World of Warcraft Season of Discovery Phase 3 Raid is the Hardest in Classic History

World of Warcraft Season of Discovery Phase 3’s new Sunken Temple raid is extremely challenging, having walled players with its difficulty far longer than any other in Classic history. For the first time in World of Warcraft, a Classic raid hasn’t been conquered in a matter of hours, making the Sunken Temple one of the hardest raids in it to date.

Races to world first clears of raids are an MMO tradition, and World of Warcraft is no stranger to these sorts of contests. That said, raids in Classic WoW usually don’t have long races: Molten Core was toppled in mere days of its original release – with most of that time taken up by leveling – and even the mighty Lich King fell within two hours of the raid opening in Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

However, the raid from World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3 may have just broken that streak in a big way. The Sunken Temple, also called the Temple of Atal’Hakkar, is a 20-player version of the eponymous dungeon from vanilla WoW. World first racers quickly leveled to the new Season of Discovery level cap of 50 once the update went live, but many of the top guilds are struggling to complete the raid. According to Warcraft Logs at press time, of the 80 guilds that have reported progress in the raid, a whopping 26 have only cleared six of the eight bosses, with the Shade of Eranikus gating them for nearly 24 hours.

The major reason why Classic raids don’t have long races to world first is because the strategies to defeat them have been honed to perfection over a decade or two. Season of Discovery throws a wrench into that with new raid versions of iconic dungeons, such as the Blackfathom Deeps and Gnomeregan in prior WoW Classic Season of Discovery phases. However, even the new mechanics of these raids haven't gated players as hard as the Sunken Temple has so far.

World of Warcraft senior game producer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield even commented on the difficulty of the instance, saying it was refreshing to see a