Which is preferable than having a lot to do that you have to do, and having nothing to do.
Last 2 expansions there was ap (artifact power and azerite power) to farm. People complained about breadcrumb ap grinding. Blizzard removed it.
The only grind you need to do is torghast until you have all necessary legendaries. after that don’t step in.
Now we don’t have to grind or farm for anything actually.
I am just doing calling quests and dailies, it gives enough anima for upgrades.
For maw it might be tidious, but it is hell of wow, what do you expect 
Last expansions there was almost no time gating. people finished a month worth questline in 3 days and complained there is no content.
Yes there are lots of little issues. but to me they are not game breakers.
I am not expert but wow has always been about chores, sometimes weekly, sometimes daily quests.
I feel another disconnect from good old Azeroth. I loved Cataclysm and the burning of Teldrassil. As a player, those two events made it feel like the stakes were much higher. Walking around in the “Afterlife” as a living hero seems like an oxymoron.
Cheers.
I feel the opposite. Right now, the “core” content is carrying the game. The problem is there is very little actual SL content. And what is there is locked behind massive time gates meant to keep you subscribed.
The whole Renown tree is literally designed not as an interesting game mechanic, but as a 16 week subscription plan.
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Ya. Raiding is the only reason to stay subbed, imo. It makes the vault gamble feel worthwhile. Also, it’s the only way to have a positive experience with the wow “community.” Everything else in SL was fun to explore and play with for a little bit, but not worth repeating.
I think something that contributes is a lot of it isn’t that fun and really lacks in re play value. It’s really hard to make single player content that doesn’t get old and repetitive.
There are times were I’m looking at callings, torghast, renown quests… Naw, think I’d rather get on my leather worker and grind a couple of vessel crafts for a change of pace.
Think those old fashion grinds that everyone complains about were actually better in some ways because they have a direct more work, more reward trade off. A lot of this checklist stuff is just that, binary check list. could take 5 minutes, could take 30, same thing gets checked.
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There’s a massive disconnect in SL between effort and outcome, way more than your usual MMO fare. I mean Blizzard is all programmers and no actual game designers these days so I understand that they can’t see this.
If you get 35 anima from doing X and the thing you want is 5,000 anima then that’s too big a gap, there is no psychological or emotional link between what you are doing and any form of outcome or reward. Every World Quest begins to feel completely pointless because of this disconnect.
I get it, MMOs, grind etc but there’s a big difference between “working to earn stuff” and “Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill”. In Shadowlands things are so far apart its insane, I mean 50x(3x35) WQs for ONE minor cosmetic is bonkers.
Then you have the flip side with say for example Covenant armour, where you get a great piece of gear that can be upgraded past anything you’ll get from quests or tradeskills and its basically a full set as a handout for turning up each week. That’s the opposite end of the supply spectrum and feels just as meaningless as the scarce end.
I’m not saying everything about SL is bad, just their reward system is way outta whack, like somewhere out around Pluto out of whack. You either get stuff you feel you didn’t earn or you can’t earn stuff you want with any sane amount of effort and very little in the middle.
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I don’t even feel like theres a lot to do unless you factor in a bunch of alts. Majority of the things to do fall in the first 1-2hr of the reset and then you’re basically done for the week.
And it’s perfect.
Being forced to do a ton of crap I didn’t enjoy blew.
Blizzard should be terrified by this. A lot of people seem to feel this way. When WoD was a mess, people were outraged. Now people are just bored by Blizzard’s lack of caring about their own game.
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They dont Time vs. reward is way off in this expac.
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They put it all into the covenant and made everything else irrelevant. They did the same thing they did in WoD with the garrison. They never learn.
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Yup. Not only did many defend WOD during the expansion, it sold almost as many copies as Shadowlands did.
People love to say things like “people always hate the current expansion!”
Well there are always people defending the current expansion too. So that argument holds zero water. Its just a lame attempt to invalidate peoples opinions.
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That’s my point… Regardless of the truth of the matter, that’s the course of how this community perceives content. Right now? It’s trash. 2-4 years later? It was misunderstood.
There are people RIGHT NOW defending WoD in a different thread.
I’m guessing you weren’t on the forums in wrath. Being called a “wrath baby” was not a term of endearment here… People trashed wrath just as much as they’ve trashed SL and BfA…
In all honesty, I don’t think SL is the best expansion personally. I still hold BC and Wrath as my favorite expacs. But is SL bad? No… No it really isn’t.
Well said OP.
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Although I generally agree with what OP stated, it may be us feeling a huge pullback from what we had in the last phase of BfA, where we could aim for certain Corruption and blast through everything.
So far, from what I have been doing, the only thing I feel significantly falling behind in the quality compared with previous expansions is the mission table.
After 16 years, the formula is still the same. And that is setting goals and meeting them (usually at what ever cost). But it’s obviously got a lot of friction in the current state. I too feel a lack of “purpose” at this point.
I think the best way to summarize the mass displeasure comes down to guilds. Whatever turn the game took that sort of non-nuclearized guilds and guild activity is what catalyzed this behavior. People got comfortable with the idea of doing things for themselves, not having accountability with their cohorts, then the game mutated to meet the niche. And here we are, with content to do, no intrinsic reason to do it, and no nudge from your fellow man to think otherwise.
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Well ill ask you this, did you pick your covenent on a min max ability? or did you pick on the one you thought was the coolest?
Because if its the later you find out there is actually a lot of fun stuff to do, because you end up caring about doing it since its for the covenant you liked.
I havenʻt reached that point yet.
There are things that are worth doing, they will help with progressing the story, or maybe get me better gear/ reputation etc.
But, itʻs not as engaging as it used to be. Nowadays, I donʻt really care if i miss a day or three to log in and do them.
It just feels like the time invested isn’t fairly compensated so it starts to cause burnout. There is no goals in-game its just a giant checklist of chores that you have to complete every day to stay relevant in your preferred endgame playstyle.
They need to chill on designing systems that keep us logged on and actually throw some fun stuff at us to play with. Its starting to be annoying tbh.
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