Warning! These are my opinions. I would be happy to hear yours in relation to mine. But remember. In this context (World of Warcraft the Game) opinions are neither right or wrong.
Legion was a good expansion. But it wasnt Great. At its launch, it was the least friendly expansion for alts and one of the least friendly for multi spec. RNG legendary drops were absolutely horrible. Aside from progressing Suramar and your order hall, there were not that many side activities. At launch, what carried it, was the deluge of class reworks, the new class and the lore and story of the expac. Each artifact weapon having its own storyline and the strength of those stories, in relation to your order hall.
However, the patches, brought FANTASTIC improvements to the flaws. (Aside from Relics for the Artifact Weapons). They took all of the weak points, over time, and improved or corrected them. Each patch, put out a integral zone to the expansionâs progression of story. Legion wasnt Born a Great expansion. It was Made into one.
Shadowlands is definitely not Born a great expansion. There is a lot there, but a lot of it is optional. The reward systems are lacking or flawed aside from PvP. The Maw as a zone was unfinished. Torghast is unfinished and bland. Covenant Campaigns were decent, but the stories are a little weak. The zones are all separated and disjointed, so they feel like lonely islands. But the dungeons are pretty solid. Nathria as a first raid, was very good. There is already a renown catch-up in place for alts. Legendarys have 2 grinds related to them. The garbage capped soul ash. And the memory to drop. But you can target these goals. The story of Shadowlands falls pretty flat. The Jailer/Arbiter machine of death thing, just doesnt hook me.
All things considered Shadowlands had a pretty smooth launch. It has a pretty decent foundation there. Its up to blizzard to make it a great expansion. The potential is there. But right now there is a lot of things to do, but none of them feel really impactful to do.
Better than BFA crap, for sure.
SLs is still young, anything could happen. But from my perspective I just dont see them turning it into Legion or Mists.
Iâll give it time. Though I keep asking myself its this is a âmeâ thing why do I still LOVE to go run the Mists farm/Tiller thing again and again. Why do I go spend the day running old content with lowbies if I hate the game now?
Seems like its got to be BFA and SLs that are the problem.
What scares me is how Shadowlands will handle patches. 9.1 is too far off and what we currently have in game simply isnât enough to keep players interested. Too many things in this game simply arenât fun. Legion IIRC launched content on a steady rate.
Legionâs problems felt more specific to Legionâs specific content, concepts, and ideas - RNG Legendaries, for instance.
Shadowlands doesnât even get fundamental WoW right. Scratch that, it doesnât even get fundamental game design right. Content is designed not to be fun/rewarding, but to waste as much of your time as possible.
Padding. Time-gates. Throttling.
Shadowlands is designed primarily so that the developers can say they improved their metrics, not so we can say, âI had fun and want to keep doing this.â
Expansions shouldnât take until the last patch to be user friendly. Yet this keeps happening and they still donât listen. Thatâs why subs fluctuate the way they do.
I shouldnât have to be on a rollercoaster of finally good to crap and back up to finally good. Itâs why some people donât even get excited for new expansions anymore.
Literally, If they put legendary Memories on Venari for stygia. Made eye of the Jailer take longer to fill, or give us a way to reduce it. Removed the weekly Cap on Soul Ash in Torghast, or just gave us a 4k or 5k Soul Ash at one time currency Limit. In my opinion, it would go a LOOOONG way at improving things in Shadowlands.
Legion did start out rough compared to the rest of the expansion. However, the patch cycles were a lot shorter. 7.1 was already released by this time in Legion.
And more importantly. Even though 7.0 was grindy. It was still a lot more exciting and rewarding than Shadowlands
SL just needs more casual content. I hated Torghast at first, but I eventually came around and started to enjoy myself. That being said, itâs just not enough casual content to keep the majority happy.
A new warfront, battleground and outdoor event would really help players interested.
the real question is why legion.bfa, and shadowlands came out broke and took til last patch to basically fix and shadowlands is headed there. some kind of changes could be made after all these yrs so this donât happen maybe? every major thing they brag about has been broken on release.
My experience was much different in Legion, I liked it right from the get go, and found it very friendly to alts. But my perspective is different: I do not view things end game, for alts. I view them from leveling pleasure and interest level.
Shadowlands is called âalt friendlyâ because of the catchup mechanics for alts, but that doesnât matter nearly as much to me as the extremely limited replayability factor for leveling up alts. Iâve done 4 alts so far and its misery doing each one, with increasing misery. Oh, the same thing. Again.
The core of legion was solid. The legendary system needed work, but was way better then what we are seeing in Shadowlands. Some classes needed a lot of work (BM hunters for one), but they turned that around so much faster then they have done anything in Shadowlands. As I said before I just donât see what they could possibly do to turn Shadowlands around, but with Legion we gave a bunch of suggestion for minor fixes that resulted in major improvements (baking in the BM hunter legendary shoulders for one). Shadowlands just feels flawed to the very core concepts.
Retail just caters too much to the 1% of players. Casuals are all quitting including all my friends. My server was more alive even in BFA than right now.
I have said many times that I think the main problem is that Blizzard keeps trying to re-invent the wheel every xpac. Instead of taking what worked and expanding on it from the previous xpacs, they scrap it and start over. This requires massive development work and QA that they just donât have time to do on a 2 year cycle.
