Again, you’ve got the report card backwards. Just because YOU flunked out of the class with a failing because you didn’t know how to have fun for two years doesn’t mean SL is bad. That’s a you thing. If you literally don’t know how to have fun, that’s definitely a “you” thing. I know myself and plenty of other folk who had a ton of fun this expansion.
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Shadowland was a tepid C for me.
Once 9.1 fixed the Covenant issues and we could freely swap, it was ok, not a great expansion, but ok. Some little blunders like removing CE/AotC early from Sepulcher to give us a gear grind in S4 instead of just letting us finish what is a normal 8 month raid tier was pretty bad, cutting some marks, as was the whole fiasco of Domination Shards.
But there was some good stuff too. Catalyst for tier was a wild success player wise and I enjoyed finally having an easy way to get full mog sets (Rogue Mythic Anthorus boots! Blizz come on!). Mythic+ remained fun like it always is, even just for some easy gear.
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I hate S4. The motivation to do mythic just isn’t there.
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I’m split. S4 Mythic+ is fun, S4 raiding is garbage tier.
I feel a better compromise would have been resetting M+ score to 0, changing the dungeon rotation, but leaving gear ilvls intact and having raids keep CE/AotC around, with the possibility of enabling affixes for guilds who are bored during farm, and adding the dinar system.
That way raiders would’ve felt less like their content was gutted to try out some new dungeons. M+ S4 didn’t really need a gear grind anyway, it’s not what’s fun to players and if they enjoy it, they could have done it on any ungeared alt.
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meh, I lack motivation to do mythic+ too, cause lack of mythic raid gear. Got portals and called it a day, might do tyranncial kara +20s just to prove that I can. Lower Kara on fort took quite a while.
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Alright chief, let’s play that game. Now tell me what those stats do for your character. You can omit crit, hit, mastery, and stam.
Now go ahead and build a model where players all want all the rest of the stats. Explain how that makes sense and is a superior model that “puts the RPG back in the MMORPG”
It didn’t? I thought the “Start of the Season Unlimited Valor Grind” aspect was fun. Have a few beers or a rum and coke and just grind like a mad lad on a new character. You can say that you could do that on a new character anyways, but it leveled the playing field a bit forcing all players to go into lower keys again, so the lower pool of keys was healthy and not just bads/alts.
I hate unlimited valor part. When gear is more prevalent, people actually expect you to have it.
@OP, your review is already better than anything IGN and Kotaku have put out. You should work for them since they have 0 gaming journalists.
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That was just a continuation of S3 and frankly, made raiders feel even more pressure to step into M+ to get a head start on S4, because the Dinar system and raid gear upgrades are a slow grind, compared to M+'s fast grind.
You could have had the same S4 M+ gear experience on any alt, without having to bump up ilvls and thus preserving CE/AotC.
Another compromise could have been having all 3 raids Fated at all times, and adding back AotC/CE for all of them, but only if done on Fated.
Yet the most best compromise : Sepulcher should have been an 8 boss raid ending at Anduin. S4 should have had the Jailer 3 boss mini-raid.
The point is, Sepulcher (11 of some of the hardest bosses we’ve seen) being a 5 month raid tier with a 1 month heads up of it finishing was a massive blow to a lot of guilds.
2 Likes
Followed by “now do it again, but it’s buggier than before”.
Gear being more prevalent is an issue with the gear grind is long, in seasons where there aren’t good catch-up mechanics like Valor and stupid stuff like open world heroic ilvl gear exists, but in a season like this, which is short, and open-world gear is bad, therefore the only good gear grind for mediocre gear is the Valor grind, then you get a lot of people doing the Valor grind at all levels of progress, and it isn’t bad.
Slow grind, but better rewards.
I’m happy with what we got. I would have quit S4 if Raiders got Dinars but M+ players didn’t get any compensation. Valor gear isn’t perfect compensation but did a lot to even the playing field, as “cheap high quantity gear” has worth when the season is short.
I only handed in one dinar quest heh. Wasn’t motivated to get the other two.
If I were to grade SL by Patch 9.2.7 alone: 6/10.
9.0: 2/10.
Problem is, I’m sick of giving Blizzard credit for releasing pure garbage and then using it to Frankenstein a passable sculpture after 2 years. The game needs to be fun at all times, not just the last patch cycle.
So it gets a 3/10 from me overall.
2 Likes
Which when you consider how early vs mid tier functions, is the inferior solution.
You want big right away, vs bigger later on.
M+ already had compensation : uncapped valor.
I’m still sitting on 3 dinars on my hunter because nothing is an upgrade without Mythic raiding.
They had more than enough warning about the problems with covenants, too. They just ignored them, just like they ignored all the (correct) issues with Azerite gear before BfA released.
They just think they’re way smarter than their testers, even when the testers are repeatedly proven to be right and Blizzard to be wrong.
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thought they went with covenants are good, and people praised them for meaningful choices (roleplayers?)
No, compensation for Dinars.
We already had uncapped Valor. In your scenario, you’re saying there would be no ilvl increase and nothing additional given to M+ players. Just a continuation of S3 but with a different set of dungeons. That sounds horrid.
The gear grind phase has a double benefit - it allows you to learn the dungeons in a stress-free environment and it gives Blizzard the time to fix the dungeons. If M+ players tried to push literally the first week of the season in a hardcore way, while the M+ dungeons were tuned the way they were at release, that would have been an even greater disaster. It took them more than a month to get the S4 pool to a point where I can now say I enjoy the pool.
No, the only people praising covenant design pre-Shadowlands were people who hate raiders/M+ers/PvPers/anybody who plays more than one spec.
The praise for Shadowlands’ covenant restrictions was 100% driven by spite.
My hunter has 3 dinars in his bags. What good are dinars ? He was beyond dinars in his 2nd week of spamming M+.
Just a whole new set of achievements and dungeons. Geez, what a big nothing uh ?
Maybe they could’ve thrown in a valor gear vendor with 1/12 pieces for some valor.