Every TBC Classic heroic dungeon has its own separate daily lockout, so you can run all 16 heroics once each per day — there is no shared cap on heroics as a category. What actually stops you is the instance limiter: five instance entries per hour and 30 per day, counted account-wide. All heroic lockouts clear at your realm's daily reset, not weekly.
- Heroics available per day: 16 (15 before patch 2.4 added Magisters' Terrace).
- Lockout type: per dungeon, per character, resets daily.
- Hard cap: 5 instance entries per hour, 30 per day, account-wide — this includes normal dungeons and raids.
- Level requirement: 70.
- Entry requirement: a heroic key from the matching faction quartermaster at Revered, held by one player who sets the difficulty.
- Exception: heroic Magisters' Terrace needs no key.
Which factions do I need Revered with?
Four keys cover the whole Outland heroic list. Honor Hold (Alliance) or Thrallmar (Horde) unlocks the three Hellfire Citadel wings. Cenarion Expedition unlocks Coilfang Reservoir. Lower City unlocks the Auchindoun dungeons. Keepers of Time unlocks Caverns of Time, and The Sha'tar unlocks Tempest Keep.
Grinding to Revered is mostly done by spamming that faction's normal dungeons while wearing the right tabard-free rep rules of the era: normal-mode trash and bosses in the linked dungeons feed the bar directly, and quest turn-ins finish it off.
Do heroic lockouts reset daily or weekly?
Daily. That is the whole reason heroic farming feels so different from raiding in TBC — raid IDs hold for a week, but a heroic you cleared yesterday is open again after today's reset. Realm reset time is what matters, not midnight in your timezone.
Saved to a heroic and want a fresh one? You cannot reset it early yourself unless you are the leader of a group that cleared it in the same reset window as an unsaved run; once bosses are dead, that dungeon is done for the day.
How many badges can I collect in one day?
Badges of Justice drop from bosses inside heroics, so your daily income scales with how many different heroics you clear rather than how many times you rerun one. The daily heroic quest, added in 2.4, stacks on top of that for a single extra chunk per day.
Practically, most players chain four to six short heroics — Ramparts, Slave Pens, Underbog, Mana-Tombs and Sethekk Halls are the fast ones — and stop when the hourly limiter bites rather than when badges run out.
What triggers the too many instances error?
Entering more than five instances within a rolling hour. It is not a punishment counter; the oldest entry simply has to age out before you can zone in again. Zoning out and back in counts as a new entry on some resets, so avoid hearthing mid-run and returning.
If you are chain-farming, plan around it: run five, take the natural break for repairs, mail and consumables, then continue. Hitting 30 in a day is rare unless you are boosting alts.
If you would rather spend that hour playing than queuing, PewPewShop's roster of vetted human players does coaching and play-together progression help — no bots, no cheats, long clean record. Our modern-WoW heroic last-boss help starts from EUR 28, and the same coaches will happily walk you through the classic-era pull order instead.