World of Warcraft: Scarab Lord? We explain the title

The prospect of sounding titles has been an important additional motivation for many WoW players from the beginning. But some titles are more valuable than others - most notably, Scarab Lord is still considered legendary to this day.

Leadership in Classic: Scarab Lords are influential players on their server.

And the launch of WoW Classic in 2019 brought the title back into focus. We explain what's behind it.

World of Warcraft: How a player becomes a Scarab Lord

In principle, it sounds quite simple: players received the title of Scarab Lord by opening the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. But it wasn't quite that straightforward, of course:

• The Ahn'Qiraj raid marked the grand finale of WoW Classic and required lengthy, server-wide preparation.
• Only after all preparations were complete could the instance be opened via ceremony.
• The value of the title lies in the fact that it was only available for a limited time and required an enormous amount of preparatory work.
• Decisive for this was the gong, which could be struck by scepter after a series of quests. Because as soon as the first player of a server had hit the gong, all other players had ten hours to do the same - only who managed this, got the title Scarab Lord.
• Because of the high requirements in the scepter procurement, there was often even only one player per server, who was awarded this honor within the time window.

It is therefore not surprising that the title holders were always prominent, extremely active players of top guilds on the respective servers. Thus, the title was out of reach for loners or casual players.