Sign inAttunement
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An attunement is a quest or chain of quests a character must finish before they are allowed into a raid dungeon. In Classic, four raids require one: Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair, Blackwing Lair and Naxxramas. Attunements gate each raid behind content a raider should already have done, and they made recruiting a new raider a job for the whole guild.
Molten Core
Molten Core's attunement is the shortest. Lothos Riftwaker stands in Blackrock Mountain beside the entrance to Blackrock Depths and gives the quest Attunement to the Core. To finish it, a player fights through Blackrock Depths to the Molten Bridge near the end of the dungeon, where a crack in the wall gives off a [Core Fragment]. Bringing the fragment back to Lothos attunes the character for good. From then on Lothos can teleport them straight to the raid's entrance, sparing them the long run through Blackrock Depths.
Players who are not attuned cannot enter Molten Core at all, so every new raider needed a Blackrock Depths run, and guilds often ran groups just for fragments. Nearby, Duke Hydraxis in Azshara offers a separate chain about the Core that ends with the [Aqual Quintessence] used to douse the runes Ragnaros's lieutenants guard. That chain is not an attunement, but many guilds treated it like one.
Onyxia's Lair
Onyxia's attunement is one of the longest quest chains in Classic, and each faction has its own. What both produce is the [Drakefire Amulet], which a player must carry to pass the gate of Onyxia's Lair in Dustwallow Marsh.
The Alliance chain starts in the Burning Steppes with Helendis Riverhorn and Dragonkin Menace. It leads to Marshal Windsor, a jailbreak in Blackrock Depths, and The Great Masquerade, in which Reginald Windsor unmasks Lady Katrana Prestor in Stormwind City as Onyxia in disguise. It ends with Haleh in Winterspring forging the amulet from The Dragon's Eye and Drakefire Amulet.
The Horde chain starts with Warlord Goretooth and Warlord's Command and runs through Thrall to Rexxar in Desolace. Along the way the player gets a magical disguise from Myranda the Hag and passes a test from the black dragon Emberstrife, and the chain ends with Blood of the Black Dragon Champion.
Both chains require killing General Drakkisath at the top of Blackrock Spire, a 10-player fight, so a player was well geared by the time they could face Onyxia.
Blackwing Lair
The Blackwing Lair attunement begins with an item. The Scarshield Quartermaster in Blackrock Mountain sometimes drops [Blackhand's Command], a letter from Rend Blackhand that starts the quest of the same name. The letter explains that only those bearing the Mark of Drakkisath may use the Orb of Command, which teleports its user directly into Blackwing Lair. The general guards his brand himself, so the player must kill him and touch Drakkisath's Brand in his chamber to be marked. Because Drakkisath had to die for each new raider, guilds often ran Upper Blackrock Spire with several applicants at once.
Naxxramas
The last Classic attunement, added with Naxxramas in patch 1.11, is reputation instead of a quest chain. At Light's Hope Chapel in the Eastern Plaguelands, [[forever:npc:16116]] of the Brotherhood of the Light offers [[forever:quest:9121]] to players who are at least honored with the Argent Dawn. At honored the quest asks for a large pile of gold and rare materials. At revered it costs much less, and at exalted it is free. Finished, it lets the player into the floating necropolis above Plaguewood.
No attunements needed
Zul'Gurub, the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj and the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj have no attunement. The Ahn'Qiraj raids were locked for a whole server until the Opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, a world event that replaced personal attunement with a server-wide one.
Later history
The Burning Crusade kept attunements and made them longer, with the key to Karazhan and the chains for Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, Mount Hyjal and the Black Temple. Blizzard removed most of them during that expansion because they made it hard for guilds to bring in new players. Wrath of the Lich King dropped them almost entirely, and Classic's own requirements disappeared from retail with time. Classic Era and WoW Forever keep the 1.12 attunements.
Sources
Categories: Game Mechanics