Given my love for Sylvanas and the lore surrounding her and the Jailer, that’s quite an insult coming from me Blizzard,
But to me it’s not so much the story, I will keep playing for the story line, but gameplay wise, it’s time to concede that Shadowland was a flop, first there was the laggy launch on some servers, though we can be forgiving of that as that usually happens every expansion,
But the fact is that WoD went through a similar cycle to Shadowlands, EVERYONe loved WoD to begin with, and Shadowlands was also very popular to begin with, but once people finished the covenant quest chain, they weren’t interested in farming anima to unlock more features of their covenants (I am still doing this, though I concede its probably too time consuming for most people),
I think we need to have a look at the things of WoD that worked and this video I linked below more or less nails it, I waited until today to share it so people didn’t think I was making an April Fool’s joke when the video came out.
Basically the things that WoD got right was…
1-You became more powerful while you leveled up in the zones, and zones had unique perks that helped you out, I can’t tell you how much that small army you could summon in the first zone saved my weak butt on each new alt, and by the time was powerful enough to do Gorgrond I could survive most alts
2-WoD was the best time in wow to make gold, it was when timewalking started, and Timewalking is about the ONLY feature that’s carried on through expansions
3-There was none of that annoying Azerite progression system we had in BFA, nor the Legion artifact weapon progression which is probably why it didn’t take long for people to be smashing the Emerald Nightmare in no time, the good thing about WoD is that it didn’t take anything away from the game.
4-Garrisons actually weren’t that bad, in fact I enjoyed them, only problem is they were TOO useful, with the mine/herb garden etc.
5-Mythic+ was not yet a thing, you could do things in Challenge Mode so if you wanted to be elitist you could go for it, but it wasn’t part of progression, now the problem with this of course was that soon this meant dungeons didn’t mean a thing in the early patches, it wasn’t until much later in the expansion that they just let you use valor points instead without mythic+ being a necessary thing for people to do.
This was one of the biggest stuff ups that turned wow into what it is now, because had the just kept the valor system in place all through WoD, maybe they would have just let mythic+ stay this optional challenge mode thing on the side rather then a mandatory progression path, there’s too many people these days that like mythic+ as an alternate way to gear, it’s fractured the player base.
Conclusion:
The fact is, if they hadn’t cut the Shattrath raid or whatever, WoD would have been the best expansion ever, but now Shadowland is going down a similar path, this expansion had SO much potential, while it is true that Sylvanas is the central point of the expansion to me, here is the truth, Shadowlands has SO much potential to be incredibly awesome and this is why…there are SO many dead people that I’d like to find out more about…
Are we going to find out what happened with Dezco’s family, Genn Greymane’s kid, Tirion, Varian, etc?
Also is Draka ever going to meet Thrall?? I think we deserve an answer honestly.
Trueeeeee lol