After much consideration, I must agree with others that the Maw is a genuinely bad zone, and an abject failure in its current state.
It’s actively, aggressively unpleasant, and has been designed to be an unpleasant experience. From the lack of mounts, to the Eye of the Jailor feature, to the many, many hostile and overtuned mobs, it’s clearly designed as a place where we don’t want to be and where we want to leave as soon as possible.
It punishes players for pursuing objectives, achievements, and cosmetics. Do a quest, kill a rare, next thing you know, your time is up and you have to leave before you get killed horribly.
It demands coordination and grouping up in the form of group-level mobs and quest objectives… but discourages them with phasing issues. How many times have you tried to start/join a group only to see that someone is in a different phase, and then everyone leaves because no one wants to leave, go to Oribos, and then spend 10 minutes coming back to some farflung inhospitable spot on the map?
On smaller servers, there may not BE many people available in the first place, which makes it darned hard to complete higher level objectives. (Like, say, the Wrath of the Jailor, Beastwarren Hunt, or rares which require multiple people to summon.)
I’m not sure WHY Blizzard thought it was a good idea to create end-game content which is actively hostile, visually unappealing, discouraging to players, and which punishes you for doing anything remotely interesting. It feels like the anthesis of “fun game experience.” There’s a difference between challenging and just plain oppressive, and this is it. This is a slap in the face to the kind of players who like to explore, kill rares, hunt treasures, complete objectives, and enjoy themselves. This is a zone where you go in, get your souls, and get out. MAYBE you complete a quest or two as long as you’re there. MAYBE you convince a guild group to get together for some Maw diving.
Or maybe you do a few things, and the next thing you know, you’re caught in a never-ending loop of death as you die horribly, lose Stygia, run back, get ambushed by assassins and flying things, die again, lose more Stygia, and eventually just call it a day and hearth out.
Honestly, we need more places like the Timeless Isle, which at least was pretty and felt like a worthwhile place to while away eternity waiting for Huolong to spawn.
TL;DR: I hate the Maw for many reasons and I think it needs quality of life adjustments, starting with the phasing issues that make it so hard to group up to complete objectives.
The Maw is, in a nutshell: tedious, unrewarding, unwelcoming, difficult to navigate (especially with no mount), punishing… Or, in a more succinct nutshell: not fun.
I get the feeling that the only people who like The Maw are the same kind of massive masochists who enjoy getting root canals without any lidocaine, which is about how doing anything in The Maw feels.
And to those who try to defend it by saying it’s WoW’s version of hell: yes, it is. But that doesn’t mean it should have been so poorly designed that the vast majority of players refuse to go there because of how bad it is.
The problem with The Maw isn’t that it’s inhospitable, imho, but that it’s boring, and that has nothing to do with how difficult it may or may not be, because it doesn’t cease to be boring even when you can faceroll through it.
Eh. Travel is a pain and Perdition Hold is a headache, but only going in there and stopping at level 2 makes it a breeze. The moment I realised I don’t need to do everything in there every day the better it became.
Just wish there was something else to grab my attention and make me want to go there beyond steady Ve’nari rep progression.
Devs’ intent was to create zones that nobody would ever want to go back and spend time in. They want you to spend 43 minutes in current content. Then log out and come back for tomorrow’s chores.
It puts additional pressure on you to be efficient and smart about how you navigate thezone which I find enjoyable. My last run I was 1 item away from finishing my world quest before i got 10 stacks at Eye 5 and i had to choose between risking my 3k stygia or trying to tank the debuff (I was already at 40% health) and trying to find another ingot. I decided to run to the Refuge and I barely made it. It was exciting and fun.
I’ve only grouped up for the Maw once. The requirement that you sync in Oribos is because cheesers would swap phases endlessly to kill rares and farm rep, removing the challenge from the zone. And I’m a disc priest so it’s not like I have great mobility or stealth or hit hard. You’re a druid.
I like that the maw is actively hostile. I like the visual design of the Maw. I don’t feel discouraged by it and whenever I Mawdive, I find it busy. And I find figuring out how to adapt to the mobs and the terrain and the environment fun.
yeah, its a challenge. I lost stygia once and I have played super conservative since then and trying to max the stygia while minimising risk is enjoyable to me. It’s a great zone. I only wish it had the PVP ruleset of old where people on erstwhile PVP servers couldn’t just avoid PVP. That would make the maw truly fun and you’d have roving groups and gank squads and people using consumables and stuff, would be great.
The Maw is 90% great, as a hardcore open world environment for endgame players. Problem is, the game literally boots you after about an hour of play and there is genuinely NOTHING to farm for other than making friends with a chain smoking french robot. I think the Maw is conceptually great but they actually teach players to hate it with the Jailer’s eye and complete lack of reasons to be there.
The Maw and Torghast are their dream content as no matter how bad they design it, how disdainfully torturous the content, without worry and say that is the point and “Working as intended.”
Make it possible to group up via LFG without having to sync up in Oribos.
Let us corpse-run back to where we died, rather than physically run back to our corpses.
Burn it all to the ground.
I mean sure, I can respect that people want a challenge. I can respect that Blizzard wants to torture us with the lack of mounts. I can respect that it’s meant to be hard.
But no zone should be so actively unpleasant that it literally forces you out after a certain amount of activity. No zone should be “Get in, do the bare minimum, get out.” Gamers should not be punished for actually wanting to get the most out of their experience… but the Maw is all “Ignore everything that’s not essential.”
I haven’t been able to do the Wrath of the Jailer in weeks because there just aren’t enough people interested in being in the Maw to do it, most of the time. I had to give up on a Beastwarren Hunt because there weren’t enough people in the zone/in the right phase.
When your content both requires a group, and discourages a group, you’ve designed it wrong.
The phasing issues stand out to me as a genuine problem that should be fixed.
I have no idea what’s causing that, but it makes no sense, there are quite a few quests and certain areas of the Maw that are clearly designed to encourage grouping up, which right now is inconvenient at best.
That can’t possibly be the intended design, so this is probably something that will be fixed soon.
Outside of that, I basically like the get in/get out quality of the Maw and the element of increasing danger provided by the Jailer’s Eye.
It comes across as the part of the expansion that got rushed the most. So, ok. Shadowlands was released during what was/is a difficult time, and it’s a great expansion overall so far.
The Maw has its problems, some of which will probably be ironed out in the near future. It’s no big deal.
At least we could mount up in Nazjatar, and later fly.
And at least it had stuff to do while you were there, and didn’t force you out after you’d done a fraction of it.
And at least it was pretty.