Leveling, but I do recall at least for expansions like WotLK, MoP, Cata, a lot of the open world end game content revolved around reputations and daily quest hubs.
And those reps and daily quest hubs offered decent gear. Not always the most optimal, not always cutting edge raid quality gear, but better than dungeon, heroic dungeon, and crafting.
I haven’t played through SL content yet so I don’t know if they have the same or something equivalent. I know that completing the campaign or whatever unlocks a set of gear for players.
But as far as playable content goes, World Quests in the last few expansions largely replaced daily quest hubs. People had complained about daily quest hubs… but I enjoyed them, and the factions they were usually tied to. Not everyones cup of tea though. So they introduced WQ’s… and here we are.
I also have friends who are fans of MMO crafting and crafting has gotten worse and worse for a lot of people over the years and expansions. In my opinion they watered down professions to the point where they are just uninteresting to me. But again, I haven’t looked into SL systems too much yet.
Edit: And PS, I think WQ’s failed to meet their objective and were an awful replacement for dailies in Legion and BFA. I hate world quests.
There are world quests that give gear, people just don’t do them because the free set of covenant armor makes it obsolete. It’s the covenant armor that is the problem, not a “lack of content”.
There’s also The Maw, which is daily repeatable content, but too many people are afraid to go there. So much for wanting challenging content…
TBF, maw rewards kind of suck right now. I haven’t even been down there in like… 2 months. Except to do torghast on alts, i don’t even do tor on mains anymore.
I mean there is probably merit to that. Looking at it from an outside point of view, the covenant sets seem like a jumping point to get people into doing those higher end activities that offer better rewards.
I will say that if anything, it sounds like they could have implemented things a bit better than how they did. But I am just now beginning my adventures in SL so I am not speaking from my experience, just from what I have seen people complaining about on here.
The Maw isn’t even that challenging once you start getting your iLvl up. I have noticed a huge jump in my survivability going from about 150 up to 186 over the past few days. It’s just not convenient to get around unless you are a druid or have the mount.
You get your covenant set and maybe a couple pvp pieces and to progress from there you gotta do heroic raid or keys so high you’ll never get an invite. I don’t understand the design.
I think they’d actually just like something rewarding.
Like you already said, the 197 set of cov gear being so easy to get there’s really nothing else they can do to continue some sort of progression, it basically stops if you don’t do group content.
Cov armor was a mistake, but hopefully we’ll see it end at 9.0 and not go into 9.1
I’m not afraid of the Maw. There’s very few things there that I can’t kill by myself. Borrgeth and Wrath of the Jailer bosses are the only things off the top of my head. Maybe the flying serpent rare, haven’t tried soloing it but I think I could take it.
But I don’t go to the Maw anyway. Why not? Because it’s empty and boring. I do the weekly quests from time to time while getting my souls, maybe do the shadehound hunt if its up, and thats all. There’s no reason for me to do anything else. It’s not fun. It’s not that challenging. It’s not really rewarding at all either. A mount, a couple of toys and pets and thats it. I’ve no reason to grind sockets or conduits. Why else should I go there?
I just want us all to be clear that Shadowlands has tons of content (more than any expansion except Legion). It’s just that you don’t want to do much of it.
And, hey, not everything is for everyone. I’m not doing the dumb Kyrian vehicle battles thing (I would much rather be able to do Ember Court). But I’m also not claiming there’s nothing to do.
Level alts (through completely different quest paths), run untimed dungeons, level professions, silly crap like forming a raid of level 1 characters to kill Hogger, holiday events (which you can fully participate in at level 40), and end game rep grinds for rare items.
Again, the Maw offers nothing beyond 20 souls a week (which you can gather in about 15 minutes) and gem slots for gear that casual players capped out in their first month of playing. You’re right that the earlier expansions had nothing like that. The earlier expansions actually rewarded your effort.
As for the Covenant, you have to grind the anima just to unlock the vendors that sell you stuff in exchange for anima. Again, you’re right that the earlier expansions had nothing like that. They didn’t screw you over in that way. Vendors were available up front, and they either accepted straight up gold or they accepted currency that you could collect at a reasonable rate from untimed dungeons.
Most of that you can still do (though I do agree, they should lower the requirements to get everything from holidays, who cares if you can make alts and farm a mount)
And yea, i think a lot of it boils down to, they made it too easy to get a gear cap. Back in wrath and the like there was gear on vendors that was crap to us raiders but i guess would really be progression to those who didn’t, we need more progression for non raider/m+/rated pvpers. It doesn’t need to be super high Mythic level gear, i don’t think anyone wants that for free, people just want avenues of progression.
Prediction: A month from now, all the people switching to Valheim will have burned through all the content, and will come back here, complaining that WoW should be more like Valheim… which they have stopped playing.
Vanilla, BC, etc… all had the same formula as every other iteration of WoW. Questing, Dungeons, PvP, and Raids. That is it; the same as Shadowlands.
The difference is, to make the game “more accessible”, the grinds are gone, the attunements are gone, the leveling is quicker, the gearing is quicker, the dungeons are shorter, the dungeons are easier, etc…
All the content you spent half a year on doing are negated by the “quick access” systems Blizzard introduced by people complaining about not being no-lifers. Everyone is consuming the content faster. The fix people called for made things worse.
I joined WoW well into Vanilla – Not only did I have all that leveling content to do, but there were still people who joined at launch doing it. There were people around doing the same content as me which means I had opportunities to do the content, and I was never left behind. When I got near / max level there were people still running 53+ dungeons – people who were raiding regularly because they still needed some rare drop or other things. I was able to see MC in the proper context, even when others were running AQ … because people weren’t all on the same tier and were still progressing.
But the core content has never changed. The speed at which we consume it has.
It’s interesting. Look at Classic WoW - there’s no systems in place to keep casual players engaged. Yet they were and even still are.
I honestly think Blizzard has developed the soul out of its own game… now if there’s not a literal neon sign that reads: “Rewarding Casual Content This Way”… players stop playing because the game is just so alien from what it used to be.