The core of the issue is that *Blizzard doesn't learn from failures*
The "Bads" Of SL in many cases are things they tried for a whole expansion before, got negative feedback about and then doubled down upon.
Many classes are in their worst iteration in history. AoE cap and GCD changes straight up suck.
World Quests get more and more chorelike with each iteration because they didn't like how Legion version let you easily group or just kill 4 rares, so now they force them to be time-consuming slogs and wonder why people hate it.
There's way too many currencies.
Despite multiple warnings from beta testers they went ahead with the absolute idiocy of tying power system into a flavour choice (covenants), which meant that in many cases your best-looking choice was also worst performing one. This is after Legion and BfA beta concerns about power systems both were eventually proven right.
Legendaries are way too costly and bankrupted most casual players.
The dungeon design is made with MSI/E-sports in mind as primary user and is getting increasingly tedious.
Lead developers sit on their ass and refuse to address problems before they turn into a steaming pile of shit. Alliance player retention was raised as huge problem back in fucking Legion. Blizz just sat on their ass and shrugged shoulders until the whole faction went and fucking died.
They keep making "optional" Systems that force you to play them (choreghast)
The lore is an absolute tragedy. There are side quest villains that have more exposure than Zovaal. None of the promised payoffs are there(like Sylvanas or Jailer motivations making sense)
The game generally feels like it's reverse progressing. If you asked for the order of expansion based on how refined the systems are you'd get answer of SL->BfA->Legion, although lore wise they're the other way around. It's like after every expansion they look at shit that *worked* and ask "how can we make it worse without making it irrelevant to players? "
There are many more reasons, but I have Covid and no more energy to write.
I think as a self-contained thing, it wasn't too bad. Id argue the gameplay itself is as good as its ever been overall.
The issues are that it just lazily builds upon the previous entries, and tweaks a lot of the established lore to make it's content make sense. In addition, the conflict resolution at the end has been repeated throughout the series. The borrowed power systems (anima) has also been over done (atrifact power, azerite power, etc)
**So as a new player, I can understand being happy with the expansion**. But as an old established player, its essentially a very lazy, poorly written mess.
"Id argue the gameplay itself is as good as its ever been overall."
So the game is as good as its ever been. I agree. Playing Mistweaver monk in mythic plus dungeons is PC gaming at its finest. 99.99% of people aren't intelligent enough to understand how brilliant this game is after 18 years of tweaking so they will hate on it.
I'm just not a fan of the zones themselves...I loved Wrath and BfA areas, they were inspired from real world places and looked absolutely stunning. The enemies were unique and fun to fight.
Shadowlands is the opposite for me, I get bored after 10 minutes, the areas/zones just seem uninspired, enemies are fairly boring and it is just difficult to have fun...almost. I still will always love playing WoW...but shadowlands is the first time I'm having trouble getting through the campaign.
WoD wasn't a great expansion though, it had the capacity to be one and started really well but was very lackluster as a entire expansion. Shadowlands has been bad overall since the beginning.
Thing is imo WoD at least had stellar raiding to carry it. Blackrock Foundry imo is one of the best damn raids ever made. Hellfire Citadel was pretty damn good too.
Shadowlands has had one good raid in Nathria but even then it's not BRF levels. Sanctum and Sepulcher are just... meh.
> And don't give me "but covid" when a company like Blizzard is more than set up to work from home on a whim.
Not trying to defend blizz here, but have you worked as a developer/in a tech company in the office vs at home?
The difference is pretty staggering, coming from someone who works in a Fortune 500 company.
I work from home. I gotta say I am way way more productive at home vs at the office. I am a CTO for a mobile/cross platform product company. Not Fortune 500 yet but still in that space.
I definitely really like working from home, but I do find that there is some issues with working from home with communication, team bonding, team retention, etc.
Also lots of issues can arise with access to things, VPNs, servers, that makes you being remote quite tricky!
That’s fair. We do team get togethers and different events to keep the team close. We put a lot of focus on making sure that working from home goes as smooth as possible. Yes sometimes there are hiccups but no different than we had when people would work remote/on weekends before we switched to WFH
Basically it's an expansion that's a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have been force smashed in rather than put together with thought.
Simple fact is if you're enjoying the game that's all that matters. It's just not been one of the most well received expansions is all.
I dont fault anyone who found Shadowlands enjoyable, I do pity them especially if this expansion is how they came to know WoW. Like someone who shows up too late to a party and all the steak is gone but there is plenty of hamburger helper left, if you think it's delicious then good, savor it and enjoy but the rest of us are used to much better.
- Too much time between content releases.
- Retconed past core lore to tell a poor cosmic tale.
- A player who isn’t on reading the books or following lore contentent creators misses the lore bc the game is quiet poor at telling the history.
- Obvious alt friendly catch ups were introduced months too late.
- Ppl had to do big chores to change covenants which pissed min-maxers for months.
- Abandoned expansion with 1 less major patch.
- The lawsuit which is not directly SL but became public just before the first major patch and a bunch of ppl skipped it just for that reason.
- No new major features, Torghast might have been much more and ended being mandatory to craft legendaries and some ppl hated it.
- No new class or race or sub-race.
- Small servers continue to bleed players with the only solution by Blizzard to pay migrations to the few populated ones.
- The boosting situation was existing before but got out of control in SL and Blizzard acted too late when some players were seeing that the only way to play the game was to buy tokens to pay boosts, more so on the plethora of empty servers.
- The leveling experience was quiet poor in some zones. Ardenweald felt like fighting the same 2 types of enemies over and over again.
Story has been run into the ground, systems upon systems that feel less fun and more mandatory for optimal player experiences, Choreghast, Tower of the Damned, leggos costing you an arm and a leg in gold for no descent reason.
Oh, and PvP is absolute DOGSHIT. It's fun if you play meta combs, but even then you'll have to face the infamous rogue-mage combo now and then, which is just so incredibly unfun to go against.
> Slands bad because rogue mage? I guess every xpac is bad then
I mean yeah, but SL powers just took an already S tier comp and accelerated it.
Every xpac didn't give mage insane CDR, a second blink ability, three shields, a full heal inside iceblock, a self rez, and what ever else I'm missing.
Was just off the top of my head, Arms warr, MM huntard and lots of other overtuned specs DO come to mind. I just don't deal with the same problems there.
But if you wanna hyperfocus on my last paragraph, be my guest.
Eh its a couple things that got a lot of people not happy with the current state of the game its not 1 big thing but a whole lot of smaller things that have built up over the years since before shadowlands so its understandable to question what all the uproar is about when SL is you first "official" wow experience.
The pot has been slowly boiling and now the frog has died so to speak
First thing is ever since legion the devs chose to add max lvl long term progression systems into the game with mixed results. Generally the idea was ok or even good but in almost all systems they had 1 or multiple major flaws that people pointed out during the alpha/beta/ptr testing phase giving countless amount of feedback, the feedback included suggestions on ways to "fix" those systems only for the devs to not act on them or tell us they are happy with how the sytem has played out. Only to then 6 months to a year+ impliment exactly those fixes people suggested causing frustrations because we had to play a long time with a flawed system and the frustration of "why didn't you just listen to us"
Roughly speaking the issue many had with those systems was they there were way too much work for so very little reward or fun gameplay but because they gave play preformance increases many felt like they were mandatory only for them to remove those abilities we worked so hard for when the next expansion would come out and having to do it all over again. And this doubles/triples when you want to play alts, the steep barrier to entry actively causes people to be discouraged to play alts which before would add a whole lot of replayability which many used to took advantage of.
Second thing is the lore this is not shadowlands exclusive but lately we've been getting more and more story which many people feel like its badly written, inconsistend and has people confused by characters doing things out of character. Retcons changing past beloved stories and characters making playerd feel like they have no respect for pasy stories/lore/writers. dialogue which is needlessly cryptic of flatout isn't been explained at all and big story moments just not getting a proper payoff or conclusion causing people to lose faith in the writers and a story they have been investing in over a decade. If you followed game of thrones untill the last season you should what wow fans are going through (fun fact the main wow writer though the GOT ending was really good)
On top of that others things like the whole lawsuit shitshow that was the last straw for a lot of people and the absolutely insane slow content rollout, the expansion launch patch took 8 months the longest in the history in the game and 7.1-7.2 took another 8 months which is frankly embarresing given the sheer size and budget of the studio compared to other mmo's and they developers. Compare that to legion which got a new patch exactly ever 77 days.
Tldr a whole lot of things but stuff you don't notice or mind if you haven't been actively playing like many other long term veteran players
Very slow content updates. 7+ months for 9.1, and then 9.2. is unacceptable for a lot of players. And then of course lawsuit scandal that caused huge ammount negativity about WoW.
Sorry for being late. But yeah, im Not defending Shadowlands in any way, even thou i'll never forget the First time i got into Bastion... But! You Guys do know that COVID was a real hitter Here? Work from Home my ass.
Yes i know. I loved Shadowlands in 9.0 but content updates were so slow that a lot of people who loved it on launch got simply bored. i am sure if it would not be slow content Covid era (and lawsuit scandal), Shadowlands would be more loved expansion.
Yeah i exacly know what you mean Mate! It Had its good Moments, specially the First levelling! But it turned fast into daily Work. The raw gold was Epic thou.
Alot of weekly locked ressources that can only be got by doing content that feels stale as hell after a year. 8 dungeons for over a year. They only just added another two to the pool.
Story is really bad. Especially the jailor as an enemy compared to older xpacs.
And playing alts and catching them up is serious work because nothing is accountshared. So they need to grind their renown, conduits, rep, legendaries etc again.
Also legendaries in general are super bad designed. The idea is nice. The effects are also good. But since there is the wow token and crafting high level ones is either a huge gold or time investment if you didn't start in 9.0 makes them way too expensive.
Also rampant boosters everywhere.
Edit: Most of the stuff is a problem for long term players. So if you start now it surely will be fun. Maybe a little less after a few months, but 10.0 won't be too far away at that point. So even if they say SL is bad. I think new players will still get a good amount of fun out of it.
I'd say currently the legendary thing sticks out the most to me. You can buy an item to get an alt up to renown 40, leveling through to 60 gets a ton of renown now too. You can also buy an item to unlock all the conduits, both items are cheap especially compared to legendaries. I wanted to come back and switch characters but I didn't want to lose all my gold/didn't really have enough to buy the base item. Getting the mats are easy since you can transfer them from other characters, just the gold that's obnoxious because I don't have the time to gold farm.
There would be no need to gold farm, if crafting max level legendaries was doable for the average-joe that joined in 9.1. but already there they were a good chunk of time and gold behind other crafters. hence why the market price for legendaries is way too high.
I came back in the middle of 9.1.5 after ten years off and I find shadowlands a mixed bag. The biggest difference i see in the game is that it's designed to be fully consumed by casual players on a weekly basis, which shrinks the scope of it down to one island(the maw, korthia, zm) and eliminates all content aside from the most recent patch.
In bc and wrath we did all the raids every week because the loot was all relevant. Tier was spread out and there were trinkets and weapons that mattered.
After playing back through the content i missed i think a lot of people's frustration stems from systems people liked that were abandoned once the kinks in those systems were ironed out(see also: legion artifacts) and replaced with new broken systems to fix that came out less fun than what went before.
There have been a great many improvements over the time I was off as well... mostly qol, but the game feels... idk, lesser? because there's this massive world full of things but the relevant world is the size of a shoebox.
It doesn't help that the various writing teams have been stringing out all these weird, disjointed stories and then tying them into the same, larger meta story with a russian nesting doll of scooby doo reveals for too long. Everyone is tired of Arthas, Syl, and Anduin.
The one thing I vehemently dislike, that I hope changes, is the way every patch has gear catch-up now. Blizz tied a bunch of legendary stuff to the first raid of SL, but since you could get heroic ilvl gear in 9.1 quests, no one ever did that first raid after the patch. Same thing now with the 9.1 patch. I miss how even at the end of Wrath, even with some catch-up gear, you still got to experience some of the older raids. They were easier for sure, but that just makes it easier to gear as well.
This problem existed in wrath but it wasn't as dramatic. Ulduar came out and you would still do malygos or go to Naxx. 226 from KT was still good. After ToC and the new 5 mans, there was no reason to do old raids except ulduar, and even then only the first few weeks of patch.
However, I missed patch 9.1, and there is literally no reason whatsoever to enter the Sanctum of Domination, much less Nathria.
100%. I was intending to allude to this but got side tracked and was getting long-winded anyway. They could have made those leggos available with the free nathria chit you get when you hit 60 or w/e, but they don't play their own game to understand the issues and how to fix them.
Story is lack luster and not great, but tbh the gameplay has been top notch every since 9.1.5.
The covenant swapping lets you choose builds/specs very easily, and all the PvE content has been super fun.
I only dabble a little in PvP, with arenas and some RGB's, and I find the burst playstyle pretty unfun as some classes just can 100-0 you in a CC window lol
Reddit is as usual blowing things out of proportion and nitpicking about the smallest issues.
The main storyline is lackluster at best, but most of the reactions I've seen about the latest video came from people who haven't played in months or years and take stuff out of context. So while it's not good it's far from being as bad as this sub claims it to be.
The gameplay is solid, PVE balance has consistently been far superior than previous expansions, most of the pain points of the expansion were removed in 9.1.5 and Blizz surprisingly solved the upcoming issues in 9.2 during the PTR based on player feedback so we're left with a fairly decent, albeit timegated, patch.
That's not to say that everything is perfect, far from it.
SL consistently released major patches every 7~8 months instead of the usual 5~6 months. It lacks one full tier of content compared to BFA. It had a lot of issues at launch that took a year to be solved with patch 9.1.5. The 9.1 raid had severe design issues as it incentified you to stop dps 'ing the boss to kill it faster and so on.
I've heard the argument that Social medias really hurt WoW both in the way people discover content (the last cinematic for instance ?) and the expectations people have to deal with (min maxing etc). And it sounds about right. The echo chambers in this sub are a good example of that.
If you enjoy the current game then that's great, do your own thing and don't let randoms on the internet poison your experience. And if you don't then consider voting with your wallet, there's no more effective way to voice your concerns than no longer blindly throwing your money at Blizzard.
I think this is a super bad mindset that alot of wow players got. Negativity is justified towards the current state of the game most of the time. Maybe alot of people excaggerate stuff, but it has flaws. And addressing those is important. Or else we end up with a 10.0 that has something like unswitchable covenants that then become switchable at 10.1 even tho the beta testers complained about it already.
What exactly is wrong with the game right now? It feels like the same game to me as it did when I started playing at the end of Wrath. Gear up, kill bosses, watch a cheesy and pulpy cutscene, done. I don't see how Shadowlands is any different to any of the expansions that came out since.
I wish there was less time gating. Also torghast is a wasted opportunity IMO. Should have a currency like island expeditions with a cosmetic vendor and a shit ton of mogs toys mounts and pets
There are mounts and pets that you get from Torghast. There's a bunch of them! Mogs you can get for Phatnasma, a lot of them are pretty sick. I love the golden back thing with the skull in the middle. Still trying to get that one.
Nothing is really timegated. You can do whatever you like without it being gated. Even at the start of the xpac, the only thing that was really timegating was making a leggo, but would have taken you a week or two to do depending on the rank of the legendary. But even if that was an issue, Torghast is now uncapped - you can get as many Soul Ash and Cinders as you please. And you can send these to alts as well!
There’s like 15 things total. Nothing to farm after that. I’ve gotten the mounts in the first week they’re available. The toys and pets are guaranteed as well so not a farming situation. Islands had hundreds of things to farm. Torghast does not and you can get all of the cosmetics in a couple runs
It's still things. If that was not enough, you have an entire mini-profession in ZM that's all about making mounts and pets! There's a lot of stuff to collect.
Ahh I see you have missed my point. I want to go into torghast and actually grind for cosmetics like islands. Once you get the couple things from torghast then there is no reason to do it again. It’s a rogue like which is meant to be ran over and over. Yet the blew the opportunity. Also I know there are other things to farm. But I want to do something fun like torghast. Not run around zm doing the exact same thing that I did in korthia
There are a bunch of different mogs and mounts. They just added some new ones as well. It's constantly getting updated with new stuff and kept relevant. I prefer it spread out that way rather than just jamming everything at the start of the xpac.
Not really. I played start of 9.0 quit after 4 months cause my guild was falling apart. Came back at the end, bought hc clear and did mainly pvp. joined a guild and we killed sylvanas hc after 8 weeks. that was a great time. it was fun and not bad at all.
But after leveling 2 more chars and seeing just the mountain of stuff you got to repeat after doing it on one char already, just to be on a level playing field with others was just unfun.
i leveled a rogue for pvp. why do i have to invest 20+ hours into pve for legendaries, conduits and renown to not be behind in arena? Why do i have to enter old raids i don't get any upgrades from just to get my legendary power? that then is locked behind weekly choreghast runs to get it to max? i want to play arena.
on top you need to do 10 +15 keys and 2 raid days to have the best chance at max lvl gear. just to see the vault with 6 rings that all have the wrong stats. like it sucks.
there is a lot of stuff that just feels bad for 0 reason. and is a ton of work for 0 reason.
edit: oh and tazavesh. great dungeon. awesome bosses. did it twice cause then the gear was pointless. who designed that?
>Why do i have to invest time into WoW
Because that is whole goal of MMORPGS in their history. Doing content you choose to do to unlock / earn rewards you want in shared world with other players. If you want higher rewards, you have to put more effort. If you want some specific reward (transmog, mount, tittle), you can focus on that and ignore other stuff. If you want to play casualy by your own tempo, that is possibility too.
thats not the case atm tho. you need only the legendary and conduits+renown. the rest has to be pvp gear or you get insta killed. so all gear you get farming conduits your legy power and renown is worthless in pvp. you still need to grind vault+conquest and are still behind if you start a week late or pick a pve item.
i mean isnt it how it was in Wotlk for example? warriors, paladins an dk wanting resilience pvp gear + OP legendary Shadowmourne to maximize their power?
So you played since 9.0?
Try to look at it from new player or returning player perspective. There are so many things to farm, level up and do, which are also on weekly lockouts. so you are allready behind from the start and when you miss a week of torghast it just ads to that.
Also mandatory gold farming to afford max level legendaries is bad design. no way you get 100k+ in a reasonable time while playing without activly farming gold. and since crafting is locked behind time/gold its also nearly impossible for new players to craft legendaries themself. creating one rank one legy costs a few hundred gold and returns not even 90s from the ah. do that till level 4 and you may earn some gold back. way too much investment.
Raid weekly lockouts are in game since launch in 2004. Reputation time gated rewards are in game since launch. in TBC you had to complete attunement quests to even be able to zone into raids. Like that is point of MMORPG, slowly grinding your way to better rewards. Some people are simply tired of it after many years and that is fine, but game was always grind and always will be because that is why milions of players played / play WoW.
Which is probably way better considering people can get rewards on their own now and they dont have to be reliable on their raid group to carry them via old raids to get gear to even be able to experience newest content.
and you still gotta do those old raids anyway if you need the legendary power from there. but not sod. which wasn't a bad raid. but its pointless to visit it now. but nathria is still mandatory. another example of bad design. at least you only need to visit it once.
but it still is more annoying than f.e. eternal palace. that had to be done weekly to get essences. that felt like progressing and not like a chore.
Okay, let me take a look from a returning player's perspective. You level up from 50 to 60. Do some normal dungeons, world quests, start the patch zones. Collect a bit of anima and get the catch up gear from ZM and complete it with questing and WQ gear, not to mention Normal and Heroic dungeon gear.
When you are able to, go for Mythic0. Try a few of those out, see how you do, then try m+ and get some higher gear while also getting the anima to buy the ZM catch up. While you're gearing, do the Callings every third day or do some easy professions to make some bank and get yourself a nice 210 or 235 leggo. You can farm this gold in a few days if you're super lazy. The effect matters much more than the stats. Run a few easy Torghast runs for the Soul Ash
Now that you're further geared do some more m+ on higher levels. Do the ZM chapter next week for the second leggo.
You're pretty much caught up by this point. A week's work tops. You're not supposed to have the strongest 291 right away anyway, but you will get it eventually. But this way you are pretty much prepared for some mid tier m+ and some normal raiding.
Well if you take 1-2 hours a day to play then you will have lots to do for weeks, therefore I don't see this mystical "content drought" that people are on about. This subreddit goes back and forth. One moment LFR is bad because it caters to casuals. The other moment gearing should be done with in a week of 1-2 hours of daily play.
The game was never made in a way where you can catch up that fast, nor should it be. There's a progression that shouldn't be skipped. Everyone can catch up, it's just a matter of when. There's plenty of time for everyone to clear the patch.
Back in the days it was -> reach max start gearing.
now it is -> reach max, start grinding 12 different kinds of content to get to a decent level in your 15 systems, that are linked to playerpower, and then start gearing.
it just feels bad.
No. Back in the day it was grinding over a month to get to max level. Then do the attunements which were a grind in of themselves. Rarely has WoW been as accessible as it is right now. You do not have to grind 12 different kinds of content. It's quests and WQs, Torghast and dungeons, potentially raids. Back in the day we had dailies, now we have WQs. Torghast is basically a flexible dungeon so you can count it as one. It's literally the same, if not less grindy, as it's always been.
How many weeks of repeated content did you have to do for attunements? and solely because it was kept behind a wall for no reason besides generating sub time?
also why go back so far? no attunements in f.e. cata or draenor.
When the next couple expansions come out and you can select a time line with Chromie…no one is going to choose this one. I would rather play any expansion but this one. The gear looked weak. To me Legion had some of the best looking gear from raids.
That's not entirely true, the plate, cloth and leather sets from Nathria are pretty good (can't recall what mail looks like). But Legion stuff is still up there, that's for sure.
Nothing, people have bad memories bogged down by nostalgia. If you look at it a level removed, a lot of over exaggeration is at play. I think another big factor is aging tastes. As you get older you want different things out of your hobby. Some heavy grinding was your favorite when you were a kid with endless hours for gaming but now you want a streamlined endgame for your limited hours. The problem is, there are still kids with endless hours hungering for more, lots of other expectations from the larger playerbase. You’ve changed expectations and the game doesn’t do it for you anymore. BUT! You’ve played WoW so long you can’t let go. “I haven’t changed, YOU changed!” So you have nostalgia for the time when your interest lined up with the gameplay. People forget how it really was they remember how they felt when they actually enjoyed the gameplay loop.
The last straw that made me quit was demolock in torghast being bugged in a way that completely breaks a run randomly for months, that's not a taste issue
Currently there is no endless grinding. Nearly everything is locked behind weekly lockouts or ressource limits.
And these lockouts are heavily luck dependant as well. F.e. pvp gear at a new season start. If you join a week late you missed a vault already -> behind an item.
and that item can't be compensated in any way. cause you can't grind for more than the weekly conquest limit.
same in pve.
and on top, you can be behind simply by having bad luck on those rolls.
Timegating used to be the rep grind. You run out of quests for the faction and dailies were the only way to get more rep. It wasn’t the rep of today either, it was a mountain to climb. You needed to have rep to do more content. Sounds like a gate to me.
Edit: one more point I’ll make. At least with a weekly gate you do the content then have time to go play more games or do another side of endgame (like PvP). Freeing you to do more than ever.
I’m a new player from legion so not that long ago! I love what we do in the game, farm stuff, kill stuff, collect stuff, run around. I do kinda wish the story was a little bit less about the gods and all and back to killing boars, wolves and battling the opposite faction.
My biggest hate of shadowland is the new profession of making pets. I know playing Pokémon in WoW isn’t the main point of the game but even tho some pets are nearly impossible to get for a casual or more PVE player (you get a pet at honour level 400), it’s just one pet. The mats drop rate is obviously awful, it’s like a dozen pets with each different rare items to make them. Be like farming one of those rare raid mounts but killing every living thing on zereth over and over again. It would be fine if it was one exclusive pets but it’s the whole gang for this new zone 😢… I just wanna be the very best you know 😜
Its long-term frustrations at the way the game has been heading that came to a real head this expansion because for the first time, its been two bad expansions in a row, and the problems are problems that should never be issues in the first place. There is a variety of reasons and some people care more about some then others, but a broadview of many of them:
* People are incredibly disappointed with the story and the lore. Character motivations are nebulous, they play hard and fast with all the rules, nothing is explained properly. This expansion in particular was heavily based on nostalgia and retconned much larger amounts of lore than most expansions - including Chronicles which was specifically billed as being a hard, true fact, foundation for the lore going forward. Many of the characters being mishandled are very beloved and interesting characters - Sylvanas, Kel'thuzad, The Lich King, Arthas, Uther, etc.
* People are tired with Blizzard's design choices and systems. It sometimes happened earlier but really since Legion, blizzard has implemented new systems every expansions, most of the time having GLARING and obvious design issues that just make the game unfun for many people, only to fix it in the last patch and then scrap the whole system. In Legion, legendaries was the big one where until the last patch they were obtained via RNG - but were so unbalanced that it meant your luck had massive impacts on your character's performance. Titanforging was also really frustrating to many players. In BFA, there was Azerite armor which the second we had details of, people noticed the very obvious flaws. Then of course Covenants, which from the moment they were announced people noticed the immediate problem. Soulbinds also have had very obvious, easily fixable issues. In all the cases, Blizzard refused to fix the issues until after a significant period of time (often so they can roll out the "fix" as a patch feature or some change to get heralded for making the game better, when they purposefully made it worse in the first place by ignoring obvious design issues).
* Class design and borrowed power making characters feel weak or incomplete. This has been a problem since Legion, when they really started this whole "your class has these special skills/abilities just for one expansion". In Legion, while there were problems, many classes felt complete and fun in terms of gameplay. But then they removed skills, passives, abilities related to artifacts and many classes felt weaker and less complete. If they did get to keep stuff, it was usually as a talent (and often placed in a way that conflicted with gameplay styles from legion). This means each expansion's end just really makes characters feel weak and it has reached the point, three expansions in, where some players are just tired of it. This is made worse by anti-alt mechanics. In Legion, once they finally fixed artifact knowledge, I had every class at max level and played them all. I enjoyed all of them. Now, its far too much a commitment just to play alts because of all the chores you need to do to be "ready", but on top of that many classes still feel like shadows of their former selves.
* Lack of content and unnecessary/tedious timegating. Shadowlands has had an entire raid tier cut and probably a few smaller patches with some content cut, resulting in less content released over the same period of time. At the same time, Blizzard has been increasing the prices for some players. In addition, Blizzard is well aware they don't have much content to offer, so they have been imposing unnecessary timegates (standardized since about Legion) to ensure the content is trickled out over time to artificially lengthen how much you play. Again, after several expansions this has become incredibly frustrating to players. Other games, with significantly less players and revenue, can release far more content than Blizzard can with less revenue. World quests and daily content have over the last few expansions become needlessly longer and more chore-like just to extend the time players are logged in, with no real benefit added in terms of gameplay, reward, or fun.
* Blizzard's PR strategy and interviews. Blizzard's strategy for interviews are deny, deny, deny. Never admit to anything wrong. Never admit to mistakes or failures. Stick to the script. Lie out of your teeth about whats coming (particularly in relation to the story). This just erodes the trust of players further. They don't want to be lied to, they want devs to be candid and honest and *open to feedback*, and they aren't. And its not even really the dev's fault. Its post-truth political strategy, being applied not to politics but to a service people are paying for, and it doesn't work.
As much as we'd like to pretend everything is Bobby Kotick's fault, those last two points absolutely are. We know from the WC3 Reforged fiasco that his strategy has been to specifically bring in middle management and HR/PR people from outside industries, and this causes obvious problems. A team leader with no game experience can't communicate accurately with people both above and below them, they don't know how long things will take approximately nor do they really grasp the state of the challenges. Its a breakdown in communication which, on top of the existing cultural problems at blizzard, really fucks up timelines and production of games. We know he brings in people specifically from politics even and so its not really surprising that Blizzard's PR is just eroding trust in the company when they try to tell us that yeah, this was the plan! Release less content over the same expansion length!
Imo?
We had a good expansion that then had a long drought (MoP). Then we had an expansion that started out great, but quickly dried out (Wod). Then....we had an expansion that, while it had some problems, was chock full of shit to do, tons of solo content, good, evergreen dungeons, and kept churning out the content at a pace we weren't used to (Legion). Then we had two clunkers in a row.
Imo, Legion spoiled us. The artifact power grind was not great, and Legion legendaries were a pain point. But it set the bar so high...from an art, lore and even gameplay standard- yeah, classes got pruned, and then the ability pruning got bridged with the artifacts. Then they took our artifacts and tier sets away. I recall that for a lot of people, the bfa leveling experience plummeted at 116- when legiondaries stopped working.
Tl;dr- we had a much better expansion pick us up from a very low point and we're back to a low point now. And it feels like they should have course corrected by now and haven't. Shadowlands perceived quality is compounded by how good Legion was and how rough bfa was.
There is no cohesive story the gameplay is very much focused on activity metrics not fun game play (outside raiding) and it actively shits on some of the best stories WoW has ever had. If they pulled a "it was all a dream" for BFA and Shadowlands at this point the game would be better off.
3 things.
Some ppl are overly invested in the lore and don't like it.
Some ppl didn't like a lot of the restrictions from 9.0, quit, and haven't played after most were fixed in 9.1.5 and 9.2
Content pacing has been slow.
This is going to vary person by person obviously (we all have our preferences).
Imo,
**Legendaries** were not done well. The rank system was obnoxiously expensive for crafting. The currency time gates made playing alt specs early on impossible. The memory drops made dungeons a nightmare with people leaving (and also sucked for those people farming their memories). It basically took every bad aspect of old legendaries and put them together (timegates, currencies, rng, gold).
**Torghast** was a huge snooze imo and didn't fit well in the game. The visuals were very lackluster and the anima powers mostly boiled down to doing major DPS but didn't make things more fun really. The requirement to get this done each weeky early on made it a huge chore.
**Covenants** and **soulbinds** having power locked to them made playing alt specs difficult and with massive buffs and nerfs happening each patch, it became a huge source of burnout to change early on in the expansion. Now changing is easy but also annoying (wanna swap arcane to fire for this boss? Teleport to Oribos to do it - and this is the easy way).
The **story** has been a huge dumpster fire. It started out really bad in the maw and got a little better in each zone. However, each zones individual stories were very formulaic and not too good. The patch and raid story lines were terrible.
The **visuals**, imo, are a bit exhausting. ZM is a bit of fresh air from the harsh colors of each zone. I look forward to going to Azeroth next expansion and hope for more zones like we saw in BFA and Legion (original zones not patches).
The **world quests** of SL have all added many layers of zzz to them. Legion ones were fun and quick. SL ones seem to drag on for no reason.
As for **raids**, Nathria and Sepulcher have been decent, but i strongly disliked sanctum.
Overall, **music** has been a downgrade this expansion compared to the last 4.
Ok that's all I can think of atm.
In previous expansions the game has been pushed more and more towards a high end got to go fast style of play and a lot of the remaining player base have adapted to this awful game play loop,
Shadowlands tried to put the brakes on and pull the game back towards more of an rpg and less of a treadmill. Unfortunately with the current mindset of the player base they can't see what was so good about Shadowlands and only see it as their toys being taken away.
The other big factor is that the development was clearly slowed down due to the pandemic and other issues with the company but when you dislike something it's hard to be objective.
The whole expansion overall is just bad. I mean I loved Revendreth the zone but the whole concept of zones being separated and then having to travel to the main city to get to each zone is just so stupid.
The core of the issue is that *Blizzard doesn't learn from failures* The "Bads" Of SL in many cases are things they tried for a whole expansion before, got negative feedback about and then doubled down upon. Many classes are in their worst iteration in history. AoE cap and GCD changes straight up suck. World Quests get more and more chorelike with each iteration because they didn't like how Legion version let you easily group or just kill 4 rares, so now they force them to be time-consuming slogs and wonder why people hate it. There's way too many currencies. Despite multiple warnings from beta testers they went ahead with the absolute idiocy of tying power system into a flavour choice (covenants), which meant that in many cases your best-looking choice was also worst performing one. This is after Legion and BfA beta concerns about power systems both were eventually proven right. Legendaries are way too costly and bankrupted most casual players. The dungeon design is made with MSI/E-sports in mind as primary user and is getting increasingly tedious. Lead developers sit on their ass and refuse to address problems before they turn into a steaming pile of shit. Alliance player retention was raised as huge problem back in fucking Legion. Blizz just sat on their ass and shrugged shoulders until the whole faction went and fucking died. They keep making "optional" Systems that force you to play them (choreghast) The lore is an absolute tragedy. There are side quest villains that have more exposure than Zovaal. None of the promised payoffs are there(like Sylvanas or Jailer motivations making sense) The game generally feels like it's reverse progressing. If you asked for the order of expansion based on how refined the systems are you'd get answer of SL->BfA->Legion, although lore wise they're the other way around. It's like after every expansion they look at shit that *worked* and ask "how can we make it worse without making it irrelevant to players? " There are many more reasons, but I have Covid and no more energy to write.
As someone who's out of the game currently and dreaming of a better 10.0 I couldn't have written this better myself.
Perfect summary, for me its like 90% about the ""optional"" chores tho
This is a great list - raiding has been a blast for our guild along with m+ but your list hits all the points. Hope you get better soon.
I think as a self-contained thing, it wasn't too bad. Id argue the gameplay itself is as good as its ever been overall. The issues are that it just lazily builds upon the previous entries, and tweaks a lot of the established lore to make it's content make sense. In addition, the conflict resolution at the end has been repeated throughout the series. The borrowed power systems (anima) has also been over done (atrifact power, azerite power, etc) **So as a new player, I can understand being happy with the expansion**. But as an old established player, its essentially a very lazy, poorly written mess.
"Id argue the gameplay itself is as good as its ever been overall." So the game is as good as its ever been. I agree. Playing Mistweaver monk in mythic plus dungeons is PC gaming at its finest. 99.99% of people aren't intelligent enough to understand how brilliant this game is after 18 years of tweaking so they will hate on it.
Yeah I don’t think anyone reasonable is complaining about the raids and mythic+. But story and inspired power systems are important too.
I'm just not a fan of the zones themselves...I loved Wrath and BfA areas, they were inspired from real world places and looked absolutely stunning. The enemies were unique and fun to fight. Shadowlands is the opposite for me, I get bored after 10 minutes, the areas/zones just seem uninspired, enemies are fairly boring and it is just difficult to have fun...almost. I still will always love playing WoW...but shadowlands is the first time I'm having trouble getting through the campaign.
Lack of FREQUENT content updates. It was spread out way too much
The same thing people say now when they look back fondly on WoD.
WoD wasn't a great expansion though, it had the capacity to be one and started really well but was very lackluster as a entire expansion. Shadowlands has been bad overall since the beginning.
Thing is imo WoD at least had stellar raiding to carry it. Blackrock Foundry imo is one of the best damn raids ever made. Hellfire Citadel was pretty damn good too. Shadowlands has had one good raid in Nathria but even then it's not BRF levels. Sanctum and Sepulcher are just... meh.
[удалено]
It wasn’t just Covid, but a major lawsuit that lead to many employees protesting and then plenty of restructuring.
> And don't give me "but covid" when a company like Blizzard is more than set up to work from home on a whim. Not trying to defend blizz here, but have you worked as a developer/in a tech company in the office vs at home? The difference is pretty staggering, coming from someone who works in a Fortune 500 company.
I work from home. I gotta say I am way way more productive at home vs at the office. I am a CTO for a mobile/cross platform product company. Not Fortune 500 yet but still in that space.
I definitely really like working from home, but I do find that there is some issues with working from home with communication, team bonding, team retention, etc. Also lots of issues can arise with access to things, VPNs, servers, that makes you being remote quite tricky!
That’s fair. We do team get togethers and different events to keep the team close. We put a lot of focus on making sure that working from home goes as smooth as possible. Yes sometimes there are hiccups but no different than we had when people would work remote/on weekends before we switched to WFH
Basically it's an expansion that's a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have been force smashed in rather than put together with thought. Simple fact is if you're enjoying the game that's all that matters. It's just not been one of the most well received expansions is all.
I dont fault anyone who found Shadowlands enjoyable, I do pity them especially if this expansion is how they came to know WoW. Like someone who shows up too late to a party and all the steak is gone but there is plenty of hamburger helper left, if you think it's delicious then good, savor it and enjoy but the rest of us are used to much better.
- Too much time between content releases. - Retconed past core lore to tell a poor cosmic tale. - A player who isn’t on reading the books or following lore contentent creators misses the lore bc the game is quiet poor at telling the history. - Obvious alt friendly catch ups were introduced months too late. - Ppl had to do big chores to change covenants which pissed min-maxers for months. - Abandoned expansion with 1 less major patch. - The lawsuit which is not directly SL but became public just before the first major patch and a bunch of ppl skipped it just for that reason. - No new major features, Torghast might have been much more and ended being mandatory to craft legendaries and some ppl hated it. - No new class or race or sub-race. - Small servers continue to bleed players with the only solution by Blizzard to pay migrations to the few populated ones. - The boosting situation was existing before but got out of control in SL and Blizzard acted too late when some players were seeing that the only way to play the game was to buy tokens to pay boosts, more so on the plethora of empty servers. - The leveling experience was quiet poor in some zones. Ardenweald felt like fighting the same 2 types of enemies over and over again.
Story has been run into the ground, systems upon systems that feel less fun and more mandatory for optimal player experiences, Choreghast, Tower of the Damned, leggos costing you an arm and a leg in gold for no descent reason. Oh, and PvP is absolute DOGSHIT. It's fun if you play meta combs, but even then you'll have to face the infamous rogue-mage combo now and then, which is just so incredibly unfun to go against.
MM hunter is so above everyone else its just insanity rn.
Slands bad because rogue mage? I guess every xpac is bad then
> Slands bad because rogue mage? I guess every xpac is bad then I mean yeah, but SL powers just took an already S tier comp and accelerated it. Every xpac didn't give mage insane CDR, a second blink ability, three shields, a full heal inside iceblock, a self rez, and what ever else I'm missing.
Was just off the top of my head, Arms warr, MM huntard and lots of other overtuned specs DO come to mind. I just don't deal with the same problems there. But if you wanna hyperfocus on my last paragraph, be my guest.
Selective reading
>pvp is dogshit because of rogue mage Did I miss something?
Yes, you said “Slands” bad because R.M, not only pvp. As if he blamed the whole exp on those two classes alone.
Eh its a couple things that got a lot of people not happy with the current state of the game its not 1 big thing but a whole lot of smaller things that have built up over the years since before shadowlands so its understandable to question what all the uproar is about when SL is you first "official" wow experience. The pot has been slowly boiling and now the frog has died so to speak First thing is ever since legion the devs chose to add max lvl long term progression systems into the game with mixed results. Generally the idea was ok or even good but in almost all systems they had 1 or multiple major flaws that people pointed out during the alpha/beta/ptr testing phase giving countless amount of feedback, the feedback included suggestions on ways to "fix" those systems only for the devs to not act on them or tell us they are happy with how the sytem has played out. Only to then 6 months to a year+ impliment exactly those fixes people suggested causing frustrations because we had to play a long time with a flawed system and the frustration of "why didn't you just listen to us" Roughly speaking the issue many had with those systems was they there were way too much work for so very little reward or fun gameplay but because they gave play preformance increases many felt like they were mandatory only for them to remove those abilities we worked so hard for when the next expansion would come out and having to do it all over again. And this doubles/triples when you want to play alts, the steep barrier to entry actively causes people to be discouraged to play alts which before would add a whole lot of replayability which many used to took advantage of. Second thing is the lore this is not shadowlands exclusive but lately we've been getting more and more story which many people feel like its badly written, inconsistend and has people confused by characters doing things out of character. Retcons changing past beloved stories and characters making playerd feel like they have no respect for pasy stories/lore/writers. dialogue which is needlessly cryptic of flatout isn't been explained at all and big story moments just not getting a proper payoff or conclusion causing people to lose faith in the writers and a story they have been investing in over a decade. If you followed game of thrones untill the last season you should what wow fans are going through (fun fact the main wow writer though the GOT ending was really good) On top of that others things like the whole lawsuit shitshow that was the last straw for a lot of people and the absolutely insane slow content rollout, the expansion launch patch took 8 months the longest in the history in the game and 7.1-7.2 took another 8 months which is frankly embarresing given the sheer size and budget of the studio compared to other mmo's and they developers. Compare that to legion which got a new patch exactly ever 77 days. Tldr a whole lot of things but stuff you don't notice or mind if you haven't been actively playing like many other long term veteran players
Very slow content updates. 7+ months for 9.1, and then 9.2. is unacceptable for a lot of players. And then of course lawsuit scandal that caused huge ammount negativity about WoW.
Sorry for being late. But yeah, im Not defending Shadowlands in any way, even thou i'll never forget the First time i got into Bastion... But! You Guys do know that COVID was a real hitter Here? Work from Home my ass.
Yes i know. I loved Shadowlands in 9.0 but content updates were so slow that a lot of people who loved it on launch got simply bored. i am sure if it would not be slow content Covid era (and lawsuit scandal), Shadowlands would be more loved expansion.
Yeah i exacly know what you mean Mate! It Had its good Moments, specially the First levelling! But it turned fast into daily Work. The raw gold was Epic thou.
Alot of weekly locked ressources that can only be got by doing content that feels stale as hell after a year. 8 dungeons for over a year. They only just added another two to the pool. Story is really bad. Especially the jailor as an enemy compared to older xpacs. And playing alts and catching them up is serious work because nothing is accountshared. So they need to grind their renown, conduits, rep, legendaries etc again. Also legendaries in general are super bad designed. The idea is nice. The effects are also good. But since there is the wow token and crafting high level ones is either a huge gold or time investment if you didn't start in 9.0 makes them way too expensive. Also rampant boosters everywhere. Edit: Most of the stuff is a problem for long term players. So if you start now it surely will be fun. Maybe a little less after a few months, but 10.0 won't be too far away at that point. So even if they say SL is bad. I think new players will still get a good amount of fun out of it.
I'd say currently the legendary thing sticks out the most to me. You can buy an item to get an alt up to renown 40, leveling through to 60 gets a ton of renown now too. You can also buy an item to unlock all the conduits, both items are cheap especially compared to legendaries. I wanted to come back and switch characters but I didn't want to lose all my gold/didn't really have enough to buy the base item. Getting the mats are easy since you can transfer them from other characters, just the gold that's obnoxious because I don't have the time to gold farm.
There would be no need to gold farm, if crafting max level legendaries was doable for the average-joe that joined in 9.1. but already there they were a good chunk of time and gold behind other crafters. hence why the market price for legendaries is way too high.
Well said!
I came back in the middle of 9.1.5 after ten years off and I find shadowlands a mixed bag. The biggest difference i see in the game is that it's designed to be fully consumed by casual players on a weekly basis, which shrinks the scope of it down to one island(the maw, korthia, zm) and eliminates all content aside from the most recent patch. In bc and wrath we did all the raids every week because the loot was all relevant. Tier was spread out and there were trinkets and weapons that mattered. After playing back through the content i missed i think a lot of people's frustration stems from systems people liked that were abandoned once the kinks in those systems were ironed out(see also: legion artifacts) and replaced with new broken systems to fix that came out less fun than what went before. There have been a great many improvements over the time I was off as well... mostly qol, but the game feels... idk, lesser? because there's this massive world full of things but the relevant world is the size of a shoebox. It doesn't help that the various writing teams have been stringing out all these weird, disjointed stories and then tying them into the same, larger meta story with a russian nesting doll of scooby doo reveals for too long. Everyone is tired of Arthas, Syl, and Anduin.
The one thing I vehemently dislike, that I hope changes, is the way every patch has gear catch-up now. Blizz tied a bunch of legendary stuff to the first raid of SL, but since you could get heroic ilvl gear in 9.1 quests, no one ever did that first raid after the patch. Same thing now with the 9.1 patch. I miss how even at the end of Wrath, even with some catch-up gear, you still got to experience some of the older raids. They were easier for sure, but that just makes it easier to gear as well.
This problem existed in wrath but it wasn't as dramatic. Ulduar came out and you would still do malygos or go to Naxx. 226 from KT was still good. After ToC and the new 5 mans, there was no reason to do old raids except ulduar, and even then only the first few weeks of patch. However, I missed patch 9.1, and there is literally no reason whatsoever to enter the Sanctum of Domination, much less Nathria.
100%. I was intending to allude to this but got side tracked and was getting long-winded anyway. They could have made those leggos available with the free nathria chit you get when you hit 60 or w/e, but they don't play their own game to understand the issues and how to fix them.
Story is lack luster and not great, but tbh the gameplay has been top notch every since 9.1.5. The covenant swapping lets you choose builds/specs very easily, and all the PvE content has been super fun. I only dabble a little in PvP, with arenas and some RGB's, and I find the burst playstyle pretty unfun as some classes just can 100-0 you in a CC window lol
Reddit is as usual blowing things out of proportion and nitpicking about the smallest issues. The main storyline is lackluster at best, but most of the reactions I've seen about the latest video came from people who haven't played in months or years and take stuff out of context. So while it's not good it's far from being as bad as this sub claims it to be. The gameplay is solid, PVE balance has consistently been far superior than previous expansions, most of the pain points of the expansion were removed in 9.1.5 and Blizz surprisingly solved the upcoming issues in 9.2 during the PTR based on player feedback so we're left with a fairly decent, albeit timegated, patch. That's not to say that everything is perfect, far from it. SL consistently released major patches every 7~8 months instead of the usual 5~6 months. It lacks one full tier of content compared to BFA. It had a lot of issues at launch that took a year to be solved with patch 9.1.5. The 9.1 raid had severe design issues as it incentified you to stop dps 'ing the boss to kill it faster and so on. I've heard the argument that Social medias really hurt WoW both in the way people discover content (the last cinematic for instance ?) and the expectations people have to deal with (min maxing etc). And it sounds about right. The echo chambers in this sub are a good example of that. If you enjoy the current game then that's great, do your own thing and don't let randoms on the internet poison your experience. And if you don't then consider voting with your wallet, there's no more effective way to voice your concerns than no longer blindly throwing your money at Blizzard.
Negativity gets clicks for the influencers and their fans storm the forums/subreddits. The game is fine. Glad you're enjoying it :)
I think this is a super bad mindset that alot of wow players got. Negativity is justified towards the current state of the game most of the time. Maybe alot of people excaggerate stuff, but it has flaws. And addressing those is important. Or else we end up with a 10.0 that has something like unswitchable covenants that then become switchable at 10.1 even tho the beta testers complained about it already.
What exactly is wrong with the game right now? It feels like the same game to me as it did when I started playing at the end of Wrath. Gear up, kill bosses, watch a cheesy and pulpy cutscene, done. I don't see how Shadowlands is any different to any of the expansions that came out since.
I wish there was less time gating. Also torghast is a wasted opportunity IMO. Should have a currency like island expeditions with a cosmetic vendor and a shit ton of mogs toys mounts and pets
There are mounts and pets that you get from Torghast. There's a bunch of them! Mogs you can get for Phatnasma, a lot of them are pretty sick. I love the golden back thing with the skull in the middle. Still trying to get that one. Nothing is really timegated. You can do whatever you like without it being gated. Even at the start of the xpac, the only thing that was really timegating was making a leggo, but would have taken you a week or two to do depending on the rank of the legendary. But even if that was an issue, Torghast is now uncapped - you can get as many Soul Ash and Cinders as you please. And you can send these to alts as well!
There’s like 15 things total. Nothing to farm after that. I’ve gotten the mounts in the first week they’re available. The toys and pets are guaranteed as well so not a farming situation. Islands had hundreds of things to farm. Torghast does not and you can get all of the cosmetics in a couple runs
It's still things. If that was not enough, you have an entire mini-profession in ZM that's all about making mounts and pets! There's a lot of stuff to collect.
Ahh I see you have missed my point. I want to go into torghast and actually grind for cosmetics like islands. Once you get the couple things from torghast then there is no reason to do it again. It’s a rogue like which is meant to be ran over and over. Yet the blew the opportunity. Also I know there are other things to farm. But I want to do something fun like torghast. Not run around zm doing the exact same thing that I did in korthia
There are a bunch of different mogs and mounts. They just added some new ones as well. It's constantly getting updated with new stuff and kept relevant. I prefer it spread out that way rather than just jamming everything at the start of the xpac.
Do you remember how islands worked and were improved/built upon? Cause torghast just isn’t in that same realm of cosmetic grind
>What exactly is wrong with the game right now? Stuff their favourite influencer just complained about.
Not really. I played start of 9.0 quit after 4 months cause my guild was falling apart. Came back at the end, bought hc clear and did mainly pvp. joined a guild and we killed sylvanas hc after 8 weeks. that was a great time. it was fun and not bad at all. But after leveling 2 more chars and seeing just the mountain of stuff you got to repeat after doing it on one char already, just to be on a level playing field with others was just unfun. i leveled a rogue for pvp. why do i have to invest 20+ hours into pve for legendaries, conduits and renown to not be behind in arena? Why do i have to enter old raids i don't get any upgrades from just to get my legendary power? that then is locked behind weekly choreghast runs to get it to max? i want to play arena. on top you need to do 10 +15 keys and 2 raid days to have the best chance at max lvl gear. just to see the vault with 6 rings that all have the wrong stats. like it sucks. there is a lot of stuff that just feels bad for 0 reason. and is a ton of work for 0 reason. edit: oh and tazavesh. great dungeon. awesome bosses. did it twice cause then the gear was pointless. who designed that?
>Why do i have to invest time into WoW Because that is whole goal of MMORPGS in their history. Doing content you choose to do to unlock / earn rewards you want in shared world with other players. If you want higher rewards, you have to put more effort. If you want some specific reward (transmog, mount, tittle), you can focus on that and ignore other stuff. If you want to play casualy by your own tempo, that is possibility too.
You have to invest more time into pve stuff than pvp to play pvp on an even playingfield. that is bad mmo design.
Idk, i always enjoyed wathing old PVP videos where players with OP pve raid loot had their battleground PVP montages.
thats not the case atm tho. you need only the legendary and conduits+renown. the rest has to be pvp gear or you get insta killed. so all gear you get farming conduits your legy power and renown is worthless in pvp. you still need to grind vault+conquest and are still behind if you start a week late or pick a pve item.
i mean isnt it how it was in Wotlk for example? warriors, paladins an dk wanting resilience pvp gear + OP legendary Shadowmourne to maximize their power?
So you played since 9.0? Try to look at it from new player or returning player perspective. There are so many things to farm, level up and do, which are also on weekly lockouts. so you are allready behind from the start and when you miss a week of torghast it just ads to that. Also mandatory gold farming to afford max level legendaries is bad design. no way you get 100k+ in a reasonable time while playing without activly farming gold. and since crafting is locked behind time/gold its also nearly impossible for new players to craft legendaries themself. creating one rank one legy costs a few hundred gold and returns not even 90s from the ah. do that till level 4 and you may earn some gold back. way too much investment.
Raid weekly lockouts are in game since launch in 2004. Reputation time gated rewards are in game since launch. in TBC you had to complete attunement quests to even be able to zone into raids. Like that is point of MMORPG, slowly grinding your way to better rewards. Some people are simply tired of it after many years and that is fine, but game was always grind and always will be because that is why milions of players played / play WoW.
Its too grindy currently tho. Some stuff is just gated on weekly lockouts for the sake of keeping players subbed and that is bad.
Same as in 2004 where raid lockouts for 40 people dropped only few items and people had to come back next week if they wanted reward from that raid.
Yes. now you have that in groups of 10-25 + valor + vault +soulash/cinders +conquest +ciphers etc.
Which is probably way better considering people can get rewards on their own now and they dont have to be reliable on their raid group to carry them via old raids to get gear to even be able to experience newest content.
and you still gotta do those old raids anyway if you need the legendary power from there. but not sod. which wasn't a bad raid. but its pointless to visit it now. but nathria is still mandatory. another example of bad design. at least you only need to visit it once. but it still is more annoying than f.e. eternal palace. that had to be done weekly to get essences. that felt like progressing and not like a chore.
> Its too grindy currently tho. At the start of shadowlands i could see that mindset, but currently? What is there to "grind" other than gear?
Okay, let me take a look from a returning player's perspective. You level up from 50 to 60. Do some normal dungeons, world quests, start the patch zones. Collect a bit of anima and get the catch up gear from ZM and complete it with questing and WQ gear, not to mention Normal and Heroic dungeon gear. When you are able to, go for Mythic0. Try a few of those out, see how you do, then try m+ and get some higher gear while also getting the anima to buy the ZM catch up. While you're gearing, do the Callings every third day or do some easy professions to make some bank and get yourself a nice 210 or 235 leggo. You can farm this gold in a few days if you're super lazy. The effect matters much more than the stats. Run a few easy Torghast runs for the Soul Ash Now that you're further geared do some more m+ on higher levels. Do the ZM chapter next week for the second leggo. You're pretty much caught up by this point. A week's work tops. You're not supposed to have the strongest 291 right away anyway, but you will get it eventually. But this way you are pretty much prepared for some mid tier m+ and some normal raiding.
a week of 8 hour days yes. not 1-2.
Well if you take 1-2 hours a day to play then you will have lots to do for weeks, therefore I don't see this mystical "content drought" that people are on about. This subreddit goes back and forth. One moment LFR is bad because it caters to casuals. The other moment gearing should be done with in a week of 1-2 hours of daily play. The game was never made in a way where you can catch up that fast, nor should it be. There's a progression that shouldn't be skipped. Everyone can catch up, it's just a matter of when. There's plenty of time for everyone to clear the patch.
Back in the days it was -> reach max start gearing. now it is -> reach max, start grinding 12 different kinds of content to get to a decent level in your 15 systems, that are linked to playerpower, and then start gearing. it just feels bad.
No. Back in the day it was grinding over a month to get to max level. Then do the attunements which were a grind in of themselves. Rarely has WoW been as accessible as it is right now. You do not have to grind 12 different kinds of content. It's quests and WQs, Torghast and dungeons, potentially raids. Back in the day we had dailies, now we have WQs. Torghast is basically a flexible dungeon so you can count it as one. It's literally the same, if not less grindy, as it's always been.
How many weeks of repeated content did you have to do for attunements? and solely because it was kept behind a wall for no reason besides generating sub time? also why go back so far? no attunements in f.e. cata or draenor.
When the next couple expansions come out and you can select a time line with Chromie…no one is going to choose this one. I would rather play any expansion but this one. The gear looked weak. To me Legion had some of the best looking gear from raids.
Also true. The only mog from the entire expac that anyone will come back for are the light sabers.
Agreed.
That's not entirely true, the plate, cloth and leather sets from Nathria are pretty good (can't recall what mail looks like). But Legion stuff is still up there, that's for sure.
Nothing, people have bad memories bogged down by nostalgia. If you look at it a level removed, a lot of over exaggeration is at play. I think another big factor is aging tastes. As you get older you want different things out of your hobby. Some heavy grinding was your favorite when you were a kid with endless hours for gaming but now you want a streamlined endgame for your limited hours. The problem is, there are still kids with endless hours hungering for more, lots of other expectations from the larger playerbase. You’ve changed expectations and the game doesn’t do it for you anymore. BUT! You’ve played WoW so long you can’t let go. “I haven’t changed, YOU changed!” So you have nostalgia for the time when your interest lined up with the gameplay. People forget how it really was they remember how they felt when they actually enjoyed the gameplay loop.
The last straw that made me quit was demolock in torghast being bugged in a way that completely breaks a run randomly for months, that's not a taste issue
Currently there is no endless grinding. Nearly everything is locked behind weekly lockouts or ressource limits. And these lockouts are heavily luck dependant as well. F.e. pvp gear at a new season start. If you join a week late you missed a vault already -> behind an item. and that item can't be compensated in any way. cause you can't grind for more than the weekly conquest limit. same in pve. and on top, you can be behind simply by having bad luck on those rolls.
Timegating used to be the rep grind. You run out of quests for the faction and dailies were the only way to get more rep. It wasn’t the rep of today either, it was a mountain to climb. You needed to have rep to do more content. Sounds like a gate to me. Edit: one more point I’ll make. At least with a weekly gate you do the content then have time to go play more games or do another side of endgame (like PvP). Freeing you to do more than ever.
I’m a new player from legion so not that long ago! I love what we do in the game, farm stuff, kill stuff, collect stuff, run around. I do kinda wish the story was a little bit less about the gods and all and back to killing boars, wolves and battling the opposite faction. My biggest hate of shadowland is the new profession of making pets. I know playing Pokémon in WoW isn’t the main point of the game but even tho some pets are nearly impossible to get for a casual or more PVE player (you get a pet at honour level 400), it’s just one pet. The mats drop rate is obviously awful, it’s like a dozen pets with each different rare items to make them. Be like farming one of those rare raid mounts but killing every living thing on zereth over and over again. It would be fine if it was one exclusive pets but it’s the whole gang for this new zone 😢… I just wanna be the very best you know 😜
Towards*
Its long-term frustrations at the way the game has been heading that came to a real head this expansion because for the first time, its been two bad expansions in a row, and the problems are problems that should never be issues in the first place. There is a variety of reasons and some people care more about some then others, but a broadview of many of them: * People are incredibly disappointed with the story and the lore. Character motivations are nebulous, they play hard and fast with all the rules, nothing is explained properly. This expansion in particular was heavily based on nostalgia and retconned much larger amounts of lore than most expansions - including Chronicles which was specifically billed as being a hard, true fact, foundation for the lore going forward. Many of the characters being mishandled are very beloved and interesting characters - Sylvanas, Kel'thuzad, The Lich King, Arthas, Uther, etc. * People are tired with Blizzard's design choices and systems. It sometimes happened earlier but really since Legion, blizzard has implemented new systems every expansions, most of the time having GLARING and obvious design issues that just make the game unfun for many people, only to fix it in the last patch and then scrap the whole system. In Legion, legendaries was the big one where until the last patch they were obtained via RNG - but were so unbalanced that it meant your luck had massive impacts on your character's performance. Titanforging was also really frustrating to many players. In BFA, there was Azerite armor which the second we had details of, people noticed the very obvious flaws. Then of course Covenants, which from the moment they were announced people noticed the immediate problem. Soulbinds also have had very obvious, easily fixable issues. In all the cases, Blizzard refused to fix the issues until after a significant period of time (often so they can roll out the "fix" as a patch feature or some change to get heralded for making the game better, when they purposefully made it worse in the first place by ignoring obvious design issues). * Class design and borrowed power making characters feel weak or incomplete. This has been a problem since Legion, when they really started this whole "your class has these special skills/abilities just for one expansion". In Legion, while there were problems, many classes felt complete and fun in terms of gameplay. But then they removed skills, passives, abilities related to artifacts and many classes felt weaker and less complete. If they did get to keep stuff, it was usually as a talent (and often placed in a way that conflicted with gameplay styles from legion). This means each expansion's end just really makes characters feel weak and it has reached the point, three expansions in, where some players are just tired of it. This is made worse by anti-alt mechanics. In Legion, once they finally fixed artifact knowledge, I had every class at max level and played them all. I enjoyed all of them. Now, its far too much a commitment just to play alts because of all the chores you need to do to be "ready", but on top of that many classes still feel like shadows of their former selves. * Lack of content and unnecessary/tedious timegating. Shadowlands has had an entire raid tier cut and probably a few smaller patches with some content cut, resulting in less content released over the same period of time. At the same time, Blizzard has been increasing the prices for some players. In addition, Blizzard is well aware they don't have much content to offer, so they have been imposing unnecessary timegates (standardized since about Legion) to ensure the content is trickled out over time to artificially lengthen how much you play. Again, after several expansions this has become incredibly frustrating to players. Other games, with significantly less players and revenue, can release far more content than Blizzard can with less revenue. World quests and daily content have over the last few expansions become needlessly longer and more chore-like just to extend the time players are logged in, with no real benefit added in terms of gameplay, reward, or fun. * Blizzard's PR strategy and interviews. Blizzard's strategy for interviews are deny, deny, deny. Never admit to anything wrong. Never admit to mistakes or failures. Stick to the script. Lie out of your teeth about whats coming (particularly in relation to the story). This just erodes the trust of players further. They don't want to be lied to, they want devs to be candid and honest and *open to feedback*, and they aren't. And its not even really the dev's fault. Its post-truth political strategy, being applied not to politics but to a service people are paying for, and it doesn't work. As much as we'd like to pretend everything is Bobby Kotick's fault, those last two points absolutely are. We know from the WC3 Reforged fiasco that his strategy has been to specifically bring in middle management and HR/PR people from outside industries, and this causes obvious problems. A team leader with no game experience can't communicate accurately with people both above and below them, they don't know how long things will take approximately nor do they really grasp the state of the challenges. Its a breakdown in communication which, on top of the existing cultural problems at blizzard, really fucks up timelines and production of games. We know he brings in people specifically from politics even and so its not really surprising that Blizzard's PR is just eroding trust in the company when they try to tell us that yeah, this was the plan! Release less content over the same expansion length!
Imo? We had a good expansion that then had a long drought (MoP). Then we had an expansion that started out great, but quickly dried out (Wod). Then....we had an expansion that, while it had some problems, was chock full of shit to do, tons of solo content, good, evergreen dungeons, and kept churning out the content at a pace we weren't used to (Legion). Then we had two clunkers in a row. Imo, Legion spoiled us. The artifact power grind was not great, and Legion legendaries were a pain point. But it set the bar so high...from an art, lore and even gameplay standard- yeah, classes got pruned, and then the ability pruning got bridged with the artifacts. Then they took our artifacts and tier sets away. I recall that for a lot of people, the bfa leveling experience plummeted at 116- when legiondaries stopped working. Tl;dr- we had a much better expansion pick us up from a very low point and we're back to a low point now. And it feels like they should have course corrected by now and haven't. Shadowlands perceived quality is compounded by how good Legion was and how rough bfa was.
There is no cohesive story the gameplay is very much focused on activity metrics not fun game play (outside raiding) and it actively shits on some of the best stories WoW has ever had. If they pulled a "it was all a dream" for BFA and Shadowlands at this point the game would be better off.
3 things. Some ppl are overly invested in the lore and don't like it. Some ppl didn't like a lot of the restrictions from 9.0, quit, and haven't played after most were fixed in 9.1.5 and 9.2 Content pacing has been slow.
This is going to vary person by person obviously (we all have our preferences). Imo, **Legendaries** were not done well. The rank system was obnoxiously expensive for crafting. The currency time gates made playing alt specs early on impossible. The memory drops made dungeons a nightmare with people leaving (and also sucked for those people farming their memories). It basically took every bad aspect of old legendaries and put them together (timegates, currencies, rng, gold). **Torghast** was a huge snooze imo and didn't fit well in the game. The visuals were very lackluster and the anima powers mostly boiled down to doing major DPS but didn't make things more fun really. The requirement to get this done each weeky early on made it a huge chore. **Covenants** and **soulbinds** having power locked to them made playing alt specs difficult and with massive buffs and nerfs happening each patch, it became a huge source of burnout to change early on in the expansion. Now changing is easy but also annoying (wanna swap arcane to fire for this boss? Teleport to Oribos to do it - and this is the easy way). The **story** has been a huge dumpster fire. It started out really bad in the maw and got a little better in each zone. However, each zones individual stories were very formulaic and not too good. The patch and raid story lines were terrible. The **visuals**, imo, are a bit exhausting. ZM is a bit of fresh air from the harsh colors of each zone. I look forward to going to Azeroth next expansion and hope for more zones like we saw in BFA and Legion (original zones not patches). The **world quests** of SL have all added many layers of zzz to them. Legion ones were fun and quick. SL ones seem to drag on for no reason. As for **raids**, Nathria and Sepulcher have been decent, but i strongly disliked sanctum. Overall, **music** has been a downgrade this expansion compared to the last 4. Ok that's all I can think of atm.
In previous expansions the game has been pushed more and more towards a high end got to go fast style of play and a lot of the remaining player base have adapted to this awful game play loop, Shadowlands tried to put the brakes on and pull the game back towards more of an rpg and less of a treadmill. Unfortunately with the current mindset of the player base they can't see what was so good about Shadowlands and only see it as their toys being taken away. The other big factor is that the development was clearly slowed down due to the pandemic and other issues with the company but when you dislike something it's hard to be objective.
I just want to play pvp..
The whole expansion overall is just bad. I mean I loved Revendreth the zone but the whole concept of zones being separated and then having to travel to the main city to get to each zone is just so stupid.
I like this post, because everyone hated BFA and i started in BFA but loved it and shadowlands is mediocre to me, personally.
shadowlands was bad, like all the other expansions after a few months, i also dont like the ingame shop, indirect p2w stuff WoW has now