Temple of Ahn’Qiraj Guide
Last updated: 7/28/26
AQ40 in Season of Discovery is a weekly lockout (resets Tuesday). It’s tuned for 20 players, but accepts up to 40 players. Loot does not change based on player count, which means the more players you bring, the easier it is to kill each boss, but the less loot each player will receive on average.
All bosses are required in SoD and must be fought in a specific, linear order, with barriers blocking your other paths.
In SoD, both AQ instances have nearly identical boss fights to their Vanilla counterparts, but have an additional hard mode.
As these fights are nearly identical to Vanilla, my guides for them will be brief, and serve mainly as a recap.
AQ Hard Mode
AQ hard modes consist of raid-wide scaling debuffs that build in power over the course of the whole raid. These also affect trash fights, like the BWL affixes do.
Before each boss, there is an obelisk you can interact with. If you enable it, you will either increase the power of your current debuff (up to a max of rank 3), or get a new debuff (if your current one is already rank 3). If you kill the boss without upgrading your debuff for that boss, the debuffs will all fall off afterwards and you will forfeit future hard mode loot for that instance.
Once a debuff achieves its max rank form, it will persist for the duration of the raid, unless you turn off the hard mode.
After killing every third boss with the hard mode still active, a chest will spawn with bonus loot, rewarding you for committing to the hard mode. A gong will also spawn alongside the chest; ringing this gong will opt out of all future hard modes.
In AQ40, with 9 bosses total, there are three categories of debuff, and three bonus chests (after bosses 3, 6, and 9).
Curse of Despair (Boss 1, 2, 3+)
Rank 1 (Skeram): Shadow clones of each player spawn, stand still, and detonate on their own after a short time.
Rank 2 (Silithid Royalty): Shadow clones of each player spawn, chase their respective player, and detonate when they reach them. Each clone will only detonate if it reaches its own player, but the explosion hurts everybody.
Rank 3 (Sartura and beyond): Raid-wide DoT (curse).
Curse of Decay (Boss 4, 5, 6+)
Rank 1 (Fankriss): Poison dropped on ground occasionally, run out of it.
Rank 2 (Viscidus): Noxious Burst, everyone must spread. After a few moments, deals damage to each player based on proximity to other players. Basically Gruul’s Shatter from TBC.
Rank 3 (Huhuran): Reduces max health of all players by 10%.
Curse of Madness (Boss 7, 8, 9)
Rank 1 (Twin Emperors): Eye Tentacles will occasionally spawn, which can cast Mind Flay on nearby players. Focus them down when they spawn.
Rank 2 (Ouro): Periodically Blinds (dazes) and damages (~3k) random players.
Rank 3 (C’thun): All players deal 15% more damage and healing, but receive 25% more damage.