Last time I played WoW was over 8 years ago. I quit in s1 MoP cus of IRL and haven’t touched the game since then.
As a returning player, I think Shadowlands game design is awesome. There’re things that bother me but overall I’m having a lot of fun in PvP.
What I like about SL:
- I like that end-game content keeps expanding with every reset. Makes me excited for the upcoming weeks when we unlock the full potential of our classes/specs. Keeps the game alive and in constant change.
- I like that arena queues are fast because there’s a lot of people playing. I set a goal to hit 2.1k and I just achieved it which I’m happy about (was tough though catching up on 8 years of changes to classes/specs after such a long time and relearning how to play).
- I like Covenants, Conduits and Soulbinds.
- I like the PvP gearing system, with a few caveats.
- I love playing MM hunter with Kyrian Covenant.
- I actually like Torghast (except when it was insane buffed that one time). Although I’d love more fun Anima Powers than simple cd reduction or flat dmg increase.
- I really like the idea of crafting Legendary to increase my class/spec powers.
What I don’t like about SL:
- LFG experience has been bad. I don’t like that I spend a lot of time until I find a group to queue rbgs/arenas with. A lot of people are toxic and give up too easily after one loss or a couple of mistakes.
- I don’t like farming rep in the Maw to access certain thing (upgrading my soulbinds, extra sockets in gear). It seems like it’ll take forever to get there given I hit the Maw a couple of times a week.
- I don’t like that I can’t lvl an alt because of the insane amount of honor I need to farm to start having fun. I’m dreading lvling an alt, and I don’t think I’ll be able to do it.
- I don’t like that certain classes/specs are so overrepresented in Arena, mainly holy paladins. I would like to play against rdroods, mw monks and rshamans more. I also don’t like lazy spell mechanics that have no counter play (mainly Ultimate Sac hpala).
- I don’t like how M+ rewards so bad I gave up on them after a few runs and only doing PvP now. World Boss drop rate is also so bad. I haven’t gotten anything from it yet.
- I don’t like that I can’t access all conduits from conquest/honor pvp vendor. There are Conduits that I may never get to try or get a good ilvl version of.
Overall I think Blizzard did a great a job, and I think if they continue to do more tweaking they may just make this expansion perfect.