Zul’Gurub Guide
Last updated: 7/14/26
Zul’Gurub in Season of Discovery is a bi-weekly lockout (resets Tuesday and Saturday). It’s tuned for 10 players, but accepts up to 20 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.
Zul’Gurub only has one difficulty level, except for one boss - Hakkar.
Hakkar is empowered by each of the five High Priest bosses, and may be fought at his full strength if you don’t kill any of them before engaging him. Each High Priest still alive will grant him additional strength and abilities, but for each one alive, you’ll also receive bonus loot from Hakkar.
To that end, ZG in SoD is completely identical to ZG in Vanilla except for three things: Hakkar, the High Priest raid buffs, and the Edge of Madness.
Most raids kill Jin’do (as he is not a High Priest) first. After that, you can either kill hard mode Hakkar, or if you choose to skip the hard mode, move straight to Arlokk.
Boss Raid Buffs
After killing each of the five High Priest bosses in Zul’Gurub, a spirit animal will spawn that you may ask for a buff. Each player may have any buff they choose, but only one buff per player at once. This buff will persist as long as you remain inside the instance. The buffs are as follows:
- High Priest Arlokk: Blessing of Bethekk, which gives you full-speed stealth after you’ve been out of combat for 5 seconds. In addition, attacking will break stealth but deal bonus damage for the first attack.
- High Priest Jeklik: Blessing of Hir’eek, which gives you a 5% life leech.
- High Priest Marli: Blessing of Shadra, which gives a 25% chance each attack to spawn spiders that attack your target for 10 seconds.
- High Priest Thekal: Blessing of Shirvallah, which gives you a 5% chance each attack to boost the haste of players within 8 yards of you by 30% for 15 seconds.
- High Priest Venoxis: Blessing of Hethiss, which gives you a 5% chance each attack to deal 1000 Nature damage to enemies in a small (5yd) radius.
Most groups will run Arlokk’s buff for the duration of the raid, as the stealth allows you to easily skip most trash, which is far more helpful than the other buffs.
If the instance resets but any of these bosses are dead, their spirit animal will be placed at the entrance for easy buff recovery. This makes running back into the instance after clearing it to hand in idols very easy, as you can just grab Arlokk and ignore trash.