I think shadowlands was a decent expansion, I know my personal biggest issues was the time gating between experiencing the story and progression through the really obnoxious anima collection. I had fun in the Maw and Thorghast, but it became difficult and annoying because like Plus it became timed which is something I will always disagree with personally. As well as the lackluster rewards from it. As well as the soul bind the system giving so much power. Otherwise I don’t have any qualms with the covenant system at all.
It is? Because Bobby Kotick has basically said previously that they plan around the idea that large numbers of players will buy expansions or new patches and then drop off. It’s literally why Mr. Kotick was trying to push yearly expansions and why Blizzard is trying to make “Season 4” a thing going forward.
No it isn’t. No it isn’t at all. Literally the opposite. WoW is notorious for constant knee-jerk reactions left and right constantly, destabilizing the game. One patch is raid or die, the next there’s a lot to do, the next they add some stupid forced raid gem garbage that makes huge amounts of gear worthless other than raid loot again. Just constant back and forth and back and forth. They remove time-gates, then stick them back in, take them out, stick them in again. Ping pong ping pong constantly back and forth around and around.
You couldn’t be more wrong, lol.
Every change has came only after months, sometimes years of protest and complaints. Almost all of the issues involving Shadowlands were fixed only when S4 was released, at the very tail end of the expansion.
It’s not the first, nor likely the last time they’ve done something like this. It feels kneejerky because there comes a time you just accept they’re not going to do anything about it.
I don’t think I’m wrong on this!
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Compared to BFA M+ , SL M+ was horrid
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Every patch of SL jerked from one extreme to the other when it came to M+ vs Raid itemization. 9.0 had almost no raid gear you needed, then 9.1 had tons of cracked raid loot you needed to push M+, 9.2 swung back to having almost no raid gear you needed unless you liked Gavel, and then Season 4 swung back to raid or die again. DF Season 1 is looking very M+ player friendly with no requirement to raid, but this is in no way reflective of a paradigm shift because it’s just the jerk back in response to Season 4. The only way we will know if Blizzard actually learned anything from Shadowlands at all is if DF S2 is player friendly in regards to M+ and doesn’t swing into raid-or-die territory all over again.
That’s why, on top of the fact that I think 10.0 MSQ/lore is bad, 10.1 is really a make-or-break for DF for me. We will only know if Blizzard has learned anything if 10.1 ends this cycle.
From what I’ve read, DF seems to have the least amount of world content to date. If true, doesn’t sound too lively. And up through MoP had lots of zones with lots to do. This “cutting corners” mindset that you refer to could mean another expansion where I quit after a month.
Okay, going to type this out, and then update it as I find out legit things why it failed.
First
- Zones weren’t connected like WoW has always done, you flew from one zone to the next, you had to fly through oribos to get to the other zones.
- Maw Shadowlands starting out you could not mount in the maw and the mobs would swarm you to the point, it stopped being fun.
- Torghast, Torghast was mandatory if you wanted your legendary and if you didn’t have your legendary be prepared to get kicked out of raids/high Keys.
- Covenants, grinding out renowned was not fun
- Covenant callings, it was the same 4-5 dailies per day, and two of them had you going back to the maw, the maw became boring and dull super fast.
- Scaling was broken for the better part of the first half of Shadowlands if I remembered correctly.
- Story, the story in Shadowlands made no sense to be honest, we went to the Shadowlands to stop Sylvanas and ended up fighting a wannabe titan of death.
- Jailer, the Jailer was one if not the worst Villain in Warcraft history. He was just so generic and dull
- Missing NPCs, where was Duratan? Varian Wrynn, Queen Tessa, We had so many notable npcs who died and should have made it to the Shadowlands, Tirion Fordring? Anduin Lothar? Broxigar? I could go on, but you get the point.
All in all, Shadowlands did indeed fail, but you have some who would say it was a good Expansion, no…it was not.
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I meant lively as in the zone appearance overall. The zones when I went into them on the beta was big and lively where you felt like you were in a huge continent almost not some small condensed area.
Content wise, ya… open world has a bunch of basic things where you then grind renown that unlocks some additional stuff for that content [rock climbing, taking pictures, fishing, dragonriding] with a big focus on professions.
It just doesn’t sound interesting when I saw it on beta.
Continuing the discussion from Now that the dust has settled, why did shadowlands fail?:
Took to long to get rep for flying.had to look up how to get rep
Bad questing experience, worst leveling experience to date, bad story and bad writing, and worst of all -massive content drought.
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I had fun 
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Many reasons:
- Disconnected zones that felt more like sandboxes created by game designers to play in rather than actual places in a real world. The zones felt fake or contrived compared to zones from prior expansions.
- Horrible “airport terminal” instead of a central city (Oribos). Also, this is the first expansion without any cities or even towns. Not even a village.
- Borrowed Power
- Poorly designed overly difficult raids. Too difficult for the majority of raiders.
- Unrewarding raid endbosses who did not drop loot making them worth the effort (Jailer)
- Poor class design decisions with Covenant powers.
- Removal or butchering of features that players liked (easy world quests, titanforging).
SL’s launch was smoother than BFA. BFA had all kinds of broken mechanics which Blizzard tried to fix with massive buffs and nerfs in the first 6 months or so. SL’s season 4 also got rid of the content drought for many players that typically afflicted the latter half of every expansion.
That said, despite these promising improvements, overall SL was worse than BFA was. SL just didn’t engage players the way prior expansions did, leading to a larger exodus of players than prior expansions. I suspect WoW’s subscription base in SL hit the lowest point since Vanilla. Truly a bad time for the game.
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I don’t think it failed, but they were too succsessful at making the maw = hell.
it was terrible boring - they should never push their story
Covernants locking people to specific specs.
stagniated patches not enough content releases and not fast enough.
Boring classes nothing new or interesting outside of covernant abilities.
Artifact grind forced.
Lore was bad seems like stuff was cut and it didnt come together well. Did arthas dirty
Shadowlands was disjointed, no loved characters outside of vampire king dude. Like zero cool characters and tons of annoying new characters… way too many annoying characters
Further ruining Sylvanas’ character, too many boring and frustrating currency grinds, boring big bad, terrible story telling like Ardenweald could of been an exception but they fumbled it post campaign, really annoying systems, far too much time gating, bleak colour pallets, Borghast and the whole lawsuit thing throwing even more fuel on the burning pile of trash that was this expansion definitely didn’t help.
So ummm pretty much everything about the expansion there is no one specific thing really.
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eSports focus, fruit bowls and body types. They aren’t focusing on the things that really matter in a game like story, content, balance, replayability, etc.
That, and they still allow rogues.
I liked it. And I liked it because I came back in the end after needing a break. So got to run all the stories which I found to be really great when presented in one hit on one character from start to finish at Zereth Mortis. And like Argus and the Isle in MoP, before it I find these final zones are always the most enjoyable. Still a lot I can do.
The Covenants and Renown System were too locked-in for one character.
It was a very inflexible expansion IMO, so far as ALTs and changing your mind with your initial selections with Covenants.
When playing an ALT hinders your Main’s progress, and vice-versa, the system has failed.
interesting. you think m+ ruined it all, i think it saved it all.
weird world we live in lol