The Horde can walk into Dalaran, and the key is a quest a Forsaken magus gives you

Week four of the beta opened the City of Dalaran, the first of the new level 28 to 35 dungeons to go live for testing. The dungeon is the headline in Blizzard’s October 8 change log, but the more interesting part is what finishing it does for a Horde character.

A Horde player in an Alliance city

Dalaran and the Kirin Tor sit on the Alliance side of this era of the game. A Horde character walking its streets unmolested is not a thing that happens, which is why GamesRadar called it one of the game’s biggest no-nos.

The route, as reported, runs like this:

1. Clear the City of Dalaran dungeon and its quest, Heart of Disruption.
2. Get the Dalaran Sewer Key, the item that lets you in.
3. Take the dungeon’s loot into the city for a follow-up quest, Shrewd Negotiations.

After that sequence, guards who would normally attack a Horde player instead treat them as neutral and let them pass. Alliance characters are safe in the city too.

What we can confirm from the files ourselves

Two pieces of this are first-hand rather than reported:

• The Dalaran Sewer Key exists. Item 277507, uncommon quality, binds when picked up, and new to this client. Bind-on-pickup matters: it means the key cannot be handed to a guildmate, so everyone who wants into the city does the work.
• A Horde quest asks for it by name. A quest recorded in game reads: acquire the Dalaran Sewer Key for Magus Wordeen Voidglare in Tarren Mill. Wordeen Voidglare is a Forsaken magus, and Tarren Mill is a Horde town in Hillsbrad, so the Horde’s way into Dalaran is being handed out by the Forsaken rather than by the Kirin Tor.

That last detail is the one worth keeping. It is not that Dalaran opened its gates. It is that the Forsaken found a way in through the sewers and sent you to fetch the key.

What is inside

The client’s encounter list for the dungeon has nine names: Arcane Anomaly, Fel Ancient, Mana Devourer, Mana Elemental, Unstable Sentinel, Shade of the Archmage, Lyn the Ignored, Atrexis the Grave Knight and Mana Wraith. Its Group Finder bracket is 28 to 35.

Blizzard’s preview said the city’s protective barrier has fallen, leaving malfunctioning enchantments, uncontrolled constructs and demonic activity behind, and the encounter names read exactly like that: three of the nine are mana elementals or anomalies.

The files also give the place two distinct soundtracks, one for the sewers and one for the spire, which suggests the dungeon covers both the underside of the city and its towers rather than one or the other.

What we have not confirmed

• The quest names. Heart of Disruption and Shrewd Negotiations come from the reporting, not from our own reading of the files, and neither is in the client’s quest title list we can see.
• Whether the access is permanent, per character or per account.
• What the city is for once you are in. Vendors, trainers and a flight point would each change how much that key is worth, and none of that is announced.
• Whether this survives launch. It is a beta week, and this is the sort of faction-boundary decision that gets revisited.

Our dungeon pages carry the quest lists and the level bands for everything that is open.