Because people are beating their heads against the wall rather than swimming with the current, and I’m advising people to stop torturing themselves like that.
We all know that anima will be easier to get later in the expansion, we all know that if you quit and come back a year from now that Blizzard will hand you an easy-to-get set of catch-up gear, and we all know that Blizzard is going to simplify and enhance all the new systems as the expansion goes on.
So if somebody wants to play the current content, then sure, now’s the time to do it. But if people just want to collect the collectibles… wait a year.
As an example, I fully intend to do all the exploration and questing achievements in Shadowlands. But I’m waiting for flying to do it. No reason not to wait.
They are twits. I mean, honestly, people who say this only play the game one way and are incapable of seeing anything outside of their own very narrow lens. My complaints have nothing to do with ilvl or high difficulty content. It never crosses their minds that people have different reasons for playing a game, and enjoy different things. I mean, aside from the Anima grind and wasting time that I harp about, I also miss having meaningful professions. All the joy and fun was taken out of the game in exchange for grinding where the rewards are not worth the grind time.
Right, so “just ignore the problems and wait for Blizz to slip em under the rug whenever they finally get out to releasing an actual patch” rather than, you know, telling Blizzard why we don’t like this, and what they could be doing better, so that we can all have a more fun WoW experience?
Now obviously I don’t beat my head against a wall, as I said, I don’t do the Anima Grind. There’s literally no point in it. But I want to do the content, but the anima gain is too slow. So, I’m here in the forums telling Blizz why I don’t play much WoW right now.
And this is what I encourage everybody to do because maybe, if enough people keep hammering them they will eventually learn from this stupid crap and learn that this kind of stuff is not OK even if it takes several million posts telling them this over and over and over and over again.
You get sub-standard gear to wear as you levelup, or one decent piece here-and-there that is on par with quested stuff of the same item level for far more work involved in making it, until you get to max level and then it’s one-or-two pieces that are comparable to normal raid gear (sometimes) that you have to spend a crazy amount of work to obtain.
Crafting always stunk. They are literally scared of giving us crafted gear that is actually decent to use for some weird reason. They’ll hand you a FULL SUIT of covenant gear for 5 hours of questing, but God Forbid you get anything better than 151 gear until you spend weeks of grinding Ve’nari then you get 164. wooo.
And even then it’s only the 8 body pieces, and some professions like Blacksmithing, require getting 2 reputations up to Honored before you can even make the full suit.
But then, like I said, this wasn’t any different in previous expansions, except for MoP where they gave you catch-up PvP gear that you could make without having to grind dungeons. You could just dump PvP gear on fresh max leveled characters and it let them get a head start on max level content to get better gear (it was good enough to get them into Heroics from day one!).
Not always, don’t forget that when they added jewel crafting, it was actually decent enough to use. Heck, I’ve been able to use rings/necklaces early on, which gives you a slight edge.
Currently in SL, professions are literally worthless. I leveled up my jewel crafting and was able to make a ring that I have to grind for days to get enough soul ash. other than that, the rings/necks are garbage.
They were a drop in the bucket, sadly. It wasn’t even 10% of your character’s performance. Unless you’re racing for World Firsts, they meant literally nothing.
This is why I laugh at the people who worship the vanilla talent trees, I started a paladin on TBC Classic, and wooo, that talent that makes Judgment cost 9 mana instead of 10 when I have 200+ is so awesome, right? Heck, I’m 3/5 in that talent and it’s still 9.
The only thing Professions were ever good at are getting alts started if you haven’t played them in forever. It’s nice to craft 100 gear to give to alts that are only wearing 50-60 gear so that they don’t get straight up murdered when they get past the Maw Intro because God Forbid you get actual gear from that.
The crafter’s mark thing was set up to take care of that. But then some gold flippers figured out how to make instant millions from it (and NOT from selling to other players, mind you) so they gutted the entire system. What a waste of 6 months of developer work.
I agree that the armor professions have mostly sucked in many expansions. But, that wasn’t the case in early WoW. There was meaningful gear to be made. But, I certainly agree that for the past several expansions, the idea of finally making gear 6 months after you have outleveled that gear is ridiculous. It’s why I haven’t taken an armor crafting profession in years. I initially thought leggos would finally be a boon to those professions. But, then I saw the requirements and was like…jeez, forget that.
But, everything has been gutted. Jewelcrafting used to make marketable products, inscription used to. Engineering used to let you make fun stuff, but has nothing except the wormhole. And, as usual, it’s not marketable. Blizzard refuses to allow you to make things to sell to other people. I will never understand why they think this is a good thing. I know several people that basically have one gathering profession and level 1 engineering for the portal because, like I said in an earlier post, navigation in this expansion is horrible.
The battle rez in BfA was awesome, but they nerfed that into the ground. Can’t have too much fun…which comes back to the “remove fun, add grind” formula that they have taken to an extreme in Shadowlands.
They could have just simply made it so that items made with crafters’ mark have decreased vendor prices sheesh.
I was wondering why the system does not work as advertised, I didn’t hear about that.
Are the developers actually that inept that they could not figure out how to fix the problem other than just removing the whole system entirely? I’m not a developer and even I came up with a better alternative in like 3 seconds of thought.
Pros:
1). Better zones, there weren’t 5 million aggressive mobs and a bunch of bad terrain everywhere.
2). You didn’t out level a zone 15 minutes in.
Cons:
1). Auto Attack. Auto. Attack. Got real boring real fast.
2). How long it takes just to pick an item up for a quest.
3). Lack of QoL features like showing you how much something sells for.
4). No shared quest credit, gotta love everybody taking the 1 named mob you need and waiting 15 minutes for it to respawn, yaaaaaaaaay so awesome.
The only avenue to feel like I could grow my character in any way outside of raid was M+ or PVP. Two things I don’t really enjoy doing. So I could raid, and then do other stuff that didn’t really feel like it mattered.
None of the covenant buildings felt like they added anything valuable to the game to me. Perhaps I didn’t give them enough time (I got some buildings to level 2) but honestly, the game had no feeling of any sort of growth outside of raid, except Torghast, which I did for about an hour a week tops.
I got reputations to maximum, they didn’t really offer me much this time. What did I get them to max for? What do I benefit from maxing out my professions? What is there to even do of value on an alt right now, other than get some 196 gear?
If I do anything else, that gear doesn’t matter and then there’s really no other meaningful rewards to go after.
Everything about Shadowlands (to me) feels unrewarding as someone who raids, but also likes to play casually outside of raid. It felt like I have to either choose to constantly push progression on things or grind dungeons/pvp to fill up a weekly vault (which I hate) or I needed to stop raiding to feel any value out of solo/casual play.
It’s just not a fun or fulfilling design. There aren’t enough interesting cosmetics to hunt down, there’s not enough allure to keep me invested in the game. It was a good play through once, but it has very little replay value, especially compared to the other expansions.
I hope that changes.
I’m still subscribed and I dabble casually, but I hate everything after level 50 now. So I get alts there then stop usually.
Of the things you mentioned, only speaking for myself obviously:
Content drought, not really a bother to me. There’s a LOT of content I haven’t done, but it’s mostly content I don’t want to do.
Core systems, yes I basically hate them. Covenants, conduits, soulbinds Torghast, disconnected zones, no flying, loot availability, lack of new pet battle dungeons, lack of archeology, all but useless professions.
You are definitely looking at the game through a fresh set of eyes, which is fine.
I like Shadowlands a lot. I am not sure about the hate, but when the content droughts, there will be some discussion. And unsurprisingly, it is about complaints and some game-philosophy bla bla.
