Fixed it for you. Shadowlands is still the worst wow expac, and not even BFA, WoD, TWW or DF come even remotely close. To sum it up:
- Torghast sucked. The RGN that made it so if you didnt get enough hp or got a bad final boss, you lost time to walk out empty-handed. Nothing fun like reaching a boss that melees you for like half your health with auto-attacks. By the time it was fixed, it was too little too late.
- The Lore was incomprehensible: retcons to existing lore, contradicting both past lore and its own lore. To say nothing of the awful writing that gave a completely awful “send-off” to Ner’Zhul, Arthas, and many other major characters. The ones that were not disrespected rarely did anything of note, and Baine in particular didnt even do crap for most of the expansion period.
- The covenants and soul link sytem was hot garbage: you couldn’t play more than one facet of the game in some specs without doing about 30% worse because what was a BiS choice for raiding was either terrible or only mid for M+ or pvp. Having to level and gear new alts of the same class just to pvp because you couldn’t freely swap covenants for over a entire year of the damn expansion is unacceptable. To say nothing of the messy balance.
- The expansion content was s***. Ireedemable trash like that “The Spider in the Wall” world quest or world quests with hidden steps that made what looked like a 1-2 mins world quests into a 5-10 mins one for no reason other than make you hate world quests. When Korthia fixed it, it instead compensated by making the dailies suck: Between terrible droprate, non-functional vehicles, that horrendous “pick orbs like 5 times by clicking a item as you jump off and pray you don’t miss it” and more, it was downright miserable.
- The expansion had the galls to offer half of a expansion of content for full price: only 3 raids total (not counting Fated because its not new content). For context, Mist of Pandaria opened with 3 raids the size of Castle Nathria, a long 14 bosses raid in ToT and another raid with same amount of bosses in SoO. And that’s not even counting the content patches between raids delivered(5.1 and 5.3) that Shadowlands lacked.
- Working on cosmetics or mounts sucked. HARD. I’m talking about “each of your alts must be necrolord, spend over 10k anima, build a construct and farm a daily 2% droprate mount, and if you skip any steps, you will not be elegible to even try it” level of absurd, not to mention the asinine anima grind that wasn’t remedied till it was again, too little too late.
- Traveling between zones or even World Quests felt like it took too long, and if you wanted to do emmisaries, it was worse than BFA: In BFA, it was auto added to your log and you could just go to the zone right away to do them and turn them in (usually in that same zone with some exceptions). In SL, you had to go manually pick it up at your convenant sanctum, and 75% of the time fly to another zone (taking 5-10 mins to get there because there were no portals to each zone in oribos or your sanctum), take 15-20 mins to complete the emmisary, then fly back to your sanctum for turn in. Asinine and boring is a understatement. It felt like gratuitous time sinking.
- The raids sucked a**. Castle Nathria was passable, but both Sanctum of Domination(20 mins final boss? are you serious now?) and Sepulcher of the First Ones(overtuned as hell on release) were awful. The armor sets of the raids were likewise mostly trash with some exceptions.
- The Maw and Korthia. Easily strong contenders for the worst wow zones ever. Nuff said.