I am at level 82, now in Pandaria. However, I left the quests unfinished in Wrath of the Lich King campaign.
Now I wonder, in order to defeat the Lich King do I need to:
-Reach Level 85 in order to unlock Raids?
-Finish the questing campaign in the Northerend zone?
You can already enter the raids, but if you’re going to solo, 85 is not enough. At +90 you could look into soloing the raids. If you have a higher level friend help you, then it should be fine. Wrath of the lich king raids unlock at level 80. Cataclysm raids unlock at 85, pandaria 90, draenor 100, etc. Always at that expansion’s level cap.
You will want to be 11 levels above the raids you are targeting to unlock legacy loot mode. Legacy loot gives loot equivalent to a full raid group, rather than a single player.
But I don’t see that raid in my dungeon finder. My theory is that because I didn’t follow the quest line all the way through I can only enter it manually by physically entering the dungeon in the map (as the story wouldn’t make sense since the narrative has a linear logic).
Is this assumption correct?
You wont find the raid in the dungeon finder.
First off its a raid not a dungeon so its dungeon finder and raid finder.
There is also no group finder for ICC.
Even for raids that had looking for group(lfr) difficulty you wont be able to find a group for because everyone just levels up to max level(120) and only does those raids. Also the raid finder only works if you are at the expansion caps. If you go over it, it wont show up anyway.
For ICC you would manually have to go and enter the raid alone or with a group.
But as said above you wont be able to solo it at 80 or 85, and i would probably go well over 90 before trying to solo it.
I see. It seems to be a system thought to serve old players or rather the current expansion players.
In other words the players most enjoying the lich King expansion storyline are the one that played it when it came out. Just as much as today I can enjoy most the one for the BFA.
(Also because I would be over leveled in each expansion apart from when I hit the level cup due to the large amount of exp available while levelling in the older expansions)