I sometimes feel bad for Blizzard because honestly people here complain about everything. Do you have an idea that you think will improve the game? Bad news. Everyone who hates that idea will be the first 10 responses. Do you hate thing X? Turns out everyone who answers your thread loves that thing, and therefore your idea should be immediately dismissed.
So I struggle with how to review Korthia. I didn’t enjoy it at all because:
It was very repetitive
The rep grind was ridiculous
The one thing it should have done - had people in /1 talking to each other - was ruined because as one player told me “We all have addons that tell us when the Rare spawn is up. We’re not going to announce it in chat - you should download an addon”
As you can imagine, I not only disagree, but I think we should all have a violent response to that. Ban the addons. File a lawsuit against the individual who made that addon. Put the proverbial head on the spike in the center of town.
But is this just “everything sucks”-ism? Many things hated are later loved. MoP. Legion. BFA is even starting to be fondly remembered. This leads me to my questions:
How can we objectively review Korthia?
How much time should be put between 9.1 and the honest reviews
Asking now, was Korthia as bad as the public is saying? Do we think it’s more an issue about the length of the patch than the content? Most important of all, how could we have improved Korthia, if you didn’t like it?
I think Korthia was ok. It was better than the Maw for sure and while it was kinda repetitive and the archivist stuff was too long, it is clear that they did that because they know we are not getting any new content for any length of time so they are trying to inflate how long it takes us to finish current stuff. This si pretty clear with ZM as well, and while it sucks for players it also is kind of necessity.
As far as Addons go, imagine complaining about Addons 20 years after the fact. Seriously man, get over it…Addons are as WoW as Raids, Dungeons, and Classes.
I didn’t think servers mattered. But I do think sharding made things worse. If you ended up on a shard that had few people, you’d be fighting Rares alone.
Honestly, as negative as I am, I didn’t hate Korthia itself, it was fine. It was just the underlying everything of the patch that was less than desirable for me, here is some of my feedback:
Korthia was fine. It was just repetitive; more of the same you could say. Try and be inventive and come up with something new for the next open-world zone. The dailies here were dull, especially the low drop rate item quests and the vehicle quests where you were not phased.
The rares. Please god, unlock them from covenants now that covenant restrictions are loosened. I’m a collector. Farming mounts in Korthia sucks because of the fact that some of them are locked behind your current covenant. I want the Venthyr Flying mount and the Necrolord Fly mount, why do I have to swap to get them to drop. So annoying.
The reps. Fine in 9.1.5, keep with this formula, they were tedious and slow in 9.1.
The story made very little sense. Narratively, the zone was sold as the city of secrets. Where is the city and where are the secrets? Lean into that mysticism more when we are somewhere we have never been.
Visually, the art team did a great job with the premise they were given, but that premise was boring. It looked like a Maw Forest, which frankly makes little sense because it was a completely different Shadowlands zone that was pulled into the Maw.
I’m lukewarm about Korthia. As a casual player for whom it was supposedly designed:]
I liked that I could do dailies/weeklies as something to do that can improve my character’s gear.
I liked that there was a change-up of covenants that sponsored the quests.
I thought that the one boss per covenant that someone from that covenant could trigger a nice touch.
I like the chests and mushrooms as additional ways to get points towards the weekly.
I didn’t care for:
Smallish zone.
Not enough variety in the quests.
It didn’t feel special enough or have enough story to it. I was expecting – more. This is a legendary archive and it was this small wreck of a place that didn’t have a lot to explore or even just see.
And the biggest problem, for me, is a feeling of ‘okay, now what?’. It’s something I hadn’t felt before with WoW. The feeling that the only point to Korthia was to be able to gear up for raids and dungeons. And if you don’t do raids and dungeons, for whatever reason, Blizzard seems to think you should be playing elsewhere.
I liked BFA because it was large, there was lots to do, places to explore, more variety in quests, more story and I played on both factions because each was different and interesting. While there were dungeons (which I did with my guild now and again) I personally didn’t enjoy them, though I did become more willing to do them.
I genuinely think the content drought before 9.1 and the length of the patch now are big reasons why Korthia is so unpopular. In 8.1 we also didn’t get much, but it was fine because we still had a lot to do from 8.0 and and it didn’t last that long.
The zone itself wasn’t good in my opinion. It was just a small chunk of Maw with stones, withered trees and a tiny ruin, while being littered with trash mobs, so there was nothing to explore really. Narratively and from the design I found it to be a bit of a letdown.
But I must say that Korthia was really bad in the beginning and then with the changes to rare loot and catchup systems it got a lot better and I had a bit more fun than when the patch released.
Worst thing for me was the insane RNG on reputation and relics. I really hope they don’t repeat that mistake and slap some more RNG on rewards for daily quest, because at one point I got just Anima, some small green relics and crap gear for 2 or 3 days for daily quests and rares, while others won the jackpot. There were days when I cleared the whole map and got less relics than someone who did his daily quests and 3 rares. Really bad and frustrating design.
My negative takeaway from Korthia is that the rest of the game didn’t keep up with it from a casual/solo player perspective.
Korthia was great in terms of content, but it was small. I liked the codex system, I liked how items both warforged and could be upgraded manually within the same range, and I liked most of the collections.
I disliked the aesthetic of it, the huge gap in progression vibes from rank 4 to rank 6, and the fact that it removed nearly all value from any queueable content and even low level mythic plus dungeons.
I’m not really sure why it was designed this way, but if you were an organized raider (normal+) Korthia had no value pretty early on. If you weren’t then nothing kept up with Korthia. By the time LFR wing 2 dropped I was already decked out in 213-220 gear. LFR had nothing to give me due to Korthia.
9.1.5 brought a little life back to the rest of the world content, however. But until the open covenants were a thing Korthia felt like it was the only content I had, and it made the game feel incredibly small.
I do like Korthia, but gosh it took me a while to figure things out with that ‘rift’… and I’m still trying to learn it more and get better at it.
Oh man, for the longest time when I would check what groups are up, I’d see groups for ‘rift farm’ and be like, huh? I had literally no idea what they heck that was. I eventually started asking people, hey what the heck is a rift farm?
It took some effort just to find out what the heck a rift is and why people are farming it. I tried searching online and everything.
Crazy!
I continue to believe that blizzard’s absolute core design philosophy – the one foundational principle they adhere to above all others – is ‘Never hand hold the player. Let them figure it out. And if they can’t… meh.’
TL;DR: Swarf has spent a lot of time stumbling along through the game utterly lost and trying to find his way…
Korthia was what I returned to after taking a break from WoW. To me it was really nice with the quests and I really enjoyed the rare encounters, but the rep grind was a lot. I felt pressure to go on every day, but days I wanted to grind I was done in what felt like a couple hours
Korthia is alright, I liked that it offered gear that was better than LFR. I do not raid but I like to have my toons geared up to the “casual soft cap” because it makes farming for old content transmog much easier.
Things I liked:
A lot of stuff to do, if you like hunting for treasures and killing rares
Small enough to traverse w/o flight and knock out dailies
I like dailies, I can do them if I want to, but if I don’t want to, then I don’t have to.
I have been able to gear up my alts easily enough, just in time for this patch to soon become irrelevant
Things I didn’t like:
The zone is so small that the mobs (which are tougher than other SL zones) are annoyingly close together, and numerous. This is a con to my pro I listed above.
The transmog I want is locked behind RNG in the daily quests so I have to check daily on multiple toons if I want to dedicate myself to completing the set.
Treasure hunting is fun, however some of these “jumping puzzles” need work. Especially the way geometry and the terrain works in WoW.
I was sick of the Maw and it’s gloominess and Korthia didn’t do much to improve how I feel about it. I think it’s ugly. I also think that “City of Secrets” is a misnomer.
If it was a one time thing, without a grind, it would have been great. Counter point, people would have been mad that there wasn’t much to do in it.
The only fun thing in Korthia is discovering thing for the first time, the repetitiveness nature of the entire content make it dull, even more with the guides and addons that basically tell you where to go
Korthia is one of the worst zones ever put into the game. It was small, cramped, boring visually, and the story quests were so spread out and lackluster.
The fact Blizzard still can’t innovate on zone design and activities beyond collect this or kill this rare is pathetic.
It takes significantly less time to complete the zone each day (15 minutes vs 25-30+ minutes in the Maw).
No GTA star system so you didn’t have to worry about getting killed while AFK.
Lots of bosses constantly spawning around the map with hordes of players killing them.
Gear catch-up system does its job. I leveled 2 new characters and it takes about 1.5-2 weeks to get to iLvl 220 then you can do M15s+.
9.1.5 turn ins are huge. I turn in 3k+ research a day @ rank 6.
Lots of treasure hunting + side stuff to do.
Negatives:
Zone was not as polished at launch. Lots of broken quests, slow spawn rates on a lot of things, etc.
50% of your daily rep gains were inside the Rift and most players didn’t know about it due to a lack of communication.
Bosses aren’t challenging and are just health sponges.
Conduit upgrade system isn’t great (not really a problem with Korthia). Needing to go 226 → 239 → 252… yuck.
Bags get overflowed with anima + research items.
Still takes 1 month to get to exalted even with catch-up systems and a lot of things aren’t account bound (like rank 5+6 upgrades and the +50% daily rep gains).
Overall I found the zone enjoyable to do. You just make your rounds doing your dailies and killing as many bosses as you can. I do not like the Maw Assaults (especially the Night Fae one) in comparison.
