Can You Revisit the Old Temple of Atal'Hakkar (Sunken Temple) in World of Warcraft: The War Within?

Blizzard sadly removed about 2/3s of the space the Temple of Atal'Hakkar during the Cataclysm expansion. The old version was confusing and disorientating... But it felt like a true "temple" you'd expect from some crazy trolls. The new version is quite bland. Just go in and kill mobs and dungeon bosses. There is one really neat thing about this instance though. You can actually still explore the old version of the map (without the mobs of course).

Support links:

Chapter 1:

Intro: 00:00-00:42
Explanation of the Sunken Temple: 00:42-01:02
How to Explore the Original Temple of Atal’Hakkar: 01:02-01:41
The Upper Ring: 01:41-02:24
The Lower Ring: 02:24-03:03
Commentary Free Exploration: 03:03-05:52

#worldofwarcraft #wow #outofbounds

[GameUnCrafter]

Do you prefer the old or the new Temple of Atal'Hakkar?

[josejuanandrade]

Explanation:

The dungeon is still complete. What they did was to move the entrance to the upper temple, where the dragons are. The only way to get there in vanilla was through that spiral stairs you went down. Also they added that grill on the center. It used to be an open hole and you coudl fall through all the way to the bottom. With these 2 changes, they completely isolated the bottom part., and the balcony in the upper part.

The entrance wasn't there. It used to be way deeper into the outworld part of the dungeon. Yes, it was harder to reach with several more enemies you had to face and in a harder to reach spot. You can still see where the portal used to be in retail. There is a wall now there, but is pretty obvious.

The Balcony over the dragon portion of the dungeon used to have troll mini bosses, each with his respective loot table, Some actual good drops btw. You had to kill them for lots of class quests. But also i think you needed them to summon another boss, that part is the only thing i cant remember exactly.

The snake statues you had to click to summon another "secret" boss in the very bottom. There was also a son of hakkar mini boss that hunters could tame to learn a high level spell for the wind serpent pets.

IIRC in the very bottom there used to be 2 bosses, a troll boss and a snake boss, the one you had to summon.

The bottom part was quite a maze, so hard to navigate, many people would ONLY do that part if they had the class quest, and the statues had a set order you had to click.. With the removal of the class quests in Cataclysm, my theory is they thought people would just always skip the bottom part now, since there wouldn't be much of a reazon, other then some crappy drops you'd outlevel quick, so instead of having to fix loot tables, etc for the new gear systems, they just cut the dungeon, made it way easier and accesible, and thought players may actualy like doing it now.... The funny part is that... even if is now much more accesible... there's no reazon to do it... most people in cata were max level... when leveling a new character it was wasy to outlevel the dungeon, and most people would just do BRD instead to lvl from 52 to 58 to go to outlands. So the dungeon fell into obscurity, since is in a very isolated location, most people would never even get it through LFD, and with the removal of so many bosses and loot and loot changes, even collectors did not had a lot of reazons to go back....

You also used to need a special item to call the avatar of Hakkar in vanilla, if you had never done the quest you could not get it. After the quest you could go get a new egg every time to summon him, but you still needed a player that had it.. so it was not rare to do a run just to find out noone could call the boss... Now you just click the pile of bones... again, so now is easy to do, but noone do it anyway because of the reazons i mentioned. Pretty sad.

[Monocle]

I always preferred the og sunken temple.. like you said when you were done you felt a real accomplishment

[infernaltourist]

I have never in my entire life played a minute of World of Warcraft, but I still enjoy watching content about it 😅

[GNUnknown]

Sunken Temple was one of my favorite OG dungeons. I did it all the time, and I would also power-run people through it frequently on my max level characters. Good times.

[sragga]

the platforms had snake sculptures that had to be turned in a sequence. had to kill the little bosses on each one, and there were quests for them, and items to collect from them for other quests. ran it many many times back then

[baker]

The old dungeon was cool. There was a whole storyline involving the Green Dragonflight and Druids in there. It was massive, but it truly felt like an old school rpg dungeon with all the layers to it and optional bosses.

[Dremag_Gaming]

Yep. They did this to older dungeons that were a bit too big and made them more streamlined. (and like you mentioned in this) many of them had people getting lost (like in Wailing Caverns)

[SetzerWoW]

They even left the old entrance in there. There is a wall around, but if you bypass that, you can still enter the stairs down to where you could enter the temple back in the days. But the portal isn't working anymore.

[Zeldarulah]

This one is a little unexciting since you can just go here in classic ha

[TheRayny]

I was just talking to a friend about this a while ago, and i really wanted to show him how it was.

Now i guess i can try :D

[FridayFables]

Old sunken temple was great for Vanilla, new one is great for Retail. Neither are better or worse, but fit best in their respective versions.

Vanilla was about the journey, dungeons were treated as little D&D campaigns you'd do with your friends for a few hours. Granted this wasn't the typical experience in Classic, but its why it was designed like that and how it was perceived back in the day. Also mobs grant a CRAPload of EXP back then, compared to today, so doing big dungeons gave a frickload of extra mob EXP which can be an entire level in itself.

Conversely. If a dungeon takes hours in Retail, well nobody has time for that, so cutting it down to a 15-30 minute experience feels a lot better for people, especially since you just que into it, zug through it for 15-30 minutes, finish and do another one.

Back in the day though, you also had no dungeon queing, so you had to run to the dungeon entrance which was WAY deeper in the outer portion of the dungeon. And all the mobs leading up to that are elite, AND theres dungeon quests inside and outside. If you were going in there, you had a purpose, and you had a bunch of class quests, ONE of which rewarding warriors with their best possible trinket, and a really great trinket on hunter too. Plus at the end of it you got a quest which gave you a somewhat okay green trinket that triggers a fart cloud that poisons everything around you for a little bit of damage. Vanilla trinkets weren't so common until late game anyway, so these would be your only sources of trinkets almost that were kind of useful.

Also the upper ring required you to kill 6 trolls channeling a spell, which wards off whatshisface, the troll boss you have to kill in the southeastern wing. They would also be required for some class quests, which drop feathers as a quest item. The bottom ring looked similar, but had no class quest related to doing it, just some regular quests and good loot.

[lvlhumanpally]

At time marker 3:46 you see two homies enjoying the view

[MsSjofn]

I loved the old version if I was doing it with friends, but doing it with strangers could be *extremely* frustrating. So I totally get why they changed it, but it's still kind of a shame.

[Sophie_the_Tallest]

I definitely prefer today's dungeon because it's only there for fast leveling, but I'd find it awsome if they used the old version for a Mythic+ dungeon

[AkaAkoVT]

So people can break out of the new zone in WoW, the caverns. It's even bigger than Deepholme out there apparently!

[RomShalfey]

Love your content. Will be missing you once you’ll be completely busy with dad’s responsibilities

[faerylnhiikira]

Re: Things on the Upper/Lower Ring. Pre-cataclysm, there was a quest for both warriors and shamans that had you enter this dungeon and kill the mini-bosses on the Upper Ring for some feathers or something (I've done this precisely once and don't remember it well). You then needed to click the serpent statues on the Lower Ring in order to unlock the boss in the flooded chamber.

Additionally, yes, it *was* much more difficult to enter the instance. You had to wander through some hallways where you could easily get turned around if you didn't know precisely where you were going. It wasn't super difficult, but it was annoying. Also, back in vanilla, all enemies outside of dungeons were Elites, so you (ideally) had to fight your way in with your party just to reach the instance portal. It was quite the trek; especially when combined with the lack of easy methods to get to the dungeon in the first place. No party warlock? Guess you're running across the world.

[sheepkind]

this was cool to see!! i’m gonna try to explore it on my own DH :3

in the last half of the video while you’re exploring, is the UI hidden? or is it glitched like that?

[calebmclarty]

Hey Uncrafter! I know this is unrelated to the video but I found a way to break into the Vestibule of the Silver Hand, the legion Artifact Area for Xalatath as well as the Warrior and Paladin Artifact Weapons. Its actually super easy to do and the entrance is still in the whispering forest. Do you have a discord server I could join and show off some of these explorations in?