I really need to run some of the dungeons. It’s been weird playing solo for so long now.
It’s awesome that you like SL.
Lots of us really don’t.
People don’t have the same tastes. I actually enjoyed much of Cataclysm (though I can see many flaws). We don’t all like the same stuff.
I think SL is just BfA part II but with less charm in most of the zones. I think once again the devs put way too much effort into big new ideas that THEY find interesting at the expense of what most players want. I think they are woefully out of touch.
I find SL absolutely unengaging and unrewarding to play. I don’t know what else to tell you. It really does seem like the worst content Blizzard has ever released, to me. WoD was deeply flawed but at least some of what they finished had the charm WoW always brought to their games. BfA had allied races and some cool zones, and cool cities. What does SL have? Ugh.
That’s my take. You obviously feel differently, and I am glad some people are having fun. I’m just not.
6 Likes
For me, having covenants locked and conduit energy kinda killed it for me. I’d swap conduits for PvP, m+ and specific raid encounters on my lock. After a few weeks I ran myself out of conduit energy. I was so frustrated I just kinda dropped PvP and m+, so now I just raid log.
1 Like
If you want my personal stance, I do not like SL because of the PvP approach.
PvP, in my mind, is a competitive experience when there are competitive rewards. See elite sets, tabards, titles, season specific mounts (gladiator mount), etc. I do not mind gear mattering in PvP. What I mind is that rating is attached to item level. Already, for people who seek to climb and be better, they’re fighting people who are either already better, or are similarly climbing and learning, and that’s fine. You should have to fight people of varying skill levels.
But I do not think people should also be put in the position where they have to fight people who have higher item level than them because of the competitive ladder. If you look at any other competitive game, the point behind them is that the people involved have the same tools, health pools, etc. Overwatch is a good example. Imagine if a diamond Winston wound up in a game with a Plat Winston, but because diamond is a higher rank, that Winston has 50 more HP and does 10% more dmg. The Plat Winston is automatically disadvantaged, and is fighting even more of an uphill battle than he would originally considering the Winston in Diamond should be better based on SR / skill alone.
That’s WoW’s problem. And I hate it. Gear should mean nothing in arena. It should be template based like it was in Legion, that way people who wanna PvP can hit cap off rip, and begin working to their rewards.
4 Likes
oh god i use mine so rarely i actually forgot it existed.
this expansion being billed as the “most alt friendly expansion ever” was the biggest scam I’ve ever seen.
god literally what was the night warrior thing. It’s like Blizzard knew the night warrior was a dud half way through writing the Night Fae story and like 4 quests in it just randomly pivots to Bwonsandi and we forget about the wrath and sacrifice and yadda yadda of the Night Warrior.
8 Likes
This is kind of a big thing to me. Once you have gone from this life to “adventuring” in the next, how is anything in this life ever supposed to top that? I feel like the WoW writers painted themselves into a corner by going this route like the D3: RoS writers previously did.
I don’t have SL, but from what I have read, it sounds like the WoW afterlife is just another “continent” or “planet” where the same kinds of stupid conflicts that the living world has just continue on; there really is no “resting in peace” for the dead. That’s not a premise that is interesting to me at all.
2 Likes
Those who do dungeons, they find M+ very interesting. Many find M+ the main reason they stick with WoW.
Those who are bad on dungeons, of course, they have no interest on it at all. They make excuses or whatever. They keep on denying that they are missing a big part of the game. They are really missing a lot leading to content-drought.
It is true. The soloist like you is asking for high quality level loot just by doing easy stuffs like dailies. They hate Mythic+ Valor becoz it is not the same valor where they get a currency to buy from a vendor… to buy welfare epics. THey have no idea that such welfare epic system are never introduced at the start of the expansion… These catchups would pop out on succeeding patches. BTW, 9.1 would have a similar system like mana pearls to buy Benthic. Dont expect 9.0 would have it.
For me, it’s just not fun. I’m tired of dealing with the player base. Tired of tradechat being in fire every time I log in. Tired of 0 effort put into the story or the rpg side of mmorpg. More power to you if you still enjoy the game. Just don’t have to settle, there are other games out there
4 Likes
Systemlands is designed for a target audience that doesn’t exist.
12 Likes
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SPEC balance is complete garbage
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Specs received almost nothing
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Content drought
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Pvp gear locked by a rating system that’s even worse.
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Covenants… just bad. Lgtbq getting stuffed down ppls throats, bad story telling, nothing worth the Anima grind
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Alts. Terribly alt-unfriendly once you get to 60, and maw intro. Once you’ve done it once, it’s garbage.
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Terrible loot drop rates. Maybe 2 pieced of raid gear with bad stats in 4hrs? No ty. GV is just as bad! I can’t even keep track of how many times I’ve received a repeat piece of gear.
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Time gating. I only have so much time to play, so I aint wasting it on renown.
God so much more I can’t keep up with.
.
6 Likes
I enjoyed BFA’s story and setting a lot. SL is a bit less interesting but I got back into professions like never before, at least for the first couple months when business was good. I plan to come back when there’s new content.
Or if it does exist, it has fairly low expectations and is quite easily pleased.
And I dont mean that to be insulting but it just seems the way it is. If you dont mind mediocre on many levels, it probably plays great for you.
3 Likes
I want to do this in 9.1, I started the xpac with near 900k, but it got wasted in the first few months of frivolous purchases - I’ve been pretty poor the last few weeks
Curious what would be a good money maker in 9.1 without too much outlay of funds to level a profession in preparation
- The fact that they’re batting 0/4 when it comes to Systems (Covenants, Conduits, Legendaries)
- The fact that they still haven’t provided the PvP system that everyone’s been suggesting (WoD)
- The fact that they didn’t have tier sets ready on release
- The fact that they made an AoE cap because they didn’t like how people were playing in M+
- The fact that they lowered the loot drops
- The fact that with the lowered loot drops, this enhances the issue when it comes to trading loot
Personal takes
- Server Choice doesn’t matter
- Guilds don’t matter
- The game feels like it’s a single player experience
- Most of the game feels like it’s built to keep you playing rather than the reasoning that you play is because you’re having fun
- The open world doesn’t make me want to explore but rather get my chores done and sit AFK in Oribos.
17 Likes
This is all sadly true and only mentions some of the problems. If there were just that many, it would almost be fixable. At this point, I’m starting to believe it is unfixable.
Compare the new zone (what we’ve seen) to, say, Isle of Thunder in MoP. It makes it feel like a completely different game.
1 Like
Yeah I just…it’s just never going to be the same again. I truly miss MoP and feel like it was the last time on my realm that my server choice truly mattered. PvP was so much better back then.
I didn’t want to make the laundry list any longer tho. I could make a 2 hour video on all the things wrong with WoW.
1 Like
I have issues with the story. You can’t call me “champion”, “maw walker”, or any of the other things made to make you feel like your character is special in an MMO.
Blizz has lost sight of what makes an MMO story special: a community (faction) coming together to further the power of your respective faction, not each individual character being the center of the universe.
It’s also odd that everyone’s character is involved in these cosmic conflicts. Even BFA, a story that was meant to be more grounded, ended up being about a huge cosmic threat. I think that WoW could do well to ground itself a bit more and focus itself more on Azeroth and day to day happenings.
9 Likes
I can only speak for myself and I hold some pretty unpopular opinions but I dislike shadowlands for the following reasons:
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Selling Carries: The ads are annoying, the group finder is full of nothing but spam and blizz refuses to allow addons to filter names and do nothing to resolve the issue despite it being against the rules to advertise there. Its dried up the pug community. It devalued an achievements people once worked to attain such as KSM or AOTC, you can no longer point to these and say I cleared this content and am therefore competent as people simply assume you were carried. As a cynic I feel its done to push wow token sales to make up for lost subs.
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I despise being forced to chose between aesthetics and performance. The meaningful choice was one of the most idiotic arguments I’ve ever heard any lead dev make to justify something like this. A choice like this is not meaningful its aggravating.
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Being lied to by devs when we were told that there was a ripcord that could be pulled if covenants didn’t work out.
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Valor usage being locked behind achievements making it useless as a way to get upgrades while doing content and instead limiting it to players who don’t really need it unless they have been unlucky with a few specific drops or trying to upgrade their bis items. I didn’t think I’d miss warforged (not titian forged) but I think the game needs some way to help less skilled players advance.
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The vault continually dropping the same item as the one you have a legendary equipped to. This has gotten to the point were I don’t even look forward to the vault, tues mornings are filled with disappointment. Worse if you fill out multiple vault slots it can and does drop the same item slot. Spent 20 hours grinding M+ for a decent chance. Here is 6 cloaks.
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The decreased drop rate of items in M+ hurt early season and when you combine it with the ilvl drop it left M+ as the most unrewarding of the three end game avenues.
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I’m not a fan of the raid personally. The first boss should have been one of the later fights and most of them end up with explanations that take longer to explain then the fight does. What ever happened to a handful of mechanics. Just because something is complicated doesn’t make it better.
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PvP is getting stomped on by mythic geared players were you have no chance to fight back. Not to mention the amount of carries being sold once again in rated.
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There are fewer M+ dungeons then ever and little in the way of new affixes and the ones that were included are (storming) are more painful then ever.
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Aoe cap was one of the worst ideas ever implemented (right after removal of flight.) Instead of learning how much you can pull you are limited to 4-5 mobs which makes every run the same unless you run with mages then you could just pull as big as possible and combust, doing more damage in 30 sec then I will in the next 8 pulls. Ah good times.
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Major design decisions are made based on what .5% of the best players who are willing to do anything to become world first might do at the cost of how it inconveniences your average player.
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WQ’s take forever often with multiple steps.
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Then insanely long grind to get anima. If you were a collector and wanted to collect all 4 armor types across all four covenants it would take years.
I can go on and on but if there was a decision that was made that wasn’t done by the art or music teams then I probably dislike it for some reason. The game is and has been headed toward a different type of player for a long time no and if it were not for recently finding a new guild that has great people I wouldn’t be here.
15 Likes
It basically boils down to four major issues:
Weak Story
Weak Content
Weak Rewards
Arbitrary Systems
Story
The story of this expansion is… bizarre. Not only in concept or execution, but even in how we participate in it. Shadowlands is a story that’s come completely out of left field with basically no basis or connection to anything else that’s come before it. It rewrites our entire understanding of the Warcraft universe’s cosmology, while at the same time refusing to explain itself clearly. It takes us to the afterlife, which turns out to just be Life 2, Anima Boogaloo, and completely underwhelming. It leaves us feeling adrift and disconnected from the story because we have no investment in the places we’re going or people we’re interacting with, which is extra bizarre, because the entire point of setting a story in the afterlife should be to take advantage of being able to use long lost familiar faces, but we get shockingly little of that, even from the scarce handful of familiar faces we do encounter.
Instead the story chooses to repeatedly shunt us from isolated realm to isolated realm to establish a bunch of glorified rep factions full of new characters that are hard to identify and keep straight because Covenants are determined by personality and give their members new forms when their souls arrive, so they’re all using the same handful of character models and written from the same character archetypes with minimal distinguishment. These Covenant are supposed to be the main lens through which we progress the expansion’s story, except it ultimately forces us to choose only one to actually progress, so we only get to experience a quarter of the expansion’s narrative unless we repeatedly abandon our progress to start over with someone new, or raise a bunch of alts to progress through a campaign story that we can blow through over the course of a weekend.
We’re just bumbling around a bunch of floating sky islands doing basically the exact same fetch and murder quests we do every expansion for a bunch of people we can be pretty confidant we will never see again after this expansion because it seems unlikely that Shadowlands is going to end with the afterlife just chilling forever in our collective backyard.
Content
Two of the expansion’s headlining features, the Maw and Torghast, are horribly boring and unfun. The Maw actively punishes you for doing content in it, on top of already being full of annoying/frustrating mobs, and is a purposely large and spread out zone that you arbitrarily can’t mount in. Everything about the Maw is purposely meant to be annoying. Torghast, meanwhile, is a boring repetitive slog that’s nonetheless mandatory due to legendaries. Crafting is dead in the water, even with it being involved in the legendary system, since the sheer number of legendary items you have to craft to raise their level versus the plummeted demand means that its more economical to just buy your legendaries from someone else rather than raise your crafting skill to make your own.
Between all this and the shortness of the Covenant campaigns, this leaves very little to actually do at endgame but endlessly grind anima at a snail’s pace if you’re not interested in progression raiding, M+, or PvP. While every patch of every expansion has wound up at this point eventually, the stark lack of content at launch combined with the fact that 6 months in we still don’t even have a date for 9.1 yet is really exacerbating things.
Rewards
The rewards for playing Shadowlands started off practically non-existent, and have only improved slightly. For starters, we have anima as the new currency that 90% of the expansion’s content is based on and which was coming in at such a trickle compared to the amounts we need it in to actually do anything that Blizzard has already upped our acquisition rates three times, and it’s still underwhelming. Same story with PvE loot drops, which were cranked down so low at the start of the expansion that players would be lucky to get one piece of usable gear in a week outside of the Vault, which creates its entire own set of problems due to its drastic inflating of ilevel for M+ rewards, which make it so that if you’re at all seriously about progressing in M+, the Vault very quickly became your only possible source of upgrades.
Each of these situations have been addressed in some regard, but frequently in ways that aren’t what the playerbase is asking for, and which aren’t actually helpful. The latest boost to anima acquisition requires spending anima on upgrading Covenant features you may not actually care about, but the boost is so small that if those features weren’t something you cared about upgrading on their own, you’re actually ahead ignoring them and continuing to earn your anima at the lower rate. PvE drops were somewhat helped by the addition of Valor upgrades, but locking upgrade thresholds behind M+ achievements drastically reduces the system’s value to the people who most need it.
On top of being boring and unfun, Torghast and the Maw have basically no rewards for doing them. Most of the rewards for doing the Maw are upgrades to make doing the Maw and Torghast easier, but Torghast only matters for as long as it takes you to get your legendary as high as you care to, after which there is literally no reason to ever go back. Covenant campaigns can be blown through in a weekend, earning you a full set of gear that can be easily upgrade to just below normal raid ilevels, rendering any content below that threshold basically meaningless, and further exacerbating the content drought.
Taken all together, the reward structure of Shadowlands announces loud and clear that Blizzard does not respect our time.
Systems
The Covenant system sucks. No beating around the bush, it sucks. These are glorified rep factions that we are arbitrarily locked into just one of in order to artificially pad the expansion’s story out by forcing us to lose progress or level alts to see the other sides of it. They create choices that are not “meaningful,” but simply unfun, because they force us to choose between character identity and game power, and in the latter case, may even force us to choose between different types of content. This system actively divides players and encourages them to do less in the game instead of more because they tied significant player power to what should have been a purely roleplaying choice, and instead of responding to player feedback on this front, are choosing to double down on it with Covenant-specific legendaries next patch.
21 Likes
So true. I have not managed to get one single Legendary pattern beyond one level up. Not one. Not only do I refuse to spend the enormous amount of gold that would be necessary to make the items for them to end up as basically vendor trash, the idea of grinding out the mats myself makes my eyes cross with frustration. If there was ever a system designed as stupidly as this one in the game, I dunno what it is. (At the very least, if we could make the legendary base items and then deconstruct them for mats, we would get some benefit from them. Obviously this was too useful an idea to consider…)
Legendary crafting could have been a fun and interesting way to improve crafting with just a little creativity and innovation. Instead, they used it as yet another means of forcing players to either buy gold or spend time grinding mats. It’s all about figures to show the investor, nothing to do with making the game more fun.
4 Likes