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Dungeon keys and attunements in WoW: Forever — what to do before you're 58

Forever inherits the Classic dungeons, and the Classic dungeons have keys. Six chains, all six needing other people. Read the first step: the wikis describe these in the past tense for a reason that does not apply here.

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Last verified September 24, 2026

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  1. 1

    Read this first — what is sourced here, and what is not

    Two different things get called "attunement" and only one of them is settled.

    Settled: the two new raids need no attunement. A BlizzCon developer interview says so directly — "the new raids at launch will not require attunement to enter, similar to the original entry-level raids." Read that sentence twice. It draws a line between the entry-level original raids and the rest, which only means anything if the rest still have attunements.

    Not settled: Blizzard has published nothing about whether the inherited Classic dungeons keep their keys. Warcraft Tavern reports that Forever "brings forth all Classic dungeons"; nobody official has said the doors are unlocked. The market thinks they are locked — boosting vendors are already selling Forever attunement runs for exactly these instances — but a vendor's product page is not a source, and this site does not treat it as one.

    So: everything below is the vanilla chain, documented from the wiki, on the assumption Forever inherits it unchanged. That assumption is the whole risk. If beta shows a door standing open, this page is wrong about that door and we will change it.

    The trap in the sources

    If you click through to Warcraft Wiki you will read that the Drakefire Amulet "was once the key to Onyxia's Lair", that the Crescent Key is no longer required, that the Seal of Ascension no longer opens anything. Those sentences are about retail, which deleted these requirements between patch 3.0.2 and 4.0.3a, years after the content Forever is built on.

    The wiki itself puts a banner on these pages spelling it out: "The subject of this article was removed in patch 4.0.3a but remains in World of Warcraft: Classic." Removed there, not everywhere. A wiki written primarily for the current game narrates vanilla in the past tense — that is the wiki's timeline, not yours.

    ~3 min
  2. 2

    Shadowforge Key — skips the Ring of Law, opens the bar

    What it does, in the wiki's own words: "This item opens the Shadowforge Gates and the East Garrison Door in Blackrock Depths. This allows you to skip things like the Ring of Law and gain access to the bar."

    How you get it: it is the reward from the quest chain Dark Iron Legacy, flagged [52D] — a level 52 dungeon chain.

    Why that matters for planning. Those two things the key buys you — skipping the Ring of Law, and reaching the Grim Guzzler — are most of what a BRD group actually wants to do. A group where nobody holds the key takes the long way and finds a locked door at the end of it.

    Plan it as two trips: one run for the chain, one for the instance. Anyone forming a BRD group should say in the post whether somebody has the key. It is the single most useful line in a BRD listing.

    ~90 minNeeds a group

    0 groups running this week · Americas / Normal

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  3. 3

    Seal of Ascension — three bosses in Lower Spire, then a dragon in a swamp

    This is the big one, and the one most likely to strand you at 60 with a raid waiting.

    What it does: "The Seal of Ascension is a ring used to open the door into Upper Blackrock Spire." The wiki is explicit that this was a hard requirement before retail removed it: "Before patch 3.0.8 the raid required completion of the quest [60D] Seal of Ascension, to acquire the [Seal of Ascension]."

    Note the word raid. Upper Blackrock Spire in this era is not a five-man — "The instance is a raid with 10 player cap." Ten people organised around a door that one of them cannot open is a specific and avoidable kind of wasted evening.

    The chain, in order:

    1. An Unadorned Seal of Ascension drops in Lower Blackrock Spire.
    2. Take it to Vaelan, in Lower Blackrock Spire, for the quest.
    3. Collect three gems, each from a different Lower Spire boss: "The Gemstone of Bloodaxe drops from Overlord Wyrmthalak, the Gemstone of Smolderthorn drops from War Master Voone, and the Gemstone of Spirestone drops from Highlord Omokk."
    4. Return to Vaelan, then travel to the Wyrmbog in Dustwallow Marsh to find Emberstrife and finish the seal.
    5. Back to Vaelan for the reward.

    Step 3 is the one to organise around. Three named bosses, three separate kills, one instance. A group that stops after the first has done a third of your chain and none of the rest.

    So what you want is a full-clear LBRS group where everyone needs the gems. Five people working the same chain finish it in one evening. Five people who each need a different thing finish nobody's.

    The Emberstrife leg is a long flight to Dustwallow Marsh and is the part people put off, then forget, then remember on the night their guild is forming for Upper Spire.

    ~240 minNeeds a group

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  4. 4

    Skeleton Key — nine quests, and the last one is a group quest

    What it does: "The Skeleton Key is the key for the Scholomance door."

    How you get it: it is the reward from Araj's Scarab, flagged [60G], "at the end of the respective Alliance or Horde quest chains."

    The chain is nine quests long, and the wiki lists it in order: "A Call to Arms: The Plaguelands!", "Clear the Way" (Alliance) or "Scarlet Diversions" (Horde), "All Along the Watchtowers", "Scholomance", "Skeletal Fragments", "Mold Rhymes With...", "Fire Plume Forged", "Araj's Scarab", "The Key to Scholomance".

    Read the G in [60G]. It means group, and the wiki types this quest Group: the objective is to "Destroy Araj the Summoner and bring Araj's Scarab to Alchemist Arbington at Chillwind Point, Western Plaguelands." Araj is an outdoor elite. You are not finishing this one by yourself at the end of a quiet evening, however much of the chain before it you did alone.

    So plan the shape of it: a long solo-ish run of collection and travel, ending in a fight you need people for. Start it well before you need it — Scholomance groups form constantly at 58+, and this is not a chain you can finish while one waits.

    ~180 minNeeds a group

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  5. 5

    Key to the City — the gates, and the man who runs from them

    What it opens: "It was required to open the Eastwall Gate that serves as the entrance to the Scourge-controlled eastern districts of Stratholme, as well as the gate between King's Square and the Festival Lane (linking the western and eastern districts) and the gate into the Gauntlet that begins the 45-minute countdown to reach Baron Rivendare."

    Where it comes from: "This item drops from Magistrate Barthilas in Stratholme."

    And here is the part that catches people: where Barthilas is depends on which way you came in.

    • Enter through the western gates — "typically referred to as the front door, Strat Scarlet Side or the living side" — and "he remains near the eastern entrance in front of Aurius."
    • Enter through the eastern gate — "typically referred to as the back door, the dead side or Strat Baron side" — and "the Magistrate sounds an alarm and runs from just inside the instance to the gates just before the Baron."

    So on the side you need the key for, he does not stand still and wait; he runs. The straightforward way to get the key is the run where he is stationary.

    What to do about it: make your first Stratholme trip a deliberate Barthilas trip, posted as one, with everybody who needs the key in the group. Agree before the first pull what happens if it does not drop for everyone — that conversation goes much worse after.

    ~90 minNeeds a group

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  6. 6

    Crescent Key — chase an imp, open two wings

    How you get it: "The key is obtained from the imp Pusillin after a chase through the Warpwood Quarter." The chase starts when you talk to him: "The chase sequence is activated by speaking to the imp, found directly inside the main entrance."

    What it opens: the other two wings — "this key was also required to open doors into and inside the Capital Gardens and Gordok Commons wings."

    Note what follows from where the key is. You collect it inside Dire Maul East, which means East is the wing you can walk into without it. West and North are the ones that need it.

    The shortest chain on this page. Pusillin is directly inside the entrance and the chase takes minutes, so a group already running East can pick it up on the way — there is no good reason to arrive at Dire Maul West without one.

    The standard mistake is running East with a group, not bothering with the imp because nobody suggested it, then needing a whole second group for a five-minute chase before the West run the following week.

    ~45 minNeeds a group

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  7. 7

    Drakefire Amulet — the one that is raid-level work by itself

    What it is: the key to Onyxia's Lair. The wiki puts it in the past tense — "The Drakefire Amulet was once the key to Onyxia's Lair, until the attunement requirement was removed in patch 3.0.2" — which is the retail timeline, not this one. See the first step.

    Which quest awards it: the chains end differently per faction. Alliance finish on a quest called Drakefire Amulet; Horde finish on Blood of the Black Dragon Champion. Both are flagged [60R].

    R means raid, and that is what makes this different from everything above. The chain does not end in a five-man. It needs a raid assembled for a quest step, which is a categorically harder thing to organise than a dungeon run — and the reason this is a guild problem rather than a pick-up-group problem.

    Onyxia's status in Forever is itself only reported, and weakly. The one source we found placing her in the lineup is a boosting vendor selling runs of her — which has an obvious interest in her existing, and which this site treats as the weakest class of source there is. It says she is on Blizzard's BlizzCon roadmap. We have not found the Blizzard post it refers to.

    If you are deciding what to spend launch month on, treat this as the one to start last.

    We have deliberately not estimated how long this takes. Every other step on this page carries a time; this one does not, because we have no sourced basis for a number and would only be inventing one.

    Needs a group
  8. 8

    What this page deliberately leaves out

    Several Classic dungeons have keys that are not listed above, and the omission is on purpose rather than an oversight.

    The Workshop Key is a Gnomeregan item that "drops from Electrocutioner 6000 in Gnomeregan in Dun Morogh", inside the instance it relates to.

    The Scarlet Key is not a boss drop at all — it "drops from the static chest (Doan's Strongbox) behind the final boss, Arcanist Doan, in the Library wing of the Scarlet Monastery in Tirisfal Glades", and it opens "the Armory and Cathedral wings of the Scarlet Monastery."

    Neither is a planning problem: you get both by doing a run you were doing anyway. They are listed here so that "not on the page" does not read as "does not exist".

    Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Naxxramas have the famous attunements, and we have not established that those raids are in Forever at all. Blizzard has named Hyjal Summit and Barrow Deeps; Onyxia's Lair appears only in a boosting vendor's roundup. Writing out the "Attunement to the Core" chain would be writing a guide to content we cannot show exists here.

    We would rather leave a gap than fill it with something that reads like knowledge.

    If you are in the beta and you have opened one of these doors — or found one already open — that is the single most useful thing anyone could tell us right now.

    ~2 min
  9. 9

    Now put them on the board

    Every one of the six chains above needs other people. That is not a coincidence, and it is the reason this page exists rather than being a table on a wiki.

    Two of them need something harder than a group — they need a group that wants the same chain on the same night:

    • LBRS for the three gems — one full clear, five people all on the Seal chain, all intending to kill Wyrmthalak, Voone and Omokk rather than stopping at the first.
    • Stratholme for Barthilas — the living-side run, for the key to the dead side.

    And two are their own kind of problem:

    • Araj the Summoner — a Group-typed quest at the end of nine, when the eight before it felt like a solo chain.
    • The Onyxia chain's raid step — a guild problem, not a pick-up problem.

    A general dungeon listing will not get you any of this. "LFM BRD" finds people who want loot; what you need is people who want the chain — a different group, with a different plan and a different stopping point.

    Post it as an attunement run, say which chain and which step, and the people who need the same gem will find you.

    ~5 minNeeds a group
https://mrgl.cc/checklists/dungeon-keys-and-attunements

Sources

Every step on this page is sourced. Check our work.