Top 10 Worst Design Decisions in SL (My pick in no particular order)

Community General Discussion
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1. Callings do not reward anima
—Anima can no longer be farmed endlessly for power, so raiders are already protected from having to do boring daily chores.
—During the covenant introductory questline, the example calling that you complete rewards a cache that contains anima, which you will then deposit into the reservoir as part of the questline. This may mislead players into thinking that callings reward anima.

2. Torghast bosses do not drop gear
—The current most popular content for solo challenges does not provide means for progression within that content, and highly favors players raiding in organized groups.
—Titanforging and corruption are gone, so raiders would not feel forced into farming for upgrades.

3. Maw sharding issues
—Players who group up after entering the Maw do not appear in the same shard, and must travel back to Oribos or Torghast and then back to the Maw to appear in the same shard as their group members.
—This is a large source of inconvenience and confusion in a zone that is already punishing.

4. Permanent loss of Stygia for dying in the Maw
—20% of the Stygia you carry is dropped upon death, and if you die again before looting this, the first Stygia that you dropped is gone forever; and considering the area is dangerous enough for you to die twice, you may lose the second drop of Stygia as well.
—There is no way to store Stygia before heading into dangerous areas, and you must save Stygia for days or weeks as you work towards the next level of reputation that would allow you to spend it; rewards are important and include permanent account-wide upgrades.
—Even if you are careful, some deaths go beyond your control, such as game glitches or server lag, friendly players pulling dangerous or high numbers of enemies into your abilities with the result that those enemies then attack you, or players of the hostile faction griefing you.

5. Lowered loot drop rates for raid bosses
—Personal loot drop rates have been approximately halved in order to artificially extend progression.
—Players can easily spend hours doing challenging content without receiving any upgrades.

6. Lowered rewards for Mythic Plus
—Timed dungeons reward 2/3 of the loot that they used to, while untimed dungeons reward 1/2 of the loot that they used to.
—Players can easily spend hours doing challenging content without receiving any upgrades.

7. Removal of bonus seals
—Players can no longer target certain bosses or activities for certain items.
—Players receive less loot overall each week.

8. World quests no longer offer significant gear supplementation or progression
—Solo players and players on their alts can no longer rely on World Quests to help gear up as gear rewards are less common and lower in power level, and caches from calling rewards rarely if ever provide power-related rewards.
—Titanforging and corruption are gone, so raiders would not feel forced into farming for upgrades.

9. Crafted legendaries (as currently implemented)
—Many legendary recipes rely on RNG to drop, the timing of certain world bosses spawning or Torghast layers being available, or the completion of activities such as raids that not all players participate in.
—Base items sometimes cost more gold than some players can afford, or would require hours of grinding materials and training professions for players to craft on their own.
—The main source of soul ash is Torghast, which some players may not enjoy doing twice every week.

10. Threads of Fate (as currently implemented)
—Players who have completed the main leveling storyline in Shadowlands can choose to level up future characters by doing activities in the zone of their choice, but without an organized, efficient group this method of leveling up is far more repetitive and time consuming than the main storyline.
—Players who chose Thread of Fate cannot revert back to the storyline mode.
—In comparison to past expansions, many players felt that the Legion invasions and BfA faction assaults provided open-world activities for leveling that felt more rewarding and interesting than leveling up through those expansions’ respective storylines.

Note to other players: It is my personal opinion that the above 10 design choices are bad for the health and popularity of the game, but my descriptions are based on facts. Whether you agree or not with someone’s opinion, you can’t argue away facts because they don’t support the sugarcoated narrative that Shadowlands is a return to the good old days.

Note to Blizzard employees (if any happen to read this): The above 10 issues could easily be fixed immediately or in future patches, and then you would have a nearly perfect expansion. I do not think that casual, new, or returning players are going to appreciate your new design philosophy of punishing the average player as the price of keeping the raiders overstimulated until the next patch. Some players just want to log in, play the game, and progress in power when they have time.

85 Likes
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These are well reasoned and articulated, even if I don’t agree with all of them.

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It isn’t challenging, and we have enough free lower tier loot available.

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Thank you. I realize not everyone can like both.

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I respectfully disagree, as classes as a whole have benefited from Shadowlands. This is also my opinion.

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This I disagree with. My mage who is level 60 has more gear WQ than she does Anima WQ. She hasn’t set foot in a dungeon beyond HoA for the Revendreth Loremaster. She’s sitting at 176 ilvl. Which for the content she does is fine.

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I only dislike the recent pay to win implementation of some of the legendary gear. If your best legendary is cheap, all is well, but some of them cost enough that you are basically back to buying tokens to afford them.

The required vendor items are a huge part of that as are the bottleneck in crafting multiple items to be able to craft better layers of gear.

Annoying to say the least.

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I would dig if you could get tokens from content that yielded effective crafting experience for those Torghast vessels. Instead of getting 5 xp only from crafting a smithin’ item, perhaps 5xp from some more invovled wq for crafting: making 5 mid-tier armor pieces. Maybe have 'em drop off the last boss in the higher layers of Torghast, capped at X amount per week.

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Only issue I have with that list is number three due to that being a technical issue. Had a similar problem yesterday in Torghast where I got put in a separate shard after we cleared four floors. It was annoying to say the least and rendered all our time spent there as wasted.

The rest is simply a difference in design philosophy. Blizzard clearly wanted to change things after BFA’s bad reception and Classic’s huge success. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that after that they were going to move away from easy gear, easy travel, easy mobs and easy world content. The game had become a parody of itself and I’m glad that these changes were made.

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My biggest problem is that they created classic to cater to the players who enjoy this stuff. I was ok with that, I never wanted to touch it and I enjoyed my retail. But of course that wasn’t good enough and now we see classic design making its way into retail.

The two player bases are completely different don’t screw retail players because classic players want more (or in this case less as it so happens to be.)

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I agree. My alt only dinged 60 a few days ago and is already getting ilevel 158 and 171 gear out in the open world. Doing Threads of Fate allows you to pick a covenant and get a jump on gaining renown right off the bat. By the time I dinged 60 he was already at level 6 .

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Ironically, I find Classic to be more casual friendly at this point and the community is more welcoming. Gear and class balance is all over the place, but the raids aren’t that demanding in the first place and you don’t need to upgrade every single slot every single patch cycle.

In Shadowlands, you get assaulted by elites just for trying to do your dailies in the Maw, and death has a permanent penalty if you can’t reclaim your stygia. It’s almost as though devs were responding to feedback from 15 years ago that even Vanilla was too casual for not penalizing you for dying, and too casual for allowing solo questing.

In my opinion, WotLK, MoP, and Legion had the best balance between casual and hardcore.

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Yeah the number of mechanics is getting a bit on the crazy side. Well to be honest it probably passed crazy in legion. I have friends who won’t touch the game because they’ve seen me play and don’t think they could cope with the amount of movement, twitch skills, and ability recognition that goes into raiding and M+.

I think the player bases is really split between people who want to play to relax and have fun with guildies and friends and people who want a challenge. WoW has tried to cater to both for a long time but the people who want a challenge keep getting better so the gap widens. At some point I think you just have to say enough is enough and design fights that are fun.

And perhaps thats part of the problem. The designers are players who want a challenge and I don’t think they would recognize fun if it came up and bit them in the a… I’ll just leave it there for now.

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No to loot from single player instanced content. Thats not massively multiplayer.

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It isn’t as if there is a binary switch. There are a lot of small, incremental steps in difficulty between a +10 and a m0. Ten of them, in fact. You’re given a great deal of opportunity to learn and improve throughout progression. The same is true for the many tiers of raiding.

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This x 1000.

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Callings definitely need to award anima and anima acquisition needs to be changed/buffed in many areas. Currently, the best way to get anima is to only do WQs probably forever, some days there is upwards of 1k+ anima from just doing WQs but you can’t get that much outside of it, and callings don’t even help out. This is very not alt friendly for those of us who want to get covenant cosmetics of all kinds.

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I’m not so sure it is. Look at the design of the first raid boss. A single player making poor decisions or having a bad connection will wipe the raid. This holds true through out all tiers. The damage mitigation and healing requirements may increase but so does the gear, thus making it scaling. Unless there are added mechanics it really is the same across all the tiers.

You can look at M+ in the same way. The last boss of Plaugefall has a dance on all difficulties. Once that dance is enough to one shot someone its a static difficulty across any remaining levels.

What I meant was that the number of mechanics is just insane. Look at the difference between wrath dungeons and raids to current ones. More mechanics is not fun its meant to provide a challenge.

This leaves a huge amount of players doing low M+ (or none at all) and stuck in LFR. For them there is no sense of progression and if their friends progress to the challenging content they lose any incentive they have to play. That is not good design.

Not every player has the skill to maintain their dps rotation without watching, not every player has the ability to watch timers, has situation awareness, or can memorize paths and what needs to be interrupted, dispelled snared etc.

The amount of design time to create challenge vs that of just something fun is getting pretty insane. I’d just like to finish by pointing out how many players don’t want the challenge by reminding you of the recent Torghast backlash.

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Hopped in expecting to disagree with everything OP said… only found myself disagreeing with points 6 and 8.

Mythic+ is still too rewarding if anything and WQs should NOT reward raid-quality loot. Besides that, some valid criticism.

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Yes, each expac seems to have increasingly more mechanics, even in queueable difficulties of dungeons and LFR. Although they require premades, Mythic Zeros in this expac have some mechanics (similar to raids in the past) that could wipe your group if even one person messes up, having not “studied” the fight beforehand.

Even if you are a skilled/experienced player, it can be punishing DPS-wise for casters who have to stop their rotations to move constantly, and some raid mechanics are especially troublesome for melee to handle.

Also, you practically need addons such as DBM, as the base game doesn’t alert you to very much or it just kind of blares out an alert without telling you how to handle it. (I have never played it before, but apparently FFXIV bosses have arrows or something showing you where an attack is going to happen and the game doesn’t even allow that many addons.)

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