Everyone has their own personal takes on Shadowlands content. Though there is a vocal group of displeasure of the current expansion with a lot of merit.
I side that Shadowlands is extremely lacking and has very little to show for, even less so in comparison to Battle for Azeroth in terms for content. All these systems they’ve had and abandoned. And with 9.1 not coming out till July / August… This Expansion has already proven to be on the downward decline FAST. And we’ve just only begun.
The Shadowlands has less zones for dailies, reputations, and activities. The “Endgame zone” has hardly if any reason to go into. No loot, no viable reputations worth grinding, the activities are gated with a limit of what we’re allowed to do. The sheer amount of timegate has ruined the Maw’s potential with even less reason to go into there once you’ve got your BIS legendary.
The Covenant system is more restricting than liberating. There’s little benefit for these locks on toys and cosmetics. And the soulbind system has proven to be useless as there’s very few reasons to utilize the three covenent binds when one character has all the profitable strengths.
What little we know of in 9.1 is depressing. The standard content we’ve come to expect.
1 Mythic+ only dungeon
1 New Raid
1 Timeless Isle zone.
Expansion on the covenant storylines.
We’ve got no new details on what exactly is coming in this patch. What is worth coming back for. We’ve already got the axe on Character customization which was supposed to be a staple of this expansion. Covenant features are not changing, nothing that exists is being changed or updated.
Honestly, 9.1 doesn’t seem to be worth coming back for unless they really want to stop acting like this is a big patch. It really isn’t.
No infinite AP grind or rng on rng on rng titanforging.
Can just log in and play what I want, play an alt, or even go do something else since playing the same video game every day for weeks is really not something I feel anyone should aspire to.
Probably the most logical difficulty to reward progression system ever with 3 paths each with their pros and cons.
Looking forward to 9.1 and beyond. I’m a fan of 6 month raid tiers so a mid-June release would be great. CN is too long and hard of a raid to be 4 months like EN and Uldir.
While there’s an infinite anima grind, it doesn’t effect player power at all, so just on that point alone it’s way better than the other iterations of AP.
2 of the big problems Shadowlands has is The Maw is terrible and Drop rates for gear are so low or like torghast no drops at all, Shadowlands is very unrewarding to play.
The deal breaker for me is that they broke scaling in old content. If they want to simply make current content a painful grind, that is fine, but don’t screw me out of doing 4 year old content.
Do I think it’s bad? Absolutely not. I adore SL despite its many flaws.
Do a lot of people on GD think it’s bad? Apparently, even though they don’t represent nearly as big a portion of the playerbase as they believe they do (just as I don’t represent more than just myself).
I speak excluseivly from the PvP viewpoint but let me elaborate on Shadowlands as I have experienced it:
Leveled 50-60 in about two days, very enjoyable experience at the start but loses its luster when leveling DPS alts, Threads of Fate is a good step for future expansions
Initial PvP grind before the season started was very enjoyable, made Battlegrounds fun and rewarding again.
PvP is extremely fast paced now, with many matchups lasting less than thirty seconds before wiping. I favor this interaction but some tweaking needs to be done (Convoke, Rogue Sub Leggo). Other than that PvP has been a blast
Now onto the negatives that stick out like sore thumbs:
Torghast is not fun. Once I got all the leggos I needed to 235 I stopped doing it entirely, I have not even done twisting corridors. A major haste buff is needed or something to speed up the content but that’s just been my perspective. I have not even leveled an alt through Torghast just because I could not fathom running this every week again.
The Maw is not fun. Even on my main I have not grinded out Ve’nari Rep. I’m not sure what can be done on this front because I lack a PvE perspective on zone content but mounting as a universal standard is a step in the right direction.
Alt Gearing is extremely tedious in PvP. Mains should be allowed to send honor to alts, and PvP honor gear upgrades should not be locked behind covenant renown. Ideally, I should level to 60, be able to ship a bunch of honor to that character from my main, then start doing RBGs or 2s/3s with friends to grind out conquest, but that brings me to my next point…
The PvP bracket is shot. I have continuously ran into people in mythic raiding gear at low CR with friends (1400-1600) as well as boosters who are selling carries in the same CR bracket. It is impossible for most players to gear this late in the season because of how out of control this is. Friends of mine have given up hope of gearing alts past 1600 simply due to how many games they lose due to boosters or mythic raiders.
Soloing old content should not be difficult. Mythic Antorus and other Legion/BFA raids should not be so difficult or downright impossible. Understandably the mechanics of certain bosses will remain intact (Eonar tower defense) but the scaling of this content ought to be doable for decent lvl 60 characters (think 176ilvl or above) so that alts may grind out transmogs or achievements. It is unreasonable to tell the entire community that they should wait until the end of the current expansion to be able to solo the past expansions.
To sum up: Shadowlands had a great launch and first few weeks, but the content lacks any long term enjoyability, gearing alts is extremely tedious, and the distance from 9.1 only exacerbates these problems. Possible fixes I entertain are:
Sending honor to alts
Being able to purchase account wide leggos with soul ash at 1.5x the price. (Rank 1 costs 1,250 soul ash, so 1,250*1.5=1,875 for the token.)
SoloQ Areans/RBGs
Fix legacy content scaling or apply the WoD raid buffs to raids in Legion/BFA
SL doesn’t feel like WoW. Just a bunch of random zones not connected to each other. A portal from Oribos to each zone would have made things more bearable.
It’s bad alright like there’s literally nothing to do, but mythic+ dungeons and raid. However even that sensation will eventually dry out. They really need a new crew now.
Pve: Lack of anything to do outside of World Quests ,Mythic Plus, Raid, torghast is boring and this is what we’re expected to do for months on end.
PVP:Pandaria PVP was better than what’s offered in Shadowlands it’s poorly tuned.
Lore:While it could be interesting to be in the afterlife of wow it feels poorly implemented Worse still it like BfA seems to be requiring a person to buy novels in order to fill in the blanks. this is not a position any mmo game should be in.
Personally, if they wouldn’t of nerfed loot drop rates, I think I’d like SL more. The gear grind after 200 ilvl was pretty terrible. It got to the point where I’d rather wait for the weekly vault. This turned into boredom and burnout.
Pvp was ok but it’s so hard to find teammates you spend 3 hours doing just a few matches. That led to boredom and burnout.
I first wanted to do all the covenant quests but by the time I got my main to where I wanted it, I was already burnt out. I dont feel like leveling alts to 60 and then doing the renown and quests.
I’m definitely not changing covenants on my main just for the quests and getting locked out of convoke so I cant use it on key night and raid night.
Torghast was just awful on druid. Not fun at all to me. I got 7 leggos on my druid and I really dont want to do anymore. Maybe if soul ash was like conquest and I could knock out my leggo in one go on alts I’d do that when I felt like it but I’m not interested since it takes 2 weeks min. Just irritates me.
Think that’s it for me. This patch was just frustrating instead of fun. Maybe if I had the ‘slow and steady’ mentality I’d like it more but that’s not my playstyle.
What’s funny is it isn’t that bad like people make it out to be. Yes, there are some things that definitely I am not happy with but if you read all the whining it is all about the following (which i might add are the same whines posted every expansion)
Not getting the loot they want from the vault and they are basically well geared but crying because 1 or 2 slots needs upgrades and are mad because they aren’t getting the free vault loot for those slots they need.
Crying about ilvl of loot for those who basically do nothing in-game. They feel they deserve heroic raiding ilvl gear again, like in BfA, for doing little to nothing.
Crying because they feel their alts should be as geared and progressed as their mains and demand alt catchups (and this started after 2 weeks of launch of the expansion) etc. They seem to think alts mean main 1, main 2, etc.
And of course crying about flying still. Although not as much which is surprising.
So that is why Blizzard sucks. WoW sucks. SLs (even though still the #1 mmo and most active players) is dead and failed and needs saving. Etc. according to the forum goers.
IMO it is good expansion. Not in my tops but no where near “bad”.
Shadowlands is fine. There’s a few rough parts of it but it’s still good.
I think a major pain point for me and my friends was that no one wanted to heal / every healer we knew quit because of things like divine toll and echoing reprimand and convoke.
