How so? It is no mystery that the 1% players have been handed everything this xpac while casuals got nothing.
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Whatever you say sweet cheeks
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What I like about SL:
1). They got rid of Azerite and Azerite Gear.
2). There’s slightly more variety in stuff to do.
3). Leveling alts is slightly better and there’s a bit less stuff that must be repeated.
What I don’t like about SL:
1). Content drought. (the last major content update was what, 9 months ago on the .0 release? lol. A smaller game, FFXIV, has had 3 content updates since SL came out and SL only had one small patch and drip-fed time-gated release of raid wings.)
2). Anima grind. (just give us more anima for our activities and that problem would go away)
3). The Maw Intro (this needs to be skippable on subsequent alts, seriously).
4). I-level scaling needs to be dialed back some.
5). The Maw Itself and the quests that force you to go there.
6). No craftable weapons at Lv60.
7). “M+, Raid, or Log Off” as there’s very little else to do (but still more than BfA).
8). You’re handed the best gear you’re gonna get without M+ or raiding within 5 hours of reaching Lv60 leaving you with nothing else to do until more content comes out.
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- (British spelling) Alternative form of draft in its various senses. quotations ▼
- (Britain) A checker: a game piece used in the game of draughts.
- (Australia) Ale: a type of beer brewed using top-fermenting yeast.
I think you meant “drought”? The only reason I bring this up is that I keep seeing people talk about a “content draught” and it’s starting to irritate me.
I think it’s hard to sum up because it seems like everybody has many different reasons depending on things they like to do in game. Maybe the take away is that every part of Shadowlands was messed up in one way or another, and we notice the things that are related to what we enjoy.
But, without a shadow of a doubt, for me, it’s this part that I quoted. I’ve never been an endgame player of mythics, pvp, or raids. I enjoy the casual stuff, having several alts and enjoying many different classes. Legion was perfection in that respect, being able to experience the story from many different perspectives based on your class. I even enjoyed BfA and never really understood why people hated it. I enjoyed playing both Horde and Alliance to experience all of the storylines from different perspectives.
I thought I’d have a similar experience with Covenants. I thought it’d be fun to have 4 or more alts experiencing the storyline and all the mogs and mounts that came with it, just like I did with Order Halls in Legion, and Factions in BfA.
But, that’s not what I got. I got 5 months of non-stop Anima grinding on one character, to the point of extreme burnout. I have never experienced such a terrible grind in the last 15 years of me playing WoW. The Anima grind was beyond extreme, and it broke me. For the first time in my WoW “career,” I unsubbed. The launch screen tells me I have 18 days left out of my 6 month sub. I’ve been faithfully subbing with 6 month subs since they’ve been introduced, because I knew I would be playing WoW. There was no doubt in my mind.
Now, I’m just kinda mad at myself that I spent 3M gold on mounts several months ago when I was enjoying the story of Shadowlands. Because now, all I’m doing is grinding out gold to buy tokens so that if I ever want to come back and see what’s going on I don’t have to spend my own money to do so.
But, as the quote says, the Anima grind is how you make people unsub. I barely started my first alt after finally completing the grind for my main to get everything. And, now that I’ve started my first alt, I barely have the motivation to play it because I know what’s in store. I don’t want to play any others either. Logging in depresses me because I feel so resentful. I’m not one of those players that has complained through the years but kept on playing.
I’m just complaining because I have 18 days left on my sub, and reading the forums is somehow more pleasurable than grinding out Anima. And, with all the negativity on the forums, that’s saying quite a lot.
But, before I finish up here, I also want to mention the lack of a flight whistle, the fact that all the flight paths are nowhere near anything I need to get to. I rarely use flight paths because it’s somehow quicker just to ride all the way across the map or teleport to Oribos and fly back. The zones are the worst I’ve ever seen when it comes to navigation. When you combine all of this stuff, it’s very clear that everything was done to waste my time…and waste everyone else’s time. That is not fun. Perhaps if even just one of those things wasn’t an issue, I wouldn’t have unsubbed. But, I swear they sat around and tried to figure out as many ways as possible to waste the player’s time. I would have instead liked the opportunity to play many different classes in many different covenants. That would have easily taken up my time and would have been fun.
It’s a shame. I enjoyed Shadowlands for the story, I enjoyed Covenants. And, yes, I even enjoyed Torghast and the Maw. Basically, I loved the content. But, I resented the time wasting when it came to navigation and the Anima grind.
A loyal customer of over 15 years that bought every “deluxe” version of the game and subbed continuously is leaving because I’ve become so bitter and resentful over the myriad of ways Blizzard has decided to waste my time as a casual. I can only imagine how I’d feel if I cared about the loot grind and had to deal with all the other stuff that I hear and read about. Time wasting is NOT fun. I could have had fun playing 8 alts in the same time it took me to grind out Anima non-stop.
So, in the future, I’ll have my one month tokens to check things out. I’ll check things out when I can fly, and from time to time when catch up mechanics are in. But, I can tell you, I will not resub to this “game” if the devs (or Ion) wants to continue their highly misguided policy of doing everything possible to slow us down. There are a lot of other games I want to play and will finally have time to play now that I don’t have this albatross around my neck.
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I heard " the 1%" quite a few times, I’ve arrived. 
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Yea you would be a classic 1%er thanks for showing up. /bow
Serious question, here: If the anima grind was so much, would it have been better if the anima cosmetics vendors weren’t added until a later patch? Would that have helped?
Not really. The cost needed to be lower to begin with. (or we got more Anima from world quests). I mean, I would have loved doing the Anima grind the past 6 months if the fruits of my labor involved 4 alts in 4 different covenants receiving all of the cosmetics instead of just one character.
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I don’t understand, then. What are you grinding anima for?
Agreed, they should of balanced the cost/anima earned this current patch directly with the vendor rewards and added more later.
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What don’t you understand? I was grinding it out for the cosmetics. It took 5 months to grind out all of the cosmetics on one character. While I was doing that, I had no time to play any other character. It was a colossal chore. And, I wouldn’t have gotten burnt out if I was being rewarded adequately for the effort I was putting in.
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Okay, but, the thing is, you had all expansion to buy those cosmetics. That’s why I’m asking, if they had just not put it in until a later patch, when you already had the anima, would that have been better?
I haven’t bought any cosmetics at all, for instance (except some pets). It’s not like the vendor is going anywhere. So I’m really puzzled by people who burn themselves out to finish something in the first quarter of the expansion that’s going to be there forever.
Also, don’t forget the lesson of artifact power and azerite power, where the initial trickle of AP became a raging river towards the end. I’m quite certain that the anima rewards will increase more and more as the expansion goes on, which makes rushing to do things NOW pretty pointless.
If I didn’t know the cosmetics existed until later, there is no way in hell I would have grinded enough Anima to purchase them. I only did it specifically because the cost was so high and when I started I had no idea it would take that long and I wouldn’t have time to play any other character. The time the cosmetics are put in the game doesn’t change the time spent grinding out the Anima.
People keep saying you have the entire expansion, but I don’t want to spend the entire expansion grinding out Anima. And, for those of us who have alts, that’s not even true. Grinding out the cosmetics on 4 alts would literally mean spending every waking moment doing the same world quests for 2 years. That is in no way fun. And, that’s just 4 alts, one for each covenant, never mind the fact you might want to have more than one type of armor. You say you haven’t bought any cosmetics, so you’re hardly qualified to understand what it’s like to try to get them.
And, I’m really not interested in the argument that we will get more Anima later. First of all, we don’t know that. Second of all, I wasn’t “rushing” to get everything right away. Like I’ve said repeatedly, I wanted the opportunity to play many different alts. This expansion was supposed to be alt friendly. But, for the casual, it was anything but.
I have never been someone who wanted to rush through content. I have never been someone who ever complained about a lack of content. The Anima effort to reward ratio is simply worse than anything else that has ever been in this game, and unless you’ve tried to grind it out, you couldn’t possibly understand the frustration or understand why this is different than any other grind, and why this goes way beyond the idea of “rushing” through content. I mean, I WISH that I had been able to play other characters and not had to rush through content, if you can even call this rushing. I never had to do this in Legion, BfA, or any other expansion. This kind of cosmetics grind has never been in the game before, and they completely ruined the experience for collectors.
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You’re forced into choosing between Covenant upgrades, gear upgrades, and the stuff you REALLY want, the cosmetics.
If you want more Anima, you gotta spend anima to upgrade your covenant, but if you’re doing that, you can’t get better gear that lets you quest easier.
But if you upgrade your gear, you’re delaying your Anima income which makes your anima acquisition even slower.
And during all of this, you “unlock” stuff at the vendors that you can’t buy because you have no anima and it takes weeks and weeks of grinding every day to get the covenant features done so you can get something one would call reasonable anima from your activities just so you can buy what you REALLY want, the Cosmetics.
And this right here is the cherry on top, this is basically Blizzard saying
“Don’t bother playing until the final patch of the expansion.”
Because time spent in Shadowlands right now is wasted because the acquisition of anima is so fooking slow you might as well not bother until a later patch increases it.
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Exactly. And this is why I unsubbed, and this is why I’m buying tokens. If Blizzard wants me to play this way, then by all means, that’s the way I will play. I’ll buy a month or two at the end of every expansion when flying is in, and when all the catch up mechanics are in. So, Blizzard can get 2 months of my sub money every 2 years instead of an entire 2 years worth of sub money. It’s a stupid way to run a game, and I’m not playing it anymore.
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I mean, yeah. That’s how Blizzard designs their games. They’re always more interested in appealing to people who quit, and come back later, than they are appealing to people who subscribe right now.
Everything we’re doing right now will be vastly easier and less time-consuming a year from now.
Blizzard seems to consider everybody doing the content now to be a sucker. I think it’s a dumb way to do business, but it’s how they’ve done things for years, now.
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
Well i can tell you this, i dont own SL yet and not sure even worth picking up. I manage to make several toons from the start and these are my though about what they shouldnt have done.
1)Leveling way too fast!
2)Too much coins for drops and rewards!
3)By the time you finish up the starting area, you have several choices where to go from there. This can be confused, but it does give players more options to choose from instead of doing something over and over, that i can understand. For example i wanted to go with the flow or the chapter, before i even finish the first part, i am already max out in that level, probably in 1/4 through or less. Depending on what you are doing, i wanted to finish up the old world quests and that can take awhile. Then Outlands, finding the right paths isnt easy. For example you want to goto Pandaria w/e that place is called, very tricky going there. The warboard that unlock vary quests can be annoying, there are so many that i am not even ready for and having a hard time trying to get back on track from the beginning.
If you understand all of this, then why are you arguing against the people who are trying to lay out why Anima grind sucks and why we want it changed now while the expansion is still relevant?
Maybe I want to play WoW during the expansion instead of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the next expansion to come out?
I remember back during Wrath, Cata, and MoP when I had lots and lots of fun while the content was current. Argent Tournament was a blast. Molten Front was ridiculously awesome. The entirety of MoP, I logged on every day and had fun stuff to do way up until WoD launch almost (I think I ran out of things to do a month prior).
In BfA, however… bleck. I took long hiatuses.
In SL, I haven’t touched my main in almost 2-3 months, because I burnt out on Anima grinding. I still don’t have all of my crafters leveled up, what’s the point? It’s all just pointless boring anima grinding.
I want to be able to play the current content, but when I think about how later patches will speed up Anima, I’m like “why should I spend hours just to get a few hundred when a later patch will let me have a thousand or more for the same work later?”
I’m literally wasting my time by logging on right now, if I do anything other than level alts, which gets boring as balls after awhile, and the Maw intro makes me very hesitant to bring a new character to Oribos because I’ve already seen it like 10 times and they think we should have to play that every single time on every single character. Just let me skip it already, it’s not even level-scaled.
Several of my characters I leveled up to 55+ through Archaeology and Pet Battles, and the Maw Intro is stuck at Lv50 and so my characters get no gear, no xp, and only a few hundred gold and a lot of wasted time doing the same boring content over and over again when all I wanna do is drag a character to Oribos and get started on their campaign or their gathering/crafting.
This is the Tanaan intro all over again, and it’s one of the reasons why I quit WoD .0. Thankfully once you get flying, you can skip that stupid thing. Why can’t we do the same for the Maw Intro?
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