Shadowlands served its purpose.
To entertain.
1 Like
Shadowlands was better than Dragonflight, you heard it here first.
1 Like
Story being the biggest offender. Lack of content being another + the padding to inflate and artificially extent something that shouldn’t be timegated. And lastly, features or things that were introduced only last one major patch. Shadowlands had very GREAT ideas but their execution of said ideas were very much the reason people hated them.
Torghast would’ve been fun but it has no purpose when you got your legendaries. The Covenants were also great but you had to go through a slog at the beginning just to get where you are again, especially the soulbinds and other progressions involving the campaign itself (Which they fixed thankfully…). I was honestly more upset by the fact Blizzard spent and wasted time on 9.1 when the second raid came out, had the nice idea to ‘make’ our tier sets through domination shards but were only existing for that entire major patch… It may not have been what we wanted but it was a unique idea to say the least.
Shadowlands could’ve been good but they just keep making it difficult and put out so little to keep us grounded to it.
4 Likes
The “re-conceptualization” of long standing, iconic and foundational Warcraft lore to support a hyper-focus on a bizarre and frankly unappealing new setting and characters.
17 Likes
Because it was a garbage expansion with garbage writers and developers that just don’t care.
2 Likes
Every event in Warcraft, down to the movement of atoms, actions of gods, sacrifices, victories… Yeah that was wishdotcom Thanos. He did everything, all according to his nipple-bot plans
Shadowlands must be purged…
7 Likes
I still dont think SL did anything horribly worse than the 2 expansions before it. It was just that it was MORE of that formula, and people were already tired of it with BfA’s launch.
It didn’t help that they made players choose between power, story, and cosmetics by lumping them all into the covenant choice though. That was probably the major early turn off for a lot of people.
Most of the other stuff people didnt like was optional stuff or could be heavily minimized and not be a part of day to day gameplay (see: Maw in general, Torghast)
1 Like
Death by a thousand tiny timesinks at every step of trying to do anything in the game.
(There are still a large number of collectables in Shadowlands I would have liked to get … it’s that I couldn’t find a gameplay loop I enjoyed that made enough progress towards them)
7 Likes
There were a few problems with it to me. Starting from the very beginning, the leveling was waaaay to on the rails. I wasn’t interested in going back on that ride after a first time because I felt stuck in it once I started. The alternative wasn’t exactly more exciting to me… it was a slow grind of world quests until you could queue for dungeons.
So being put off of even entering the expansion isn’t a great thing as far as replay-ability goes.
Then once you get past that you enter the systems. Again it is overly controlled. And not to mention rather expensive.
I dunno… it’s all dark and depressing there and your just trying to get a little more currencies to level up a little bit more in those systems every week. Professions felt sad, it didn’t even have archeology. Then the story was very confusing and didn’t feel like WoW. Like a sci-fi geek got put in charge of telling the story.
There were a few things I certainly enjoyed however. I liked the classes more than I did in bfa. The flow of content actually felt better than bfa as well. There were some cool characters. The zones were pretty… liked the gear design for the covenants. I liked the original dungeons that released with shadowlands.
But the meat of the expansion itself just wasn’t as good as others.
1 Like
Probably the worst expansion for the arts portion of the game yet. The writing was horrid, worse than Medan in my opinion. The music was so forgettable, I forget that Shadowlands even has music at times. The art was good at some levels but it was so over saturated with grey in certain places.
And this is without getting into the ripcord ect.
6 Likes
Only with the remaining playerbase.
6 Likes
Other difficulties weren’t removed to make way for them.
1 Like
if it weren’t for mythic + we probably would’ve seen a more significant sub drop
2 Likes
This was one of my reasons for leaving the game. I only recently came back to check out Wrath Classic. I feel like M+ is one of the worst things to have been added to the game. It has fostered an esports mentality that trickles down to every aspect of dungeons – from normal to regular mythic. WoW was toxic before, but even more so since the introduction of M+.
5 Likes
#1 reason: lack of content
#2 reason: excessively long content droughts
3 Likes
A perfect storm of a crappy patch after a very long delay, the lawsuit shenanigans that caused many to boycott Blizzard, and then FFXIV rising in popularity. Very hard to come back from all that at once.
4 Likes
This is the only reason a lot of players kept playing since Legion.
3 Likes
For me, it was the borrowed power systems. I played at launch until Feb then quit after clearing N CN. Just couldn’t see myself continuing to farm torghast and do it all over again on another alt. I would’ve loved to get into PvP since the vendors came back but with the upgrade system being egregiously long I couldn’t be bothered, let alone in addition to the borrowed power systems.
I’m glad they finally realized their design sucked and needed to change, just a shame it took them 6 years to do so.
2 Likes
Yeah, 9.1 was definitely “the fatal wound” - that patch was the point at which the expansion started bleeding so heavily it never recovered again until it got a temporary “boost” due to players returning for WoTLK Classic
I remember sooo many regulars/familiar faces on the forums quitting right around the 9.1 timeframe
…it should be noted that a lot of these same players/posters never came back, even 1 week out from a new expansion 
3 Likes
M+ haters are probably my least favorite group of people in the wow community. It opened up a lot more content for casual groups of people and gave people more repetitive content and gearing methods to entertain themselves with. It was probably one of the best changes to the game.
5 Likes