First thing Ill say before I get on with it is this is my thread and I don’t like the expansion. If you like it, good for you. Go make your own thread.
Alright lets get started:
Torghast
Torghast is basically a dungeon except less difficult, less fun, and longer than actual dungeons. The unique thing is you can do it alone but there is no greater point to it beyond that. It is meaningless. It presents nothing new. It is a time waste.
Some people will say that you get upgrades to your character. To this I say ‘not really’. My class still plays the same. I am literally pressing everything the same as I do outside Torghast. Its not like the prerelease Torghast where characters grew immensly powerful with very unique abilities.
So gameplay-wise Torghast is a failure. What does it award?
Soul Ash, which is a thing I have no reason to care about were it not for the fact that you can use it to make a legendery piece of gear. But wait do I even care about the legendary? No I dont care about that either. So why am I doing Torghast? Because I want to play with other people, and as you enter more difficult content you will need more powerful gear to clear it.
So in conclusion Torghast is a massive boring slog, that you have to wade through to earn the priviledge of actually playing the good content of the game. You cant just go and play the good content. You have to play this garbage before you get to do the good content.
Covenants
The only good thing about covenants that is directly related to gameplay is the new abilities. Thats it.
Soulbinds are garbage, and conduits are worse than garbage.
Do I even remember how I got a single conduit from my collection? I literally could not tell you one.
So what do conduits mean for you exactly? Do they change how your character looks? No.
Is collecting any of them impressive or fulfilling? No.
Do they change how your character plays in any meaningful way? No.
So why are you collecting them? To increase damage or survivability values. Thats it. Conduits represent nothing more than another barrier, another way to waste your time before you can go and play the good content.
Alright how about Soulbinds? You open a new menu which lets you either activate a different soulbind, or click some buttons around a tree to activate different conduits. Thats it. Do the soulbind bonuses provide any meaningful gameplay changes? Again no, just an assortment of passive effects.
Again it is just so meaningless. So shallow and forgettable.
The last thing I will say about Covenants is that choice between the four was no choice at all. As an example, 95% of priests will take Venthyr, and the other 5% are probably roleplayers or something. Same goes for Paladins taking Kyrian and so on for every class. The entire thing is a failure.
My advice to Blizzard is to focus on the things that actually matter to people.
Cool transmog to customize your character. Why is this expansion so lacking in this department?
Challenging and unique dungeons and raids to run with your friends.
Solid and interesting class design WITHOUT any additional expansion specific systems. Refine the talent tree. Maybe add a fourth column. Instead of making expansion specific systems.
A competitive and fulfilling pvp system. I would really like a solo arena queue.
And thats it, those are my thoughts. Thank you for reading.
I think Shadowlands is good, but I also agree with both of your points. Torghast is very underwhelming, but thankfully it’s down to a 40 min a week activity. The covenants not being easily changable is something I’ve been against since they announced it.
Despite those things I still have fun in game. The mandatory content to keep your character up to date is way down from BFA. It’s basically 40 min of Torghast and your two renown levels which can be done in an hour. That is a massive improvement and very appreciated.
IMO Torghast is worse than Islands or Warfronts. You hit the nail on the head that it is nothing new. Quite the opposite. It’s just a more boring longer dungeon that you can do solo. The powers you get do not impact play, they just make it necessary to collect all of the phantasma and make it a bigger slog.
Im ok with expansion specific systems. They aren’t the problem really. The issue is that it is all we get each expansion and there is almost nothing that continues from xpac to xpac. We have great class halls from Legion that are pretty much useless. A half assed attempt with Garrisons. The ideas Blizzard has are not all bad, but they are often implemented in a mediocre manner and are not really improved upon to make them better like they should be. Something like the class halls should be a central feature that gets updated each expansion. Not forgotten and left to rot in the Broken Isles.
Hey so I get that compared to BFA the mandatory chore stuff is way down. What I am saying is how about we have none of it at all. If the game is good, people will play it because they want to. It should not need to give them chores to get them to invest their time. Look at a game like LoL, which is literally just the game and nothing else. People are highly dedicated to that even though there is arguably much less to like about it than WoW. LoL doesn’t make people do chores. You either play or you dont.
I think Torghast has some longevity issues, sure. If they don’t release new legendaries/powers to make people spend their soul ash there is going to come a point (we’ve already pretty much reached it, really) where doing more regular TG is not worth the time/effort because more soul ash doesn’t make you more powerful. I’ll probably cap it out and then wait for the next patch to see if they either allow another legendary slot or release new legendary powers that are better than what I have. But I agree, most of the legendary powers (from what I’ve seen) don’t make you act in much of a different way. They just buff an ability.
Regarding conduits and soulbinds, I agree, they’re pointless. I like the Necrolords because one of the conduits allows me to have a hearth back to my covenant (while also having my regular hearth set to Oribos). Unfortunately the other factions don’t have such a hearth or I’d be selecting that option on all of my covenants.
I can’t say that I have any noticeable difference while questing, other than Wild Spirits. Dreamweaver with the Night Fae has a 30 second slow fall with only a 1 minute cooldown that I have found to be extremely helpful while navigating around.
There is actually a lot of nice new sets available because of the covenants but since they decided to make these items excluded to others not in the covenants it makes it feel like a whole lot less to collect. I don’t want to do this 4 times on DIFFERENT characters so I can use the set or mounts or toys on that one character only. That’s dumb as heck.
Less difficult? Becoz you were just on lower layers. Everyone is facerolling the lower layers. The question is could you beat the last 2 layers. Did you faceroll it? Nope.
Again a stupid comment. Torghast is allowing us to experience our toons on God-mode. Then at the very end of the run, we would be facing a God-Boss to test our God-skills. That is the concept. The only problem of the game and its mechanics is it takes too long.
Have you seen the Maw? It’s a bit hard becoz you cant mount in there. Well, Torghast has a reward that let you have a mount on it. And it serves as a prestige to honor you that you are among the best that has beaten the end layers of Torghast. The reason why you suck in Maw is becoz you dont know there are rewards that makes you efficient on Maw.
People has been beating M+10 with unupgraded low level legendaries. You can reach decent good content without doing much Torghast.
That show how noob you are. They are not all the same. Good players min/max on their conduits adjusting them accordingly to before going to the actual fights.
People change soulbinds/conduits according to the game he would play. There are fights where we need to be on AoE-god mode and there are fights where we need to be on Single-target god mode. The reason why you suck and cant beat M+4 and above becoz you dont know what you are doing with your talents/conduits/soulbinds.
Prove me wrong.
SL content is okay. It’s just Noobs dont know what the f they are doing. They are not progressing thru the game becoz they’re noobs.