I recall there was some hype from the community that we should explore shadowlands during Legion’s Uuna questline. 
In terms of design, I think it’s warcraft enough besides Oribos and Mortis. 
…storywise, I think they made the Kyrian dumb as they understand the Jailer’s threat and continue dumping souls for the Jailer. 
honestly i think the whole point was the night elf story and to write off sylvannas who is was turning the horde vs itself
Another Shadowlands hate thread. ,/yawn
Except both of those stories were done so poorly nobody wants it. Imagine making the NE goddess revealed to just some bumbling idiot who had no actual respect for her people. Then Sylvannas’ whole character go from being, the ex slave fighting for revenge, and freedom to. The ex slave, who was really still a slave and then tried to gas light the world into saying she’s not one.
The Shadowlands was cool until it became an expansion.
It was a double down on ppl not wanting to do pathfinder and borrowed power. So they came up with renown and made even more of a chore out of stuff. It gave them the template for being able to swamp us with micro management and useless items for time played metrics. Oh and lets not forget a time gated storyline that was strictly to cater to alliance fanbois who wanted Sylvanas dead because “alliance be weak” reasons. It had stuff that forced you to go to WoWhead and have certain addon for dungeons for M+ {MoTS}, because LTGBQTYSH reasons. It was an expansion to basically see how much crap we would endure. Honestly I am surprised they let us have DF and dragonriding. Although they have managed to make itme bloat even worse and somehow make professions worse by catering to that one person who wanted tinkering.
If there were no Shadowlands, then there would be no Ardenweald. Story and characters aside, that is probably my number one favorite zone. It felt good being there and the music was fantastic.
Elune is a goddess, she cares for her people but the night elves didn’t die out. there were people still worshiping her. She also knows far more than us players would know in the game so her grand scheme and knowledge would out weigh a worshippers feelings of regret, pain, and anger.
Sylvannas was never “free”… when she was freed with arthas the jailer had already taken the shard with a part of her soul from her as he was a key factor behind the lich king. He then started to influence her when he needed her like any powerful person does with assets they have under their control. She had the illiusion of freedom and choice until that point when it came to light she wasn’t so free as we had thought…
now this isn’t give blizzard credit on a “great” story but its not as bad when you take the time and actually look at the parts from a individual from that worlds view point… as players we have more knowledge and know that blizzard completely messed up.
One place where Shadowlands ties in with the rest of the World of Warcraft, in my opinion, was in the Revendreth zone. It was my favorite zone because I could inhabit a place where the original builders were long since gone. There are many such zones in Azeroth: Dire Maul, Ashzara, and what not. I really enjoy being immersed in such decadent surroundings.
The worst zone ever.
To add more, I feel as if Blizzard should’ve used more of the show instead of telling when it came to Shadowlands, they said the Jailer was this big bad guy who needed to be imprisoned by his siblings, but to me, I never really felt that.
I actually liked a lot of the world-building and small storytelling that Shadowlands brought throughout the launch zones. Some of it felt “alien” for sure but I think that was kind of the point. The brokers in particular are quite an interesting “neutral” race and I’m wondering if there will be a future connection to ethereals revealed later on.
The macro-level story was where they went astray and chaining themselves to that (bad pun given the Jailer’s powers I suppose) made it extremely difficult to salvage. A lot of the retcons they made in order to fuel that main story simply shouldn’t have happened, among other reasons.
It would have almost certainly been a better expansion if not for Covid, because as much as they never admitted it, anyone who raided and took any sort of notice to the game knows they straight up missed a patch.
The whole Korthia and SOD rolled into one as the second raid was just bad, they added some random little zone with 30 rares, 20 mounts, 45 achievements and some super secret vault that was just a room.
It’s almost certain that vault should have been a raid, Korthia should have been much larger and SoD should have been the last raid, tacking on 3 bosses after Anduin felt like they tore apart what should have been the last bosses of SOD, you know, the Jailer hiding in his jail, you climb the tower to fight him and all that.
If that all went ahead better than it did, yeh it would have helped a lot.
Oh so it was another experiment ,oh geesh I should be getting payed for being a guinea pig .
that’s part of why it was so ill-recieved.
I’ve often said that having the Jailer be the mastermind behind everything was a huge flaw, what they should’ve done is have him be more of an opportunistic villain who saw what was going on and then swayed Sylvanas into working for him towards the end of Legion promising her freedom, however, I would’ve also worked in an Anduin angle maybe saying the Jailer could show him Varian and then when they both come to the maw with the expedition force, (us the players), he reveals it was all a trap and then we have to escape and find a way back home.
I have no idea…
The way they handled Arthas in SL was one of the biggest letdowns ever imho. Didn’t hate SL, but definitely one of my least favorites, mostly, because of above mentioned. Bringing the Renown system on over to DF was another stupid thing they did.
Shadowlands is the movie/TV show equivalent of getting to the end and the camera pulls back to indicate it all happened in a snow globe.
Isn’t this what they said they were trying to do… Close one chapter to open a new one.