Antorus, The Burning Throne, the final raid in WoW: Legion, opens today

World of Warcraft's next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, was announced at Blizzcon this year, but Blizzard isn't done with Legion. Today, along with Patch 7.3.2, the final raid for this expansion opens. Antorus, The Burning Throne, will be the last chapter in the war against the Burning Legion as players fight against the living embodiment of the planet Argus.

The servers are already live, so of course dataminers have already sniffed out the raid's final cutscene. If you're OK with spoiling what happens, you can watch that here.

Like all raids, Antorus, The Burning Throne opens in phases. Today, the Normal and Heroic difficulty version of the raid is available to players. Here's the full schedule, according to Wowhead.

  • Tues Nov 28 (NA) / Wed Nov 29 (EU) - Normal and Heroic difficulties Open
  • Tues Dec 5 (NA) / Wed Dec 6 (EU) - Mythic difficulty and Raid Finder Wing 1 - Light's Breach
  • Tues Dec 19 (NA) / Wed Dec 20 (EU) - Raid Finder Wing 2 - Hope's End
  • Tues Jan 2 (NA) / Wed Jan 3 (EU) - Raid Finder Wing 3 - Forbidden Descent
  • Tues Jan 16 (NA) / Wed Jan 17 (EU) - Raid Finder Wing 4 - Seat of the Pantheon 

That means if you're not much of a raider and plan on doing Antorus on Raid Finder difficulty (the easiest), you'll have to wait until January 16 to experience the full thing.

If you're looking to take on Antorus in Normal or Heroic difficulties, the WoW community already has some thorough guides you can follow. This minimalist guide by redditor Flaimbot is nice and easy to understand. But, as always, Wowhead has an in-depth guide to each fight if you really want to master it.

This won't be the final patch of Legion, but 7.3.2 does set the stage for the transition into the events of Battle for Azeroth. Without spoiling too much, the final fight against Argus has consequences in a certain zone back on Azeroth. You can spoil what happens here, if you like. This will eventually be the setting for the new battleground which should be coming later and acts as a prologue to the greater conflict in Battle for Azeroth.

Of course, what's the point of a new raid without shiny new armor sets to equip? Antorus, the Burning Throne bosses drop tier 21 armor. You can see images of each classes' set here, but I've embedded this one below because it's so damn sexy.

Patch 7.3.2 is mostly about launching the raid, so there's not a whole lot of new content besides. Still, you can read the full patch notes as there's some minor balance changes to a few classes.

We'll have to wait until December 8, when the Mythic version of Antorus launches before we see the raid at its full potential. As always, the best WoW guilds from across the globe will be competing in a mad dash to see which one can beat it first. We'll have coverage of that event as it unfolds.

But for now, I'm desperately trying to catch up on gear after a short hiatus. Let me know if you've tried the raid and what you think of it so far.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.