Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) – Northrend
You can tackle Northrend two different ways. The first is to take the boat from the faction city to Borean Tundra to go run The Eye of Eternity (EoE). I tend to skip it because it feels out of the way, thus I just take the portal to Dalaran, Crystalsong Forest in my faction capital. From there, I complete the raids in the following order: Icecrown Citadel (ICC), Trial of the Crusader (ToC), Ulduar (ULD), Obsidian Sanctum (OS), Ruby Sanctum (RS), and finish with Naxxramas (NAXX). You always want to finish in NAXX because it’s the longest exit of any of the WotLK raids. Reminder: You can only choose one difficulty per week per raid per character (ex: 25-man Heroic). So choose wisely!
Icecrown Citadel (ICC)
Icecrown Citadel loot is weird. It’s probably best to just always run it on 25-man Heroic until you have unlocked every tier set you want because the 10-man tier pieces are purchasable with gold near the entrance, 25 Heroic drops base 10-man Heroic tokens anyway, it drops the 25-man upgrade tokens, and the final Heroic upgrade tokens. This difficulty also gives you the best odds to getting Invincible, and you can get the Shadowmourne quest done.
I would recommend waiting to sort out buying the highest upgraded tier items until you have 5 of each token on your desired class. This also means that if you want to knock it out for every class (there were 10 of them in WotLK), you would need a stash of 50 tokens (10 of every class group)! Once you have everything you want from Heroic, then scope out your missing pieces from Normal versions (there are different colors for 10- and 25-man).
You can easily exit ICC via a portal to the start of the raid, zone out and head to Trial of the Crusader in the same zone.
Trial of the Crusader
ToC began the confusing loot and lockout times when they separated Normal/Heroic, but only let you run one a week, but had separate loot colors for 10/25/Heroic/Normal. I haven’t spent a lot of time deducing the differences in unlocking everything, but I think it’s going to be very similar to ICC. Luckily, there are not a bunch of class-based tokens, just a Trophy of the Crusade that is warbound.
Talk to the guy at the entrance to start each boss. For the PVP battle against the opposing faction, do not go and instantly kill them all. This sometimes bugs them. Run through them to engage combat, let them cast a couple things, and then kill them. As far as I can tell, you have to teleport out of ToC, but luckily they give you a portal for this.
Ulduar
This was the last raid to have a single difficulty (no Normal or Heroic), but the first raid to have hard modes (harder ways to do fights to increase loot quantities). Make sure you engage each one correctly (for the most part you just go one-shot each boss). To double check, I’ve found this guide from 2009. For your piece of WoW history, Ulduar’s hard modes are what inspired Heroic modes for Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel!
Another tricky thing about this raid is the first boss, Flame Leviathan. Blizzard brilliantly released “vehicle combat” which was an unfun way to force us to not play our classes. Luckily, you outlevel Ulduar significantly, so you can engage the hard mode for the first boss and then just run your mount all the way to the end. Starting the fight will put you in combat, so make sure you’re mounted first. After killing the two giants in front of the large door, the tank should come out and you can one-shot it. You’ll probably be stuck in combat and cannot mount, and the loot chest might also be covered by the tank, so just let the Postmaster handle the shipping and proceed to the next bosses.
After killing Mimiron and Yogg-Saron, you can utilize the teleporter pads to get where you need to go. After Yogg, you can either teleport out and fly down to the next raids you want to farm, or teleport out to your capital city. It’s probably a wash as to which one is faster since the next raids are in southern Northrend.
Obsidian and Ruby Sanctum
Located underneath Wyrmrest Temple are two single boss raids. For Obsidian Sanctum, you can just run to the boss and everything in the raid will pull when you start combat. For Ruby Sanctum, you have to kill the three general bosses before the raid boss spawns.
Naxxramas
Naxx is divided between 4 wings and an upstairs. It’s very linear, and even the end-of-wing teleports back to the center can be used while in combat, so don’t worry if some trash is chasing you between bosses. There’s not really any tricks for this raid, but it does have two fights that have non-skippable phase timers (Gothik the Harvester and Kel’Thuzad). There’s no penalty for doing nothing for the timer until the next phase, so feel free to alt-tab or stare at another monitor for the 3-4 minutes it takes for the fight to phase. Once finished, you can run out back towards Sapphiron if you have outstanding business in Northrend, or just teleport out to begin sorting out your new transmogs!
Pandaria – Mists of Pandaria
You’ve already farmed all of the Cataclysm raids as part of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor farming routes, so now it’s on to Pandaria! I haven’t actually farmed Mists of Pandaria because of Remix. As of 8/1, you couldn’t even solo Siege of Orgrimmar because Galakras was bugged. That said, SoO has a pretty coveted transmog from the final boss, known as Tusks of Mannoroth. SoO was also the first raid with Mythic difficulty, and the first raid where you can do multiple difficulties each week. The rest of the raids synchronized loot between Normal and Heroic, so be sure you always select 25-man. I will likely update this part of the guide in the future when I can return to Pandaria solo.
