With this Tuesday’s weekly reset, World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth has seen a number of intense changes. Within the Horrific Visions, players will see a nerf to two of the most disliked madnesses.
If you’ve spent much time pushing Horrific Visions for any number of reasons, you’ve likely encountered the Leaden Foot madness. This madness punishes players for moving while in combat, slowing them drastically.
There’s no limit to how obnoxious and dangerous this madness can be, but it reaches new levels on a five-mask attempt. Stormwind especially sees a number of extremely dangerous moments for this madness.
While in combat, moving gives players a stacking debuff that slows their movement speed. The stacks grow incredibly quickly, so much so that a few seconds of movement can effectively root you.
This can spell disaster against a multitude of encounters, such as the elite enemy outside of the Mage Tower in Stormwind or within the Valley of Wisdom in Orgrimmar. Both heavily utilize AoE abilities that rapidly drain sanity, and players may find them unable to move out.
Melee classes were especially susceptible to this effect, but thankfully, no class will be needing to worry about it much. The slow that stacks with the madness has been considerably reduced, as well as capping at a lower number of stacks, maxing out at 50% instead of the previous 90%.
This means that, while still a formidable madness that players will need to keep in mind, it is much less likely to be the sole reason a player crashes out of a Vision unless they’ve been incredibly inattentive. While movement will still be challenged, players won’t be rooted for a few seconds of dodging likely-fatal amounts of AoE.
Blizzard has also nerfed the Split Personality madness, one that presented an opposite problem to Leaden Foot. While Leaden Foot forced players to be still, Split Personality forced players to flee a clone of themselves every six seconds, which feared them for four seconds.
The two in conjunction provided the most obnoxious challenge possible. Generally, players would sometimes find themselves weighing which madness affected more, needing to decide if they wanted to flee their clone to avoid the fear and incur the slow or accept the fear to avoid the slow.
With this change, Split Personality clones will now only be spawned for 5 seconds, making them disappear quicker. Additionally, the disorienting effect they bring has been halved to two seconds instead of four.
While Visions still won’t be easy, the nerfing of these two extremely difficult madnesses will make them considerably easier. If you’ve been trying to get your five mask run complete lately, now might be the best time to do so.
