I know many people only play WoW to get the rarest most expensive PVP gear and some don’t even read the quest dialogue. I rarely do PVP though. Who else actually enjoyed Shadowlands questing and thought the design for The Maw and the enemy sin The Maw were cool, not lame? And we had a cool titan-level powerful villain! I liked All the area designs for Shadowlands, espeicially The Maw and ArdenWeald. Oribos Too. The only story detail id id’t like was what they did to Arthas in the end. That was the ultimate insult to the character.
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I liked most of the Zone Questing.
Zone Questing is always fun.
Of course the Torghast Storyline wasn’t good nor were the Cutscenes for the Jailer’s Story.
Zovaal had little characterization with his only good scene being the one where he activated Icecrown’s Forge of Souls to extract the Soul of Azeroth.
Denathrius was interacted with directly and while his motives weren’t revealed his character was shown constantly therefore he is superior to Zovaal who seemed more of a plot device than a person.
I loved Ardenweald, Bastion, Maldraxxus, Revendreth, the Maw, Korthia and Zereth Mortis in terms of Questing aside from the Dailies and World Quests. Of course I never cared much for Dailies and World Quests aside from as a chore to complete to get to higher levels.
In terms of beauty and wonder I would rank Bastion first followed by Ardenweald followed by Zereth Mortis followed by Korthia followed by Maldraxxus followed by Revendreth followed by the Maw.
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Well i find the concept of dealing with afterlife a bit tricky, you must really understand alot of things before trying to apply it to your setting so… blizzard never had a chance of doing it good cuz of the way the game works.
With that said, the pantheon of death, how the souls are just fuel (anima) for the system,
The whole of zereth mortis being a giant machine for creating worlds and “gods” made everything look cheap.
The infinite afterlives and how everything about nature ended in a night elf zone urgh.
But shadowlands do brought some good things, the first one as the true creators( for now) of the setting and how that is messing up with alot of titans fans heads. It is so hilarious to read the titans threads lately.
Sylvanas arch was much better than I expected hence what they had to work with.
It could be much worse.
And finally arthas’ soul being reduced to nothing was the best thing this expansion could have done for the entire franchise!
The dead should stay dead.
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I liked all of the SL’s concepts, not its execution (except Ardenweald I thought that was boring.)
I don’t think I liked anything about the story of Shadowlands. The one bit that I would’ve liked in a vacuum (Sylvanas’s final words to Arthas’s remnants) was ruined by the context of BFA and SL itself that built up to it. If you can even call it a build-up.
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You liked her dancing on the grave of a mind control victim like herself? Strange.
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From what I understand, Arthas was never mind controlled. That’s why he and Nerzhul were considered “failures” by Zovaal. If he was, then he would’ve… I dunno, but he wouldn’t have tapped Sylvanas for the job of being his #2.
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I positively adored 65% of the Covenant storylines.
Maldraxxus and Ardenweald slapped. No questions asked. Ardenweald is very Midsummer Night’s Dream and as sort of WoW’s answer to the Faewild I think it works perfect. It’s sort of a flipside to the Emerald Dream that’s not the Nightmare. It’s a place full of sugar plumb fairies, but one that may rot your soul because you suck at acting, and this will be considered a prank.
I also adore Maldraxxus. Though it does annoy me a bit. As it had deathless battle hungry soldiers, cackling goo loving plague doctor, menacing masters of black magic rituals, and abominable fresh astronoch artisans making weaponized mass graves.
But they were friendly, at peace or even in celebration about their nature, and while a bit off putting were hardly malevolent.
Gee I wonder if there’s any other faction that could use this level of nuance.
Beyond that I thought the aesthetics of Revendreth were great. So much of it is exactly what I’d love to see a rebuilt Tirisfal/Gilneas to look like. Additionally the idea of sin eating was cool but sin is a loose as (no pun intended) Hell concept in this setting.
Really the only aspect from Revendreth is Denathrius and his Dreadbois. Have them float around being the settings token Lawful Evil, Lucifer type. Gives you fair deals in exchange fod your soul. Well, providing you read the fine print. But most don’t, as he seeks out the desperate whomst like to live deliciously.
Bastion was there. Nice we know angels are cops. They are 8ft tall blue literally statuesque greco-roman people who grab you by the neck though. So, they have that going for them.
Beyond that I dont see much worth revisiting.
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Shadowlands did the impossible.
It retroactively made BFA even stupider.
It remains the only expack in WoW where I was playing and yet checked out of the max level story before it was over. It mangled everything we knew about WoW spirituality to jam it into the soul-airport waiting room and it was an overall blight. But that’s just my opinion.
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What about the execution?
I loved it. Much superior to Bfa.
Ignoring the greater overall story arc, I thought that the questing was mostly quite good. Bastion was pretty mediocre, though. If the Shadowlands was the realm of the embodiment of death and not the actual afterlife, it wouldn’t have seemed quite as bad to me. Sort of like if the Emerald Dream is the embodiment of nature, but night elf druids don’t go there when they’re born, they don’t go to Ardenweald when they die. As if it were the manifestation of death in the aspect of Nature.
Bastion’s aesthetic was disastrously missaligned for a covenant of grim reapers.
Are you saying that Bastion and Maldraxxus’s aesthetics should have been swapped?
No, I’m saying that in my opinion they aught to have been darker. Their aesthetic seemed more appropriate for a light aligned organization. They chanelled divine justice like a sect of paladins or something, but justice wasn’t their business. They were just a taxi service for the dead.
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I still think the whole expansion ruined the concept of death. Even playing Dragonflight now, whenever they are resurrecting characters I think of the Shadowlands.
Do these resurrected characters remember which death zone they went to?
When we commune with spirits I don’t understand how it happens. Are there planes of death that regularly communicate with the living?
Shadowlands made WoD look great, so it is terrible.
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Souls with a weak attachment to Reality go straight to the Veil which is the True Afterlife where all Cosmic Realms grab Souls from with the Spirit Healers of the Shadowlands grabbing what Souls that have not been claimed by the other Cosmic Forces and taking them to the Shadowlands while Souls with a strong attachment to Reality will go straight to the Physical Plane as Ghosts.
Souls with a not as strong attachment to Reality and yet are not supposed to be dead are revived by the Spirit Healers.
The Shadowlands merely claims the leftovers of all other Afterlives.
This ^
Basically took a diabolical $#!% on all lore to do with ‘Communing with the ancestors’ or ‘Ancestral plane’ and the concept that the spirits were eternal.
I, and many roleplayers use to have the cosmic pacts or faiths have meaning or influence to our characters story. Few still do, but a great deal many had those meanings & influences butchered.
Shadowlands ‘lore’ kind of showed that pacts or faiths have no meaning whatsoever, because they don’t go to their respective afterlives at the end.
— Sure you could argue “B-but there was infinite afterlives in the Shadowlands!” sure. But without anima they dry up right? They’re not eternal, they’re entropic. Especially the double death theme, suggesting one’s extinction if they die there (which kind of defeats the purpose of having an afterlife). They also either forgot or retconned the light afterlife, since the light ‘Has no purchase’ in the Shadowlands.
As I stated in another thread –
Shadowlands ‘lore’ is more damaging to the World of Warcraft story than beneficial.
- It gored & feasted upon the old lore, leaving large masses of it to rot in the ill-wind.
- It ruined many, many spiritual, mystical and even religious (both ingame & out) tropes. (Eg. Reincarnation)
- In regards to the above: One’s belief in the WoW universe meant nothing (Whether you worshipped the light, loa, void or Elune meant jack squat). Which quite frankly, is some solid BS.
- The fact that the afterlife and souls there follow the same entropic law of the living universe was sad. Means the most ancient souls that were humble die without anima to sustain them - along with realms that don’t have people go to them since they’d dry up. The afterlife & souls should be eternal, if ‘slain’ at best they should just reincarnate them (Would give greater meaning to ‘The cycle of life & death’ as well).
- It destroyed characters (as in their character development, stories or personas).
- It destroyed characters (Quite literally - as in erased) that should have always been eternal, such as Ursoc & Rezan. And ones that shouldn’t had been ‘erased’ completely out of respect for the writing of the characters such as Garrosh & Arthas.
- The afterlives and realms of ‘The Shadowlands’ were more robotic & synthesized than mystical, and created through mysterious wonders of spiritual glory.
- Not to mention it seemed to ignore various afterlives of afterlife lore snippets told throughout the WoW universe, and just did their own thing. “There’s many afterlives though as we saw” was still a cheap copout.
- Ignored the fact there’s a void and a light afterlife.
- Also ignored or were ignorant of many other lore to do with the Shadowlands & various spirit-beings or spirits in general.
- And then there’s ‘The First Ones’ which devalues the titans and titan lore. Just because we’ve sailed through a lot of titan lore - it doesn’t mean you have to diminish its lore or devalue it.
Those are just some from the top of my head, but there’s many more.
Honestly would love if they retconned Shadowlands lore, by just over-writing it (Hey! Shadowlands did that to all the other lore, why not the other way around!?) . 
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Yeah there’s an absolute ton of issues with it. In the very next expansion after the death one, they have Centaur necromancers summoning ghosts of their dead. How does that work if they went to one of the afterlives? Do they just get yanked out? How do we see Uther’s ghost multiple times, or any ghosts we talk to? Did the Forsaken get sorted before getting pulled back when they got raised by necromancers? Do they remember it? Will they go somewhere else when they die again? If there’s no “Light afterlife” where did the Argent Crusader in Icecrown go when you try to find a cure for him. And why did they need to create Ardenweald? an afterlife that does the exact same thing that the Emerald Green was supposed to do.