I never played Shadowlands. But it looks amazing to me. Why do I hear bad reviews about it from the general WoW population?
It seems like the apex as far as visuals and level of enemy you’re facing: literally reality and creation at stake.
…now I’m fighting spiders touched by the void.
Personally I loved the expansion, it was one of my favorites. But there were several big complaints.
First, was the Covenants and borrowed power. After doing the initial story you had to pick a covenant to join and they each gave you a different power. The top end game players didn’t like this because the covenant power that was best for one dungeon or raid wasn’t better for the next.
I believe this started with complaints from the RWF people who many of the top players look up to. To them it really made a difference because they face such tight margins.
The next biggest gripe I heard was the “retcon” argument. There was no real retcon but people didn’t like the idea that the Jailor turned out to be such a major driving force for all the lore that had gone on before the expansion. To me that didn’t matter as much.
Third in line was people who felt that the afterlife should remain a mystery. I can only imagine that these people must have hated Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” and most of Ancient Greek Literature which dealt a lot with the Greek Gods. To me there is only one purpose for a mystery, it exists to be solved.
Looks and the expansion itself were two very different things. U had like 6 different currencies you had to farm, Tedious torghast. The entire expansion drove many nuts.
Loved it. But hard not to as it was my first expansion!
The super long flight paths to get between zones alone was enough for me to despise the expansion.
Let alone the horrible story, massive retcons, having to farm Torghast for legendaries, etc.
For my money and I feel I’m not alone on that, it’s hands down the worst expansion… but Castle Nathria was a fantastic raid, even trash can get it right at times.
I really loved the zone designs, and how alien (“otherworldly”) Shadowlands felt — I even made a few posts back in the day pointing out that Outland/Draenor shared assets so you could recognize that Draenor would be the Outland, and that the Outland was Draenor. I likewise pointed out that Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Pandaria, Broken Isles, Kul Tiras, and Zandalar all shared assets so they were recognizable as being on Azeroth. Shadowlands, by contrast, had unique assets, design, and mobs. You cannot mistake Shadowlands for Draenor/Outland and Azeroth, and I loved it.
I also enjoyed the class design in SL, compared to WoD/Legion (although DF was a definite step-up).
I enjoyed the fresh new lore, although I’ve always been in the minority.
I enjoyed Torghast, too; I liked challenging myself.
However…
SL was very, very, VERY grindy.
It was horrendously grindy.
THAT is why, at the end of the day, I rate SL as a mid-tier expansion — better than WoD by a considerable margin, and far superior to Legion, but inferior to all the other expansions.
I burned out on the grinding by the time Zeneth Mortis dropped, so I stopped playing there by the time I hit revered with the Enlightened — I was sick of the grinding. (And I can handle grinds! I have the 100 Exalted Reputations achievement. Look at my achievements for various grindy things.) I spent the reminder of the SL expansion working on Torghast and older expansions.
TL;DR? It was the totally absurd grinds that really hurt SL.
Shadowlands was a beautiful expansion; art and music as usual are first class. But it is so GRINDY! SL was/ is a collector’s nightmare.
- The Jailer is a thing and has been manipulating events to serve his plans to reshape all of reality to be forced to serve him. What are the specifics of his plans? We’ll get into those retcons soon.
- The Dreadlords were actually infiltrators who were created by and loyal to Sire Denathrius. Denathrius is the Lord of Revendreth, one of the realms of the Shadowlands. The Dreadlords revealed that they’ve always been working for Denathrius and have just been deep cover agents the whole time. Anything a Dreadlord has ever done is reframed as furthering the Jailer’s plans. This means everything from the Scourge to the Legion to the Wrathgate is all part of the Jailer manipulating events to his favor.
- The Helm of Domination and Frostmourne weren’t stolen from the Shadowlands. Instead, they were created by the Jailer, who took the designs from the Primus, and were given to the Dreadlords as a way to control the Scourge.
- Ner’Zul was a willing servant of the Jailer when he was the Lich King. He actively attempted to further the Jailer’s plans using the Scourge. It is still up in the air whether Arthas was in control of himself of if he was also serving the Jailer.
- Similarly, Kel’Thuzad was never loyal to Arthas or the Lich King, only the Jailer. He did everything with the aim of furthering the Jailer’s plans.
- Sylvanas has been serving the Jailer since Arthas was defeated. She did everything with the aim of funneling souls to the maw to strengthen the Jailer. Her plans were always to cause the maximum amount of casualties so the Jailer could have as many souls as he needs.
- Similarly, Sylvanas’ soul was split in 2 the moment Arthas killed her. Her personality as the Ranger General has been a separate entity since then and essentially she hasn’t really been in full control of he actions since her death. This is the same case with everyone killed by Frostmourne.
- Through the Dreadlords, the Jailer convinced Sargeras to form the Burning Legion, all with the aim of pumping death magic into the world soul of Argus. Argus was being used as fuel for the demons to regenerate in the twisting nether, essentially allowing the Legion to be infinite. But, the whole time it was just biding time so the Jailer could pump Argus full of death magic so his soul would go to the Shadowlands and cause death to stop working properly, kicking off the events of Shadowlands.
- Through Meu’Zhala, the Jailer convinced Vol’Jin to put Sylvanas in as the Warchief of the Horde so she could get as many people in the Horde killed as possible to funnel souls to the Jailer.
- The Jailer made a deal with Odyn to get his eye. Where this allowed Odyn to look into the Shadowlands and create the Valkyr, it also allowed the Jailer to see into Azeroth and understand everything going on there. This also retcons the Valkyr to just be copies of the Mawsworn Kyrians who are the Jailer’s servants.
I borrowed this post from Reddit because I’m lazy.
So yeah, there were a lot of bad and implausible retcons in terms of story. Apart from Tiffany, almost everyone thinks so.
The gameplay wasn’t that great either.
Shadowlands had some nice transmogs, I liked what Covenant abilities I did play with (I still miss the Necrolord banner on Warrior), Maldraxxus and Revendreth were visually neat zones, and Sire Denathrius (and Remornia) had great voice acting.
These are the only things positive I have to say about Shadowlands.
Out of the millions of people who play this game, millions of them don’t enter notes in the forums so it’s a strech to say “everyone thinks so”. At best you are hearing from thousands out of millions which is about 1/10th of 1%.
Now as you go down that list you see an expansion of the lore as things that were known had their back story explained but not much was really changed.
It’s a lot like the Hobbit where we met Smegal and learned about his “precious” only to find out later it was “The one ring to rule them all”. Was that a retcon? Or after seeing Gandalf’s army fighting Sauron only to learn in the that Samirillian that Gandalf and Sauron were minor Gods and that a much larger army in the “West” at defeated Sauron’s superior Melkor in the 1st Age.
In both cases they were not retcons. They were expansions of the story.
Good gameplay, but undermined by annoying systems that seemed designed to waste your time and restrict choice.
Also people in general really didn’t like the lore, they didn’t like what was done to sylvanas, and the jailer was not an enticing villain.
Also, i think the fact that the zones were so separated was to it’s detriment.
I liked the look of the zones (except for Maldraxxus, but I don’t like the more nasty side of the plague stuff anyhow), but the storyline and lore were both… meh and lacking.
Me and my bf even loved Torghast for the experience, though neither of us were forced to grind it for the M+ / raiding scene, so we did it of our own free will. A lot of people being forced to do it to keep up with the meta definitely soured it for them.
I’ve always loathed this argument, of course the vast majority aren’t offering their opinions on the forum, but has it not been the majority of the people who have spoken about the expansion… been pretty negative about how bad the expansion is?
The art team always carries the entire game. No exceptions.
In all seriousness though, there was a SEVERE lack of world content. All WoD really had going for it was Ashran (ew) and its leveling experience, but once you were done with either of those, that was it.
The whole thing felt like a MASSIVE step backwards from Mists. There was a lot planned for WoD, but many of those ideas were scrapped so the game could be released on time. Sort of sad to think about.
It is rather the rarity of your view that leads me to this conclusion, or let’s call it a realistic evaluation. Relying on the silent masses from this position, in my opinion, is wishful thinking.
In the end, this ‘expansion’ changed character motivations and events retroactively. And that’s all that matters.
This wasn’t a retcon, but it wasn’t an expansion, either. This was a revelation. The author (Tolkien) knew what Smegal’s precious was right away. He just didn’t tell the reader in order to maintain suspense.
To make this comparison valid, Metzen must have thought to himself as he wrote the Warcraft story in the Warcraft III manual in 2001/2002: So the Jailer is actually behind Sargeras, the Burning Legion, and the Scourge. But we’ll put that off for now and reveil that later.
This is absurd. Especially since the cosmology was created in 2014, which kinda had some retcons itself.
(Edit: I’ve been told that Tolkien actually rewrote things, so despite my initinal claim this could be an actual retcon.
It doesn’t change the principle of retcon/revelation, though)
As far as I know, Tolkien started the Simarillion before the Hobbit.
This very much. I’ve never disliked an expansion in this game, but SL was the first time it felt like a brick wall with all the different currencies and progression systems.
It was better than BFA, DF or TWW.
There was certainly a lot of grinding, but it was almost all for cosmetic stuff.
Torghast was either fun or miserable depending on your class……kind of like delves.
Korthia and Zereth Mortis were awesome for mount collecting.
The first 2 raids were fun.
The dungeons and zones were great
Covenants were perhaps the only borrowed power that actually enhanced gameplay. Some were just awfully tuned.
Well that’s an incredibly rare take. Lol.
amazing art and zones, garbage lore, grindy systems, uncomfortably slow travel.