Lore:
After you get done fighting through the ruins that make up the Courtyard of the ancient kingdom of Ahn’Qiraj (not really, though, the instance portals are seperate), you’ll find yourself at the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj, a forboding building filled to the brim with ancient, evil bugs.
Oh yeah, and an Old God too. And C’thun just woke up from a couple thousand year nap, and when you have thousands of eyes, all that crust is really going to get on your nerves. So he’s sending his minion bugs out to see what’s going on in Azeroth. Now the dragonflights need your help to push the great snooze button and put C’thun back in time out. Because they can’t do anything themselves ever.
Degree of Difficulty: Hard
The trash is actually really easy. It’s not too close together, and for the most part you’re just going to breeze right through it. The only place that gets really annoying is the swarms in the tunnels in the second part of the instance. If you’re mounted on a Qiraj tank, you’ll get dismounted and have to fight off a ton of mobs. If you’re on a regular mount? Just run through them.
The real challenge, even with a group of well geared 80s, is the bosses. The Twin Emporers have long been the bane of groups, because if you can’t successfully tank them on opposite sides of the room and coordinate switches during their teleports, they’ll heal back up to full health in no time. It’s the one thing that prevents this raid from being soloable or even done in smaller groups. Other boss gimmicks are just as annoying. Ouro will bury himself in the sand and trap players running back from dying and Viscidus can only be killed after being hit by rapidfire frost spells (good luck gimmick Paladin group!). Those are skippable, at least. C’thun can still one shot you with his chain lightening though.
Special Features:
There are a handful of mounts that drop here, including an extremely rare Red Qiraj tank. They are, however, all only able to be used inside the An’Qiraj instance. They do, however, count towards the 100 mount achievement if that’s something you’re interested in.
Recommended for Levels: 60-63
It’s hard to recommend this for anybody, really, except achievement whore 80s. While the instance was fun for it’s time, and really provided a good base for what Blizzard would do with raids in the future, especially with mob pulls that were a little tighter and the boss gimmicks were difficult, but at least unique.
It’s funny, though. If you’re looking to level an alt through old world content before Cataclysm, or in some gimmick level 60 guild, you pretty much have to hang around here. The gear is better than pretty much anything in old Azeroth and with a bunch of level 60s, beating Ahn’Qiraj actually feels like a genuine acomplisment.
