Gameplay wise I dont like all the systems. Anima+covenant order hall (or whatever your main base is called), souls from the maw and stygia, torghast/soul ash, renown, conduits/soulbinds, more mission table. It’s so much to keep track of. For the most part I don’t hate any single one by itself. It’s just the combination of everything seems disjointed and convoluted.
I’m not necessarily wishing for less content. I just wish it was more streamlined or something. Or maybe it’s the fact that I feel it’s too much to keep up with in a single week. It’s too much of a chore to do everything but it feels too punishing to fall behind.
Beyond that I’m very disappointed with the lore. The fact that almost none of the afterlife lore presented in shadowlands doesn’t fit with the lore already present in wow’s various cultures and belief systems is very boring and lazy to me. It also makes Shadowlands feel extremely disconnected from the rest of the game lorewise.
In addition to basically wasting/ignoring all the lore for things like ancestor worship, light worship, old god/loa worship. They’re also messing with a bunch of the lich king lore. I feel like they basically rewrote the origins of the lich king and scourge to try and make their new character/big bad seem cooler by riding on the coattails of Warcraft’s most iconic villain. They couldve connected the Lich King’s origins to the Shadowlands in a lot better way IMO. As is they’ve basically turned any demon involvement into a footnote. Messing with such a recognized character and piece of lore it’s kind of made the whole thing seem hollow to me.
The story itself, while not bad IMO, is not very compelling. I don’t hate Sylvanas and actually quite enjoyed her character before she got written into a fairly generic villain in BfA. However, im very bored of the story revolving around her. I don’t hate her so I don’t feel any connection or excitement by our “hunting her down”. However I am quite tired of her cause she’s basically just been doing the same thing on repeat since legion and it’s gotten very old.
Obviously most if not all of this is very subjective but these are the main issues I have with shadowlands personally.
My response to a similar thread. To add a bit to it there are changes I’ve enjoyed about Shadowlands, such as the vault system vs M+ chest and the return of pvp currency (though there’s improvements still to be made) as well as the return of valor. Overall though there’s not enough there to out weigh the negatives IMO