Invasions have been a running theme in the Legion expansion starting with the pre-release event that brought players up to speed in terms of both gear and level. It also brought players together in a huge way by providing them with objectives to congregate around and complete together, putting the "massively multiplayer" into MMORPG. After Legion released, invasions disappeared for a time which I was not too happy about even though I expected it.
Invasions returned in patch 7.2, this time exclusively in the Broken Isles, and much like the pre-release invasions they captured the atmosphere of widespread Legion influence, powerful enemies, and great rewards. However, I couldn't help but feel that the invasions this time around were basically more time-limited emissary quests since to earn the best rewards, one had to do 4 Invasion World Quests. Therefore, I felt it would've been redundant to write an article about them since I already covered World Quests.
I expected this to be the end of invasions since patch 7.3 was going to take place on the Legion-controlled world of Argus. However, PTR information indicated there would be new content in the form of Invasion Points, which caught my interest. While I didn't do much research on it since I wanted to take a blind run at it on live for personal reasons, I was pleasantly surprised by how much it resembled pre-release invasions. In this article, I will express my thoughts on this content and what it contributes to the overall gameplay of Legion.
How Invasion Points Work
The zones themselves are considered scenarios with a relatively high player limit that groups together players based on region. This helps to ensure that Invasion Points are crowded and active and considering the difficulty, the help of allies is strongly needed. Each zone's scenario follows a similar formula involving three stages. The first two stages involve defeating Legion forces and completing objectives related to the zone, such as unfreezing allies. The final stage always involves defeating a random Legion commander that is drawn from a pool who drops loot that serves as the scenario completion reward.
There are three active Invasion Points at a time that are available for 6 hours. Once the time expires, three new Invasion Points are made active. Completing an Invasion Point "saves" you to the scenario, meaning one can complete three Invasion Points every 6 hours, or 12 per day. While this might not seem like much, it does help that Invasion Points are at least always active unlike Broken Isle Invasions, so it's a more consistent source of rewards.
Finally, there are Greater Invasion Points that are active for 7 days at a time and basically serve as the World Boss encounters for Argus.
The Rewards
Greater Invasion Points, due to their weekly lockout, are far more rewarding and can award a player with item level 930 gear along with the opportunity to bonus roll for more. In addition to the typical world boss rewards, these bosses also drop a high amount of Veiled Argunite, Pristine Argunite, and some Primal Sargerite, the latter of which will likely be very useful in the future.
My Thoughts
Considering that one is limited to doing Invasion Points "only" 12 times per day, I don't think it'll hold player interest for extended periods especially since play sessions can involve constant play. However, it's a good form of supplementary content that adds more to do in the Argus zones much like with hunting rare spawns and treasure hunting, both of which are also time-limited activities in a sense. Due to the varied environments with respective objectives that the scenarios provide and the fact the commander fought at the end is randomly drawn from a pool, the activity feels a little less repetitive, though I expect players might get a little tired of it by the time the Antorus raid arrives.
With that said, I think the reward system is tuned a little too low when taking into account how often players can do Invasion Points compared to killing Argus rare spawns on a daily basis. I can understand that Veiled Argunite is intended to drop in relatively small amounts since only 650 are needed to buy Relinquished gear, but there's other base rewards Blizzard could fiddle with to make the content more worthwhile such as other Legion currencies. On the other hand, while it isn't very detrimental to the experience, players can AFK until the final stage then tag the commander to earn a reward. The fact this can be done is a bit disheartening since I was expecting Blizzard to learn to encourage active play after how well they handled AFKing during the pre-release invasions.
Overall, while I personally don't do Invasion Points much at the moment, I think they are useful to Legion's gameplay as another solo activity with a solid gameplay loop that can be added to the other relevant activities players can choose from. They seem like an improved version of the pre-release invasion due to their similar structure paired with more frequent availability. The content isn't without its shortcomings though and a few tweaks along with a moderately demanding update could help to improve the relevance of the content until at least the next expansion.
Suggestions to Improve
The issues of encouraging inactive play and lacking rewards can both be fixed with a single type of change. Specifically, this type of change would reward players for participating during the first two stages of an Invasion Point. For example, when doing any activity that contributes towards completing the stage's objective such as helping to kill a mob, there's a chance that players receive an Artifact Power token or an item that can be converted into a currency like Order Resources. Another (possibly easier) approach could be to add non-elite rare spawns that contribute to the appropriate objectives and these mobs would drop the aforementioned rewards as loot. While both of these aren't perfect fixes and may encourage play that distinctly comes off as leeching, at least those who leech are actively playing instead of sitting at the portal waiting for the commander. Plus, such behavior is more obvious and could arguably be considered griefing with all the consequences that come with it.
The possible issue of repetition can be addressed by adding more scenarios and/or by adding more possible objectives to existing scenarios. I would love if both of these suggestions could be implemented to release along with the Antorus raid but I can understand if development if focused elsewhere such as on the next expansion. On a somewhat related note, I think the current state of available content may allow for a longer raid tier (but outside of several content updates, certainly not a year-long raid tier).
Final Statements
This conclude my thoughts on Invasion Points which as I said I think are a decent piece of solo content though not something players are likely to spend all of their play time grinding. Actually, this will probably be the last article in this article series unless more content is added after the Antorus raid. While there's more Argus-related content that I plan to write about, none of it merits adding another part to this article series. Thus, in the very likely event that this is the last article in the series and you, the reader, happened to read all of the articles in the series, I hope they provided some insight into what I want out of WoW's gameplay, if not the gameplay of games in general.
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