I’ve enjoyed Shadowlands immensely although it is a huge time sink.
The Great:
Denathrius was 10/10–voice acting, storyline, heroic fight, I heard good things about the mythic fight, IMO he’s the highlight of the expansion. I especially love his voice acting in P3 when he’s getting mad that he’s losing, it’s just perfect. I also liked the fight more as I did it because even 8 weeks in I kept learning new details about how to do it better.
Sanctum has some good fights as well, I like Fatescribe-style fights that require lots of raid coordination and had immense fun coming up with my own strategy that didn’t involve the weakaura. (I listed the strat at the bottom*) Doubly so that I then refined that strategy over the course of a few weeks which is great gameplay.
I also loved Revendreth and Castle Nathria’s artwork, darker than usual for WoW but I liked it.
The storylines were very solid. I loved the Bastion Covenant Questline and there was a ton to do for the 9.1 questline.
In Mythic+ one thing I will also say is that the affixes COMPLETELY change the dungeons from week to week. It had a steep learning curve as a tank because Fortified Bolstering and Tyrannical Bolstering are totally different, but also completely different from Spiteful which is also different from Necrotic. It definitely adds a lot of challenge to the dungeons and is very effective at making the strategies dynamic.
The Good:
Overall I like the theming, artwork, and stories of Ardenweald and Revendreth. I’m also pumped to see how the story plays out in 9.2.
Mythic+ is in a pretty good place, there were no dungeons I dreaded and they were all within a pretty reasonable range of difficulty.
Healing design is good because I feel every healer has at least one weakness. Disc is light on single-target heals, Holy is almost purely reactive, Paladin’s only AoE requires clumps of players, I didn’t play the remaining ones as much but mistweaver I think is a little light on AoE as well, druids may also be light on single-target and have no damage reduction, and shamans I dunno (need the targets to be damaged?).
Tank design is also in a pretty good place from what I saw, they all have strengths and weaknesses and at a heroic raiding level I felt that a solid player behind the keyboard was the most important factor.
The Bad:
I did not raid mythic but I heard mythic Stone Legion Generals was just awful.
I have some issues with De Other Side. It’s too long. The mechanical wing is too visually jarring. The main sanctum is too sparsely populated. There are no teleporters out of the mechanical and troll wings. The way Hakkar works is kind of counter-intuitive with the adds. I don’t really like the party split for the Mueh’zala adds. If I could remove the dungeon from the game I gladly would. Although it does go to show that the other dungeons are quite good, Spires, Halls, Depths, Taza’vesh all have very good and consistent theming and decent boss fights.
I don’t particularly care for Sylvanas phase 2, it has some cool elements but I think the idea probably looked better on paper than it actually turned out. Maybe it’s just that the sense of urgency is missing because there’s so much down time dodging the first waves, summoning and crossing the bridges, the target dummy phase, etc. It just takes too much time.
This is a little specific to me but I do not like where healing priests are at right now. Discipline was fine in raids but I felt I was missing a big single-target heal in mythic+. As a pug raid leader I also had to switch off discipline because multiple discipline priests really made our weak areas even weaker, for example when there was no enemy to hit. This caused me to switch to Holy and although I like their toolkit maintaining Flash Concentration is the least fun I’ve had healing probably ever. But it’s just too good to not have.
Simultaneously Great & Terrible:
9.1 has a LOT of different power systems that slowly increase player power. But it’s also five hamster wheels to turn and very alt-unfriendly. There is:
–ilvl / Great Vault
----Raiding / PvP / Mythic+
–Legendaries / Torghast
–Codex Rep / Sockets
–Covenant Renown
–Conduit ilvl
–Domination sockets and Gems and Soul Embers
–Death’s Advance / Assaults as catchup
–Taza’vesh as catchup
So there’s a lot to do but doing it all takes a LOT of time, and that’s a big part of why I’m deactivating until probably the end of 9.2 or later.
Plain old mistake:
Drop rates on gear in SoD is clearly too low. I’ve been doing 9/10 for weeks, 4 mythic+ dungeons a week for months, did heroic Denathrius at least 8 times, and I literally did not see a set of shoulders drop for 4-5 months. That’s just insane and it hasn’t been that bad since vanilla honestly. I can understand making Great Vault a primary source of gearing as a design choice but lowering SoD drop rates to the levels they’re at is just too low.
For the future:
The big question I have is how long is the current model going to work? The game is incredibly polished after 15 years of iteration, but as someone that’s played off and on that whole period I don’t see a lot of changes from Legion to Shadowlands. Granted when WoW released in 2004 it was a game ten years ahead of its time. But for example the graphics weren’t even cutting edge back then and so for the game to stay relevant 15 years later it’s gonna take more than re-releasing Legion every 18 months. Blizzard is no longer the mid-sized company it was back then either so at a corporate level are they still going to be able to innovate and make hard choices to break things that work well in hopes of creating something even better?
Although I definitely feel the forums are a very vocal minority of players that hate the game (50% of players never even touch LFR let alone heroic or mythic raiding) I think some of the “QQ Blizz is losing MAUs” has an element of truth. How many subscribers does the game need to keep pushing out really high-quality content?
I don’t feel the game is ever going to die, as my buddy currently runs a very successful Ultima Online server and it’s 2021 lol. But there are some questions about how will the game be run / servers merged / factions balanced if the scope of the game significantly decreases.
So in summary I think a lot of things are going right, but since the video game industry is so constantly dynamic if WoW is going to stay vibrant there needs to be some bold gambles every expansion that win. And ultimately there may just need to be a WoW 2.0, as I’m sure there’s just certain features that can’t be implemented without a new engine designed in the 2020s. (Possibly with skill shots.)
*What I started with was for 2/3/9 I was putting 3 dps in groups 1, 2, and 3 and then telling them to do the inner, middle, and outer ring. If RNG was such that no one in a group had affinity, then the healers were told to be a backup.
I then tried modifying the strategy to putting one of the healers in each group which made it very very unlikely that RNG would result in a group with no affinities, but I didn’t quite like that as much because the healers are kinda busy in that phase to just run off and do a ring.
What I did this last week which I liked was that I put the tanks and healers in group 3 and told the tanks they had to do the inner ring while tanking the add. Then I put the DPS in groups 2 and 3 and told group 2 to do the middle active ring and then group 3 to do the outer active ring. This seemed to work pretty well as even though more orbs got eaten, the tanks are fairly well-equipped to eat a few and it actually helps the rest of the raid out more than you’d think. Plus the healers were no longer crammed in the door almost 150 yards from people doing rings which I think also helped a great deal. Plus as a tank when I finished my ring I was much closer to see what was going on and could help escort a late ringrunner.
Don’t get me wrong I would absolutely use the WeakAura in a raid with 4 rings active (16+ people), but one of my biggest gripes against the community is that people follow how-to videos too blindly and don’t use their noggins to adjust properly when a fight, such as this one, is VERY different for smaller raid sizes.