I still have PTSD from Shadowlands. I actually cringe when/if needing to go there for whatever reason. It caused a lot of pain.
Not because of the locked covenants, though having some convenants better for one class and then suddenly the worst for the same class was beyond annoying.
Travel was absolutely awful. Going from one region to the next, always through Oribos was painful, not to mention patch day bugs of going from Oribos into – limbo with dozens of other players on a regular basis.
The Maw. Enough said.
ZM: Hated this zone with a passion and still do. It utterly removed immersion and was purely for the meta. Hated the stupid idiotic platforming puzzles. The stupid grinds that REQUIRED materials from raids or dungeons, so were unobtainable. Hated the stupid psychotic birds. The only thing it was good for was gearing alts, if you could grit your teeth and ignore the rest.
The individual zone stories were good. I liked them. Best thing about SL in fact because that gave you four different storylines you could pursue with 4 different characters.
The overall story: I think enough has been said.
Many of my guild quit the game at this point and have not come back.
And taking away the skip for alts was another idiocy I do not understand.
I’ve never been one to tell anyone they’re wrong for personally enjoying SL. I’m certain there are a few out there. But lines like:
Ion apologized for it because it did objectively push (or alienate in his own words) players away from wow. It pushed so many players away from wow into other MMOs that FFXIV had to literally stop selling the game because their servers couldn’t handle the massive wow refugee traffic.
I’ll say it again, if you or anyone else personally likes SL that’s fine but it did so much damage to wow overall.
If people enjoy DF or TWW, more power to them. I’m not playing Retail at this time so it doesn’t bother me one bit. Well maybe a little, obviously more games to play is strictly better than less games, but if Retail players are happy, as long as I keep getting SoD they’re entitled to whatever preferences they have about the current state of the game and direction it’s going.
I just really think it’s cringe when people have to insist I have to like the thing they like and dislike the thing they dislike - it’s not happening, you can’t make me hate Shadowlands.
I wasn’t around for a long spell, at least 10-12 years, and SL was my first time back, so there was so much learning curve, that what the top players, or long-time players, has issue with wasn’t even on my radar. But for immersion and art direction, it was a great expansion. I liked the covenants too, kept me engaged.
After going back to some expansions I missed, the one I might have disliked immediately was BFA. That’s the only one that gave me an ‘eww what is this?’ reaction. When I ran it on a horde alt recently, it was better. I hate Boralus.
I did not like Korthia, at all, but trudged through it. Also, maybe Final Fantasy was just a juggernaut that was going to be unstoppable no matter what wow expansion came out at the time.
Also just want to point out OP was originally comparing Shadowlands to Warlords of Draenor, that seemed to be his main focus. I don’t think he was trying to dog on War Within in comparison. That would be me.
Also, as far as Ion being an apologist, well that’s just human nature when something doesn’t go over well for whatever reason. I don’t know the whole history numbers each expac, but it’s natural he’d say that.
Maybe SL is just a scapegoat expansion for something that was going to happen anyway (the Final Fantasy exodus.)
Dude… I’m so mad that we are not going to get cool stuff like that anymore simply because people were bullied by mobs in the Maw or had suboptimal parsing on some fights due to Covenant locking.
Revendreth is S-tier and Blizzard is just shutting the door on it because of some game design issues + FF14.
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I said I didn’t care about Retail’s direction but you got me thinking about that art and it’s just so good in Shadowlands and it’s a shame we won’t see more like that.
It is interesting to see this take becoming more and more prevalent. I guess everything improves a little with age, but I have no idea how anyone puts SL above any other expac for content/quality except maybe BFA. For me, BFA was just as bad but the Old Soldier cutscenes were so damn good that they’ll always be a trump card.
It really wasn’t. Final Fantasy got a massive exodus that was bewildering and baffling to its playerbase at the time. It had unprecedented growth and is now experiencing decline. Final Fantasy does not have broad appeal. It’s a niche game.
The line graph that Blizzard showed in GDC shows Shadowlands was at an equivalent point to the low of BFA with Classic shoring up its numbers. Without Classic, Shadowlands can clearly be seen as WoW’s lowest point in history. Lower even than BFA by pure numbers.
You can like the art direction in SL. I liked Revendreth and Maldraxxus. I’m one of the few people who liked Torghast just to play with powers and do roguelite dungeons, despite how flawed it was in implementation. SL, by the numbers, almost put WoW in the dirt.
The issues with SL came from massive internal company drama that came at the same time as COVID sent productivity to a screeching halt. But WoW had been suffering before that under Afrasiabi’s rule.
My issue with Shadowlands was the fact that you had to play it 40 hours a week just to heroic raid.
I checked out of the story in BFA after Bolvar Fordragon came back, invaded Light’s Hope Chapel, killed a whole bunch of red dragons, resurrected champions of the Alliance and the Horde, and even let one of his death knights break into Undercity, but we had to pay attention to some faction slap fight instead. And then we didn’t talk about the Lich King at all for the entire expac, while apparently he was around just raising death knights. So Shadowlands having a bad story didn’t matter to me. If the Lich King coming back didn’t matter to the writers, I don’t really care about w/e Sylvanas was doing.
What did matter was another expansion of grinding AP to get the power you needed to do a tier of raiding that honestly isn’t hard enough to warrant the time spent, AND they dropped the loot you got from things. After doing a day of heroic dungeons and getting NO loot, and experiencing four wipes on the first boss of necrotic wake because the DPS didn’t want to kill the adds and kept dying to them, I looked at the rest of the chores I had to do that day and decided that was it. I wasn’t paying money to have a second job.
Of course the expansion is fine NOW that you can go back and you don’t have to do all the chores for raid power.
honestly while I think Legion has better high points than DF, DF has better low points than Legion.
Legiondaries were a mistake. AP sucked even back then. But there was so much good about the expac that I forgave it even though it was the expac that led to BFA and Shadowlands.
