The maw was a failure. Torghast was a failure. Korthia was a failure. The rest of the expac was actually fine.
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I suspect it has to do with Blizzard trying to draw out subscription lengths.
In the past you had casuals having to get good and join guilds. The casuals threatened to leave unless they got epics. Blizzard gave them epics and they still left.
So, since then Blizzard had been struggling to find a way to keep casuals around, so they cooked up all sorts of sub systems in SL.
The story was bad
Lack of fast travel in the beginning
Locking players to certain set of abilities with covenants
Leggos with dev locked-in min prices with vendor items created a hugely inflated crafting situation
Complaints going largely unaddressed for quite a long time.
By 9.1.5 things were a bit better. But by then so many people had left. 9.2 is how the xpac should have started. Much easier time getting around. The Maw and Korthia still not having flying is really stupid.
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For me personally, from a story perspective I was interested in the infinite realms of the Shadowlands and all the places they could have gone (especially since we had to little mini-worlds on Argus that were fascinating). Instead we ended up with four mostly generic smallish zones. That was a huge letdown.
As for game play itself the biggest part of my dissatisfaction could be reduced down to two things -
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Travel Time - they made a series of conscious decisions to slow down travel to increase time in game without creating more content. The removal of the whistle and the long flights between zones being key. Then ZM with the annoying little flappy things everywhere knocking you off your mount.
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Grateful Offerings - they put a currency in with no function other than to slow down the acquisition of cosmetics/mounts/toys. It was beyond frustrating.
Those are my thoughts (and the reasons most of my toons hit 60 and lefts the expansion).
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I definitely didn’t stay for M+.
The raids, except for 1 fight, were actually solid and good fun.
Because somewhere in Blizzard HQ, there was a ‘time accountant’ who looked over everyone’s shoulder and kept saying “More time, pad in more time.”
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huge time gated things like renoun. Thorgast grinds that took all of my free time at least in s1. Gold required for legendary items. Sl wasnt good for me until s4. Was the same with bfa
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The fallacy of ad hominem. If you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger. It’s the dying gasp of someone who knows they have lost an argument.
By the way, as you can see “ad hominem” is Latin but even that was a translation from the Greeks who had identified that fallacy a few centuries earlier.
i mainly play for the story and world building.
soooo, yeah
The BIGGEST issue in my book: the inability to pivot quickly enough. And that’s not necessarily Blizzard’s fault, if you don’t want huge content droughts you need to keep making the game in advance. Take for example Shards of Domination. I did not partake in that system, I kind of stayed subbed giga-casual, because it reminded me wayyyyyy too much of Azerite Gear: a thing that’s supposed to be like tier sets but not tier sets at all. It kind of set the state for the return of tier sets to feel even better (and it was pretty great IMO).
Other issues:
-Never give us an end-game zone where we can’t even mount up. The Maw failed on two fronts: it was somewhat uninteresting and kind of empty, and we had to spend more than twice as much time in there because of walking (except druids and worgen). And our time spent was then limited because of the Eye. Being able to mount up on a shadehound or regular mounts made the zone more palatable. I hope they never do that again.
-Lore. And everyone loves banging about lore and asks to fix it but without specifying, so I’ll specify: Zovaal sucks. He was boring, uncharismatic, he was mustache twirly to the max. That would be fine if they hadn’t retrofitted him into near and dear events of lore significance.
-Conduit energy and covenant swapping. Restrictions on re-speccing need to stay to gold costs at most, and being at a rested area is a fine enough restriction. As for the covenants, I dunno who else ended up choosing a jack of all trades covenant, a covenant that was good enough for 2 of 3 specs, or one that was BIS for one spec and OK but not bIS for your other spec. That felt weird.
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What I hate about Shadowlands? Well…like many of us here, pretty much everything. At first, I was hyped then few minutes later into the Maw, I realized how horrible it was without using mount–but I’m a druid so, I’m glad for that–getting around the Maw. That and I also main a worgen* so, it was no issue for me getting around. Now for covenant…it’s actually…ok. But my biggest gripe is how each zones are cramped and every mobs come after you. Overall, beginning were such chores. But I only stayed because of my friends and communities.
Korthia came out and I did the storyline on my Tauren and I realized it’s no fun that I didn’t bother to try on my worgen and vulpera. I chose not to bother with that and maybe will do it when I hit 70 in Dragonflight. Probably can one-shot the mobs at 70, who knows?
Then there’s ZM. Finally, a bit better that I can fly around but I hate those damn raptora screeching and fly after me when flying around.
Now for storyline? Thinking back, I find it hard to make sense of that storyline because I felt like they’re missing everything. I…honestly am not sure what was going on in there.
Glad they finally made it alt friendly and able to use mounts in the ending. Talk about stupidest expansion ever.
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I’ll give my reasons!
The Narrative
Battle for Azeroth was bad in this regard, and Shadowlands made it worse.
The Shadowlands were a big mystery to everyone: All we had on it was vague documentation and the Drust who were involved somehow. For the first time we were going to see what the Shadowlands are like! We will know firsthand what death really is.
…And it’s squandered on Sylvanas and the Jailer.
Battle for Azeroth revolved around Sylvanas as well, and it turns out she’s a really bad anchor for a narrative. Arthas worked because he had relations with so many other characters and races on both sides of the aisle. He was the motivation for Sylvanas’ entire character.
Once he was gone, so was her main motivation and they had no idea what to do with her ever since. From Cataclysm onwards she went from ‘mysterious vengeful former ranger with tenuous relations’ to ‘Captain Planet villain’. She has almost no relations with anyone else save the Blood Elves and even that isn’t much to go off of.
When in BfA they made her the main character, none of the other characters had anything to go off of: The anchor of the narrative is something for everything to bounce off of, otherwise it’s just a bunch of random events with random motivations.
With that and Sylvanas having no longterm plan they just said she works with the Jailer. Why? Who knows? Hope sucks I guess? And even that didn’t go anywhere.
It was so bad that the entire quest campaign involving her and saving the major leaders was completely removed from the game and retconned. No other quest campaign had this treatment. All to end with her just hopping into the Maw to probably end up coming back as The Maw Queen or something.
The rest of the Shadowlands aren’t much better: Bastion could have been fun if it wasn’t feeding into ‘wow look at all these horrible wartime memories your character apparently has’ so hard. Maldraxxus is just nonstop war and it gets kinda tiring. Ardenwelde is my overall favorite but it’s ruined by Elune being revealed and turns out she’s a tad nuts and sociopathic. Ravendreth is fun at points but there’s a lot of filler and navigating the zone without flying sucks.
Then there’s whatever happens in SotFO and that entire area. Heart of all creation is in…the afterlife? Okay.
Narrative doesn’t affect gameplay, but it heavily affects immersion. I find it hard to get into something if it makes no sense. A lot of things in SL’s story makes no sense. Easily the worst storytelling I’ve seen in quite some time. By trying to tell a story, it actively made itself worse.
My favorite example of this is Metroid: Other M. Super Metroid has a text crawl at the start and that is the only bit of direct narrative in the game, and it’s a highly atmospheric experience. All the narrative is just playing the game, and it’s great!
Metroid: Other M has many cutscenes, and a lot of words. It also completely destroys the character of Samus Aran. Instead of a tough, awesome bounty hunter, she’s like a wimpy teenager who needs Daddy Adam to approve of her every action, to the point of activating her abilities. She literally goes through a super hot area without her Varia suit, which resists extreme heat, taking damage all the while until Adam authorizes the suit.
Also Ridley was born as a Furby. I highly encourage everyone to watch this, it’s a collection of all the cutscenes with gameplay placed in. You’ll see what I mean.
That was a major part of it for me.
The Maw and Torghast
I can safely say out of every zone in every expansion, The Maw is the absolute worst one. It was a SLOG to travel through and have fun if you’re playing a class without stealth, or many movement enhancing abilities! It was stuffed to the brim with overtuned enemies and elites, and there was no good way around them except cutting through them.
Even better, every single thing you killed built up your daily timer, making The Maw even worse to go through. Have you ever played a game that tried to discourage you from playing it? And, of course, once you max it out you’re just dead. You can’t be in The Maw anymore for the day.
Torghast, though, was something I was excited for. I love roguelites like Hades, Binding of Isaac, and more recently Tiny Rogues. Having a mode like that in WoW sounds right up my alley! Wow!
It’s ruined by two things: Runs take way too long and it’s required content. It’s not like the Mage Tower where you do it for fun, cosmetics and to challenge yourself, you either do Torghast, or good luck getting into a group with no Legendaries.
A standard run took around an hour, bit more on higher Layers. Of course you had limited deaths, and if you hit your limit your run’s done. Better luck next time, sorry for the absolutely zero reward and wasted hour! Get better! This was a big problem for classes with little or no self healing: Enhancement Shamans have good healing. For five casts.
Melee was also particularly punished: There were some bosses that would wide the floor with you, not because you were unskilled or careless, but because there’s no good way to fight them in melee range. You just soak damage and hope you kill it before your HP hits zero.
In 1.0 you had to do a lot of Torghast: Legendaries took a ton of Ash to make and if you were unable or unwilling to do the higher layers the amount of Ash you would gain would be pitiful. It could take weeks, potentially more than a month of grinding depending on how far you were able to get.
It took something that could be good side content and made it required, which killed the fun of it in a hurry. To compare, an average Hades run takes 30 minutes to an hour. An average Torghast run took an hour plus. And you were expected to run it every week for hours.
4.0 made it, like a lot of things, better, but the pain of the initial experience lingers to this day.
The Chores
In no particular order: (Based on 1.0)
- Do all the world quests, not just in your Covenant’s zone but in all the other ones. Hope you enjoy that flight animation!
- Deposit your Anima in your Anima thing that you get from said quests.
- Visit all the unlocked Anima buildings and do whatever waiting game they want you to do next.
- Visit your mission table and send your troops on things. (Quick aside, out of all the mission tables this one is my favorite. Although that’s not saying much.)
- Run whatever dungeon they tell you to run for the week.
- Go to the Maw to recover souls while doing whatever assorted quests you may have there.
- Manage your Soulbinds.
- Run Torghast.
- Progress your Covenant campaign. (Note, the campaign initially was timegated so that you could only complete one chapter of it per week. There was no good reason for this.)
I’m probably missing some.
Note that while some of these were Weekly chores, most are Daily. You started your playtime by spending hours doing these chores before doing whatever you wanted to do.
And, again, this was required content. Wasn’t so much for the gear or Anima, but it was needed for the Renown that gave you benefits, especially higher HP than someone with no Renown. If you didn’t do these you would fall behind in a hurry. And unlike 4.0 these chores gave you a singular Renown level.
It was timegate after timegate after timegate and it made doing any of the world content a grind. At least in BfA, if you weren’t going for rep you could pick and choose but in SL there’s none of that. You’re doing those quests whether you like it or not, buddy!
It was bad.
The Covenants
The idea behind Covenants was good: It was so good that in DF they seem to be doing a similar thing with their factions.
Difference being, the factions seem like optional content, and don’t provide any significant gameplay rewards: All flavor and cosmetics. This is what Covenants should have been, and was advertised as such.
This was not the case.
What Covenant you chose factored into your power level significantly. Picking the wrong Covenant has the potential of a difference in thousands of DPS and HPS, and survivability for Tanks. You also have to consider your best Soulbinds and Conduits (Which, by the way, was also timegated by a resource ) which, of course, you’ll have no idea which one is the best when the game launched.
This was made worse by making it extremely punishing to change Covenants. If you realized you like another Covenant more, or just want something different, you would completely reset your Renown and have to start everything from scratch. It’s like wanting to change your Spec but you’re set back to level 1 and lose all your skills.
For something so important in a gameplay and immersion context, it’s wayyy too punishing. 4.0 made it a lot easier but before then, you better have been sure you picked what you wanted, 'cause you sure weren’t going to change.
The Encounters
Since BfA and M+, I feel dungeon design has went from making engaging, memorable encounters (The three Icecrown Citadel dungeons are some of the most memorable experiences in a dungeon I’ve had) to stuffing them with a ton of trash mobs and clearly designing it for M+. All the dungeons blur into a mess of spamming AoE and just cleaving everything with no thought.
There are some memorable dungeon bosses, like the one where you have to bait the Abominations and the one where you actually duel other players for benefits, but they’re few and far between. I don’t even remember most of them.
The high point for Raids was Castle. It has a fun air about it, the encounters were interesting (except for the one where if you look at a boss the wrong way you just die. That one wasn’t so fun) and Denathrius was one of the few good characters in the Shadowlands. It was a good raid.
Then, because it wasn’t satisfied with being bad content and wanted to double down as a bad raid, Torghast, Raid Edition.
The Maw is already an uninteresting desolate wasteland. Torghast is more so. Boring trash grinds, forgettable bosses and really boring design that made you feel like you were suffering for eternity in The Maw.
And the Sylvanus encounter. We were told it’d be the most epic raid encounter of WoW’s history, and they weren’t wrong! It’s the most epicly awful encounter in the entire game.
Somehow Sylvanas is more tank than any threat we have ever faced in Warcraft. Very abusive mechanics, takes five hundred years to kill and some really bad RP thrown in with some bad trash grind for good measure. All while Sylvanas rants on about all kinds of nonsense, including the death of hope.
While Sylvanas wins the title of ‘worst encounter’, not to be outdone, SotFO wins ‘worst raid’. I never really cared for the design decisions: I felt like I was playing Warframe or Destiny instead of WoW. The trash and bosses were very much overtuned, with more heavily punishing mechanics.
Finally, we get to the Jailer, the…main antagonist? I think? Anyway he’s gonna dominate Azeroth who’s not really into that. All of the previous statements apply. In addition a mechanic that requires you to jump into an instant death pit to avoid doing massive raid damage…probably shouldn’t ever be done again. It’s so janky and oftentimes I see people dying because of desync or lag, myself included.
I’m really hoping DF’s dungeon design eases off the M+ rushfest dungeon design and sticks with the more ‘fun’ side of Raids instead of the doom and gloom the last two raids brought.
Conclusion
There’s some minor things but I think that sums up my biggest complaints of Shadowlands. What few things it does well is very much overshadowed by everything it does poorly.
It took what should have one of the biggest reveals in WoW’s history and made a mockery of the whole song and dance. It’s like being able to see what Heaven is like and it’s just a bunch of people doing chores and grinding a tower for hours.
And almost all of it was because of the timegate approach. 4.0 has proven that with the removal of a lot of these it could have been at least decent. 1.0 was easily the lowest point in WoW’s entire history, and I still remember it for all the worst reasons to this day.
It made me quit playing entirely and actually swap over to FF14 for a time. And by this time I’ve played WoW for about 10 years or so. I did a lot of RP, I enjoyed the races and setting, I loved WoW! And Shadowlands killed it. In Sylvanas fashion, it actually killed hope.
Dragonflight seems like it’s taking a lot of the right steps, but I’m still wary. If I get another Shadowlands 1.0 tier experience I don’t know if I’ll ever return. I’m not going through that ever again.
…There’s my thesis on ‘why Shadowlands was bad’. Wow! Bye!
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Define “Fail”
Player numbers dropped to their lowest points ever. While it may have sold well WoW’s business model is for recurring players.
That’s why they caved and made all the sweeping changes they did. WoW is very notorious to sticking to their guns, better or worse.
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The story was atrocious but that doesn’t in and of itself make or break an expansion’s success.
However, the main reasons for Shadowland’s failure was twofold.
The first was its systems. Legendaries were fun but were exorbitantly expensive. Because classes were built with legendaries in mind, some felt incomplete without them. You needed multiple legendaries if you played multiple specs, which meant millions and millions in gold. Legandaries were not some rare, mythical item that 0.1% of people had like Atiesh or Thunderfury. These were non-optional addons. You could cut some of this cost out by simply using a low ilvl legendary, but it was still prohibitive.
That leads us to Torghast. Torghast was controversial for several reasons. While I personally found it a lot of fun, a lot of the playerbase didn’t appreciate having to do it for soul ash. What was worse, is that at the beginning of Shadowlands if you lost Torghast, you got nothing for your time. You wasted it. You had to beat the final boss in order to get Soul Ash. It ended up feeling like a chore that you have to do, rather than a fun gameplay mode.
There was also the acquisition of conduits, and the conduit energy that prevented you from changing your conduits frequently.
Then with 9.1, came more systems. And 9.2? More systems. You had to make sure you were leveling your renown, which was prohibitive at first. You had to make sure that you walked the tightrope of all these things, and it just made it frustrating and exhausting to play. Having alts was more difficult and needlessly complicated than it should’ve been. This is to say nothing of the balancing nightmare that was covenants themselves.
The second problem was content draughts. Blizzard has lied and said they always intended Shadowlands to be a 2 patch expansion, but that is simply untrue. They obviously intended there to be more content.
Blizzard’s already tenuous production pipeline was no doubt crippled by the pandemic. They were obviously left hobbled by work from home. This is understandable, honestly. It just left this expansion in a really precarious place, and it made it difficult to save an expansion already rife with problems on the outset.
Dragonflight is looking better because they’re removing a lot of the systems and making it more straightforward to play. How good it will be is anyone’s guess, but it likely won’t be as abhorrent as Shadowlands was.
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Locked Covenant - Becoz Elitists Streamers championing the Expansion whined and players without thinking thought Streamers were correct when in fact it’s not applicable to them. The elitists want to take advantage and abuse… Let’s say, oh we need Kyrian on Spires of Ascension. Becoz elitists cant switch, they whined. What they want, regardless of dungeons you do, they cover its covenants with their one toon. Which of course, Blizz is against it. You were Night Fae then you become Kyrian becoz of Spires of Ascension. It’s so stupid. Did the average players see this? Nope, becoz the stupid Streamers fooled them.
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Players thought that becoz Covenants are 4 of them, Most of them thought they have to do all of them. Hey, it’s designed for players just to choose one and be happy. Instead, noob players made 4 toons doing each of them with tantrums becoz the grind is too much for each covenant and it’s 4 of them. Blizz, didnt asks you to do all of them. The reason they said Shadowlands has meaningful choices becoz you have to choose from 1 of 4. But the stupids chose all of them. Lessons learned from Blizz, never make 4 grindy Covenants ever again becoz Stupids would play all.
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Legendaries are bad and overpriced. On BFA, players whined becoz Professions are useless on Endgame. So Blizz made CRAFTED Legendaries in Shadowlands which is very useful for Endgame. And still players whined. BTW, Legendaries prices are dictated by players… not Blizz. And Shadowlands is raining with gold… everyone could afford even the overpriced Legendary base items in AH. It’s just the Lazies are too many.
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Torghast is grindy. Which is not. If you think over it, Torghast are not balanced on Solo. That’s why it’s hard to most Solo classes. But it could balanced on groups. So make groups on it and it would make Torghast run 100% easier. Have you ever figured why on Group Finder, it includes Torghast? Do 1 run in 25 min. Do 2nd run for another 25 min… 50 min in a week is very easy for Casual. And once you get your Legendary, you dont need to visit Torghast ever again. Where’s the grind?
Shadowlands is very fine. For Casuals who dont do dungeons, there are tons of stuffs to collect. Whiners who never even tried Shadowlands, of course dont know anything about this. They just regard SHadowlands 0/10 becoz they let the Streamers judge the game for them. Those Streamers switch to FF14. Did you follow them? Why are you back here? Becoz the Streamers you followed who hated Shadowlands so much is now playing DF. ROFL.
Play the game yourself and judge it yourself. Dont believe on Streamers. They just want your Views. Did you love Asmon having a smiling face playing FF14? You know it’s fake right. As soon as the camera goes out, he logs in to his WoW toons. ROFL.
Exactly my feelings. There was not a single thing in SL that I look back on with fondness. Hands down the worst expansion so far and a failure on every single level for me. So glad its gone I may drink on the 28th to celebrate it.
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Hi, this game’s loot systems are awful enough without making additional, awful suggestions. Thanks.
Also, those of us pushing keys all season aren’t doing it for vault rewards.
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The extreme time gating.
Content gating.
Content was anemic.
Story was very boring. I did like the rez of Ysera, but that was it. The Jailor was a very one dimensional character, or was at least ill-communicated in game.
Torghast difficulty even though it was mandatory felt bad.
Covenant systems. The gating in these made my head hurt.
Best thing about Shadowlands? It’s ending.
5 Likes
I thought SL was a huge success!
I had a lot of fun leveling in Revendreth.
Getting the Sinrunner Blanchy mount was super fun, farming Anima and maxing out all of my covenant’s Reservoirs was fun and getting my toy Smolderheart, not to mention my muckpool cookpot, was awesome!
Don’t know what the haters are complaining about…