I disagree with every single point the OP. Especially legendaries and professions. Professions are in their worst state they’ve ever been in. Having a legendary tied to professions is probably the worst game design ever. You either grind an insane amount to upgrade your legendary or you pay whatever some rando on the AH decides to offer. I don’t think anyone likes shelling out over 100k gold just to fully upgrade 1 legendary that’s probably only useful for 1 spec.
I’d take the previous expansion in a heartbeat. Nothing in the past xpac required paying tons of gold.
I think Shadowlands is a pretty good case study for proving the people on all the social media surrounding this game have literally no idea what they want and will switch their complaint to fit a narrative that insert game, restaurant, lemonade stand here is evil and must be trying to force them to leave. Pretty much everything in Sl is stuff I saw people here and on reddit complain endlessly about not having and now that its not here, they still complain because now they have stuff to do but don’t have to.
I’m going to disagree, it feels like they learned literally all the wrong lessons from classic. Then layered it with a story that’s not engaging and regressive systems that are focused on MAUs and not on player fun. It honestly feels incredibly spiteful.
I should also point out that 9.1.5 really isn’t fixing any of these things. Just surface level stuff that should have been fixed in beta. The systems are still spiteful IMO.
Legendaries, while great to have back, are terrible in SL with the forced running of Torghast to make them … after you get a recipe drop, make enough gold to buy the (repeated) base items, etc. Constant tuning means you make one, then have to make a new one, then Domination gear comes out and oh go make it on a new piece. The legendary system in SL is just another grind to keep us playing and not enjoying.
The Grind … not sure how you can even compare the SL Grind to Legion. Legion we had artifact power. Pretty much all we had to go after to get what we needed done. SL has renown, relics, stygia, ash and cinders, valor, Anima power … capped or not, this is still a lot of endless slog grinding to keep the time played metric up.
The Ripcord … this is the one I most can’t believe is being cited as “Bliz is listening.” Everyone told them before SL even launched how terrible the Covenant system would be. Ion didn’t care … he wanted us to make a meaningful choice cause (once again) we weren’t playing the game “his way.” You can’t tell me that a notable percentage of people who quit the game during SL did so because of the Covenant system and how poorly balanced it is (I can’t multi-spec as a mage cause all three specs have a different preferred covenant).
Pulled the Ripcord now? Who cares. The damage is done. I won’t be patting them on the
back for this one at all cause they knew enough to pull it from the get-go.
Ion is now at the helm of two poorly reviewed and received expansions in a row. In any other profession he’d be fired or at least replaced. I have no hope for a new expansion being any different than the last 2 under his leadership.
While you are right that there are things that were asked for (ex no azerite grind for power) there are hair of thing we specifically told them we didn’t want from bfa she then specific things we told them from alpha and Beta onwards that are here.
To say Shadowlands delivered on (some) things that were asked for while technically correct is also wildly misleading
While there isnt an endless progression, there is a gated progression. Some of these barriers are being removed, allowing us to grind soul ash in 9.1.5, but they didnt need to be there in the first place. Conduits are another grind. Renown another grind. And with domination sockets, re-grinding and making your legendary items are now a thing till 9.1.5.
While I hear your stance on things they did right. But I have to respectfully disagree. In my opinion, they got everything you mentioned pretty wrong. And they stubbornly discounted player feedback through beta and 9.0. All of the 9.1.5 changes are things that were pointed out as early as beta. While I am happy that the changes are coming, I will not pretend that they didnt wait a year, till the game population was in the state that it is, in order to make them.
Covenants: Covenants launched and were a complete mess. By and large, people chose which covenant performed better for them, instead of which one they cosmetically liked. This was proven by statistics. Covenants also, in most cases, spec locked your character. Additionally soulbinds were time gated. So you were also spec locked, till you worked through the campaign enough to get a second soulbind. And then, in most cases, that second soulbind, was not great for your Offspec.
Conduits: RNG conduits and RNG conduit upgrades are bad. And Conduit Energy. Also horrible. Yet they kept a universally disliked and bad system for over a year.
Legendary Items: The market was horrible for these. Leveling the professions and getting the ability to craft the blanks at higher levels, was way too expensive for the crafter. Even on a high pop server, the blanks were expensive. Not to mention the legendary powers. Ele shamans BIS legendary power was not available till after week 2 of Mythic Nathria being unlocked, due to it coming off a world boss.
Power Grind: Shadowlands has one of the worst power grinds. Mostly because of how it feels. Granted, once you unlock your soulbinds, craft your legendary, get your conduits, upgrade your conduits you are done. But everything is all front loaded. And your character really is incomplete till these are done. Shadowlands got the power grind very wrong. Once you character hits max level, they are very incomplete. Then you have Renown, Soul Ash, Conduits, Legendary that all have to be done, before you are complete.
All of the fixes in 9.1.5 are simply corrections to bad systems. Bad systems which the players said were bad systems in beta. Which players said were bad systems in 9.0.5. Which players said were bad systems in 9.1. And now that WoW is in a content and population slump, they are finally caving into the player requests.
9.1.5 Is a good .5 patch. But if they listened to player feedback in beta, they wouldnt need a lot of them.
Seems like professions are designed to be massive gold sinks. Orboreal shards cost 125g each, threads cost 9g each and recipes use 30-60 each. If you wonder why things cost so much, it’s crafters trying to recover their gold.
Alchemy recipes use excessive amounts of herbs per single item. Cooking recipes use excessive amounts drops per single item. All designed to be a time sink.
Engineering almost feels good, but when your gadgets share a 5 min CD with potions what’s the point of them. They need to buff the damage of bombs and do a separate CD. Why not allow engineers to stuff a leggo memory into their helms, that would be cool.
Enchanting is the only profession that feels on point. I would love it if they got rid of vellums, make the game more social again.
And heavens forbid that blacksmith or any other crafting class cannot make a reasonable catch-up weapon. Even a 220 craftsble catchup weapon
That’s… literally all that happened with professions this expansion. They also made it so the only way to make any decent gold was via legendry crafting making everything else bar enchanting/alchemy pale in comparison. Professions needed a lot more changes but we saw nothing outside of the addition of the new legendary items - like they even just straight up removed archeology how is that good professions?
Yes and instead we had to grind out a currency in a boring repetitive scenario style thing that was incredibly hard for some classes and a breeze for others every week. I have not touched legendries in months because I really just do not like torghast at all. The overall idea for SL legendries was great but they ruined it with torghast and how ridiculously expensive it was to craft the base items.
Dude we literally have to come back every week to get our renown, soul ash, stuff for great vault, korthia relics, domination shards and conduits. There are multiple power grinds in SL, just because they aren’t endless like AP was doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
This is literally just QoL/bug fixing how is this a relevant point. Even you said and I agree anyway that it still has issues in certain zones/areas that hasn’t been properly fixed.
I honestly don’t even get what your point is. The whole covenant locking thing was an just dumb because it was just to try and make it seem like there was a lot more content than there was and so the devs could pat themselves on the back with a job well done. Most people did not want to have to choose between performance and aesthetics yet they made us do it anyway, and ONLY reversed it after they started to bleed players almost a year later. That’s not “listening to the player base” that’s panicking and people are sick of this being why changes are made.
Like you’re allowed to like and play the game obviously that’s your right, but don’t try and defend and explain the horrible decisions that have made this expansion so much worse than it should’ve been. SL has done almost nothing right because everything that had a good foundation was ruined by time gating, restrictions and currencies that just weren’t needed. It sucks because SL could’ve been immensely better but alas it wasn’t.