My sub ended back in February or March.
There are a number of reasons I’ve decided to stop playing.
Scaling has ended the RPG element of WoW being an MMO-RPG. This one has been slowly eroding my patience with the game since it was implemented. Imagine for a moment you’re playing a D&D campaign. Your group now have level 20 characters, epic feats, godly magic, you get the idea. You’re passing through a village because you decided to go by foot just to relive the old days. The village is under attack by a raiding band of goblins. You laugh, remembering how you used to struggle with those goblins back at level 2 or 3. You prepare to unleash cathartic hell upon them.
DM: “Oh, I’ve scaled the Goblin’s stats so they’re more of a challenge and still relevant to you guys.”
Suddenly you’re busting out spells literally designed to kill gods just to handle a bunch of goblins. Worse, after you win and get an actual upgraded piece of loot, your DM says they’ll take that into account for the next encounter.
Obviously from a RP/RPG perspective, scaling is bad. In WoW, its a lot worse. It feels so backwards for enemies to get HARDER as you level. I went from 50 to 54 with a breeze, but then suddenly I’m sitting down and drinking between every pull, and by the time I hit 59 I’m popping every cooldown I have just to survive. This is the most absurd form of progression I’ve ever seen, and the knowledge that an upgrade can cause the world to scale and make you relatively weaker always makes me pause before equipping it.
No more Character Customizations in Shadowlands. Yup, I’m one of those people who spoke out with their wallet. I do not approve of this, at all. Its going back on what they said while Shadowlands was in development, and worse, most races are in an absolutely pathetic state as far as customizations go. Nightborne need a major overhaul, Lightforged Draenei are terribly plain (sorry if I offend any Lightforged players), and over half of the core playable races barely got anything. The real winners were Orcs, Humans, Night Elves, and Trolls. Worse, you can’t browse the General Discussion forums without people flipping out that Void Elves, “got so much,” when it was a copy/paste job.
So, yeah. This was the straw that ultimately broke the camel’s back for me.
Anima Drip-Feed - A.K.A. Timegating Gone Wrong. I feel no incentive to do anything in Shadowlands, and a big part of it is the absolute abysmal flow of anima. Even the buffs they’ve given aren’t enough to make me want to come back right now.
Blizzard cannot see the Fine-Line between Challenging Content and Tedious Content. The Maw in a nutshell right here. There is nothing challenging about the Maw. It is pure inconvenience. You can’t mount, and you can only do so much each day before the game forces you to stop with the Eye of the Jailer. Torghast is a similar chore. Some classes win it just by breathing, others need to pray for the right powers. I’m not into it.
Borrowed Power - The Hype-Killer. There is nothing so absolutely de-motivating to me playing this game as building up the latest expansion’s system of, “borrowed power.” Back in Legion I loved my class artifacts. Aluneth was snarky and I loved the Mark of Aluneth a ton! I always figured the weapon wouldn’t be sticking around in the expansion after Legion, but I had hoped to at least keep the skill. Nope.
Azerite was a joke when it started, Azerite Powers and Corruptions broke the game.
Now we’ve got Conduits and Covenant Powers in two flavors (general and class), and I cannot work up any enthusiasm to even enjoy them because I know they’re gone by the next expansion. I’d sooner just not even add them to my hotbars.
I get that the Developers are worried about ability bloat, but borrowed power systems where we spend each expansion slowly regaining what we had in the previous one is not the answer. I’d much rather each expansion brought about a few new class skills/spells/abilities that would replace existing ones, but with new effects, and with the option for players to use older versions.
For example, take Arcane Explosion. Maybe next expansion Mages get a new spell, ‘Arcane Bomb.’ It replaced Arcane Explsoion, has a 15-30 second cooldown, is a ground-targeted AOE, and leaves behind an arcane fallout field effect that debuffs enemies that stand in it.
Doing something like that, but with every class, could open up new ways of playing classes and specs. Balancing all of that would be a nightmare, but that’s why they should focus on the current expansion’s skills. Focus on giving different classes or specs different playstyles this way. Bring back the old Monk Fistweaver gameplay (healing by dealing damage), or let Priest shields provide a DPS buff, encouraging DPS players to still avoid damage in exchange for dealing more damage, etc…
