Shadowlands: Love it Or Hate It

Community General Discussion
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Nah the modern talent tree is a slog to even read.

And the fact thay there is an auto fill button tells me that during testing blizzard saw that a ton of players were ignoring their talents entirely. And instead of fixing them they just offered this band aid solution and released them anyway.

I think having interactive flight integrated from the opening of an expansion is better.

I dont think the leveling/questing experience suffers from its existance.

Theres a reason games dismount players in certain areas.

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At least it had content.

Unlike DF which was a giant nothing expansion with nothing to do.

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These forums are home base for a vocal minority of haters.

The game is 20 years old and going strong. Many more people learn to the love it side. They just stay away from this bastion of entitlement and hate.

Go ahead and post something positive. Anything on any topic. The same group of haters will pour out of the woodwork to shout you down.

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Shadowlands was filled with potential and they dropped the ball on nearly everything. Besides the dreadlord arc and a good chunk of Ardenweald it was a dud. Whoever thought undead space robots would be fun was losing it.

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The proper comparison would be Covenants to Class Halls.

The Legendary systems of both Legion and Shadowlands were pretty bad, just a question of what made them bad.

Legion Legendaries were grindy due to RNG.

Shadowlands Legendaries were painful to make and expensive to buy. They also involved the crafter or the people supporting that crafter sinking money/time into it with a pretty bad return on investment over time.

How exactly is it a slog to read?

Auto-fill? As in default build? That literally exists as a baseline for people who don’t know where to look for talent builds and aren’t interested in spending time making their own, so it fills out the trees with some basic assumptions as to what pieces of the kit you might or might not want to pick up, and it leans into taking passive abilities.

It’s not a band-aid solution, it’s a plug-and-play solution for people who don’t need or care about optimal talents. My family members that log in once or twice a week aren’t going to sit and look at talents or look them up, beyond maybe hunting for a questing build somewhere. Default builds exist for that segment of the playerbase.

Either you’re implying it does have an undesirable impact, or you’re saying it is fine.

Last time I checked I still can’t fly in raids, inside buildings, in caves, inside some dungeons depending on their scale… Where else should people not be able to fly? It looks like flying will be temporarily limited in the new 11.07 area, and flying might potentially be disabled in the 11.1 zone to encourage usage of the racecar feature. So where’s the problem?

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The proper comparison would be Covenants to Class Halls.

No. Legion legendaries were a borrowed power system with a sub-spec talent tree. Which evolved into the Azerite necklace, which evolved onto covenants, which evolved into Hero Talents.

Frankly I think covenants were the best version of any of those systems. Modern Hero talents are just boring.

But I think the entire concept of a sub spec is a dumb idea. Its just blizzards way of preventing another large pruning event. Because all the no-lifers cried when they got nerfed in WoD. So now the only way blizzard can deal with power creep is with borrowed power systems. But no lifers complained aboit that too. So now the game is just a bloated unplayable mess.

They also involved the crafter or the people supporting that crafter sinking money/time into it with a pretty bad return on investment over time.

True. That might make me reconsider. (I guess Azerite necklace would be the next best iteration)

Legion legendaries were so dumb as soon as I saw the announcement that every player would get ashbringer I laughef and skipped the expansion.

How exactly is it a slog to read?

Because its roughly 2,300 words (I counted) just for the class tree and one spec tree. And its dense prose too. Filled with numbers and references to other abilities that require you to go back and forth with your spellbook.

All while the game has done a terrible job of even teaching your class up to this point.

My family members that log in once or twice a week aren’t going to sit and look at talents or look them up, beyond maybe hunting for a questing build somewhere. Default builds exist for that segment of the playerbase.

Make the talent trees shorter/more digestible and people will read them.

This isnt a netdeck thing. Casuals only netdeck when a game like path of exile presents them with an unnavigatable abomination of a talent tree.

So where’s the problem?

Ah good. So maybe there will be at least one zone this expansion that is fun to quest i.

You know we used to get 13 of those. It was kind of the whole reason I bought the expansion ya know? To play in the new zones.

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Legion Legendaries as in… Artifacts? Not the same thing. Be more specific.

I don’t. :dracthyr_shrug:

So you didn’t play it, but you have strong opinions on it. Yeah, that tracks for the forums.

Because words? Brother, quests exist. If people don’t want to read and don’t care default build exists, but are you actually hung up on the number of words used for talents?

The people who don’t care now didn’t really care when it boiled down to one talent a row. They were going to just pick an option or look for somebody to tell them what the best option was, and move on.

So your enjoyment of a zone boils down to whether or not you can fly in it, and if you can it’s ruined somehow? That seems like a rather arbitrary stance to take.

There are new zones. If you get pissed off because you can fly in a zone, that’s your problem, and that opinion puts you into a minority of the playerbase. IF 11.1 cannot be traversed with flying mounts, you can bet the new ground mount system is going to be pretty fast. Will that ruin your time too?

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2 things sucked in Shadowlands, both story related.

  1. Ruining Sylvanas
  2. The Jailor taking credit for everything that’s ever happened in wow lore.

Outside of that, I loved Shadowlands.

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Went to my brother’s for dinner last night , always a nice time as my folks visit to and I get to see my nieces and nephews.

Anyway he surprised me with a book on the lore of shadowlands. It’s a hard cover book not very big but probably 150 ish pages . Looks pretty neat I’ll check it out this week. It goes through each zone the covenants and each leader of the covenants. Then it seems to explain how they relate to each other.

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They were in essence a similar system to the Legion Artifacts. They both had restrictions which made playing your offspec a less fulfilling. Covenants had the renown grind and a gated story content for them.

The legendary system in Legion was horrible. It was just RNG drops. That was the system until the end of the expansion.

Now trying to conflate the two, is strawmaning the argument. Saying Covenants, were better than RNG Legendary drops, but people give Legion a pass, implying something relating to comparing Legion to Shadowlands. Makes no sense.

Legion had a lot of flaws. And it took most of the expansion to have all the systems be good and flexible. No one has said otherwise. Legion had so much Warcraft thematic content, it simply was more engaging and immersive. Everyone felt connected to Legion. The zones, the Class Halls, the Artifact Weapons, the villains and the threats. Everything with Legion oozed Warcraft. And the content there was very good.

Shadowlands, just felt disconnected. The zones were islands, with starkly differing themes to them. You had to take a flight from the zone, through the airport that was Oribos to the next zone. They felt disconnected. The story, villains, themes, zones all just felt outside of Warcraft. The felt foreign and unfamiliar. And I get that they may have been going for that, but still. Bastion, Revendreth, The Maw, Korthia, Zerith Mortis, were so new and different, I personally felt so disinterested in them. Ardenweld and Maldraxus felt connected somewhat. But, having Maldraxus being the origin of the Scourge Plague, but not quite fleshing out that lore and story felt meh.

You are entitled to your opinion there, but Dragonflight actually added so much Optional content. Shadowlands had required chores every week. You can choose to define content how you want, but Objectively Dragonflight had more things to do than Shadowlands. Shadowlands, had more required things to do.

I dont think Dragonflight was WoW’s best expansion, but it felt like Warcraft. I personally enjoyed BfA more, but BfA is not without its flaws.

And you seem to be trying to defend Shadowlands by saying other expansions had negative aspects. Which doesnt really work, when the main discussion is why Shadowlands gets the bad reputation it has.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Shadowlands may be your favorite expansion. It is going to be some people’s least favorite. That opinion is subjective. If you want to debate the negative aspects of Cata, MoP, Legion, WoD, BfA, Dragonflight, or even TWW, I am happy to. But, the negative aspects of Showlands for me will still remain the same, and it will most likely remain in one of my least favorite expacs.

You are confusing Legendary Items with Artifact items. And right here, you are using the Legion expansion to correlate aspects of the game, yet you skipped the expansion. So you have no real opinion on it. So using it as an experience to compare it to other expansions is disingenuous as you did not experience it.

So here you are, trying to defend your opinions on Shadowlands, by using expansions you skipped, with systems you do not understand or did not engage with as references.

Just another angry person who cant take accept differing opinions or that they may be wrong about something. So please keep arguing about Legion Legendary drops when you actually mean Class Halls and Artifact weapons. Which arguably has been the best class specific lore and content added to the game.

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You were doing well up to here. Of the millions of people playing this game, we hear from thousands in forums and not all of those hated the game. So ou have no clue as to how the majority felt about the Covenant problem.

Also, this only impacted high endgame content. People doing professions, gathering, transmogs, roll playing, etc were not concerned about the marginal power in the covenants. Also they said from day one that this was an alt expansion. Once you did the story once with your main, it was very easy to level your alts through “Threads of fate”.

Yes, and that is NOT a retcon.

We are all robots. We happen to be biological robots, they were mechanical. But they made it clear that the robots needed a real soul to guide them. That is why Pelegos agreed to be the new Arbitrator. All those robots have souls in them.

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I’ve often wondered if Shadowlands was intentionally written and crafted as a way to signal the end of WoW’s lore and the company’s business direction. The lawsuit came to light, casting a shadow over Blizzard, and the player base quickly began to decline, followed by significant layoffs. Microsoft likely saw an opportunity to capitalize on the fallout.

The real challenge, though, was that fans and customers weren’t ready to move on or accept that it was over. I even remember there was a loyal fan on Youtube who got so angry and started to trash some WoW collection. It was sad but that was a fan that was super upset about the lore.

/justsaying

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I had a thought similar to this, but not so much the “why” behind it. It just seemed that after a villain like The Jailer, who is the mastermind of all the evil, is defeated, what else is left but petty conflicts? In comparison to “eternity’s end” and “unmaking a flawed reality,” what else could there be?

However, WoW is still popular and probably makes a ton of money. So it must continue on. So now we have these considerably more trivial conflicts at hand to be dealt with by the Champions of Azeroth. There’s always a battle at hand, folks! Someone has to take care of the bad guys. It’s almost like the Avengers. That’s who we must be.

I could be 100% wrong, and that’s fine.

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This is objectively wrong. There are several youtube videos and also posts from WoWhead and other warcraft sites, that overwhelmingly show that people picked whichever covenant was the best performing covenant for their class/spec. And it was not by a small margin. Most people chose the covenant that had the most powerful ability and soulbind for there main spec. Not from M+ or Heroic-Mythic Raiders. And it is supported by as much factual data as non Blizzard could gain.

Retcon Definition:
(in a film, television series, or other fictional work) a piece of new information that [imposes] a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an [inconsistency

Revise (an aspect of fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a new piece of information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events.

So by definition, what they did is a Retcon. You are wrong.

This is reaching here. Im not sure what you are reaching for with this, or what you are trying to demonstrate by this, but it doesnt refute or even counterpoint anything I said.

The realm of death, the afterlife, the great beyond, was presented as endless small worlds, that souls are sorted into by an Arbitor. These small worlds are interconnected somewhat, but only the 4 that we are sorted into from Azeroth, have this internal power struggle, among extremely powerful robots created by the titans to be caregivers for the souls.

And with there being countless realms in the shadowlands, for all different worlds, and the Jailer was to unmake reality, but the other countless realms were not involved? Where were their robots? Did they get routed through Oribos too? I just felt the whole narrative of the Shadowlands was schlocky.

There were the gorgers that were invading Korthia and Ardenweld and Zerith Mortis. But, that really didnt go anywhere.

There was the Drust in Ardenweld. Which added some color to the Drust, but didnt really evolve or move that story forward. Instead they just kind of ended the story in a very unfulfilling way.

And this is the case with most of the stories that played out in the Shadowlands. They ended quickly in an abrupt way, and were largely unsatisfying. They introduced so much, without building much back story. And even further wrapped up all that they introduced in very unfulfilling ways.

And by Definition… it was a Retcon.

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I enjoyed some of the lands and quests but the overall story was just bad.

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It also seems to disregard the people who just stopped playing and never said anything, kind of the problem with using a silent group as your shield. You can’t know one way or the other what they think.

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Is it weird that I miss these? Granted, the SL implementation felt a bit half-baked. But it seemed like a system that could be further expanded and refined. I was all for an evergreen in-game auto-battler.

Covenants activities in general gave me a feeling that I could always be making meaningful progress no matter how much time I had when I logged in.

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I didn’t play it because of not being able to mount in the Maw. Forget that mess.

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IMHO:

The systems were awful.
The story was awful.
The transmog was awful.
Half the zones were awful. Bastion & Ardenweld were good, Rev & Maldrax were awful.
The maw was beyond awful, everything from art to gameplay design.
Torghast was… mostly awful the whole time, but by the end it was tolerable.
The raids were awful (I awknoledge a lot of people liked Castle Natheria, so my take is a bit spicy).

There was just nothing good about that expac. Barring an amazing fall, it will go down as the worst expac in WoW for me, edging out BFA by a hair.

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Imo Shadowlands was lovable except for:

  • The actual main story arc, Sylvanas, Jailer, Eternals being robots completely undermining freakin’ deities, Pelagos becoming the Arbiter, Dread Lords being retconned into this whole mess, Arthas being absolutely disrespected, in fact all the massive retcons to work the Jailer into the story, etc. That narrative direction was dogpoop. Sylvanas’ character and the entire original Scourge story died for these dogpoop sins.
  • Korthia. I weirdly liked the oppressive nature of the Maw and Eye of the Jailer at launch, but the several months of Korthia for some reason were an absolute slog.
  • Oribos. I will remember that freakin’ ring as the worst city ever designed. Somehow, the USB cable of cities. Always end up doing 2-3 full loops before figuring out which side you need to go.

Otherwise? I liked the concept of afterlives, loved seeing old RTS characters like Kael and Vashj make a friendly comeback and get some closure. I even loved Covenants being mutually exclusive! The transmog was often phenomenal. The zones were also all extremely beautiful and well designed. And we got Denathrius, one of the more memorable and likeable villain in a while.