On Raid Design Part 3 – Ahn’Qiraj
The third part of my raid-ranking-series (up to Ulduar) takes us to the first 20-man-raid from back in vanilla wow and outlines why Ahn’Qiraj took spot #6 on my raid ranking.
Setting
Aaah, sweet dreaded Silithus. Once upon a time, back in the days of Vanilla wow, there used to be that area in the south-west corner of Kalimdor, where alliance and horde would work for the cenarion hold to fight the silithids. Those bugs were a gigantic part of the endgame and it’s hard to describe the whole Ahn’Qiraj thing without the proper story and action around the twilight cult. Long story really, really short: Cenarion hold stands up against the approaching silithid invasion and needs every helping hand they can get, be it horde or alliance, as long as they would support the cause. It was a very lore-heavy zone, especially with the cenarion hold story deeply woven into all old-world Azeroth.
You knew these guys, be it from cleansing plants in felwood, investigating silithid hideouts or whatever else it was you did for them. Anyhow, they clearly were the good ones: Druids living in harmony with mother Azeroth, not taking side in the everlasting struggle of alliance versus horde, but always holding on to their love and care for everything nature. My whole ranting comes down to one point: By working towards Ahn’Qiraj you were taking part in WoW-history, bug by bug.
Flair
The instance itself isn’t that spectacular, yet the flair is awesome. That is because to even be able to enter Ahn’Qiraj you had to get a lot of stuff done. There was reputation to farm, and quite a lot so. There was a world event to open the gates, and each server had to work towards that. In fact, it was a time of a lot of server transfers, for motivated guilds would seek higher populated realms to get a shot at Ahn’Qiraj sooner than on their old, low-pop home.
Other than that all of Silithus was full of repeatable quests: Farm this, farm that, kill twilight guys, get artifact pieces, blah blah blah. There were even summonable raid bosses, and in order to be able to summon those you first had to summon 5-man bosses that could only be summoned after farming items off of regular mobs. In short: Silithus and everything going on there was huge and important. It felt epic to take part in history and therefore setting foot into the instance alone felt epic enough.
Trash
I don’t remember much of Ahn’Qiraj trash, but I do remember that it was tricky. There was poison to cure, mana to drain and a lot of damage flying around. The instance was wide-spread and very, very open and stuffed with trash packs. Difficulty was as high as you had to know what each mob did to get through the pulls without deaths.
Encounters
The boss fights in Ahn’Qiraj 20 made for some real challenges. It wasn’t unusal to have a wipe-only night in there, and progress was slow. There was Kurinaxx, who wasn’t much more than an initial gear-check. Swap tanks, keep distance to raid members, kill fast. That’s about that. If he’s to strong then you’re too weak.
But it got much better after that. General Rajaxx was a very action-loaded fight. He sent waves of minions against the raid and it’s NPC-supporters, and living through those alone was everything but easy. Seven waves, each with “trash” and a mini-boss, had to be controlled (crowd control in every form was a big thing here) and brought down before, finally, Rajaxx would show up on the scene. Next up wos Roam, where my warlock would be mana-draining as if there was no tomorrow. Following him was Buru, a fight all about movement and raid coordination.
The variety in encounters was very cool, every fight had it’s clinches and little specialties going on and almost every ability of every class had it’s use here and there. Very, very cool encounters.
Summary
If bugs and desert are your thing, then Ahn’Qiraj 20 is your place to be. The encounters are cool, trash is okay and it’s nothing like easy. The downsides used to be the immense farming that had to be done to be able to step in and that there are only six bosses. Desert and bugs gets very annoying over time, especially since the whole zone looks the same, you it soon was “enough” of that. Still, Ahn’Qiraj 20 is an awesome raid.
I remember back in the day when Silithus was a ghost zone, there were no quests, no rep grind, just and empty scary zone full of bugs.
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