It honestly shocks me when I hear so many people hate on Shadowlands.
Yeah, the story was wonky and it made no sense making the most indecisive character I’ve ever met in WoW become the Arbiter… but that aside:
I loved the zones; I loved the music; I loved the transmog, dungeons and raids.
There was so much to do and see.
For me, the biggest mistake they made was making the Kyrian black armor unlock be so fricking hard. If they fix that, then my issues with Shadowlands end. Oh, and the fact that Draka doesn’t care at all about Durotan all of a sudden. That part was very stupid.
The visuals of systemlands were amazing. It was bogged down by bad story, rigid balance decisions like covenants, disjointed zone design and other oddities like year long patches.
I throughly enjoyed Shadowlands. But then, I’m a leveler and roleplayer these days. I loved that I had a lot of stuff to do that wasn’t end-game. The story was amazing, and I loved having separate covenant campaigns to experience.
I feel just the opposite here.
After BFA and SL I was borderline ready to quit the game. Old content is the only thing that kept me here.
DF was a return to the old feel of the world that I enjoy about everything up thru Mists. It felt like getting back to Kalimdor and Northrend for me.
The only good parts of Shadowlands were some of the gear sets, the raids, and the Revendreth quest line (and zone in general). The rest of it was boring, bland, and forgettable. Or just outright bad like Dollar Store Thanos…I mean Zovaal. Generic forgettable bad guy with no personality, no motivations, and no backstory.
DF was a MASSIVE return to form for WOW. It probably saved the game.
Totally valid. People like different things, and that’s cool. To DF’s credit I liked alot of the systems they added and improved on… but just about everything else has been nauseating.
Shadowlands did have some nice aspects but it had a lot of really bad ones:
Nathrezim retcon to be from the Shadowlands
The Scourge, but an entire afterlife of them
6+ months between content patches
Sylvanas was a terrible boss to prog
The Maw, and by extension Korthia, were very bland and boring zones
The Afterlife Airport that is Oribos was poorly designed. Why couldn’t we fly there?
All the zones being disconnected and requiring you to travel through Oribos every single time you swapped zones was bad design. Once flight was introduced they should have allowed us to fly ourselves to the gateways and just slingshot us through
The Jailer is a completely forgettable villain
The Covenant system was neat, but it was introduced horribly and they didn’t listen to BETA feedback about allow to swap Covenants until a year into the expansion
Anima is just a stupid concept. You “die” in the Shadowlands and you become goop that fuels the Shadowlands.
There’s probably more but honestly, I’ve tried to not think about Shadowlands at all since DF launched because we were stuck there for what felt like longer than any other expansion.
I actually loved the dungeons. The soundtrack was awesome and the zones were nice to look at, especially Ardenweald and Bastion. You can always count on the art team to deliver.
yeah the conduit crap and that console in ZM that I touched maybe twice really murdered any hope the expansion might have had.
Anima grinding, overly exaggerated anima prices for mogs…mogs that all pretty much sucked anyway. Annoying time wasting and nauseatingly repetitive mechanix most of the world trash…I mean…ION…WE GET IT…you love that slow/root/stun/circle of death crap but jesus christ man…give it a rest already. lol
ZM bored me to death play wise. And the modeling and textures was so bad I half expected to find out some 4th graders had done it all for the zone.
The ONLY redeeming quality for SL for me was Revendreth is awesome as a zone to look at. Thats literally it.
one of the biggest things I disliked about shadowlands was that I couldn’t travel from zone to zone without taking an unnecessarily long flightpath through nothing.
they should have just opened portals to the zones. I don’t buy “technical limitations” for a second.
That’s high on my list of things I loved about it, funnily enough. I think it suits them beautifully. They always had that deathly vibe to them rather than demonic.
That’s not to say I like the notion that they were always secretly serving the Jailer. I don’t. I hate that. But them just being from there, awesome.
In an expansion where the storyline was a huge selling point, having it be convoluted and messy is a primary reason why people hate on it.
I took a break from shadowlands and coming back I was bombarded with 10 different storylines with absolutely no direction or order in which to do them.
Using a hub that you are required to use the flightpoint from was also not a great decision, it made traveling between areas an absolutely chore.
Shadowlands was neat for a lot of reasons, but that does not excuse the poor writing choices and weird mechanic choices they made.
Absolutely agree. they cant possibly get us all liking the content at the same time because we’re all love different things.
I know some players loved corruptions…I appreciate that…but I detested that and azerite, lol.
I fully understand why some disliked DF. I mean, I dont like the currencies thing yet again. If I see one more flightstone Imma start pulling my hair out lol
Went back to Shadowlands last week to poke away at some unfinished achievements over the past few days and have to say I was quickly reminded of why I was so eager to put it behind me. Back and forth and back and forth on flightpaths, googling endless unnecessarily hidden easter eggs and trying to guesstimate where on the map coordinates are pointing, anima … ug … the anima.
I loved Ardenweald, it was everything that the Emerald Dream was supposed to be but failed at in DF.
Bastion was too bright
Maldraxus was too bleak
Revendreth was too campy
And the Maw… ugh… they were shooting for hell and they hit the mark a little too closely
But the biggest problem with Shadowlands is the lore destruction it caused, the ignominious end for Arthas, the out of character behavior of Sylvannas, and the “Elune is a robot” controversy.
I wholeheartedly agree. As time goes on, Shadowlands stands out more and more as an actual awesome xpac. It only gets better as I go back to the zones and remember good times.
