What little content WoD had was good and instead of adding content they forced more garrison work. It was like a really long pre-patch for Legion seeing how they gave up on it to work on Legion.
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The Shadowlands ambience and atmosphere were top notch. I enjoyed my time thru the xpac!
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I loved WoD, it was just the lack of new content end game that sucked. The expansion itself has one of my favorite campaigns and raids in the game.
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Original Torghast was excessive until they made it shorter and added flawless.
Covenants were too restrictive
Didn’t care for the dungeons except NW
Zerith Mortis Rares…oof
Oribos was too bland.
The intro through the Maw was just exhausting and exceptionally funny with Thrall.
Bastion needed sunglasses
Drust quests in Ardenweald were annoying being in a hugely one sided faction server before the shared tagging of DF. Also too few mobs.
Extreme server phasing meant I played alone a lot
War mode wasn’t fun like BFA.
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Can’t agree. I loved the hell out of Torghast.
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See, here’s the thing: I liked Shadowlands a lot too (it’s easily in my top 3 expansions ever; I actively don’t care about this game’s lore even though I’m familiar with it), but there are some things that were unforgivably bad about it.
Covenants being locked like they were, the expansion having a miserable patch cadence, Conduit Energy existing, Torghast being the way it was in terms of needing to play it for player power, Shards of Domination, Sepulcher’s ridiculous tuning past Normal, Korthia, etc. were all unforgivably bad directions to take the game.
That being said, seeing people ride Legion’s nuts so hard because it got good in 7.3.5 but seeing people still incessantly bash Shadowlands because everything before 9.1.5 was very bad is so weird to me. Shadowlands after patch 9.1.5 was a very different, and considerably better, game than it was during 9.0 and 9.1, and it was a better game than Legion was and for much longer than Legion was good.
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It was miserable as FDK. And I felt climbing the levels took too long until they shortened it.
I did mostly solo stuff as groups usually blew up. I took Venthyr to teleport past traps
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Shadowlands was actually tied for my favourite with MoP, but even as someone who likes it, I recognise that the quest chain design in particular, but not just that, was not user-friendly.
Having done it on a couple characters I STILL get tripped up by quest chains that suddenly bloop dead because you’re not the required 38% through this other quest chain.
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Anyone who liked Shadowlands either:
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Never cared much about WoW’s lore and story to begin with (lots of people who just kind of raid, observe the scenery but don’t engage with the lore as a whole just neat cutscenes or raid stories or questlines at most. Frankly these people are also the target audience for big CGI movies with little substance that favor spectacle over good storytelling and characters and while everyone is allowed their preference I think this is bad for art and culture and arguably an RPG, even an MMO one needs better favoritism of story and consistent, beloved lore over spectacle)
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Hated WoW’s earlier lore or at least were completely ambivalent about it to the point seeing it butchered didn’t even register so much as a twitch of upset.
Either way they weren’t invested in the earlier lore, all decade and a half of it that many of us had grown old with, had learned, loved, lived as RPers, etc.
Now I personally loved WoW. And as anyone who loves someone who starts acting very self-destructively can say it’s hard to watch, it hurts because you love them. If you never cared you’d shrug at the self-destructive behavior or see only the good times not the pain and loss of the person, but if you loved them, loved them as they were and they changed for the worse, betrayed who they used to be, it’s really painful.
And I’m even someone who would say WoW’s lore had issues. But SL didn’t resolve them, it was like taking a weekend drinker who sometimes collapsed on the couch all day Saturday in a stupor once in a while and addicting them to harder drugs on top of it, in that it definitely changed things but not for the better, it made things worse, the wrong direction. And now after DF they claim to be sober again but also claim that self-destructive period was not actually a problem or unhealthy and keep around many of the friends who enabled those habits so it’s impossible to really move on and heal and you’re just waiting for the next disaster in their life from the sidelines.
We’ve been discussing this lately and while many people have said that, so far no one has been able to point to any specific lore that was changed by Shadowlands.
For example:
While this might sound very clever it fails completely at pointing out actual lore that was “reconed” by Shadow Lands.
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It was kinda meh for me but the cosmetics were really well done.
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Looking m+ rn and tww, sl was way more fun
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Agreed!
- One thing i liked was the covenants, they were so different.
- One thing i didnt like was that the covenant abilities were so unbalanced that certain classes were practically forced to join certain covenants. (but me being a casual and self proclaimed rebel i consciously bucked the trends)
- I liked the art styles - the yucky undead place looked yucky and undead, the magical forest place looked magical and forest-y.
- I didnt like the travel between zones when you didnt have a pocket portal
My friends lost interest and stopped playing at around when Korthia came out and soloing in there and ZM was boring
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I haven’t checked the PTR but by default, it’s when we’re 11+ levels over, so not until we’ve started into TWW leveling.
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It was the most tedious and annoying expansion. You needed like 10 different currencies to do anything. farming one or two currencies is fine but there was anima, Cosmic Flux, Ashes, the amount of ashes youd get in a single run was very small especially in the beginning. umm sending currencies to alts made like 500 go into the nether, how to farm those things was tedious. Constantly doing the same run over and over again and if you had too many deaths in that run you cant complete it and need to start over from scratch.
Then you had the completely separate currencies you needed to farm for the maw. (stygia) and you needed that currency to help with your ashes and later cosmic flux runs. Run back to your body to pick up that currency if you died and if you died running to that currency the currency is lost forever. You were punished harder in that expansion for dying or messing up more than any other expansion. It was the retail version of hardcore mode. Confuses me as to why you are bewildered by it.
PS forgot to mention you had to beat specific bosses for specific powers you needed for legos. so farming that was fun…ish.
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I did a lot in Shadowlands without needing all those currencies.
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so your saying you came at patch 3?
No, I started on day one. I gathered what currencies I needed but I didn’t notice it being a big deal. I did my Anima run each week and collected my 20 souls but that didn’t seem that hard.
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Shadowlands had so, so many problems. In a vacuum, the visuals were good. I didn’t really feel like they suited WoW so much, though. The whole aesthetic of pretty much everything pertaining to the Jailer and his forces was just…“worse Lich King,” which turned me off pretty badly. The Maw was ugly, Korthia was ugly, Torghast was “the ICC we have at home,” etc.
Bastion and Ardenweald were very lovely to look at, but I hated their story and concepts. Which is really where Shadowlands fell apart for me. No matter how much they tried to force me to care by walking me through hours of forced dialog quests, I simply did not care about any character or faction in the entire expansion.
I did not care what happened to the covenants, I did not care what happened to the Shadowlands themselves, I did not care about alt-universe fanfiction versions of Garrosh, or Kael’thas, or Vashj, and I especially did not care about Draka, Pelagos, Sylvanas, or the Jailer. Yet we were expected to care.
I’m glad TWW seems like it’s going to continue Anduin’s character development in the wake of all the Shadowlands nonsense. I think there’s potential to convert that into some pretty strong storytelling, if done well. I’ll keep my guard up, though. I’ve been burned in the past.
Now, apart from the abysmal story and character writing in Shadowlands…what really made me hate it was the “systems” that everyone keeps mocking. “Systemlands” is called that for a reason. It was the absolute peak of the daily-chore-driven, borrowed-power-givin’ design philosophy of WoW, and it was just awful.
When I played it, I actually did not understand how to create a Legendary item based on the in-game quests and prompts. I had no idea what it wanted me to do. When I found a guide online, I realized that I simply did not care enough to actually make one. I did not care about grinding Torghast. I did not care about Maw dailies. I did not care about Anima. I did not care about Renown. I did not care about Soulbinds.
I did not care about any of that stuff. There was a massive list of “stuff to do” but I didn’t care about any of it. The dungeons were bad, the questing was bad…in particular, the number of forced dialog quests (especially in Bastion), was truly awe-inspiring. I quit three different times before I was able to finally get to level ~53 and escape that place. Not that the other zones were much better, but they were a little bit better.
Shadowlands is the only expansion where I simply did not care to play the current retail content at all until after Dragonflight was announced, and I only played it then because I wanted to be 60 so I could actually play DF when it released. When I tried to humor the idea of playing max-level Shadowlands content until then, I lasted a couple of days before I stopped.
If it hadn’t been for WoW Classic coexisting with Shadowlands, I probably would have done nothing but roleplay and randomly farm transmog for the entire 2-year span.
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Shadowlands was a cool expansion ruined by abysmal systems.