storyline that takes place in the Azj-Kahet zone, which looks to be the final zone of the intended leveling experience for The War Within — and, thus, likely to include the direst threats our characters will face in these initial moments of the expansion.

The basic story for the Nerubians of Azj-Kahet is that their queen, Ansurek, made a deal with Xal’atath. In this deal, Xal’atah mutated Ansurek’s people into more powerful beings — real paragons of their species. In exchange, those Nerubians started helping Xal’atath gather the substance known as the “Black Blood of the Old Gods” from the depths, for Xal’atath’s own nefarious purposes.

That Black Blood of the Old Gods, in fact, is the first thing you’ll see when you first set foot into the raid: you’ll plunge down into a pit of it. From there, you’ll battle your way through the other parts of the palace, until you reach the queen’s own inner sanctum, where you’ll face Ansurek herself as the final boss.

The picture above shows a top-down view of the raid on the left, and a side cutout on the right, illustrating the path players will go through when raiding the Nerub’ar Palace. According to Associate Game Director Morgan Day, a major element of that exploration is verticality, including going through webs and silken threads to traverse the raid zone.

Other than the final boss, Queen Ansurek, we don’t know much yet about the other bosses that will challenge us in Nerub’ar Palace; only that there are eight of them in total, as the illustration above clearly shows. Still, we’re eager to learn more about this raid in the coming months. The verticality aspect certainly sounds interesting, and it’s great to have an actual raid fully dedicated to such iconic creatures from Warcraft lore as the Nerubians.