Nightmare Incursions

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Greetings,

As we approach the release of phase 3 of Season of Discovery, we wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the new Nightmare Incursion feature and to set a few expectations around how this will function. This is quite unlike anything we’ve done thus far in Season of Discovery and in order to prepare you for what you’ll face, we wanted to provide a short primer to help prepare you for your first few incursions.

So, what are Nightmare Incursions?

Nightmare Incursions are new outdoor content that is predominately PvE-focused (though PvP will occur on a PvP server in these :blush:) . You’ll start each incursion with a quest that you get at new Field Captain NPCs outside of each of the dream portals located in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas, and Hinterlands. This quest will have you taking on the new demon creatures that have taken up residence just outside the dream portals in each zone. Once you’ve neutralized a number of these threats in your current zone and made contact with an agent of the Emerald Wardens near the dream portal, you may return to the Field Captain to hand in the starter quest and you will be given a satchel with randomized mission that will take you into the nearby portal (to stage an “incursion” one could say) to perform a task. Upon interacting with the portal you will be transported into the dream to start your missions. These missions could be a number of things from missions to slay targets, gather resources, or even defeat a very powerful boss.

This content is very “old school” in nature as well, and is quite unlike more modern daily quest systems you’ve likely encountered in more contemporary versions of World of Warcraft. If you’ve ever done the Cenarion Hold Field Duty missions in Silithus that arrived with patch 1.9 in Original WoW, you will notice some parallels and similarities when doing Nightmare Incursions. Season of Discovery is a version of Classic WoW, and we wanted this content to feel right at home with the other repeatable content available in the original version of the game.

What level do I need to be to participate in Nightmare Incursions?

Nightmare incursions are separated out by level with Duskwood being predominately level 25 content, Ashenvale being Level 40 content, and Feralas and the Hinterlands being level 50 content.

What should I do to prepare for Nightmare Incursions?

The Nightmare Incursions missions are flagged as elite quests and while you can complete some of them solo, others will be very challenging to complete alone. Due to the randomized nature of the missions you are given as well, it’s possible to get a group-based mission while playing solo, or gathering-based missions that may require someone in the party to be able to use herbalism, skinning, or mining to complete.

Therefore it is our recommendation that when planning to tackle this content, you form a three to five player group to do so. This way when each member of the group hands in the initial quest, and each member gets their own randomized mission (all of which are sharable with up to 4 other players) you have a variety of activities to tackle during that incursion. Grouping will likely be the most efficient way to gain reputation or experience as well, as you can knock out multiple missions in a single trip, rather than needing to return to the waking world in between missions.

There’s a lot more to discover about Nightmare Incursions and we want you to venture into this content yourself to find out more. We did feel that due to the nature of this content however, it made sense to get at least some information in your hands to prepare you for when Nightmare Incursions go live later this week, in case you wanted to coordinate grouping with your friends.

Thanks for taking the time today with us to go over this primer for Nightmare Incursions, and we are really looking forward to seeing you brave the dangers of the Emerald Nightmare with us on Thursday, April 4th at 1:00pm PDT!

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Will the game know to give you the correct gathering mission based on what you have or will it just be a mission randomly given to you that you might not be able to complete because you’re not that profession?

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if i had to guess, the reason that got mentioned in the first place is so that you know ahead of time to bring friends who have the gathering professions that you yourself do not have

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I did just make a minor edit to the post for clarity. You don’t need to have gathering professions yourself to complete a gathering-based mission if you are given one, but having folks in your group that can gather will help as the the materials needed for these quests can be traded (but cannot be placed on the AH).

If you have a gathering profession, it might even be a worthwhile business opportunity to go into the nightmare and offer to sell your services to passerby who might not have a gathering profession themselves. :slight_smile:

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Follow up 2-Part Question: Will these be new Nightmare only gathering materials and if so will the gathering nodes to collect them be on a quick spawn timer?

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Really like that approach - was worried would end up with worthless quests and be unable to complete.

Nice!

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Yeah, you’d want them on a quest item respawn as opposed to standard gathering node respawns.

If they are just like any other herb/mine we’ll no doubt have a few bots farming them and everyone else will delete on pick up as they wouldn’t be worth doing.

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If by “will help” you mean “is mandatory”, sure

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Knowing the status of our community, I somehow doubt that it is a reliable expectation to get help from someone with these group quests.

Folks may ask for 10G to pick a flower for you and unless your decked in epic raid gear, you are not invited for an elite quest.

:joy: :upside_down_face:

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I was thinking more like mobs drop the items but then gathering prof can loot them additionally, like beasts, swamp things, and rock elementals.

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Will the level 60 elites outside despawn on thursday?

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This hasn’t been touched on but are these always available or are they an every “X” amount of hours event?

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I was wondering this as well, how often are these events, and associated quests?

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And if it’s random quests can we literally go 40-50 just from incursion spam?

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Will Horde levelers on PVP Servers just be effectively excluded from Nightmare Incursions at 25? The only way to get there is through a major Alliance PVP choke point for the STV event.

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Most mains in SOD have double crafting. So this is going to be nearly impossible to do unless you pay someone who’s exploiting this for gold in the zone. Was looking for a way to stay out of ZF and try something new but looks like my 5 man is going to have to go spam dungeons. None of our mains have gathering and we aren’t paying someone 10g to skin an animal for us. Swing and a miss here.

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Sounds like it? I believe this is intended as an alternative to dungeon spam for those who don’t want to solo quest.

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I think double crafting mets is cringe. I’m happy to see some incentive to having one or even two gathering professions.

My 5th alt had zero professions previously. Now I’m leveling mining and herbalism because it will have an actual benefit which I think is fantastic.

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Sure it’s cringe. But it’s also the best thing to do for raids and most people do it. I don’t like doing it but it’s expected if you want to raid in my guild. I would venture to say 80% or so of all main characters in SoD have double crafting. So it does hamstring those people into paying for a service or ignoring the content and grinding dungeons instead which is sad.

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