Horrific Visions

Let's get this out of the way:

Horrific Visions, the big non-raid gameplay system they've introduced in 8.3, is a bit convoluted.

You basically need to do Assaults, Daily Quests, and those specific dailies where you go into a different horrific vision in the various assault zones to farm Coalescing Visions.

(Brief aside: I think the quests where you go into the Ny'alotha version of the Vale or Uldum are a little confused, aesthetically. They seem to only pop up when it's the Black Empire assault in that zone, which already makes things dark and filled with gross flesh monsters and floating obelisks.)

Once you get 10,000 Coalescing Visions (an amount that makes the 5-10 you get off a single creature feel negligible) you can trade them in for the key item you need to start a Horrific Vision.

It seems like we'll alternate between Stormwind and Orgrimmar each week.

If you haven't done this yet, here's how it works:

Once you've gotten through the quests to get your legendary cloak, you can brave the visions. While inside, you'll see a sanity meter that slowly depletes over time, capped initially at 1000. Each vision is divided into five areas, with three different levels of corruption.

Cathedral Square and the Valley of Strength are both starting areas for the respective visions. Here, sanity drains at a baseline of 4 per second. Other areas drain it at 8 per second, and then 12 per second. Additionally, each zone has a different "insanity effect," which will generally make things more inconvenient but sometimes also provide an opportunity to get a buff.

You can do these with 1-5 players, though so far I have only done them solo.

You can sort of choose your difficulty by venturing into various areas within the vision. To end it successfully, you'll have to fight the final boss - Alleria in Stormwind or Thrall in Orgrimmar. The first few times you go in, you'll want to stick to the first area and head for the boss more or less immediately.

If you drop to zero sanity or zero hit points, the vision ends early, potentially robbing you of your rewards (I was very sad to mess up on my last one on my paladin today and not get his reward.) I believe that if you play as a team you can revive other players, but the instance scales in health and damage the more players you bring.

Wrathion sends you to collect an item off the various zone-bosses (at first he just has you go after Alleria/Thrall) to upgrade your cloak. There is also a currency you'll earn with each creature you slay in the instance, which then allows you to upgrade a talent-tree to improve your chances in the visions.

So far, I've enjoyed them, though it is a bit frustrating when you screw up and don't get your prize, which feels like a major setback given the timegating on the currency you need to buy the key. In case you couldn't tell from that sentence, it's also quite convoluted.

But I will say that the visions themselves are pretty cool places to explore. The Stormwind one in particular has had some very creepy, nightmarish things. The whole premise is that this is the dark world that N'zoth wants to kind of overlay over the real Azeroth - it's a vision of the dystopian future should N'zoth succeed.

In the visions, not only has Alleria gone mad and sacrificed her son Arator to the Void (and seems to have mortally wounded her husband Turalyon,) but there are also details like all the orphans from the Stromwind Orphanage singing and playing around the dead orphan matron. There's even a rat around the Stormwind canals that, if attacked, cries out for you to stop, but attacks you so you can't. When it dies, it turns into (if I recall correctly) Topper McNabb, a well-known Stormwind citizen to anyone who's hung out in the game. Then a cat comes out, thanks you for killing him, and begins to eat.

I keep thinking about how cool it would have been if this kind of nightmare-version of Azeroth had been a bigger part of BFA. I'll maintain that mechanics have generally been the expansion's biggest issue (I'm so eager to ditch Azerite gear once Shadowlands comes out,) but I also think that the choice to split the narrative between the faction war and the Old God stuff left both halves (well, especially the Old God stuff) unsatisfying.

You almost wonder if they should have made this all about the faction war and then have the big reveal that N'zoth was behind it all along only come at the very end, leading into a Ny'alotha expansion.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited for Shadowlands, but it seems like there's the seed of a really great expansion in this patch, but one that will never sprout.