I don’t hate the Shadowlands - it seems cool. A good introduction to WoW for me.
I think it is different from the Azeroth I imagined this world (and the one i grew up to people talking about) to be but it’s not bad.
My main grips are how long each patch lasted and the narrative. For the story potential and what could’ve been, the story was absolutely atrocious. Mindless villain with no depth. It was bland and terrible. Barely any true scourge lore in the expansion that was supposed to be a return to the WOTLK vibes and era. Yet this was the most random expansion thematically. Smurf angels, fairies, vampires, sentient scourge vs evil bald man then future alien tech titans or something. Idk, it’s just been terrible.
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There’s no simple single reason why 9.0/9.1 wasn’t fun for me, but rather the critical mass of whole myriad of little time sinks, slowdowns and grinds at every step of open world gameplay.
Too many systems, dungeons sucks, story sucks, class balance sucks , and outlaw rogue is a casino royale
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Too many systems, tied to player power. I don’t like doing basically anything but BGs and occasionally some DGs. Making me do things other than those makes me irritated.
Blizzards attitude towards Covenants.
During the entire beta phase so many of us were practically begging for Blizzard to listen.
They kept ignoring us.
We liked the Covenant being a meaningful decision, just wanted the player powers to not be tied to it. Shove them onto a level 60 talent row.
Fast forward to 9.2
Covenants are now freely swappable. Which means they essentially realized that people didn’t like being locked to an important talent, but it also means Covenants aren’t really a meaningful decision anymore.
So who won here? Nobody. That’s who.
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Terrible story telling. Absolute rot.
The whole “ultra cosmic power” thing. Guh. The whole “there is a super super evil bad super duper power still out there to destroy teh uunnivverrssseeee” trope is real old.
The constant e-sports garbage being forced down our throats. Not to mention all of the durn skips people do.
The above actually ties in to the flying debacle. Blizz (Ion) cries about, “But we want people to see all of teh things we do, so that’s we are delaying flying.”, but then pushes people to skip content in their dungeons. Makes it very obvious that delaying any kind of flying is just more time gating nonsense, and they could actually give a durn about people seeing the content. Speaking of which…
Time gating upon time gating upon time gating. You want some time gating, in your time gating? Because that will have to be some more time gating added in.
Bugs in old content. Bugs in current content. Bugs affecting transmog. Bugs affecting things bought in the Blizzard store. Fix yer shiz, Blizz, and stop being fail.
Pelagos. /cringe. Obvious signal was obvious.
“GUYS!!! ZM is super special guys!!!1111” Fake hype for months “LOOK!!! You can walk on teh speshul water!” /facepalm
Honestly, I can pick apart Slands all day.
The main thing, though? They did Arthas wrong. They keep throwing away lore left and right, and then? They went and utterly destroyed an iconic character. They had a potential gold mine of storytelling there, that could have continued on in to the game, ad infinitum.
They did Arthas dirty. And I am going to forever be on the warpath with them for it.
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I don’t hate it , I just feel its lacking
So here are my legitimate issues
- Massive content draught. Shadowlands set the record for longest time between patches. With already lackluster content, this is a problem of WoD proportions.
- Systemlands overload. There’s just so. many. systems. First of all, gotta get your conduits, and that takes time and some of them have are quite important. Then you need to get legendary, which required running torghast. Then you need your renown. Then you need to set your soulbinds. And you have to do all of that before you’re properly viable for content.
- Currencies. Related to 2), this has to be the most currencies we’ve ever had? Anima, offerings, codex, soul ash/cinder/flux, souls, stygia. Never mind the minor stuff like rubies. And why are some of these not going into the currency tab?
- War on quality of life. I feel like Blizz went out of their way to make things annoying for the sake of being annoying. First of all, getting rid of flight whistle? Then, you have the gall to make us get flying three times in one expac? Why is flying between zones taking us through Oribos international everytime? Why is getting conduit levels take so long? Why are world quests so multitiered now? Why is there so much time gating?
- Worst leveling/questing experience in WoW. So, I know leveling is not the biggest thing, but I like to play alts from time to time. This is the first time that I recall that you’re punished for leveling, where current dungeons are removed as you level up. Then, why is the campaign removed from the threads of fate? Third, and related to 4) why are bonus areas so out of synch with side quests, and why do they take so long now?
- Worst story to date. I have never felt less enthusiastic about a villain than ever before. Jailer is easily the worst written character in WoW’s history. To this date I do not understand his motivations. For that matter, I still don’t know Sylvanas’ motivations. He never felt scary, though they did try with the maw eye mechanic.
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why is it that when something is hated so much and it has tons of information of why it is hated by every spammer in their thread…
someone comes along and asks the question “is it so bad? idk why everyone hates it I loved it”
ive seen this pattern over so many things
There’s been just as much hate for every expansion. WoW players hate every current expansion and every current patch, then they miss then and love them.
The entire mid-section of the expansion fell completely flat. Korthia was bad, Shards of Domination were bad, the overall gameplay loop was bad. 9.0 went live with locked covenants despite MONTHS of feedback. We were told they were so integral that they simply could not be unlocked… until players started dropping and suddenly it was possible.
The fact that the game even HAD conduit energy showed that there was a fundamental problem with how the devs approached the game. The entire problem boils down to a tired game-design philosophy. Our playtime was spent doing so much arbitrary stuff that by the time I was done I didn’t even want to do OR have time to do what I actually wanted to do when logging in.
Wanted to do Mythic+ for the week? Go get your 1000 anima and 20 souls for renown first, go spend an hour in both wings of Torghast, go do your Maw dailies for stygia, same thing happened in Korthia. That all being said, 9.2 is pretty good, I don’t do anything but what I want to do right now which feels nice.
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lol no thanks keep your beta for azeroth and systemlands in your room, rose tinted glasses grincel
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Okay, just as long as you keep paying your sub for it.
the story mainly. jailer was a terrible villain, i don’t care about this whole focus on cosmic power warcraft is leaning into either. overreliance on systems. hardly anything account wide so i don’t feel like playing alts. cookie cutter feel of the past few expansions
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im paying my sub because i think the game will improve, im not obnoxious and ignorant like you get gud
If I had to choose one thing that makes me hate Shadow Lands on a personal level, I’m going to pick something that is not related to any specific system or and particular decision Blizzard made: the number of real-world friends of mine who play WoW has dropped all of the way to just 2 of us playing alliance and 3 of us playing horde…and one of the 3 on horde only barely playing occasionally. It was actually down to just me on alliance and two of us on horde, but one friend re-subbed after the Dragon Isles announcement.
We were already down to 3 ally, 5 horde at the end of BFA and 3 came back to play at SL launch, but now we’ve dwindled down to nothing. It’s not quite like Cataclysm where everyone in my friend sphere including a number of work acquaintances who played all quit, including myself (played about 6 weeks of Cata and quit until the exact day of the MoP “annual pass + Diablo III + Tyreal’s Charger” deal was available, which drew me back in…good because I loved Mists); however, it sucks to just have a couple of people to play with. I do occasionally do a little bit of stuff (RP stuff mainly) with another guild on Thorium Brotherhood which is still made up of part of the original guild I was on when I started playing in Feb '05 on Cenarion Circle but restarted on Thorium Brotherhood when it went live (mid-'06 maybe?). But, even that’s rare anymore because most of them are only logging in once a week now. I do also still have two of my original characters over in my original guild on Cenarion Circle, and they still have at least 50+ active members, including a couple of old work mates, so I could play there if I really wanted to (I really don’t like a couple of players in that guild though for various reasons).
So, what I really don’t like about Shadow Lands is that the combination of everything in the expansion—just like in Catacylsm—has driven away a lot of players. There are plenty of times I’ll login in at what should be decently populated times but won’t see a single person in Stormwind/Orgrimmar and maybe half a dozen to 10 players in Oribos. Other servers like Moonguard (the one Ally IRL-friend also plays there, so I login occasionally there) still have plenty of people it seems, but it’s getting to the point where my main (RP) server—even though we were already merged with Farstriders/Silver-Hand years ago—needs to be merged with it, Wyrmrest, or Cenarion Circle or something. That was something I absolutely didn’t want to happen even as recently as Legion, but now it sounds like a good idea with as few people as I see playing on this server…
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Its all bad, I could be here for a long time and write a wall of text detailing exactly where I personally think they went wrong.
But for me the uninstall button came with the flagrant attempts to bury anything that may or may not be construed as offensive just in case it hurt their court battle and as such women were replaced by fruits and we lost a huge chunk of the flirts and jokes.
The only reason I am here is because my wife because she wants to play but hates playing on her own. That does not mean I will forgive and forget - returning the flirts and jokes is the only step in the right direction for me.
WOD was better than SL
1, PVP gearing was stupid broken and bad
2. The MAW being grounded and not even a mount at first.
3. Torghast was boring and tying it to leggo stuff was just wrong
4. Campaign grind
5. renown is just another word for reputation grind. Tying it to progression was bad game design
6. Borrowed power. IE conduits and leggos and other boring stuff for BIS gear
7. The woke crap. Just bad for business and boring lazy game design
8. No real catch up mechanics for alts.
9. Too many flying hoops to jump thru. Should be available at max level in all zones for gold.
10. Ions lawyer talk .
11. The community council PR stunt.
12. Scaling
13. Anima is just another word for azerite which was bad game design and boring.