I always liked Shadowlands… I felt like I was one of the few that did. Torghast was getting a bit old but by that point I didnt really need to do it anymore, and later on they nerf how much we had to farm it to a point where we barely had to do it at all.
I enjoyed it a lot more than BFA thats for sure.
Going back to Shadowlands now is like going out to a cleaned up spill area and asking what all of the anger was about.
Of course it looks fine now. It wasn’t fine playing through it at the time, and Blizzard’s internal legal problems threw more fuel on the fire that was already going pretty strongly.
There are always contrarians who will tell you that it was a hidden gem that the playerbase unfairly dogpiled on, but Blizzard itself has acknowledged how badly Shadowlands flopped. Make of that what you will.
I love that people continue parroting this nonsense, as if most of the playerbase just blindly followed streamers or YouTubers away from the game despite it being a “good expansion”.
People quit playing during Shadowlands because it sucked. General metrics reflected that and Blizzard has acknowledged it.
I loved everything about Shadowlands but the game systems at the time they were relevant. I didn’t like covenants, I didn’t like Torghast, and I didn’t like how the Maw functioned.
The zones? The story? I actually liked them all and I felt like everything else about the expansion was interesting and well done, even though a lot of people didn’t think that.
It was the same for BfA for me too. Everything great, but the Heart of Azeroth and other systems sucked.
WoW is 10000x times better for me now in DF and TWW because they did away with bad systems that ruined the expansion.
And once again you can’t challenge a thing I said. All you can do is hurl insults.
It must be frustrating. After all that positive reinforcement from the few thousand who ran the anti Shadowlands echo chamber, out of millions of players, suddenly you are faced with real facts that you just can’t challenge.
Some people are of the opinion that Shadowlands was a bad expansion, others felt it was perfectly fine. Just about everything was disrupted by the COVID pandemic including the Shadowlands release. Those are facts.
The rest, opinion.
End of the day, the flop that was Shadowlands forced Blizzard into a design shift. You don’t have to like that that is the case, but that is exactly what happened.
Shadowlands was not some hidden gem that a majority of the playerbase liked. It had incredible initial momentum that died pretty quickly and was one of the lowest points Retail has ever seen, if not the lowest.
We get it. I’ve (on another character, mind you) had these discussions with you before. You can’t just accept that Blizzard has acknowledged it was a flop of an expansion that was generally disliked for half or more of its lifespan. There’s always a reason, there’s always a justification, “oh that was just a fringe group of Blizzard employees”, “people are sheeple for streamers”… You’ll never stop defending the absolute pile of steaming crap that was Shadowlands. I don’t get why, but you’ve dug your heels in pretty badly on this one.
Everything you’ve said is irrelevant.
The majority. As confirmed by everything said about SL when it was current and confirmed by the game director himself.
SL was overall poorly received.
SL drove players away.
it stopped being campy and started being more childish and soppy with the only real conflict being with characters who are comically unreasonable/evil with no motivations beyond committing evil for the sake of it
Rating expansions is tricky, because you gotta take into account how the expansion was
-As current content
-As non-current leveling/farming content
-What has become a trend, at the end of the expansion where Blizz lets you do whatever the heck you want or finally “fixes” a lot of the growing pains that were considered features during said expansion.
In that sense, I’d say, in the way that Azerite Essences and then Corruptions ‘fixed’ BfA, Zereth Mortis fixed a lot of SL. But, raids aside, 9.0-9.1 were a rough time for WOW. I did/do like SL dungeons way more than DF dungeons. I like TWW dungeons a lot more than DF, not as much as SL.
Sure but the blame placed on so called “systems” is not the only factor or even the strongest one. It was a minority complaint that the developers chose to cater to for reasons that have nothing to do with subscriber loss.
They were forced into a design shift because they lost so many players not as a result of specific feedback from shadowlands.
No Sl did not have worse sub retention. What are you basing this on? WoD is objectively the worst expansion. Having stuff to do is miles better than HAVING NOTHING which is the story of WoD. People were bored from the begining of WoD as it offered NOTHING for non raiders to do at max level. Legion corrected this. Now you may not enjoy those things but that’s a you problem and offering everybody else more is OBJECTIVELY better.
They weren’t forced into a design shift because of specific feedback, and I didn’t say that.
Nowhere in that did I say there was a specific reason or that focused feedback was why the design shift happened. Please at least try to read what I say. It was a flop, and as an expansion it was pretty costly in terms of player retention.
Blizzard themselves provided a few reasons they believed the playerbase reacted so negatively to the expansion, most of which were derived from both focused and general feedback. The design shift, that happened as a response to a massive downward slide in player engagement with Retail as a whole because of Shadowlands.
It’ll always stick with me that WoD had both the highest and lowest active sub count in WoW’s history up to that point. Hard to say if that’s still true though, since the cliff that sub counts fell off of in WoD directly led to them shifting away from sub counts when reporting on WoW’s revenue and health. 
I absolutely despised torghast, I hate that my class had its legendary tied to it. I honestly just couldnt get into shadowlands, lasted three months before I quit playing it.
I loved Torghast, but people who didn’t enjoy it being forced to do it for access to Legendaries ranks pretty highly on the list of stupid decisions in Shadowlands, lol.
I actually enjoyed Torghast at some level
Until they did their “balance changes” to the powers where warlocks and monks continued to be god mode OP but they nerfed the strong DK combo
The big changes that came after Shadowlands were Dragonflight, Follower Dungeons, Delves and Story Mode Raids. All that was a design shift caused by Shadowlands?
Well I saw Ion in a Preach interview say that they had learned their lessons from Shadowlands. He seemed to indicate that they focused too much on story then went on to talk about his usual topic, high end game content.
So that was what was wrong with Shadowlands? They offended the RWF and HOF people? And the solution was Dragon Flight and Delves?
Blizzard will always say that current expansion is the best time to play, even when it clearly isn’t.
Nothing can ever change that Shadowlands did to the lore, to the whole story basis, to the feel of WoW what Sylvanas did to Teldrassil. Burned it to the water-line, disrespected the inhabitants, left many of them scarred, left a permanent gaping wound in the world, destroyed a beautiful place with real history.
It ended any hopes for consistency and decent story from the WoW devs, it closed forever the door on Chronicles actually setting a decent foundation for the WoW lore that respected the original basis with a few necessary retcons which we were told would be foundational from then on and built on. That was easily, laughably brushed aside and tossed in the trash. It shredded one of if not the best story in the game which was the whole Arthas tale and that includes Sylvanas and her intersections with it.
So sure if the story is just set dressing and you don’t really think about what it looked like last week or 4 years ago and don’t care about consistency or being able to write a character that exists in that world or get in the headspace of that world. If you never cared for WoW as it existed from vanilla through at least Legion, the story, the feel, the fact that that game at that point in time had devs who despite their many faults were at least smart enough not to try and write out how the afterlife works and then show it to players and it’s ridiculous. If for you the game is just rushing through mythic dungeon content or whatever it is you do and retcons don’t bother in the least, living world doesn’t bother, beloved stories you cared for don’t matter, then sure it’s something that can be looked at through the lens purely of systems and problems with those of which there were plenty such as the disconnected zones, grinds, etc.
But to an RPer, to someone who started the game in BC which was another misfire from a lore health perspective but more easily siloed away from the rest of the story (as after all it’s pretty much been ignored while SL’s developments have been center-staged in the main story ever since) it was and will remain the worst expansion ever.
Even if they create an expansion in future that blows up Azeroth and transports all our characters to an outland-like fragmented floating remnant of it and completely wreck the class balance and just for giggles make Anduin, Sylvanas, Alleria, Khadgar, Thrall, Jaina, etc all dreadlords all the way down, that expansion STILL wouldn’t be as bad as Shadowlands and would have the redeeming quality of throwing out the rest of the already burnt and ruined lore with it and holding up to scorn anyone still pretending to care about story. I would respect them more for doing that and showing their contempt to their defenders and holding them up to scorn than what they’re doing continuing to build on the tumor that is SL lore which needs like all tumors to be excised.
“Dragonflight” as a block big change without breaking down what happened during or leading into it is essentially you not acknowledging most of the changes that actually came with Dragonflight or TWW.
It’s okay. I expected you to be disingenuous.
Blizzard typically doesn’t like to admit to past faults or gives them a passing glance at best. Shadowlands was bad enough for Blizzard or key figures within Blizzard to deem it necessary to actually admit to glaring errors that were made.