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Honestly, I think the community got what it asked for with this expansion, and then kept on complaining. Shadowlands is my favorite because the systems it had made sense for the worlds we were exploring. Like your feelings on Ardenweald, I feel very connected to Maldraxxus.
In honest reflection, most of the things I didn’t like about shadowlands weren’t even unique to the expansion. Friction between covenant swapping and legendary crafting costs existed in legion legendary RNG and bfa azerite armor/corruption acquisition. My biggest turn off was the 9.1 raid shard system which ended up causing me to take a break until season 4, since I was only raiding at that point, which I ended up adoring.
Overall, I think the largest hits to my tone was disappointment in the scope of korthia and theme/story. When I’m not playing the game, I think about the world and story, and when I’m playing the game, I think about the content drought (which again wasn’t just a shadowlands issue).
I do think the new m+ dungeon rotations going forward will help alleviate the monotony of each seasons keys at the expense of higher mastery over the dungeons, and I’m curious how fated raids will be implemented, if at all, in DF.
I can relate. Bastion was a good zone but I love Ardenweald very much including Revendreth. Not a fan of Maldraxxus though. I enjoyed SL for what is was and my favorite raid was CN, I miss that raid. My warrior originally was with Nightfae covenant and due to guild pressure I switched to Venthyr and that was when I fell in love the whole vampireish theme and the covenant ability turned out to be real fun. So, I enjoy both Nightfae and Venthyr covenants when playing my warrior.
Covenant was fun i remember hard thing what to pick as my home. but problem for me was Legendary items and farming torghast . So this 2 things kill my spirit to play wow 🙂
DF will be the best wow expansion. Purely from the fact we get flying from the start. I also lost interest in previous expansions cause you had to ride everywhere. When they reintroduced flying in later patches I would fall in love with the game again.
I think Shadowlands near the end was fine, they just took too long to make it not a chore. Like the person who made Torghast ash a weekly lockout, then made the ash mandatory to craft items that in some cases give you like 40% extra burst damage every minute, just needs straight up fired. Oh, you wanna go pvp? Sorry bud – gotta wait 6 weeks for your ash to be ready to make your legendary.
What?!?!
One of the biggest complaints I had about BFA was that we hit max level and we had nothing to show for it. Azerite armor taking the place of what should have been a new spell or two as we would have gotten in previous expansions.
Shadowlands seemed to change that with the covenants. We hit max and picked out covenant and got two no spells for it. But placing people who wanted to perform well and to also play a character they wanted to be are two conflicting ideas in this system. And while I enjoyed how it worked out for me I would never discount someone else who was frustrated by it. I have the empathy enough to understand why the covenant system wasnt the greatest for them. Imo we should have been able to pick our covenant and then pick which of the spells/soulbinds we wanted. The changes they made to quickly switch were not damaging to the game and it lowered a lot friction within the system. Like it(conceptually) or not I think that was a good change.
Dragonflight seems to be trying to improve this idea and I'm all for it. I loved the covenants and I made many characters this expansion and had fun in all 4. So I'm excited for dragonflight. Being able to progress them all seems like a good change and it's kinda how I played in season 3 and 4 anyway. My one take away from this is that they seem like they are taking feedback to heart with df which is in stark contrast from what blizz was for decades.
The biggest complain from my side is that many features were interconnected and you "had to" do all of them to be be successful in something you really like.
Wanna raid? Then do these activities every week: torgast for legendary, maw for sockets, covenant campaign + calling + weekly quests for soulbinds and stamina buffs, at least one (better 4) m+ for the chest, and don't forget to grind the conduits…
None of these is bad on it's own, but it's just not fun to do all that when you do not want to. I grinded all achievements in the maw and think it's a really cool zone, but doing it every day was just too much.
I loved beta DF exploring and dk is great, i think the scaling will be good too. Most classes are double dipping talents/gear and will be good getting rid of SL legos, to this expansion. I think DF is my fav already after beta. Yes some bugs , but great tbh. SL will be for me about maldraxxus, for your Same reasons.
Ardenweald I think was a good area for the nature "death" area. I'm not big on the rest of the covenant areas. The look of bastion is good, but the smurfs were too weird. The maw was good as a "hell," maybe too good because a lot of people hated it.
The covenant system is big what screwed up Shadowlands zones, because the zones were designed to support those systems, which meant Blizzard was extremely limited with what they could build into those zones, and the failure of those covenants served to further fail the zones along with them. Mix in the bad storytelling to make that even worse.
The mechanics of the raids were top tier, the best so far IMO. The theme of the raids particularly SotFO and failure to utilize more than token established villains was terrible.
I felt the same way about the Vampy Boys. I think that had something to do with me hating S3/S4 DK playstyle.
I had plenty of guilds die while I was raiding with them. It was a little jarring but I picked up the pieces and kept the friends I made close. We will see how this goes into df. I have higher hopes for the population going forward. All the negative press with blizz and Activision really drove people away in droves. Also the raids were ridiculously hard and yeah recruiting was a nightmare.
The one thing I've been bothered by is being improved in dragonflight so I can't really complain anymore 🙂 I almost only do m+ cause that is the content i enjoy but not getting better loot for doing a +20 vs +15 felt a bit bad. Especially when we only get one 304 piece a week and you have to hope that your bis piece will come out of the vault with 100+ of different items on the loot table. My wish would be, either we get to choose one dungeon to get our vault loot from each week or let us upgrade our m+ gear with valor all the way up, after the race to world first is done. That would make it easier to off spec as well since you wont spend the entire season hoping to get bis gear for main spec. My impossible request would be to get the bis gear for raid in raid and the bis m+ gear from mythic+. I don't like the feeling of being behind in m+ groups only because I don't want to do mythic raiding while they can be potatoes in m+ but still have better gear than me for that content.
Shadowlands was a very love/hate situation for me. I really like the concepts of covenants but the restrictions placed on changing covenants/soul binds, cosmetics being character locked, and the pace of progression felt needlessly restrictive and actively discouraged me from trying new covenants. Thorghast sounded like a great feature, but the limited powers and wings quickly became boring and repetitive, a situation that wasn't helped by certain classes/specs having powers that were lack luster. I liked the idea of crafted legendaries, but the amount of time and/or resources required to reach max lvl was ridiculous, and the fact that most of the crafts made before max lvl were wasted quickly ruined it for me. And don't even get me started on just how terrible The Maw was… The one saving grace for me was the dungeons, raids, and to an extent the outdoor zones added with the major patches. They were thematically appropriate and generally well designed imo. That said, if I hadn't had a consistent guild group for raiding and occasional M+ runs, I would have quit before the first patch. As you mentioned all this stuff was address eventually, and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised that they were addressed at all. Too many times in the past the dev team just dug their heels in and refused to make changes to the detriment of the game. It's disappointing that it took so much discontent to get here, but I'm confident the devs have learned from their mistakes, and the future of WoW is going to be much better for it.
Feel the same. For me my favourite expansion and i play since vanilla. Ok the story could be better but i feel the same about the covenants.
The funny thing I learned this expansion is that people seemed to not mind some bad things but really hated others(even if they were a lot smaller impact).
For example everyone hated balance between covenants but they didn't hate tier sets in season three blowing balance completely out of wack. If you weren't a Bdk, Destro, survival, or holy priest then you were undesirable even at key levels that it truly did not matter. It kinda baffled me. Now I was the benefactor of the tier sets so I had fun, but let's say I was a ret paladin I would not be having a great time trying to push higher keys. Even running your own you get less applications on the off meta classes.
i really enjoyed the gameplay of SL.
in fact i played much much more SL than even legion !
after the 9.1.5 and the free covenants swapping and valors i had a blast
raid where super cool and i liked a lot the m+
but i was really disconnected with the external world tho everything felt so small and i detested everything about the travelling
strangely enough i had a blast in progressing the maw + khortia i liked a lot this new way of 'questing'
i liked to do the 'perfect' thorgast with my friend too and adored the mage tower 2.0 ( did everything! ) i'm proud of my book 🙂
frankly i think the only problem with SL was the very very very long patch
S4 was a BLAST tho
It just comes down to how god-awful the storyline was. They ret-conned like 20 years worth of storytelling for a giant man-baby with a terribly uninteresting lackey and it makes it really difficult to take any of the world seriously when that's the case. And that's what I always loved about the game, that this was the WORLD of Warcraft. I keep coming back because the systems and gameplay are so smooth, but the world itself was what always kept me engaged, and it's been really hard to remain engaged with this particular expansion outside of just Mythic+.
Two steps forward with systems and gameplay, ten steps backwards with world-building.
Agreed. It's a meme that the current expansion is the worst. I also agreed that the current expansion is the best expansion.
I almost always love the expansion I'm in. Sure I might be a little bored with it at the end but I don't fault the expansion for it most the time. This expansion did have some terrible patch cadence but most of them do lol what upset me was trying to do 3s with my friends. We tried so hard to get to 1800 the first season, but we'd get to 1780 and then suddenly everyone had freaking 20 ilvls on us because they got carried to the rating and were able to upgrade gear. We quit for a long time because of it. I absolutely loved s4 m+, though! That was a blast. (Also feel the same about adrenweald!! I could almost cry thinking about leaving it.)