The content we love is lost. I have no idea what I am doing here

Community General Discussion
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Feel free to call me sour but I am shocked at how incompetent the developers are. I can only speak for myself here but I think most players will generally agree with me.

The content we love is lost in Shadowlands.

There is absolutely nothing, zero about the legendary item system that feels legendary. It’s a gated grind that savagely punishes players who prioritize increasing their characters strength. The requirements are collectively more time consuming than ever. GL finding a group for all but the most trivial content if you fall behind.

Remember when we would get cool talents at max level? Me too. Sure, it’s there via legendaries but you have to work for it and I mean that quite literally. The chores most of us either disdain or care little for are integral to all aspects of character power and progression now. I’ve played on and off since TBC. I have never felt so obligated to do chores, let alone to simply stay relevant in PVP and progression PVE content.

Shadowlands introduced eight dungeons at launch. This is equivalent to MOP and less than all other expansions, but remember MOP launched with a new BG, race, challenge mode dungeons, scenarios and a ton of QoL improvements like AOE loot and account-wide achievements and collectibles.

Shadowlands has no additional battlegrounds, world PVP zones and arena maps.

Shadowlands has reduced the loot in dungeons and raids with the sole intention of inhibiting character growth.

Yet, again there is the illusion of choice. For players interested in optimizing their performance you’re lucky if you have two choice legendaries to choose from. Yes, this will get better as the months go by but it’s not just that. Let’s say you have eight hours a week to play outside of raids and organized PVP. You’re going to fall behind if you decide to play around with an alt or hit the battlegrounds, whatever it is. Yes, this will improve as we hit the dog days of a patch but remember this isn’t your job it’s a game you pay monthly for.

The developers doubled down on the worst aspects of BFA and then some. You know what I’m talking about. (And if you don’t this thread is irrelevant to you).

I know the grind will ease up as time goes on but who cares if you don’t enjoy the present.

This is more subjective to your view on the content, but I wish Blizzard added a few more dungeons and a battleground or two instead of the thematically unpleasant, mind-numbingly dull and repetitive cotent that is Torghast and Maw or perhaps finally addressed faction imbalance and the notion of “bring the player, not the class”.

It doesn’t matter but I thought I was going to love Shadowlands. As it turns out it’s not for me. It looks like World of Warcraft has now taken the direction of a free-to-play mobile RPG but costs $50 upfront and $15 a month. I don’t have the patience for that crap. As far as gaming goes, there is nothing that scratches the itch like WoW progression raiding does for me. Even though I never cared for the character upkeep grind I felt like it was a reasonable ask from a design perspective. It always tappered off dramatically. This is no longer the case. Catch-up mechanics and the dead period of a patch are irrelevant if you want to remain competitive in the present.

I just don’t understand why I am paying to do trivial boring tasks just so I can remain relevant in the aspect of the game I enjoy. I believe competitive PVP players have the same exact issue. Whatever, I’ll see if the raid is fun and I’ll grind it out for a few more weeks in hopes of getting my chores down to 2-3 hours a week. If not, fine. The end. It’s been a long time coming.

P.S. Blizzard you’re an awful brand now and a stain on Activision’s crappy name. Your anti-consumer practices disgust me.

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It reminds me of the legendary weapon grinds from Guild Wars 2. Except where those gave a small competetive advantage over the next tier down for weapon quality and they mostly existed as a novelty, these are incredibly powerful in scope and have a Korean MMORPG style grind stuck on them.

And apparently Blizzard forgot their own promise when they said they were trying to avoid the mandatory nature of legendary gear quests circa WOD and MOP. That was an outright lie- Legion’s legendary gear had mandatory grinds tied to them, with some specs not working without it so all told we only had BfA but even that had the legendary cloak which was more of a ‘nice to have.’

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/signed

It wasn’t even that long ago when people were complaining about endless grinds and now we have like 3. People complained that it was hard to level and gear up alts and now it is nearly impossible.

Raiding has never felt less accessible to a casual player, I have basically signed off on never raiding this expansion cycle. Remember when you just had to farm badges and could jump into a raid? What was wrong with that system?

It really felt like they just ignored the player complaints and doubled down on everything.

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Yup. I thought the BFA Azerite system was universally disdained, but apparently Blizzard knows something I don’t. Honestly, I’d take the AP grind over whatever the hell this is.

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“We heard you loud and clear. We’re doing away with Azerite Power grind! Now let us introduce you to these new and improved grinds!”

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I’ll give you, The Maw.

But Torghast is subjective. Just saying… :sweat_smile:

The only thing that comes to mind when you say this, is time-gating. As personally that’s my biggest qualm besides the covenant system itself at the moment for Shadowlands. Otherwise I’m genuinely not sure what you mean.

Majority of the negative feedback that I’ve seen (That isn’t overly subjective), is from what they’ve done to various aspects of the game to time-gate. Things like…

  • Reducing the amount of loot given per dungeon
  • Reducing the amount of WQs per day
  • No Flight Whistle
  • The amount of Anima given per token / overall
  • Renown in general

Otherwise systems like the infinite resource grind (Azerite) or corruption has been lessened greatly or removed in Shadowlands.
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I really don’t get this complaint of people feeling they’re so far behind.

I took my time, I finished leveling like last Saturday… I didn’t start doing Torghast last reset. I didn’t even play at all Monday or yesterday. Started doing dungeons Sunday, Heroics Tuesday. Just started Mythics today.

I’ll still have my BiS Legendary crafted by next Tuesday, just in time for raid night.

I’m forming groups and joining groups with guildies who bled their eyes red learning Mythics last week… the only downside being, I have to say: “Sorry, first time here - what’s this boss do on Mythic?”

They explain it. I learn it.

Then they give me 184 loot they no longer need because they got it last Thursday or some damn thing, while I was vent killing some old high school friends in Among Us.

Really just don’t get why people feel like if they aren’t miles ahead, they cannot hope to catch up.

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I know it sounded like that is a foremost issue of mine, but I’m not behind. I’m concerned I’ll be behind if I miss capping out Anima and Soul Ash one week, but my issue is rather niche.

My favorite part of WoW is competitive raiding. I don’t have the patience (let alone time) to spend my ‘gaming time’ doing chores. I’m willing to accept it’s almost a necessary component of design, but I have not seen anything like this in WoW. I’ve been raiding with a <US-100 guild since WOTLK. My point being is I’ve always had to deal with gating and grinds, but I’ve never felt like a monkey before. This isn’t my primary account (I’m sure someone will investigate). I believe this issue also extends to more competitive PVPers

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Oh boy do I agree. Just got 1 legendary on my shaman, I have 2 max level characters both similar ilvl, with the shammy a bit ahead of the DK. The scope of work to gear 2 characters, or even change specs alone (farm new legendaries, craft new gear, farm the correct conduits) is intense, and having 2 characters at max honestly feels very hard to maintain.

I have very little interest in levelling any more alts because of these systems.

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First I wanna say, I passionately agree with you,
MoP to me was amazing, call it nostalgia or whatever but I loved it, Dominance Offensive and Shieldwall PvP was glorious.

Also what I quoted, you also forgot a entire new class, which played differently to anything we received thus far, Blizzard back then made sure every expansion was great and fulfilling.

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Glad I’m not alone here. Yeah, I loved MoP. It was probably the most fun I’ll ever have with this game. I can’t believe I forgot to mention monks in my little rant. Blizzard has become so mediocre the latest class (DH) doesn’t even have three specs lmao.

I know right? I’ve been busier than usual but I was confident I’d have my main alt raid ready. I haven’t even been able to level her yet. Luckily some of my guildies have found the time for theirs and I’m the only paladin main this go. All the same, I thought I’d be bouncing between characters (fun imo) but I’ll be lucky to muster up the will for one competitive alt.

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It’s sad to see how far we’ve come to how little we achieve now, Vanilla, TBC, Wotlk and MoP Id literally wake up on the weekends excited on what to do, quest level, PvP see my online friends.

Shadowlands is the Opposite, my guild is really active Wednesday ( reset day for Aussies), they literally do mythics, Torghast and callings, and then vanish, occasionally logging on for WQs…

Don’t get me wrong, I love WoW, but Shadowlands seems like the least mmo experience I’ve had within the expansions so far, that’s what I find dissapointing, and this is just the beginning where most people play before the drought in content hits…

My biggest hope and savior to all this be February with Blizzcon, I’m really hoping big things are shown, content, class sets, new raids, perhaps new races, BGs, class teaser?, I want them to get people excited again, make them have reasons to log in and play.

As controversial as new races and classes are, it was fresh things to do, it made new and old subs play WoW, level and enjoy it.

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This entire legendary rant would make sense if you could wear more than one legendary and if every one of them were useful. I spent most of this expansion literally at work so far and have played maybe 30% of my available time and have a pretty decent one. Almost no effort.

As for cool talents at max level… We got two. You even picked between 4 unique ones instead of three. Yeah mop did have a lot of QoL but the thing about QoL is once you have it you cant just… Add AoE looting twice. It’s already there. Torghast has a solo challenge mode and Mythic + is the route challenge dungeons have taken although not for everyone.

They did reduce loot and it’s pretty lame. I would like Torghast to at least drop low entry loot if you do it solo.
The Maw sucks though I’ll give you that. Let people mount or have Dark Souls currency loss. Not both.

A decent chunk of this post does seem like subjective nostalgia and disliking the modern iteration of systems you say aren’t there, but are just different. The only things here i agree on are The Maw and not enough loot.

So far the only Shadowlands complaint i have is i can’t live inside Torghast. Gimme WoW but it’s Torghast lmao.

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people who play wow for pvp are adorable.

It’s bad. And not even devs care about it. You might aswell switch to mobas or overwatch for pvp with abilities

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I absolutely agree. I used to look forward to logging in, and when I didn’t I took a break. I’m very much anticipating season one but other than that I am already at the point where I’m questioning whether I want to login and do chores or enjoy another game or something.

What blows my mind is how there is no longer a way to get ahead in this game. In the past you could buckle-up and grind something out if you really wanted to and get a slight (if silly relative to effort) edge for a little while. Now you either keep up or fall behind, and even better, you can’t catch-up. At least in the sense of being current because by the time catch-up mechanics are relevant you’re either a benchwarmer or holding your team back.

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What I want to know is, where’s the fun content?
What can you do in the game that is fun, without expecting a reward from it?
Most things in the game now is a chore/grind to maybe get xyz.

Classes generally played better in WoD. That was apparent after the removal of Legion rental powers.
It’s a joke that few classes have actually had real class design work since Legion.

Class design/class balance are some of the most important things in the game but they always seem to take a backseat.

I think you mean ascended gear. (legendaries were originally skins)
For me GW2 died when pulled that.
You can watch the original devs “we dont make grindy games.” Then it got turned into a grindy game.

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I’m right there with you dude. Granted, I left the game back in cata because WotLK was the pinnacle for me (having played from mid vanilla) - Shadowlands was the first time in a long time that I was interested in the game again, and I have loved alot of the content in this xpac until probably a day or so ago.

I will stay long enough to enjoy the raid and some more mythic content now that we’re getting stuck into it, but the hamster wheel grind and proverbial carrot on a stick has never been more obvious than right now whilst the best content is time gated, and requires significant chore work to enjoy. And to be honest, that is far too much a price to pay to enjoy content we paid for when accounting for people’s real lives.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the dungeons and dungeon crawling at the moment even though I wish they’d buff the loot drops,but:

I thought I was paying for enjoyable content, instead I’m handed with daily chore lists for renown that I can no longer acquire until the next reset. Or an endless list of crafting materials to stock to upgrade my legendaries (which also cap out e.g. soul ash). Or to face the same layer 3 torghast 3-4 times until you roll the lucky dice and get the right anima powers. It’s starting to taste a bit bitter.

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I agree with you.

I think their behavior is understandable, in terms of understanding why they are doing this, but that doesn’t make it any more likeable.

Basically, they have done this because they know that WoW has two kinds of players: (1) “Core” players who, like you, like raids/M+ (and the PvP equivalent of these core players, who are focused on rated PvP) and (2) a wide group of casuals who are much less dedicated to the game, but are much larger in number.

Acti-Blizz is a publicly-traded company listed on the stock exchange, and so securities analysts and their metrics tend to be rather influential on management practices, because meeting certain metrics analysts focus on tends to drive stock price analysis, which then in turn tends to drive stock price, which is what the shareholders care about – they don’t care about WoW, you, me, instance design or anything else, but they care about the stock price of Acti-Blizz.

A core metric is “player engagement”, which is measured in various ways, a couple of which are “logins per player per week” and “time spent in game per login” and “time spent in game per week”. The higher these numbers, the higher the player engagement. There is marketing data that strongly suggests that the higher these numbers are, the more people tend to stay playing your game and that this tends to drive revenue in terms of both subscription fees and store item/services sales.

The game is therefore designed around these metrics now. Companies do this all the time – skew their business operations to drive operating metrics which, in turn, foster growth in the stock price. This is something I have seen myself in corporate environments I have worked in … people work towards metrics, because metrics are a significant part of how things are measured and evaluated in the workplace.

Here, what Blizzard is trying to do is design a game that provides the content that the core players like (raids/M+ and rated PvP), while at the same time providing a context that drives consistent player engagement metrics across the board – this retains players and drives their metric. It does alienate some players, that’s true – but any design does that. This one drives the metrics they want while retaining enough players for them as well – so far, at least. If the players revolted en masse that would be different but … that hasn’t happened, and the last time it did happen, after the flying debacle in WoD, Blizzard kept moving forward without missing a breath – meaning that baked into their approach are certain assumptions about player losses they can absorb while still finding the new design approach to be beneficial overall despite such losses.

Unfortunately what this all means is that they will not design a game that allows core players to just focus on their core content. That satisfies the core players, but doesn’t drive the engagement metrics because they either skip too many login days or don’t stay logged in long enough when they do log in daily or what have you. So they add in chores that everyone must do, including core players, to stay competitive for the content they like to play, and this drives up the engagement metrics to the level Blizzard wants to meet its internal thresholds and the messaging it wants to be able to give the securities analysts in the market.

The core “master stroke”, if you will, of all of this was the creation by Blizzard of a game design that requires “keeping up with the Joneses” as a core design. That design, and the massive player “buy in”, at a time prior to the time when these “player engagement metric”-centric things came along, allowed Blizzard to add lots of chores to the game which people put up with because they were already bought into the idea of keeping up with the Joneses in a video game as a core design principle. It’s the rat race that is the core dynamic that drives the whole thing – Blizzard built the world’s best digital rat race, bar none, and the “core players” have bought into that rat race full stop because it feeds their egos to be at the top of the food chain in the rat race. That enslavement to their own ego investment, in turn, allowed Blizzard to add all of these onerous chores to the game that now have come back to bite competitive players on the butt, as it were.

So lots of things to blame – public company pressures, corporate culture and performance metrics, greed, and digital rat race egos. All of them have conspired both to cause and to enable Blizzard to create the current iteration of WoW, for better or worse.

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Amen

10 char

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Yeah I miss getting new awesome abilities at max that will stick around after an expansion… No more borrowed power and leggos are only time gated theres no real challenge other then arbitrary grinds to do. Its hallow as a souless shell…ironically fitting for the shadowlands. I’m only enjoying the time with my friends in the guild planning for mythic raiding.