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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 
) . 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!