I detest SL whole “threads of fate”. This is probable the system I hate the most.
When I level an alt I do so with the intention of actually doing the storylines again. Legion/BFA did it best by giving me the freedom to level where I wanted and do questlines I enjoyed. Now my options for leveling are 1) follow the same boring path I took 2) do Threads of Fata which means I skips alot of the story beats. It is just inferior in every why to what we had.
There is a huge difference between Legion and Shadowlands storylines leveling: Legion was zone-based while Shadowlands as very linear. I find Shadowlands leveling to be disengaging.
This. I did at least all the zones fully for like 7 characters, just because of the central buildup to suramar and chase for pillars of creation. Which sort of paid off in the pre-7.3 time of the game, giving a free 30 minute rez in outdoor zones if you got the 5 7.0 legion macguffins. Not to mention a decent amount of rep to work toward balance of power/paragon boxes later on.
Assaults were awesome to level in.
I loved Legion leveling and assault leveling. I really hate on rails questing.
Good times indeed. Especially when looms were good, and not the neutered versions they are now. One of the many Shadowfail fails was not having assaults in all the other zones. Of course these devs are like lets just confine assaults to a zone that a lot of people despise, or don’t care for, and make the other zones useless besides for just leveling.
Eh…
Shadowlands leveling at least provides a cohesive and continuous story. The problem is that it wasn’t a very good one.
The issue with Legion is that each zone was basically a self-contained story that was only loosely related to the other zones (if at all).
If the SL story was actually good, I think that approach would be better.
The only downside to SL leveling is that during launch on high-pop servers, it becomes a nightmare. I think time has proven, every time WoW funnels all players to the same area/item the servers fall down on high pop.
Legion worked somewhat well in that it split the playerbase early (weapon scenarios), then again for zones.
BFA split the zones, but forced everyone into the same spot in Ogrimmar and had us basically bring down the server ourselves. WoD had the same funnel to one area bring the server down problem, but then was largely linear in nature meaning lots of lag throughout. It did at least split us up by faction, which doesn’t do much because of how one-sided factions are per server.
Still I think the linear quest tells a better story (or can).
Doesn’t help its a flawed premise.
One does not walk in and speak to the archon. YOu must…run the trials. One of them showing our deeper darker selves. Pretty sure by mirror 2 Anduin would have shown jsut what baggage he is carrying lol.
then…we don’t even see her. here is your trial power…go do some more stuff would ya?
and up walk sa king! OMFG its a king!
And theres should ahve been one large sized smurf going ummm…we have seen kings come from like 10000 worlds. This is special because???
i never did threads of fate but i honestly hate the linear zone style compared to BfA and Legion with zone based style. why? because certain zones i just hate. those zones are the ones i like to knock out first. with SL it’s literally revendreth and thats the very last zone. i just started it on my new main man it’s hell. this is also i think my 4th play through of the story it’s such a damn slog.
I believe the reasoning for changing from Legion style was so that the story was more coherent overall and they wouldnt have to go back and say things occured in a specific order instead of them happening naturally that way.
An example of this issue happening was doing Stormheim before Aszuna and as a result Greymane attacking Sylvannas’ ship in Stormheim before the quest in Aszuna where the Gilneans/Alliance learn that Sylvannas is up to something there
imo threads of fate is a nice compromise as once the storyline is done initially the zones can be played in any order
and when i level an alt i do so with the intention of getting to level cap asap so i can do the fun stuff. I’m glad we have options now.
I just hate everything about Shaowlands, period. There’s not enough lipstick in the world to make that pig pretty.
Whoah… .WoD?
WoD, where Horde players couldn’t even build a garrison and start questing because of the Master Surveyor, until Blizzard hotfixed the quest to just auto-complete once you got it?
WoD, where the phasing was so borked that Blizzard had to implement severe limits on how many players could be logged in at one time, leading to massive login queues because server capacity was ratcheted down so much?
To the point where they gave everyone free game time because it was such a cluster?
That WoD? Worked “somewhat well”?
Bastion is just the worst.
You just escape from the Maw, you’re on this serious high adventure story, and then you get to Bastion and they’re all “Can you help with the cooking and cleaning?”
I think there’s one thing we can all agree on:
Stop repeating the stupid Legion mistake with putting cosmetics in paragon boxes.
It was in level scaling during Legion that they changed all old zones from “Do 100 of 115 quests” to “Complete all storylines”.
Devs don’t like players having options.
Except we could have just done both. Rather then automatically finish quests if you choose Threads of Fate, they could have allowed you to continue doing quest while still being able to do new things/daily whatever.
I agree. After the terrible story the “track” storyline of Shadowlands is my next least favorite feature.
I hate leveling as i have been playing wow for more than decade and i have leveled more than 100+ toons so all in all i just dont find it at all interesting ,Its just a chore which i just gotta do and get that over with asap .
1/2 the fun of leveling to me was that I could just weave in and out of dungeons, bgs, main quest, side quest…. Then once at max level, you did pretty much whatever you wanted with out any real consequence… didn’t want to quest after max, no real issue.
In SL your were initially locked into the story, then the campaign once you hit 60. When they finally added threads you originally had to finish filling 4 bs bars after 60 before even starting the campaign.
9.1.5 fixed a lot, but there was a good 6 months there where I might have stayed subbed or played more often if it was even more like BfA in how leveling was structured.