For me it was the maw hands down. If I never have to set foot in that accursed zone again it will be WAY too soon. Having the expansion focus so much on the maw burned me out on the expansion I walked away at the end of Phase 1 and didn’t return until this week.
4 Likes
BFA and Shadowlands had the pervasive feeling of “If you’re not doing X you’re wasting your time”.
The core problem wasn’t that there were a bunch of power progression systems. The problem is that there was only one way to progress the systems.
So instead of being able to log in and spend my time doing what I wanted to in the game while still making some progress. I wasn’t allowed to make ANY progress unless I played the game the way the developers thought I should.
12 Likes
agreed, but i liked the content that was available for WoD, ESP the garrisons, even though they were a bit too mandatory. Blizzard has a bad habit of trying to force people to do what could otherwise be fun side content.
3 Likes
no mounting in the maw
forced maw lockout
covenant swapping being a PITA
overworld was boring, took too long to travel between zones (and you couldn’t fly them because…uh…because YOU JUST CAN’T, OKAY?!)
timegated story was disappointing
quite a few specs left for dead still from bfa
a lot of the dungeons sucked
borrowed power
conduit energy
m+ and loot fiasco
pvp being better for gearing than m+ or raid
the only good things they added was converting m+ gear into tier, fated raids, and m+ being mostly old beloved dungeons
5 Likes
Blizz needs to stop making new things each expansion and iterate on what they have.
Garrisons and Order Halls were great but have both been dumped. Is my Paladin still the leader of the paladins or not?
The Class Order Hall was a great way for Blizzard to provide new continuous content for each class and its just been abandoned with no resolution.
9 Likes
Playing SL was like playing a mobile game with all the time-restricted tasks. Hated it so much and i never want to step foot in Maw again.
Did i tell you how much i hate MAW?
8 Likes
it sucked cause it told you how to play the game .
when you logged in it said you do this if you want progress.
it never let you the maw walker make the choice of doing things how you want to do them. that is why M+ was the only good thing i about it. i got quest done to unlock flying and then i stopped then after that it was nothing but M+.
the raids seemed fun but meh…
2 Likes
Too much stuff you had to unlock mainly legendaries.
2 Likes
It was an expensive adventure through the Shadowlands. In game and out of game. I bought alot of tokens to help with crafting. 
2 Likes
M+ may actually be the primary reason WoW still has as many subs as it does. Almost everyone I know does KSM every season, and 99% of them don’t even consider PVE their primary content. It’s just a fun way to get a legacy mount/title doing relatively easy content.
2 Likes
Just found another one doing Ember Court tonight when I took Vashj’s picture with the Vanity Mirror.
They put SO MUCH GOOD WORK into Ember Court, yet barely anybody ever did it because of the damn covenant restrictions.
1 Like
All the problems from Shadowlands, in my opinion, stem from mismanagement regarding the timing and development of content.
Now whether that came about from the current internal issues plaguing Blizzard, the management team, etc., we will never entirely know, but it’s fair to assume all the lawsuits and corporate reshuffling certainly didn’t aid development.
I knew Shadowlands was gonna have a garbage story ever since they decided to focus on Sylvanas during the ending of BFA, and all the trash associated with her character. Even in some of the reveal trailers for SL, you just KNEW the Jailor was gonna be trash.
But holy crap, they ruined so much lore along the way. Arthas. Elune. A bunch of nonsensical plot lines like Bastion just feeding souls into the Maw… for reasons. The whole Mawsworn storyline where every character has reasonable doubts but then just decides to… kill everything… for reasons.
Not to mention the butchering of world content (there was nothing good). No invasions? No periodic zone events. They had these huge necropolis-structures in Maldraxus, but nothing like flying up and assaulting them?
But the worst, in my opinion, was the content release. Korthia was awful. Mini-patch material. Grindy dailies in a terribly small zone with no story. And then Zereth Mortis was EVEN WORSE BUT IN A BIGGER, MORE EMPTY ZONE. Holy crap. Flying around to kill rares, great. Very cool. Compelling content.
We lost a patch, got a sewed together raid, and every content patch was lacking and underwhelming.
4 Likes
Now that the dust has settled…
How much anima did we get for Arthas?
2 Likes
Many reasons.
World quest design was even more tedious and unrewarding than BFA. The removal of Titan forge made it less rewarding.
It did not respect my time at all.
The content update updates felt even more grindy and less rewarding for time invested.
The solo player content felt way too time consuming and by the time you grinded it out. The next patch was ready to do it again.
Overall, the world content felt like a after thought, and they focus on dungeons and raiding.
7 Likes
There was a multitude of reasons.
First, as you mentioned, was M+. Going from BFA to SL where you got less loot from M+ made it absolutely enraging to run the same dungeons over and over again and getting literally nothing for your time in over half your runs. I’ll never forget how at the start of SL I ran Halls of Atonement SEVENTEEN TIMES and only got loot in four of those runs. And two of them were duplicates of loot I had already gotten. That was a running trend in Shadowlands, where it felt like progressing your character was just spinning your wheels. The fact that this hasnt changed in DF does not leave me hopeful.
Second was the story. I’m not going to go into detail because I cant stomach re-living it all, but I’ll mention three things out of god knows how many:
- We had portals leading into the afterlife from Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Stop and think about that for a few seconds.
- “I WILL NEVER SERVE” I think I threw up in my mouth a little when I saw this cutscene.
- The Jailer was literally the dumbest and lamest villain in the game’s history. We still dont know what the hell he was trying to accomplish, and the expansion is over.
In short, the story was poorly written, badly thought out, had dumb characters in every sense of the word, and wasnt even finished.
Covenants were poorly designed and despite Blizzard’s promises, there was always a ‘best’ option for whatever class or spec you wanted. Prot Paladins ALWAYS picked Kyrian, and if you didnt you’d just be objectively worse than the Pallies who did, and so on. This combined with how utterly infuriating it was to change your Covenant at the start meant that if you picked the ‘wrong’ Covenant, you’d be stuck for like a week behind everyone else playing catch up. It was horribly designed and felt awful, and Blizzard’s stubborn refusal to change it for over a year despite immense community outcry lost them a lot of goodwill when they didnt have a lot to spare.
Everything about Covenants was just a poorly made disaster, and it made the already cynical community even more doomer-pilled by the time the expansion was done. Blizzard’s ‘fix’ for Covenants that made them easier to swap between was something that the Beta testers had been begging Blizzard to make for months, only for Blizzard to refuse and say “lol trust me”. Then when Blizzard finally caved and put in the Covenant swapping shortcut that EVERYONE had been screaming at them to make, it just felt like Blizzard had been purposely screwing with us for the sake of wasting our time and intentionally making the game frustrating rather than making the game fun. This did not improve the community’s view of Blizzard’s dev quality.
The Maw was the worst zone Blizzard has ever made, bar none. And once again it was an example of awful, intentional design decisions made by Blizzard directly against community wishes that ended up being a trainwreck, only for Blizzard to sheepishly change it to exactly what the community had originally asked for months after the fact. Korthia was an almost as bad follow-up zone that just soured the taste even more.
Torghast was a lot of fun at first, but the fact that you were pretty much forced to grind it for your legendary items was just tiresome. It could have been a fun cosmetic-farming activity where you go in and just beat up bad guys and get super overpowered for giggles, but Blizzard had to ram the square block into the triangle hole once again and put a gear grind into a part of the game that didnt need one. They seemingly gave up on making Torghast more fun about halfway through the expansion and just settled on giving you new ways to grind with some halfhearted rewards at the end. Its a shame, because Torghast was an interesting idea that they’ll now never revisit, and its all because they were trying to force it to be something that it wasnt. Another Blizzard failure due to horrible dev decisions despite what the community asked for.
And finally, the leveling zones other than Revendreth were probably the worst in the game’s history. In every expac before this, I’ve played through the main story multiple times before getting tired of it. With SL, I just wanted the questing to be over.
Oribos sucked.
TL;DR basically every feature of Shadowlands was half-assed or was intentionally designed counter to what the community asked for. When Blizzard finally fixed the problems so that things were what the players wanted, nobody cared anymore. The story made the whole thing feel like a joke anyway so everyone who cared about the backstory was mentally checked out the moment we saw the concentrated cringe that was the Shadowlands cinematic.
Also, Mists of Tirna Scithe was the worst dungeon we’ve had in years.
5 Likes
Whole lot of trash! Agree though, I didn’t like any of the things you listed.
At least back in bfa the one thing I did love was the zones and dungeons. I thought they were pretty cool. Somehow SL found a way to screw that up too.
3 Likes
M+ has only improved since it’s inception.
SL failed, for me, at least, because of legendaries and how they were tied to specs.
Add on to the fact they you only had 2 choices in how to obtain them, buy off auction house or craft. To me, shelling out hundreds of thousands of gold on a small pop server just didn’t make sense. Would’ve preferred a quest chain or something that actually involves playing the game.
Also Torghast was terrible and not fun at all.
2 Likes
Terrible lore with Sylvanas. Gloomy, depressing zones. Grindy questing. RNG, mounts, mogs that are gated or take too long to farm etc.
M+? Many won’t even play the game if not for M+. Maybe I can’t speak for everyone else but I’d have left if we had no M+ in this game because the alternative is raiding (Sigh @ wiping for hours) or PVP (Sigh @ Toxicity levels, button spamming to break my fingers and wrists.)
Ohh is that what the OP meant by M+; yeah I can agree with that. It was crap. RNG as usual and Bliz making things grindy. Kinda depressed with how we have 3 loot vault items but its still not gotten better.
RNG is just as bad, we can’t pick the stats or what kind of item slot we want in our vault. Its all RNG which hardly makes any difference from what they promised imo. 1 vault slot vs. 3… from what I’ve noticed. Additional 2 being crappy items in the vault? Pretty high chances of that based on exp. now lol
3 Likes
The part where you said “no mounting in the Maw”. You can actually mount in the Maw if you finish the first three chapters in the Chains of Domination campaign. If you do that, you won’t ever have to worry about the Eye of the Jailer.
1 Like
Class Design & A focus on using borrowed systems to crutch up. So, essentially it’s actually Legions fault. Shadowlands just continud to attempt to fix a problem that legion started. Hopefully with Dragonflight and everything being tied into our actual characters via talents, we’ll actually see meaningful design choices and streamlining in the future.
I’m not saying legion got it wrong, I’m saying it was destined to fail. Doubling down on pruning was augmented by the fact that we got the most amazing artifact weapons to support our now crippled classes. But when those weapons were taken away we felt incomplete in BFA. Shadowlands simply had this happen again despite some effort to remedy it with talents and minor changes here and there.
That’s it. When specifically this game feels bad it’s almost never the fault of the world (the zones, the quests, the raids, etc.) but the vehicle we experience that world through. When our characters, or other players characters who naturally interact with ours and influence the experience we have don’t feel right. It’s not fun.
4 Likes