How to do Visions of N’Zoth Assaults in patch 8.3

When looking at what’s coming in patch 8.3 one of the first things I tend to gravitate to is open world content, especially things I can just do without worrying about other players. I was a huge fan of the Legion Assaults in Legion, so I’m pretty excited about the coming attacks of N’Zoth and his followers in the upcoming patch. But these Assaults aren’t the same as the ones we got in Legion, and it’s worth talking about how you’re going to get to them, what happens during them, and how you can have fun and profit wrecking the minions of darkness.

So let’s talk about these upcoming invasions of the Black Empire, shall we? We shall. Or I shall, anyway, I can’t make you do anything.

The Mandatory Introductory Quest

First and foremost, if you want to do the Assaults, you need to complete the introductory questline to the patch, which will allow you access to them.

That’s it.

You want to do the Assaults, you have a two to three hour total series of quests to complete. It’s a very long and involved questline because it serves as the intro to almost all of patch 8.3’s new systems, including the Horrific Visions as well as the Assaults. But once you’ve done that quest, you’ll unlock the incoming legendary cloak as well as Assaults and Visions, so it’s well worth completing.

To do an Assault, you go to the zone where it’s taking place — either  Uldum or the Vale of Eternal Blossoms — and you do the objectives in the zone. There will be two stages — one where you complete said objectives similar to when you’re doing World Quests in a region, and then a second stage when you’ve finished a zone’s objectives and you must find and kill the commander of N’Zoth’s forces.

Since there will be one Major Assault and two Minor Assaults a week, it’s worth noting that there will be World Bosses up in whichever zone has the Minor Assault that week — Vuk’laz the Earthbreaker in Uldum and Grand Empress Shek’Zara in the Vale. They drop 430 gear.

What happens during the Assaults

From there, the Assaults this time around differ from the Legion ones in a variety of ways. For starters, they don’t come with the same time limit as those did. There’s also a varying difficulty between Assaults this time around. Assaults occur in two zones, Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but there will always be a Major and a Minor Assault up.

The Major Assault can be in either zone, but it lasts for a full week, so if Uldum is the zone under full attack it will remain so until server reset. The Minor Assault will be in the other zone — so if the Vale is under Major Assault on Tuesday, then the Minor Assault will start in Uldum on Tuesday and last for three days and 12 hours, resetting on Friday around 7 pm. So in every week there will be one Major Assault and two Minor Assaults.

When one of the two zones is under Major Assault, the raid portal to Nyalotha will be in that zone. The zone will change to reflect the full fledged nightmare assault, which a change to the sky, various corrupted NPC’s and mobs replacing the zone’s normal inhabitants, and the Vision of N’Zoth portal (also called the Mini-Vision to differentiate it from the Horrific Visions which players can run as repeatable content) will be present in the zone that is under this Major Assault. There’s also the Great Worm from Beyond, which will debuff anyone who flies close enough to it and one shot kill you if you try and engage it in combat. Just avoid it. Fly low, or don’t fly at all.

Rich rewards come from Assaults

So, what do you get if you do the Assaults? Well, for the two minor assaults you can do a week, the following rewards are on offer. 5500 Coalescing Visions (so you can earn enough in a week to buy one Vessel of Horrific Visions, allowing you to run a Horrific Vision, if you do both Minor Assaults that week), 2000g, 500 Artifact Power, 50 Corrupted Mementos for use at the Titan Research panel near MOTHER and Magni Bronzebeard to help increase your resistance to N’Zoth’s corruption, and finally one piece of gear that scales up to ilevel 440, close to your current gear level in much the same way that a reward from an Emissary chest would.

The Major Assault just gives you a Vessel of Horrific Visions outright (which means you can get two a week if you do all three Assaults), 2000g, 750 Artifact Power, 120 Corrupted Mementos and that scaling piece of gear that can scale up to 440 ilevel and which has a chance to get Corruption as well as a special bonus on it. If you don’t want Corruption on your gear, there will be a way to cleanse it, but you’ll lose the bonus ability as well.

That’s pretty much it. You’ll get to do one Major Assaults and two Minor Assaults every week. They’re up constantly — no having to wait for them to respawn, with the Minor ones resetting every three and a half days. You could do one on Tuesday and the next one on Friday night or Saturday morning.  Just do the intro quest and you can start doing Assaults.