I noticed a lot of questions in /G chat and personally addressed to me lately. People wondering what do they HAVE to do and being afraid of falling behind. So I thought I would make a small guide/FAQ, to help those wandering through the vale, not knowing what they are doing or shooting for/at.
If you need any questions answered after this, don't hesitate to ask questions in the reply. Or to just PM/message me in game.
8.3 and you.
You may be lost in the game already, hearing about a lot of new things, not knowing what is important or what isn't, that is fine!
Let's take a walk through it together.
The following things come to mind when thinking of the patch:
- Our spiffy new Cloak and the path to get it
- Corruption of N'zoth, and how it might bite us in the ass
- Season 4 (of Mythic +)
- Invasions (N'zoth/greater and Lesser invasions)
- Visions (Daily and Horrific)
- Mechagnomes and Vulpera.
Blizzard has done a great job of introducing you to all elements of 8.3, tho-ugh you may not have recognized all of them.
The Cloak and its ranks:
A few people have expressed the feeling they are already falling behind on their cloak and are having issues figuring out what to do with it.
If you follow the questline you get from meeting with Anduin, (you automatically get the first quest, meet with Anduin), you will eventually get your rank 1 cloak, a good amount of coalescing visions, a couple of vessels of Horrific Visions and a corrupted piece of gear. (or two/three)
The main feature of the cloak is to allow you to progress with 8.3's content more easily as you increase your rank. As you level your cloak, you become more resistant to the negative effects of corruption gear and the loss of sanity in visions. When you get introduced to the first vision, before you get your cloak, you will notice you are losing sanity at an insane rate. The more you work on visions, the less issues you will have.
In order to improve this, you need to do the horrific visions. You get your first free taste of this in the questline. You will not lose anything from failing this one. You will only get the cloak upgrade quest afterwards and getting Thrall (or Alleria) down in this vision is a close fight.
This is purely an introduction to the vision. You do a short extra scenario after this and you will unlock a way to upgrade your cloak with talents to make the visions easier. Then you will also get the quest to upgrade your cloak's ranks. In the first week you will get to rank 6 max.
Will I fall permanently behind if I do not get to rank 6 this week?
You will not fall behind permanently. After today we will get 2 - 3 chances to upgrade our cloak each week, but the max rank will increase by 1 each week. You only need to succeed once to get the level up the next few weeks. The other two tries you can use to catch up or experiment.
What is the difference between daily visions and Horrific visions?
It is bad naming from Blizzard that has led to this confusion. There are 3/4 places that you are confronted with the term visions, two of which are instances, one is a currency and one acts like a key:
- Coalescing Visions --> Currency to buy keys
- Vessel of Horrific Visions --> Key to enter Horrific Visions
- Visions of Darkness (Daily Visions) --> A vision of darkness comes with a daily quest next to its entrance. you can find the entrance at the N'zoth invasions area. By completing the daily you get currency to buy keys from. *(2000 for the first one you do that week, 1000 for all other days after till reset)
- Horrific Visions --> The main place to earn corrupted momentos and upgrade your cloak
How do I upgrade my cloak?
Wrathion will offer you a quest to upgrade your cloak. At first he will give you the next quest right after completing the previous, but after you catch up to the current week's max rank, you'll have to wait till the reset to continue ranking up your cloak. At this point, you have caught up with the other players if you feel you are behind.
For rank 2 -> 5 your objective will be to kill Thrall/Alleria (this changes each week)
If you feel comfortable, you can push for more, but if you fail to kill one of the two, you will not get your quest objective.
For rank 6 your objective is to kill one of the Medium objectives. This is regardless of killing Thrall.
For rank 7 -> 11, you need to collect pages from medium objectives. The amount needed is increase with ranks.
This is also regardless of killing Thrall
For rank 12+ you need items that drop from Hard objectives. Killing Thrall/Alleria is not necessary.
After the first week, you can easily gather 2 - 3 keys each week. Each time you improve your cloak, the content also gets easier to manage due to your resistance rising.
Do you need to do the Visions Solo or in a group?
You can do either, depending on personal preferences. Healers and tanks might find it easier with a buddy, but depending on your cloaktalent choices either type of gameplay is boosted and allows for an easier time. I found that with a small group is most enjoyable and easier to progress. (Tank + 2 DPS, or DPS + healer buddy is generally nice. A full party of 5 works as well, especially with the increased Sanity talents.)
You mention 2 types of invasions as well, what is that about?
8.3 introduces invasions in Uldum and Vale of eternal blossoms. These are the main source for coalescing visions.
There are a total of 6 different invasion areas in these 2 zones. 3 for each zone.
Each week one of the two zones will be attacked by N'zoth himself. During this week, the following happens to this zone:
- The raid entrance can be found in the center of this zone
- Completing the invasion will give you a Vessel of Horrific Visions, a piece of gear (that scales with your current gear and has a high chance of corrupting) and a few smaller perks.
- Daily Visions of Darkness will appear in this zone.
- Items that form a key to a chest. The chest will contain 500 Coalescing visions plus a few other goodies
- Daily quests to complete for 50 currency and sometimes azerite/war resources.
You will find the following in these zones:
- Two lesser invasion sites, which give you:
- a chance to forge a key to a chest which contains 250 coalescing visions. one for each invasion
- daily quests pertaining to the specific minor invasion site.
- A chest with a chance for a piece of gear (with a medium chance of getting a corruption), 5500 Coalescing visions, and some gold
This sounds like a lot to do, what is the recommended minimum I need to do to not fall behind too much?
You can easily get by with doing the following:
- Keep up with the invasions:
- Do the N'zoth invasion once a week for a Vessel of horrific visions
- Do the lesser invasion twice a week. (once before saturday 20:00 and once after.) This will net you 11000 coalescing visions, enough to buy 1 vessel and have 1000 to spare.
- Try and keep up with the Daily Visions of Darkness. They give a total of 8000 coalescing visions. combine that with the 1000 left from the invasions, you have almost enough for your 3rd key.
These chests combined give you 1000 coalescing visions and would complete your 3rd key for the week.
But as said above, if you do the listed points, you'll have 3 keys 9/10 weeks.
What is corruption and how can it hurt me/the raid?
Corruption = power
Lots of power, but this power comes with a price. With the right pieces of corruption you can increase your DPS/Survivability/Healing significantly, however, every piece comes with the negative corruption score. The more powerful the piece, the higher your corruption gets. Negative effects are personal, but can influence the raid.
There are multiple thresholds on corruption that give effects that limit you:
with a netto corruption of 1+, you will get randomly slowed at times. (This get harsher the higher your corruption is.)
This is a magic debuff that can be dispelled, however I recommend healers to adjust their add-ons to show it in a separate colour, as the raid has their own debuffs that require dispelling and you might not see the difference. (Have not tested this before, but learned from Ravnal that this can be adjusted and it was confusing at first.)
20+ An eye will spawn at your location, damaging you as long as you stand in it. (You can imagine that fights that require stacking up might be difficult if you have to move out.)
40+ You spawn an add that follows you and melee attacks you. (this does 30% of your HP per hit) And he becomes faster the higher corruption you have.
60+ If you get hit by the add, it will apply the other debuffs on you, almost definitely killing you.
80+ This debuff is always active and reduces your healing received, while increasing the damage you take.
All in all, the power is nice, but you need to keep the raid in mind as well. Take valued choices and things will be fine.
Upgrading your cloak also gives additional resistance, so your 60 corruption piece will give you a net worth of 40 corruption after you take your Rank 5 cloak into consideration. Another thing that will help is equipping one of the 3 new essences, their minor gives 10 corruption resistance as well.
You can always "cleanse" a corrupted piece, this removes the positive and negative effect and allows you to wear the gear as usual.
I hope this FAQ collection helps you, if you have more questions do not hesitate to ask them!
