Loot scarcity. It causes players to reach a plateau quickly. Then where each upgrade feels meaningful, it doesnt make up for the many, many times up till that point, where nothing dropped, and the player experienced frustration. Valor will help, but the damage has been done people stopped playing. This week I went 10/10 Normal and 7/10 Heroic Nathria. Zero drops for myself. I did get traded a ring, which was nice. But 17 boss kills. Zero Drops. Felt terrible.
Valor will help with some of this. But content like covenant activities and Torghast, just dont bring enough to the table for your character to Feel like they are progressing.
The Second Main Problem
Class imbalance. Now all through Alpha and Beta people said that there was no way to balance the covenant abilities, soulbinds and classes. SL launched and yes, people largely played which covenant had the best performing ability for their preferred spec. They hindered their offspecs in some cases and they also hindered the player experience. Players felt pushed into the covenant which performed best, rather than the one they wanted to play. And some covenant abilities are just dull. Mind games for example, is just a press this on CD. It has no interaction with anything. But it is one of the better abilities for Priests.
On top of this, there is Massive class disparity. I struggle to remember a time where classes were this imbalanced. And not just the classes. The specs in some cases. There are many situations where you can play your class/spec EXTREMELY well. But if you changed spec and covenant to the top performing, you can play mediocre compared to your preference, and out perform your preference significantly.
By and large, people want to play WoW how they want to play it. They want to spec they like, and not feel like they made a bad decision. They want to tmog their gear, and be part of a faction, they identify with. They want to do the content they enjoy and feel like they are improving their character. That their character is getting a little stronger each time, by the player doing what the player enjoys.
Shadowlands, in an effort to give the players more identity and meaningful choices, gave players the opposite instead.
Seeing the dps and healer hps shift from boss to boss in the aggregated Castle Nathria logs, it’s looks relatively balanced. They are adjusting stuff on the fly. Seems to be more frequent nerfs and buffs like they have too much time on their hands. lol
At least for DPS warriors, the covenant issue I see is that Fury feels awful without Condemn, and it’s very potent in the rotation and progression. Venthyr is the only covenant for us that isn’t just a GCD cooldown that stuffs us with rage. Protection has a lot more freedom there.