General Information

Ahn'Qiraj was added to WoW with the 1.9 patch, January 3, 2006. However for players to enter it a massive war effort was required and it was not open to play for roughly a month on most servers.

The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj are located in southern Silithus.  They are commonly referred to as AQ20 referring to the instance being the 20 man raid in Ahn'Qiraj. It is an outdoor 20 person raid instance, so in most areas you can mount to run through it faster.

Ahn’Qiraj has a few subtle differences to earlier implemented instances.  The three main ones are:

1. No matter where you are in the instance when someone agros a boss the whole party enters combat.
2. When you are in combat with a boss they can teleport you back to them, so running is not always an option
3. When the group enters combat with a boss a door locks off access to most of the instance.  So if you re-enter the instance in the middle of a fight wanting to run back to the group, tough luck.  You will be left waiting for the door to open when they win the fight or wipe.

While Ahn'Qiraj has several difficult encounters it is not as hard as MC or the 40 man raids.  While the whole group does need to be level 60, there is no requirement to have everyone in epic gear.  Tier 0, 0.5 or other blue gear should be just fine with proper tactics.  AQ20 is on par with or slightly easier that Zul'Gurub.

Quests

The quests for Ahn'Qiraj are given out at Cenarion Hold in Silithus.  Several quests are class specific and also reputation specific, meaning you can only complete them once you have earned a set amount of reputation with the Cenarion faction.  The rewards for the class / Reputation based quests are a ring at honoured, a cloak at revered and a weapon at exalted.  The items are also part of a set, so when you complete the set of three you earn an additional bonus.

Click here to return to the table of contents of TenTonHammer's Guide to the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj.