Legacy Raid Journal

Blizzard never wrote boss mechanics for the Classic, Burning Crusade and Wrath raids. This fills them in, laid out exactly the way the retail Encounter Journal lays out a modern raid boss.

Open the Encounter Journal normally (Shift-J), pick a legacy raid, pick a boss. That's it — there is no separate window and nothing new to learn.

What you get

Abilities tab — the boss lore paragraph, then stage headers, then one collapsible row per ability with a real spell icon on the left and the journal's own markers on the right.

Overview tab — a short strategy summary, then Tanks / Healers / Damage Dealers / Raid describing what each role is up against. Mechanics live on the Abilities tab and are never duplicated here.

Real spell tooltips — 1,126 of 1,212 abilities carry a verified spell ID, so hovering a row gives the game's own tooltip, identical to a modern journal entry, and shift-click links it in chat.

Ability markers

The right of each row carries the Encounter Journal's own markers, in the game's own art and order, up to four at a time: Deadly, Important, Interruptible, Bleed, and the dispel types — Magic, Curse, Poison, Disease and Enrage.

• Dispel and Bleed markers are read from the game's own spell data rather than guessed from a spell's name, so a Magic marker means the effect really can be dispelled.
• Interrupt markers come only from observed combat logs, the game's own flag for that spell, or a written source. A cast bar on its own is not a reason to mark something interruptible.
• A row that has earned no marker shows none, so the markers still mean something when you see one.

Difficulty and faction aware

Wrath raids differ between 10 and 25 player, and again on Heroic. Where a mechanic only exists on one of those, the page follows the difficulty you have selected and redraws when you change it — so Heroic-only abilities and adds appear on Heroic and stay out of the way on Normal.

The same applies to the fights that differ by faction. The Icecrown Gunship Battle and Trial of the Crusader's Faction Champions each show you the enemy you actually fight, not the other side's.

Raids included

Every vanilla-to-Wrath raid that still exists as a raid in the retail journal — 19 instances, 108 bosses, every one with lore.

• Classic — Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair, Blackwing Lair, Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, Naxxramas
• Burning Crusade — Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, The Battle for Mount Hyjal, Sunwell Plateau
• Wrath of the Lich King — Naxxramas, Onyxia's Lair, The Obsidian Sanctum, The Eye of Eternity, Vault of Archavon, Trial of the Crusader, Icecrown Citadel, The Ruby Sanctum

Multi-boss encounters get a section per creature with its own portrait and abilities, the way Blizzard does it — the Four Horsemen, the Blood Prince Council, the Twin Val'kyr, Sartharion's drakes, Mount Hyjal's attack waves and the rest.

Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman are deliberately excluded. In retail both are Cataclysm five-player dungeons, not vanilla-to-Wrath raids.

Staying out of Blizzard's way

• Blizzard wins. A boss is only touched when the journal reports no data of its own. Anything Blizzard already documents — Ulduar, Black Temple, Timewalking guidance — is left completely alone.
• Native navigation only. Instance pages, boss lists, loot, model views, the expansion dropdown and search all stay exactly as Blizzard built them. The addon adds no navigation of its own.
• Tiers 1-3 only. Nothing here can attach itself to Cataclysm-era content that reuses an old name.

Commands

• /lrj or /legacyjournal — open the Encounter Journal on the raid tab
• /lrj debug — print raid and boss counts, lore coverage, spell ID coverage, and which frames and API functions are present. Use this if content stops appearing after a patch.
• /lrj dump — with the journal open, opens a copy-paste window with the live structure of every rendered row. Use this if the layout looks wrong rather than missing.

Safety

Everything that touches a Blizzard frame is guarded, and the injection path runs inside a protected call. If a future patch renames a frame, the addon prints one message and adds nothing rather than throwing errors. It reads no combat events, makes no decisions, and automates nothing.