I never understood the hate Shadowlands gets. I enjoyed the theme. Afterlife, Hell, etc. Really hit all my fun buttons.
Maybe too many currencies, but we have that problem now in Dragonflight.
idk. Time seems to change things. I remember MoP being hated and now it is praised. Even Cata is getting some love now when people detested it when it was out.
Five years from now, people will probably be singing praises for Shadowlands.
They did that with mists of Pandaria too
Bashed and thrashed cause kung fu panda memes but now its praised like its the best thing ever
They did the same thing with wrath, now wrath classic is out and wrath classic servers are ghost towns full of bots
what wasn’t?
I could go on
But some primalists that was never heard of, never foreshadowed. Isn’t?
I didn’t like how terrible anima was implemented. It was just insane that first year or whatever. Earning so little. I also didn’t like how all the zones were entirely disconnected. You had to pass through Oribos to get anywhere. Not a great design decision at all. The Maw and Torghast were pretty clearly/obviously bad/underwhelming. The story/lore was obviously quite bad as well. The theme and atmosphere of the zones and the art and everything, was one part that SL did well.
As a casual, I also liked it in several aspects. There were a lot of weird systems though like legendary gear, soulbinding, the horribly designed anima currency system, etc. The story was also fine, but it wasn’t World of Warcraft. It was fine as something independent and separate, but the ties to the game were odd for many people.
I hated powers being locked away in covenants, hated borrowed power systems, hated each zone being separate and having to travel through Oribos to get to each one, and hated Korthia and the Maw. /spits
I’ll be the first to admit that. I was extremely biased against it from the beginning. The very notion of going to the afterlife made me roll my eyes so hard. My retinas detached for about a 1/2 a second.
That being said… I also disliked the villain. Denathrius was good. The rest? boring. I mean literally the jailer had like seven lines and just looked bald and menacing? For somebody who orchestrated every major event in wow history up to that point… He was pretty absent. He also lacked personality but without spoilers I guess that makes a little sense. Doesn’t redeem him.
I actually enjoyed the different looks of the zones. I hated how they were disjointed though I do understand why. They could have easily put portals instead of the flight paths which they should have done.
We got two rare hunting zones… boring. And yes d f suffers the same criticism. I could go on but I feel like I could write a novel about what I disliked about this expansion
it’s boring, it didn’t look or feel like warcraft, korthia is such a drag to quest in, the big bad felt empty, and the writing took and kept a lot of wrong turns, and so on and so forth. i think all the turmoil at blizzard at the time didn’t help. just a perfect storm of not good stuff.
Never said they were.
But at least their existence isn’t causing major incoherent retcons to the story
I doubt it. lol.
Its not Mists. Its not legion. Even BFA had some redeeming qualities.
SL was just pure garbage
I was thinking Tyrande and wrote Elune.
Walter White is more bald and menacing.
ugh…
I had wiped that from my mind. lol.
Now I remember the disgust the first time I started adding up anima needed to buy those crappy mogs.
I think I bought 3 of them total from two covenenants.
Well for one they absolutely de-mystified freaking death of all things. Everything about the Jailor was a let down. They fumbled Artha’s conclusion completely and shoved Sylvanas’s down our throats even more and then had the balls to try and redeem her in a single damn patch. They left plot threads hanging everywhere especially in regards to the Covenants. And it was Shadowlands where the writing really started going from bad to…just…patronizing. It’s gotten worse in DF.
Gameplay wise the Maw just…just the Maw. For the longest time, the only people who could traverse this literal hellscape with any level of conveniance were either druids, shamans and worgen. Everyone else was stuck walking. Torghast had pretty crap rewards. Hey you got through all those levels? Here’s some ash and anima. Oh!
Anima! The main currency of the expac and all the cosmetics are locked behind it usually costing in the thousands. Covenant upgrades also cost in the thousands. Usually came in packs of 35. Maybe 70 if RNGeesus was feeling magnanimous.
No seriously, who’s saying SL is GOOD?! They need to see a psychiatrists about these delusions before they get worse.
Maybe the jailer just needed to cook
I think we all did, but Blizzard went about it the wrong way. The zones were gorgeous, except for maybe Maldraxxus and maybe Ardenweald, Ardenweald was just too blue, and Maldraxxus someone said it looked like someone’s booger (part of the reason I’m turned off of it)
My problem with it was some of was a raid, I didn’t like SoD. I also wasn’t too fond of the renown system either, the dungeons were great though. But the story on the other hand, was trash. I lost interest after season 1 and this is coming from someone who doesn’t pay attention to lore in this game.
Even then like it made sense if you went through the second part of the Shadowlands story where you have to track down the forner Night Warriors who help you try to calm down Tyrande before she got herself killed.
I saw Tyrande as being more like the Oracle of Delphi type of high priestess. Allowing a deity to speak through her as what the purpose of a high priestess.
The Shadowlands story was a nothing but missed opportunities. Failures too many to list. I’ll let others cover these.
The Shadowlands covenant system had a lot of players complaining that they were being forced to play gasp “suboptimally”, since they would often have one “best” covenant/soulbind/conduit setup for raids, and a different “best” for M+. The original two-week cooldown and conduit energy system really cheesed off the minmaxers.
Players that didn’t like fun hated Torghast which was necessary to get legendary items, which themselves needed a grind to find the recipe you wanted. This left players queueing for dungeons, and leaving after the boss didn’t drop the recipe.
Everyone forgot about Domination Sockets and Shards. I think they were supposed to be a kind of a “choose your own tier set bonus” that was declared a failure and the idea was deprecated almost immediately.
As someone who didn’t touch Shadowlands until the last patch with all the catch-up mechanics, I didn’t like: