Horrific Visions WOW in Patch 11.1.5: They’re BACK and Bringing the Madness!

Ah, the main event! Horrific Visions are special instanced areas that show you a terrifying “what if” scenario – what Stormwind or Orgrimmar would look like if they were completely taken over and twisted by the power of the Old God N’Zoth. They were originally a big part of an older expansion, Battle for Azeroth. Now, they’re making a comeback in The War Within’s Patch 11.1.5, but they’ve been revamped! They’re designed to be much more accessible and fun for players tackling them alone, while still offering a challenge for groups. You’ll explore a corrupted version of one of the two capital cities (which city is available rotates each week), fight twisted enemies, and try to achieve objectives while dealing with a very unique mechanic – managing your sanity! Think of it as a unique dungeon-like experience focused on exploration and survival against psychological horrors as much as physical ones.

Get ready soon! The Horrific Visions Revisited are a key feature arriving with Patch 11.1.5. This patch is scheduled to go live around May 20th or May 21st, depending on your specific game region (usually Tuesdays for the Americas and Wednesdays for Europe). As soon as the patch maintenance is finished and the game servers are back up in your area, you should be able to begin the short process to unlock and access the Visions. So keep an eye on those patch day announcements!

Finding the entrance is straightforward once you know where to look in the new War Within zones. First, make sure you’ve completed the initial introductory questline that guides you through the start of the expansion in Dornogal – that’s the main hub city you’ll be spending time in. Once that’s done, head to the southern side of Dornogal. You’ll be looking for a noticeable area where the Bronze Dragonflight, the dragons who mess with time, have set up their operations. This area is called the Coreway Overlook. There, you’ll find a specific portal structure known as the Tenebrous Gateway. Interact with the hourglass found near this portal. This will open up an interface where you can queue up for the Horrific Vision instance that’s currently active for the week (either Twisted Stormwind or Twisted Orgrimmar). Once the game loads you into the Vision instance, you’ll find an NPC called the Image of Wrathion right at the start. Talk to him and tell him you’re ready to begin the challenge, and your run will officially start!

Nope, that’s a major improvement and a big difference in this revisited version! In the original Battle for Azeroth Horrific Visions, you absolutely needed to farm a specific currency called Coalescing Visions and then use that to purchase an item called a Vessel of Horrific Visions just to enter. It limited how many runs you could do per week. Thankfully, that whole system is gone now! Once you complete the initial short questline in Dornogal to unlock access, entry to the Horrific Visions Revisited portal is completely free and unlimited. You can jump in as many times as you like without any cost!

You have options, which is great! The revisited Horrific Visions are specifically designed with solo players in mind and are much more accessible to tackle on your own compared to their original versions. So if you’re a lone wolf player, you can definitely queue up and face the madness by yourself! However, if you prefer playing with others, you absolutely can! The Visions allow groups of up to five players total (including yourself), just like standard dungeons or the new Delves content in The War Within. Whether you go solo or with friends, the core mechanics and goals remain the same.

Yes, there is! This is a fantastic new addition to the revisited Visions. Once you are inside the Vision instance, you have the option to summon a special companion called the Construct of Soridormi. You can choose what role you’d like this helper to fill – they can act as a Tank to soak up damage for you, a Healer to keep you topped off, or a DPS to help you defeat enemies faster. They’ll follow you around and assist you in combat. A particularly nice perk is that this Construct is completely immune to the Sanity-draining effects within the Vision! You’re not required to use them, especially if you have a full party, but they can be a significant aid if you’re braving the Visions by yourself or with just one or two friends.

Sanity is a unique and crucial mechanic that’s essentially your character’s mental resilience against the terrifying corruption of the Vision. You’ll see a special meter on your screen tracking it. Your Sanity slowly drains away just because you’re in such a horrible place, but it drops much, much faster when specific enemies hit you with abilities that target your mind rather than your health. Keeping your Sanity meter from reaching zero is absolutely vital because if it does, your run ends immediately, regardless of how much health you have left! It’s a race against your own deteriorating mental state, making careful movement and dealing with specific enemies a key part of surviving the Vision.

As mentioned, passive drain happens just by being present, but the most significant Sanity Loss comes from certain abilities used by enemies. These are attacks designed specifically to shred your mental fortitude. As your Sanity Bar drops, things within the Vision environment start to get more intense and strange. You’ll begin experiencing “Madness Effects.” These aren’t just visual illusions; they are often active madnesses that apply debilitating debuffs to your character, spawn additional hazards like void zones on the ground, or otherwise make combat and navigation much more difficult. The lower your Sanity falls, the more frequent and severe these corruption effects of the Madnesses become. If you completely run out, your Horrific Vision Ends abruptly in failure.

Fortunately, yes! You’re not just passively losing your mind the whole time. The primary way to regain lost Sanity is by finding and using Sanity Restoration Orbs scattered throughout the Vision. You usually have a limited capacity for these orbs per run, so you need to use them strategically to extend your time inside. Additionally, performing certain objectives or specific actions within the Vision can sometimes grant you a smaller boost to your Sanity. This includes things like defeating particularly tough enemies (elites) or interacting with unique items you might discover like Odd Crystals or special potions. Good Sanity management involves timing your Orb usage and knowing which actions give you a little mental reprieve.

Masks in Horrific Visions (often called Faceless Masks) are special items that act as difficulty modifiers, much like affixes in Mythic+ dungeons. You find these Masks by completing sections and objectives within the Visions themselves. Once unlocked, you can choose to activate any number of the Masks you’ve found before you start a new run. Each activated Mask adds a specific, negative effect to the Vision, making it harder – increasing enemy damage, adding more monsters (Mask of Multitudes), reducing your maximum Sanity (Mask of the Long Night), causing sanity loss when you move (Mask of the Burned Bridge), and more! While they drastically increase the mask difficulty, the key reason to use them is simple: activating Masks significantly increases the amount and quality of rewards you earn from the run, including more Displaced Corrupted Mementos and better potential gear or collectibles.

You unlock the different Faceless Masks by successfully completing objectives within the Horrific Visions. As you clear the various corrupted zones and defeat the bosses within a Vision run, you will earn progress towards unlocking new Masks. Often, successfully completing these objectives, especially in runs where you’ve already activated other Masks, is the way to acquire the quest items or achievements that grant you access to additional Mask types. It’s a progression system – the more you push and succeed in Visions, the more tools you unlock to make future runs even harder (and more rewarding!).

Once you’ve unlocked multiple Masks in Horrific Visions, you can choose to activate any combination of them before starting a run – you don’t have to use them all, or any at all! The mask difficulty scales directly with how many masks you have active. Activating more Masks makes the run progressively harder by stacking their negative effects. The absolute maximum challenge in Horrific Visions Revisited is completing a run with eight masks active simultaneously! This is the peak difficulty and is typically tied to the most prestigious achievements and rewards, often requiring mastery of mechanics and significant character power.

Displaced Corrupted Mementos are the shiny new currency you will collect exclusively from the Horrific Visions Revisited in Patch 11.1.5. You’ll earn loot in the form of these Mementos from defeating enemies (trash and elites) and opening chests throughout your Vision runs. It’s important to note that if you played the original Visions, your old “Corrupted Mementos” currency from BfA cannot be used here – you need to earn the new type! These Mementos are vital because they are the primary resource for almost all Vision-related progression and rewards. You spend them on permanent upgrades for your abilities at the Hourglass of Horrific Visions (by exchanging them weekly for Echoes of N’Zoth), purchasing powerful new Helm Runes to boost your character, and buying tons of cool cosmetic items like armor sets, pets, titles, and especially mounts from the vendors in Dornogal.

The Hourglass of Horrific Visions is a specific structure located near the Vision portal in the Dornogal starting area, usually attended by the NPC Augermu. This is where you spend your Displaced Corrupted Mementos to unlock a permanent upgrade tree specifically for Horrific Visions. This system is entirely new content compared to the original BfA Visions – there was no Hourglass before! By exchanging your Mementos for a weekly limited currency called Echoes of N’Zoth, you can purchase upgrades that permanently enhance your capabilities within Visions. These upgrades include things like increasing your maximum Sanity, making Sanity Restoration Orbs more effective, reducing the rate of passive Sanity loss, giving you passive combat benefits, or even granting unique abilities like a cheat death. These upgrades are crucial for handling higher mask difficulty and push your tribute progress further. While these upgrades only apply inside the Visions, they do represent a progression system where your character becomes significantly more powerful for this specific content, making it feel somewhat like a form of borrowed power tailored to the Vision experience, allowing you to overcome challenges that would be impossible without them.

You did hear correctly that the concept of “Corruption” is returning, but in a very different form! In Patch 11.1.5, Visions introduce powerful new Helm Enchants, officially called Lesser and Greater Runes. These are not the same system as the old gear Corruptions from Battle for Azeroth, which applied both positive and negative effects to your gear slots and had infamous effects like Twilight Devastation. Instead, these are simply powerful enchants you apply to your helm (specifically item-level 350+ helms). You unlock them initially through quests involving Displaced Corrupted Mementos and materials found in Visions, and then you can purchase more from vendors. These Runes grant strong, void-themed corruption effects like damage-over-time abilities, stat boosts, or unique combat triggers. Importantly, these Runes work outside of the Visions too, providing a general power boost to your character, making them a form of borrowed power for The War Within Season 2. They offer a pure power increase without the negative side effects of the old gear Corruptions.

Oh, it’s way more than just gear! While you can definitely earn loot directly from Vision runs, including gear whose quality increases with mask difficulty (potentially up to Champion and Hero track), the rewards extend far beyond that. The main currency, Displaced Corrupted Mementos, is used to purchase a massive amount of stuff from vendors near the portal in Dornogal. This includes full cosmetic armor sets for all gear types, cool pets (like Reek!), titles (“the Mad,” “the Faceless One”), cosmetic back pieces (including updated versions of the old legendary cloaks and Dragonscale backpacks), and several mounts. Additionally, many unique mounts and pets are found as rare drops from specific enemies or chests within the Vision of Stormwind or Vision of Orgrimmar, or are earned by completing specific puzzles or achievements tied to the Visions.

Yes, absolutely! If you missed out on them the first time around, or just want them on different characters, many of the popular rewards from the original 8.3 Horrific Visions are making a triumphant return in this revisited version. This includes fan-favorite mounts like the Wicked Swarmer (now a vendor purchase for Mementos) and the notorious Mail Muncher (still a rare drop from clicking mailboxes in either Vision!). Prestigious achievement mounts like the Black Serpent of N’Zoth and the Ny’alothan Shadow Worm are also back, tied to completing achievements for clearing high mask difficulty runs (five masks for the Serpent, eight masks solo for the Shadow Worm) and potentially unlocking the Hourglass. So, if you’ve been chasing those old visions of N’Zoth collectibles, now’s your chance!

No, and this is a fantastic change! Unlike the original Battle for Azeroth system where you were limited by how many Vessels you could acquire each week, the Horrific Visions WOW in Patch 11.1.5 have no entry limit whatsoever once you’ve unlocked them. You can run the Vision of Stormwind or the Vision of Orgrimmar as many times as you want, whenever you want, back-to-back. This is incredibly player-friendly and makes farming for Displaced Corrupted Mementos, gear, or specific rare drops much more efficient and enjoyable. There’s no artificial gating on how much time you can spend in the content each week.

Based on the information released, the Horrific Visions Revisited content is intended to be a permanent, evergreen addition to The War Within, not a limited-time event. There is no official end date that has been announced for the Visions themselves. This means you shouldn’t feel pressured or rushed to farm everything as quickly as possible. You will likely have plenty of time throughout The War Within expansion to explore the content, work on your Hourglass upgrades, tackle higher mask difficulty runs, and collect all the many rewards, including the mounts and cosmetics, at a pace that suits you.

While the core concept of exploring a corrupted city, battling enemies, clearing sections, reaching a boss, and managing your Sanity is similar, almost everything else surrounding it has changed or been added! Key differences include: Free Entry (no Vessel/Coalescing Visions needed), a brand new currency (Displaced Corrupted Mementos), the addition of a helpful Construct of Soridormi companion option, a completely new permanent upgrade system (the Hourglass) using weekly Echoes, new passive bonuses earned during runs (Tributes), new Helm Runes as power boosts (different from old gear Corruptions/Twilight Devastation), Unlimited runs (no weekly cap), new Masks added alongside the returning ones, and updated rewards including new mount models. They essentially kept the core spooky scenario but rebuilt the progression, access, and helper systems around it to be more modern and player-friendly, particularly for solo play, while still supporting groups and high-end challenges with mask difficulty.