Torn on Gating and Difficulty for Horrific Visions

I've failed Horrific Visions a couple times. It feels real bad.

With the assaults and the major Blacktalon Agent dailies, it seems you can get enough Coalescing Visions to do about three or four Horrific Visions per week, and maybe an extra one about every week or two if you're diligent about doing all the dailies in Uldum and the Vale.

Apparently those dailies initially gave 50 CVs, but now give 250, which is theoretically a good thing - more Visions - but also makes it feel five times worse to skip one of those dailies. You'd still need to do 40 daily quests to get a single additional Horrific Vision, which is why I'm not actually getting too stressed about it, though - but it's that gradual sense of losing out in the long run.

Now, the Visions themselves:

The times I've failed is when I've tried to space out my use of Sanity Restoration Orbs, saving them for when I'm really starting to run low, and then getting into some situation where I'm getting knocked into multiple groups and unable to get out of combat to use the orb (the madness effect that makes you leap from imagined fires is very frustrating.)

So there's a part of me that wishes that we could just run them over and over like the Deaths of Chromie scenario, grinding at it to make our runs more efficient and thus more capable of completing additional objectives.

On the other hand, time gating is a tool Blizzard uses for pacing purposes.

Time gating itself is a controversial tool in Blizzard's arsenal. Cynically, you might think that Blizzard does it to keep players subscribed to the game longer. Yes, you have to wait a week for the raid to reset before you can try again for the loot you want.

I'm not sure I could really put it past them to consider the monetary rewards of time gating, but I don't think it's pure cynicism either.

Gating allows them to pace content. Because WoW is a social game, they want lots of players to be playing at the same time, and that's more likely if players are playing frequently - and for longer stretches. But beyond even that, slowing down the pace allows players to relax - you might only be able to log on for an hour a night, and time gating gives you a chance to keep up with players who can play all day.

It can also make the content feel more substantial. Indeed, in 8.3, they released the raid far earlier than I expected. I'm sure in part this was because it had taken so long to get 8.3 after 8.2, but even then I'm not sure I feel it was the right choice.

Conceptually, I love the idea of Visions of N'zoth. WoW has a tendency to make its supernatural threats ultimate a kind of military engagement. The game is based on the RTS series, after all. And so you have its zombie plague organized as a military force in the Scourge. You have its demonic world-destroyers organized as a military force in the Burning Legion. And, frankly, you typically have its Lovecraftian elder gods organized as a military force in the various Aqir or N'raqi forces.

But N'zoth was never militarily strong like Y'Shaarj, C'thun, or Yogg-Saron were. The notion that N'zoth must attack people through their own perceptions really makes N'zoth very different from other Warcraft villains we've seen before.

And the idea that N'zoth is not invading with some army of Aqir (well, he is, but that's kind of a side project) but is instead doing this reality-warping, alternate-universe-dystopia-overlay strategy is just a super cool fantasy concept. (It reminds me a bit of the Phyrexians' use of the plane of Rath in the Invasion Block of Magic: the Gathering, but while Rath was actually just a physical place that carried the Phyrexian forces, Ny'alotha is a much more psychological, dreamlike realm.)

So, to be honest, I wish we had more of this before we actually got to fight and destroy him.

There's certainly aspects of this that suggest that maybe, perhaps, we should have gotten a whole expansion of this stuff (read: yes, we absolutely should have.)

But also, mechanically, while I really enjoy doing the Horrific Visions, and want to hop in immediately if I fail one, the fact that I can't does make me take it more seriously when I do get to run one.

Of course, that makes it all the more frustrating when I do make an error - pulling one too many mobs when I'm getting low on Sanity, for instance - despite the serious strategic considerations I've made.