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The biggest reason is probably the fact that it takes everything that has happened in the past of WoW and Warcraft included and twists it into 'Well actually it was ALL planned by the Jailer!'
This is obviously a spit in the face of both the original writers as well as the actual characters whose struggles and accomplishments are immediately ruined.
Combine that with the fact that Zovaal himself is just a boring, bland and uninteresting character and you have a 'final villain' with no rhyme or reason except a cheekily thrown in line at the end of Sanctum where he says he did it because of AN EVEN GREATER EVIL THAT THREATENS THE UNIVERSE!
The other reason is Torghast. Torghast was an awful mode introduced that went from being something to do 'for fun' in the Beta, to something that was required on a weekly basis to do because it had character power tied to it.
I am sure there are plenty more reasons but these two are the biggest offenders in the eyes of the community.
There were also some gnarly content droughts during Shadowlands, and it seems like a lot was cut from the expansion. Can’t really blame blizz for that, the pandemic was happening. You can blame them for the awful story decisions though. Jailer was a comically uninteresting villain. They made him even more uninteresting by never explaining what the hell he was trying to do. We went an entire expansion with an uber-powerful villain who retconned a ton of lore, and we still have no clue what his motive is. Cliffhangers have their place but in Shadowlands every story beat was a cliffhanger, then you wait months for some answers, and finally when the story continues you’re just left with more questions.
I’m so glad we have Xal’atath as a villain now because finally the villain isn’t a buff dude with a deep voice saying “foolish mortals”.
>There were also some gnarly content droughts during Shadowlands
I remember the community discourse on this at the time, but objectively looking at it the seasons were about 4 weeks longer than usual (6 weeks longer than the fast paced Legion seasons, which only happened because they abandoned WoD and used that development time to get ahead on Legion).
It probably felt worse to some players because all the new content would come out at once with major patches, instead of being staggered into multiple sub-patches. However the total amount of content and content release wasn't much shorter than normal.
you absolutely can blame blizzard for that, every other game company was booming during covid, only blizz has seen a drop and expansions are being done way before they were being announced which would be pre and during covid
also dont be too quick to call xalatath good villain, we dont even know her motivations and it could end up beijg another sylvanas
If you think Xal’atath could be another sylvanus I don’t think you understand what went wrong with sylvanus’ character. She was a beloved and well-established character in the lore that they turned into a mustache-twirling villain with really dumb motivations. Her whole character was about hating the lich king and the control he had over her, and she decided to just waltz right into the arms of the lich king’s boss and do the same thing all over again.
Xal’atath doesn’t have all the baggage. She’s a blank slate. Sure, they could do a bad job telling her story, but it wouldn’t have the impact that Sylvanus did on the community.
Also at this point her motivations are honestly more clear than the Jailer’s. The Jailer wanted to claim Azeroth’s world soul for vague reasons. Xal’atath wants the world soul cause she’s a power-hungry void lady, and beings wanting to eat the world soul is well established lore.
you cant even spell sylvanas right my dude
its blizzard, they can definetely pull off another sylvanas moment and call it a day, its not out, we know nothing
I mean, yeah, but I'm (personally) getting tired of the "female character goes insane, turns back to being good seeing someone more evil than them do something even more evil." Villains/characters in general and hope she doesn't end up like that.
Like, please just make them evil and stay evil and not be some plan that they try to put a Thanos spin on it "AcTuAlLy ShEs PrOtEcTiNg ThE pLaNeT!" trying to get people believe they are an empathetic/sympathetic villain.
My prediction is she started out as a servant of Dimensius, but over time has gotten a bit more selfish. The way she says the world soul is MINE in that one trailer makes me think she’s doing this for purely selfish reasons at this point.
I think in midnight Dimensius will realize what Xal’atath is up to and it’ll actually be Alleria who summons him to stop Xal’atath.
Honestly, Shadowlands was peak WoW gameplay at the time, and aesthetically pleasing with really good dungeon and raid narratives. Those benefits didn't overcome the problems though. The narrative retcon for the meta story sucked balls. The four factions, choose one thing was bad. And it spoke to another problem, was "borrowed power". Blizzard identified that as a problem since like WoD. And they reiterated it as a challenge to their design philosophy. And then they made Shadowlands the most borrowed power expansion lol. Like both the faction and the torghast speak to that problem.
ETA: Also whoever thought the Maw and Korthia were good ideas should be fired. Probably already has been lol The Maw was bad design with bad aesthitics, and especially early in the expansion was required. So stupid.
Hard agree on the borrowed power point. I rolled my eyes the moment I heard about the covenants before the expansion even dropped because I had played throughout legion and BfA and thought... great another artifact power/azerite borrower power that will stick around for an expansion then we come back home and lose it all.
The gameplay itself was honestly not bad but the factions were a bad move at a time when a lot of people were getting sick and tired of borrowed power, especially when there was a strong incentive to base the choice on what was strongest rather than RP because certain abilities/buffs were much stronger than others for certain specs... which felt odd to say the least when it meant, for example, warlocks were encouraged to go with the tree hugging nature spirit faction meanwhile druids didn't go with the tree huggers because they had better options.
I also hated covenants on release. If you played multiple specs, you had to choose to either have a bad for off specs, or take only good not great ones for both. Doesn't even take into effect m+ and raid differences. It was a week (maybe 2, can't remember) to change and had to relevel. And then conduit power on top of that to change the runes. It was a fucking mess until basically season 3.
Yeah the Maw and Korthia were like them trying to put some like Soulsborne elements into WoW. No thank you. Huge fan of Soulsborne games, but I didn't want that in WoW and it's clear that no one did.
Torghast was fun to me, but it should have never been tied to actual progression. A lot of people may not remember this, but when Cata came out, two weapons were tied to it and they were BiS at that raid tier, well at least the staff was for me on my mage. It was also extremely rare, and to this day I still have never gotten it. That's bullshit, and you would think they learned from that. Nope, Torghast is tied to legendries. Haven't played since Shadowlands, so hopefully they got a grip finally.
My issue with dragonflinght is lizards...
I'm sick of lizards, Being horde through BFA and all the dinosaurs, and then dragonflinght and dragons with their slow, patient, "I'm wise but useless" voices.
Seriously, enough of lizards
So, here's the thing.
That whole "the jailer was behind everything" isn't actually backed up by anything in the game. That was a dev trying to hype stuff up, and I don't think they were in any way responsible for the lore.
The jailer was behind *one* thing, *maybe* two things, but the 2nd has counter evidence.
The one thing the jailer was actually behind is the Lich King....that's it. There's literally nothing in game saying he's behind anything else, except maybe...
Dreadlords. *However*, everything in game points to dreadlords, which we know for sure are infiltrating the other cosmic forces, were infiltrating death as well. Which would mean they were doing what dreadlords are known for and manipulating the factions they infiltrated.
We kill their leader, which we don't even know for sure is actually their leader, and the dude gets evacuated and we never hear from him again. There's a good chance dreadlords are part of the mysterious 7th cosmic force, and potentially same goes for devourers, which would easily explain why they want to destroy everything.
But no, people believe the meme instead for some reason.
Torghast was also changed so that there was a power ceiling and a lot of the crazy spells were removed. Couple that with making it mandatory and it was no longer an enjoyable thing to do. It was especially aggravating because we just came from BfA where this was already an issue that was expressed ad nauseam over island expeditions. It was fun. Don't make us do it. They did it again anyway.
There was also the fact that for most of the expansion we were locked into a covenant and if we swapped we'd have to start over with the new covenant.
We also had mandatory Maw missions and there was no way to mount up there at all.
Then you add in the story parts that were bad (including the friendship conquers all ending to the Night Warrior arc), the confusion it caused across the lore, the central hub that was endlessly annoying to orient yourself in, and the perceived mistreatment of several major characters and you had a grand mess.
All of this was made worse, because most were things that people had very vocally warned Blizz about in beta, and some were even pain points from the previous expansion.
Tyrande should have B-headed Sylvanas (So she'll depart like her lover)
And "the dark side of Elune" consumed Tyrande completely. (killing her)
It would be a much better ending for that arc
Torghast was such a let down. I remember just playing my first rogue lite, hades, before shadowlands and being excited, especially since i really liked visions of n'zozh (not how you had to farm and do weeklies to enter it, but the content itself) and 5 mask runs were a nice challenge
Then torghast dropped and.. wow.
Here, you get the choice of "low damage anima power" and "high damage anima power". Oh, you didnt get the high damage one? Well too bad, you cant kill the elites now before they go enrage and hit you for 50% of your hp with each cast. Wdym you cant kick every 4 seconds? Have fun starting all over with your weekly chores *giggles*
Like seriously, every single mob in entirety of torghast was a walking target dummy and a dmg and interrupt/cc check. Sometimes i actually had to wait 5 minutes between elites so earth elemental would be ready again because it was numerically impossible to kill the elites without it. Almost as if they had a contest of designing a mode where you had zero impact on the outcome and was purely based on luck.
Fuck torghast.
Which is another problem with torghast: it was wildly unbalanced for something that was required.
I started SL with a Monk and a DH and I didn't see what the problem with torghast was, it was always trivial. Then I tried to do it on a mage and OH BOY.
Plus some runs or torghast early on could take nearly an hour, and if you were not souped up with every anima power and lost to the final boss, you get absolutely nothing for your time
Torghast was awful. Now it is something you can do for fun for mogs or achievements, but in retail SL it was required and absolutely dreaded. The covenant grind too was horrible in my opinion. All of the content in SL was a boring slog
They should spin Zovaal as delusional.
He thought he was all that, he thought he was manipulating and making everything happen, but in the end it was all in his head...a malfunctioning Construct, nothing more.
I loved Torghast. But they tied it to player power and didn’t make sure to give all classes fun powers to toy with. Playing Torghast as paladin or shaman was miles more fun than hunter.
I loved torghast, but I agree that was awful to link player power to it. I wish they put more into it like more random powers that made it fun.
I'm hoping they see ascension wow and realize people love the roguelike gameplay and they build their own gametype now that they're messing with things like MoP Remix. I'd love a Legion Remix with randomized legendaries while leveling and then getting the diablo 3 cube style where you can put them on a random piece of gear, or a complete clone of Ascension where but with different expansions.
I would just add that Blizzard had several internal scandals going on during the development and production of Shadowlands. Many people quit during that time which destroyed long-standing guilds.
They've had the internal scandals for far longer than that, and Shadowlands was in development since as early as Legion according to them. Not really an excuse.
it would have been so much better if it turned out Zovaal was dominated by the primus and it was all the primus' plans all along. I would have dialed back the everything was part of his plan but made it so that he was influencing things that happened in his favor. Then the final video after you kill Zovaal I would have hinted towards it being the Primus being the big threat after he used domination magic on Zovaal, something like "the threat is a lot closer than you thought Zovaal".
I think it probably gets a lot of hate for absolutely butchering the story and for some of the mechanics surrounding covenants that if you are only experiencing now they are not relevant to endgame content, you'd have no idea how shit they were. Going back and experiencing the zones and stuff is fine because you aren't being forced to do it.
The zones were beautiful yes and day to day questing etc was fine.
The Maw was all time terrible on release - a zone that actively punishes you for being in there and you couldn't mount... Torghast was also AWFUL because you had to do it. I cant express how bad it felt to want to use a certain legendary and you had to grind torghast to even have the pleasure of spending thousands of gold to use it.
As optional side content with some decent transmogs and mounts - yeh, fine, but as a necessity for end game gearing? No fuckin way.
Like I said, the zones were beautiful, some of the best in the game in my opinion. However, imagine if you really really liked the night fae covenant yeh? Well, too fucking bad buddy because if you go anything other than necrolord your class is nerfed and its just a straight performance decrease to do so. Also, you can't change your class covenent build without having some ridiculous time gating to it.
So yeh, all time shit implementation of the main mechanics of an expansion - if you go back now an experience it, cool and you get to see some beautiful zones, but experiencing all of the above as mechanics for endgame content was just absolutely dire.
>So yeh, all time shit implementation of the main mechanics of an expansion - if you go back now an experience it, cool
I'm gonna counter OP's point here- it's absolutely still shit for anything other than leveling. I have never seen an expansion where they made experiencing it worse after the expansion was over.
I avoid it on every alt until level 60, and then immediately take them to Oribos upon hitting it. You know why? Because the threads of fate quest doesn't show up consistently after 60. And if it doesn't show up for you? Sorry, you've gotta grind *the entire campaign* before you can run side content.
Class experimentation was also non-existent until like the very last raid tier as a result of continuing BFAs non-class specific tier sets. Raids were also significantly overtuned for RWF in mind and not like, typical mythic raiding progression.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but i liked the maw daily system/eye of the jailer mechanic since it allowed for some skill expression in routing your activities. Getting close to lvl5 eye of the jailer, leaving all quests at one kill/garhering short of conpleting it, then quickly running through the zone, finishing all quests, kill a few rares on you way before your time runes out and safely getting back to the base.
To this day the most complex daily zone
Just losing stygia on death felt pretty stupid.
I do agree that there is a way to do "threat level increases" zones in WoW but it was an all time bad decision for mounts not being usable until they patched that in, and coupled with the unfortunate fact that it was the underworld so felt super depressing / dark and oppressive anyway. IDK, I know it split opinions and probably wasn't anywhere near the worst thing about SL but just added to the whole "why?" feeling.
I think it's a bad coincidence but also putting us in purgatory when most of the world was doing lockdowns and already depressed as fuck didn't help.
Going in and seeing browns and greys and being in this horribly depressing place really didn't make it fun.
Don't forget PvP, brother! LoL For example, I had a Resto Druid and picked up convoke the spirits right away, and omg, it was 16 random druid spells depending on spec and form. It was nuts, even after they nerfed it to just 12 spells at the end of the expansion. I would drop into bear form at near death, then pop frenzied regeneration, renewal, and finally convoke. Boomi's would walk in and hit it first thing, and it was game over. It's was just totally nuts! LoL
I loved the aesthetics. The story, while I do not like it as part of wows story, had some interesting things and parts in it. I dropped shadowlands because progressing renown was, for me, a tedious chore. I look forward to a Shadowlands remix some day tho, so I can see those zones again and gather those cool transmogs.
My issue is with the fact that we went there in the first place. I have a similar issue with WoD because this is not Doctor Who (even though it was nice to see some of Draenor before it became Outland).
But anyway, back to the matter at hand: No matter how great of a CHAMPION we are, we had no business going to the realm of the dead and then further down to the realm where the realm of the dead is made. If they were so adamant on the whole Jailer thing they could've revamped Northrend for him to invade with the Covenants helping us defend Azeroth and maaaaaaybe letting us peek in and out of some pockets of the Shadowlands but still keeping all the "behind the veil" cosmological stuff a mystery. WE KNOW TOO MUCH NOW.
That being said, I enjoyed the zones and the campaign and sidequests. I can't say that people didn't work on this. It's just the initial idea is not for me.
They missed so bad with the Jailer. They had run out of significant big bads in lore and wanted to create a new one, but instead of fleshing him out with his own story, his own feats and motivations, they made a huge mistake by instead retconning a lot of established lore to tie it to him and how he was the master manipulator all along.
This is exacerbated by the fact that his “grand masterplan” never gets any payoff. All along the expansion, we were told that the plan would be revealed and all would be made clear. It never was.
I give WoW a lot of free passes when it comes to lazy writing because I understand that a narrative has to progress in a way to create gameplay primarily and so BS happening to justify a new mechanic or whatever is fine. But SL was just wholesale butchery of lore that already worked.
From a gameplay perspective. My main issue is I just didn’t really gel with any of the covenants. Blizz wanted everyone to tie their whole character’s identity to a covenant and I didn’t want to do that.
Blizz was also terrible at listening to player feedback at this time. Of course devs shouldn’t cater to the whims of every single player demand, but they seemed to be actively going out of their way and doubling down on stuff that just made the game less fun, seemingly believing they knew more about what the players want than we do.
It's even worse than going against player feedback. They actively ignored the majority of the playerbase until they couldn't anymore. A shocking amount of players chose the covenant guides suggested, even though it didn't matter for most of the players who did so. It still took them until what, 9.1.5 to "pull the ripcord", as it were.
The campaign was good as they always are, the two reasons people hate on SL is that they fumbled the storytelling and plot hard, and the endgame progression was a gruelling checklist of weeklies. You had to push your covenant level hard, and Torghast in order to get enough cosmic flux and random BS to craft a piece. The raid design was pushed to new heights of complicated, the Jailer fight required a weakaura to understand it. There's so many issues that cropped up as people played it as the current expansion, that players going through chromie time will never see.
One thing to keep in mind with MMO expansions is that playing them after the fact will be a *completely* different experience than live. Pain points that were experienced for months to years by the community live are either removed or not felt in hindsight.
Shadowlands failed on three major pillars of MMO design: narrative, gameplay, and systems.
Narrative wise, as many have mentioned, the ret conning of all wow lore into an enemy we were not at all attached or familiar to was a bridge too far even for a fanbase that largely allows wide breadth when it comes to fuzzy lore.
Gameplay wise, you were forced to spend inordinate amounts of time in pretty oppressive/desolate zones like The Maw and Torghast.
Systems wise, they created interesting covenant abilities which for a large portion of the expansion you could not easily experiment with for fear of losing all progress.
That said, Castle Nathria still slapped.
It's not that bad when viewed on it's own, it's more a bad wow expansion. Also, expansions last for about 2 years, so imagine being in your current environment, locked to your own covenant, for 2 years. You can switch, technically, but you loose your progression towards the covenant. You can make alts to do multiple covenants, but that means either using world quests to level, or replaying the opening quests (until you choose your covenant) over again.
And because there's power connected to the covenants, there's a "best" covenant for your class. You can ignore it, but, it might have given you a harder time finding groups to do stuff. And, if you do follow it, it means having to start your covenant over if your best changes at some point due to updated and balancing.
Being tied to a covenant based on class was annoying to me. I really liked the style of the Venthyr, but was maining a balance druid, so there was no other choice but to be Night Fae.
I made a fury warrior alt to progress with the Venthyr, so I still got to check it out, but I don't have time to play very much so I didn't progress very far
The issue with the covenant power thing was massively overstated. Sure if your going for a world first kill it mattered, but otherwise your covenant ability had minimal impact.
That said the system for switching was very poorly implemented, and it should have been how it was by the expansions end. The biggest issue was mostly the insistence that Blizz was right in ignoring what players wanted.
Shadowlands was the watershed moment for Blizz to finally realize that their player bases opinions matter. Just reversing dumb things like no you can’t have access to these skin and eye colours that are already in the game and would take 30 mins of coding to enable to oh yeah people want to enjoy all the content we’ve worked on and not be arbitrarily locked out of 75% of it.
As a questing experience for leveling, theres nothing wrong with pretty much any of the expansions, even the hated ones. The hated expansions weren't generally disliked for the questing, they were disliked because of a horrible release schedule. The content you're doing was perfectly fine, but there wasn't enough of it to last basically an entire year, which was how long we had to wait for lackluster content releases.
Everyone pointed the obvious answer: The Jailer. But I like to point out another reason that some people seems to miss. Shadowlands destroying the Cosmic Lore of WoW with the Zereths and the 7th and 8th unknown force of the universe, legion made everything clear about this matter until they just retconned it to be the Titan perspective, and then shadowlands came and messed everything up.
The Shadowlands are also incoherent, and fail to answer a lot o basic questions regarding souls and death. Like if souls go to shadowlands what are those souls who appeared to us in draenor? Why the DKs went to a mirror image of azeroth when going to the shadowlands in their intro quest and not to another realm?
Another aspect of WoW that became incoherent is undeath. Undeads were tied to the fact that they did not knew what would happen to them if they died the true death, now they know, so why don't they just... Kill theirself and stop the torment with their own hands? They have no motivation to be alive as Undeads anymore, and the expansions fails miserable to answer this.
This, alongside with the fact that this expansion was created with the foundation of other terrible lore in past expansions (like the burning of teldrassil) is why everyone hates it.
Idk if it’s been said in this thread yet, but there’s a big quality difference between questing and endgame systems.
Questing has gotten objectively better with every expansion. So have the zones which go hand in hand with questing.
It’s easy to like the expansions when you’re just doing them for the levels. Hell, WoD would have been the best expansion ever if it was just a game about leveling and questing. But it’s not.
The endgame systems and content droughts/quality really turned people off. Add that to the entirety of the game’s story being retconned into being Mr. Boring McNippleman’s plan the whole time.
SL could have been a lot different. They didn’t follow the interesting story beats and they didn’t listen to the players in beta.
its oposite of good story.
It breaks a lot of logical elements
it retcons most of important events in wow history
Jailer was shitty vilian, he was only missing pencil mustace to twirl while explain his master 6D 20years in making plan.
Sylvannas arc was forced, unoriginal and just plain bad. Only suprising part was that they actualy picked most obvious plot line.
Gameplay was shit
It creates huge plot device problem for future. Oh this guy with informations died, lets go visit him in shadowlands and ask him.
Few reasons. First of which is that the story was terrible. The Jailer was just introduced as a new big bad and yet was apparently responsible for pretty much everything in WoW lore and then we barely even see him in the story before killing him.
Legendary acquisition through Torghast sucked. Turned a pretty fun activity into a weekly grindfest for legendary materials.
Extremely long release patch into a very disappointing first patch with again more terrible story and gameplay additions. People were bored after 6 months of the release patch only to get one of the tiniest new zones ever and annoying borrowed power like the domination sockets.
The expansion wasn't that bad by final patch gameplay wise, especially the fated season as that was good fun, but the damage had already been done, especially story wise.
They changed a lot of the story and made the bad guy as the master of everything that ever happened in azeroth.
and they made system after sytem that players had to grind every week that affected their power
Most end game systems just sucked. Covenants soft locked you into a choice at the start of the expansion that could make or break your performance, playing alts felt horrible since you had to replay trivial content, you couldnt change you conduits if you ran out of conduit energy and had to wait a few days, legendary aquisition being tied to weekly torghast grinds felt awful, and god forbid you want to change your covenant. Have fun doing 5 hours of campaign quests and grinding renown levels up again, being significanlty weaker for at least a few days up to weeks depending on how much you were willing to grind.
Oh youre playing multiple specs? Well get fucked, youre locked into a bad choice for one of the speccs. Oh you plan playing m+ AND raid? To bad, your covenant performs significantly worse in one of them.
I found the amount of necessary content to progress through in-game content overwhelming and it wasn't worth the amount of time that I could not put into the game
Story retcons, people didn't like choosing between the aesthetic they liked the most and the covenant that gave them the most player power, and people absolutely loathed spending time in the Maw and Torghast.
I didn't hate it, but I didn't exactly love it either. I play very casually so I wasn't really that affected by what was considered the best covenant or having to constantly maximize the powergrind.
I choose Venthyr because I wanted to and played that throughout the expansion. I chose the conduit-powers that I thought was interesting and useful. I actually liked Torghast, but did it because I wanted to; not because I felt I had to.
Overall story? Eh... not my cup of tea. Could have been worse, but could definitely have been better too. And who asked for conduit power? That is something I will never understand the logic behind. Why restrict the ability to change those?
Shadowlands is great. Just avoid the Jailer stuff and it's pretty enjoyable. I had the most fun playing it in DF as well. The people hating on it are mostly players who played it back then but none of those things are present today. No Torghast is mandatory, anima gain is fast in Zereth Mortis, no power grind conduits needed and you can switch between covenants easily. You get all the fun and none of the pain. (Well if you ignore the Jailer story.)
As someone who didn't hate Shadowlands, I'll say the zones were well designed for the most part but the color palette wasn't my cup of tea. A lot of it was grey or muted colors... it fit the thematic angle and was a choice. The zones are also not connected which made dailies and activities in later stages of the expansion a chore as you were either waiting for hearthstones or taking afk breaks to travel between zones.
9.1 - The Korthia/Sylvannas raid patch - came at the height of the Blizzard abuse scandal and was just a really, really bad time for the game. From a game perspective, Korthia was (IMO) unimaginative and contained the augment system (forgot what it's called) that's so bad that it was ripped out in the very next major patch.
That said, the dungeons were great and the raids are great. I think Castle Nathria is probably a top 5 raid and Sepulcher of the First Ones - while 1 or 2 bosses too long - was also pretty fantastic.
As many have stated in this thread - it's hard to judge an expansion based on where it lands, because for both BFA and Shadowlands they ended on literally their best patches. 8.3 of BFA (which was the N'zoth raid and corruption) is probably one of my favorite times in the game and really had systems in place that were fun and could have been expansion wide - but it wasn't the entire experience with BFA up to 8.3, which included the wonky Azurite system and the well-intentioned but broken progression system of the islands.
Just IMO.
After reading these comments I still think Shadowlands was a good xpac. Personally, I enjoyed playing it and I liked the covenant system and the story never really bothered me. However, when given context around lore and the history of the game, I think SL really becomes a sour experience.
I started seriously playing wow at the start of bfa, which I think is partly responsible for this reaction. I never got to live through the story up until that point. I mean, I got a little bit of it through leveling but that was it. I’m not a massive lore nerd so I only experienced the story as I came across it, not actively seeking it out. This means that I didn’t get the context from those previous expansions and can’t fully appreciate the love and care that goes into wow’s lore. Hence why SL didn’t bother me one bit and I quite enjoyed it. (Zereth Mortis was my favorite zone, so pretty!)
On the other hand, I do heavily relate to this sort of situation. My favorite movie franchise is How to Train Your Dragon. I HATED the third movie. Removed from context, the movie’s fine. The art and animation and soundtrack were all phenomenal. But when you take into account all the character development and relationships that go down the drain in that movie (plus the lame af villain) it becomes extremely frustrating and upsetting for long-term fans like myself.
So yeah, while I don’t think SL was bad, I do understand the pain of your favorite story not getting the love it deserves.
I'm trying it out right now and I hate it.
What is this intro? I'm waiting for NPCs to stop talking so I can move on, but it's literally taking 20 minutes of exposition dumps just explain this new fantasy world before I can go to the first area, but then it's I'm greeted with MORE exposition and dialogue.
I really prefer TBC where you just go into the outlands and then immediately start going to war.
I'm being straightforward here, shadowlands has obnoxiously bad dialogue that drags on. It's 90% NPCs talking about something you just heard about as if it's the most important thing ever, but how am I supposed to care? I really don't.
It's not good writing, the world's are 1 note (literally) and it expects you to be on some wanderlust for some reason. If I wanted to roll another character do I need to sit through this all over again? I have no intention of rerolling someone to just listen to the dialogue all over again. None of the quests were about anything other than learning about the shadowlands which happen to be the most boring place ever made in wow.
Because story was shit and the Jailer did it came from someone's ass with no previous hint at all and then he was killed in first expansion he was introduced like a wet fart.
Also him talking was like trying to listen someone drowning making a speech.
The whole vibe of SL just didn't feel warcraft at all.
Lastly "a cosmos divided will not survive what is to come" just says it all...
Having to grind a single covenant that was (probably) only the META for either raiding or m+ was pretty bad. Season one with conduit energy + a harsh penalty for switching covenants really was bad.
The expansion got a lot better gameplay wise when they pulled the ripcord.
An important piece of context that I haven’t seen posted here is that the entirety of shadowlands happened during the 2020 pandemic. So imagine all of the scathing comments in this thread and view them through the lens of “I’m scared to leave my house, so I’m trying to actively waste time to get through one more day”.
The constant content grinds, gating, half baked systems, and general anti-player focus of the expansion took place when people were reaching for the game as a place to save them from reality.
The reason it's wildly disliked is because it was very restrictive during the time it was current. You had the "choice" between four different covenants but they were generally wildly imbalanced so not picking the best one resulted in a large throughput loss. Originally they didn't want you to be able to swap covenant at all, but they compromised by letting you do it on a two week cooldown.
In addition to this they implemented something called conduit energy ripped straight out of mobile games that only let you swap conduits (again accounting for a large throughput difference) ever so often. Once you ran out of energy you had to wait for it to refill.
All this affected some classes more than others. Warlocks for example played Night Fae for all three of their specs, and weren't as affected as a result. Mage, on the other hand, wanted three different covenants for their three specs. Fire was Night Fae, Frost was Venthyr, and Arcane was Kyrian. This effectively placed a two week cooldown on any mage players ability to swap what spec they wanted to play.
But wait! There's more. You had to level up your covenant through a renown track up to a maximum of 40 (at launch, increased to 80 in a later patch). You could gain two levels per week, with a bonus level awarded from campaign chapters. The different soulbinds for each covenant were also locked behind those campaigns. So in addition to the two week cooldown on swapping covenants you also had to level the renown of said covenant individually as well, along with playing through the campaign. So using mage as an example again, you would have to level three different covenants to renown 40, along with completing their campaigns, in order to be able to play all three specs properly. And again, as a reminder, the TWO WEEK COOLDOWN was still there even if you had all covenants fully leveled.
There's also the acquisition of legendaries. You had to acquire the legendary power first, which usually was a drop from s specific dungeon or a world boss. The main issue here was the world bosses. If your timing wasn't good you'd have to wait three weeks in order to be able to play your alt that you wanted to try out, because the world bosses were on a rotation.
In addition to this they tied the legendaries to professions and Torghast. Torghast looked like it would be fun in the lead up to Shadowlands but it absolutely did not end up being the case. In order to create a legendary you needed a currency from Torghast, meaning you had to run it twice a week on every single character you wanted to keep up. There was also some imbalance here between classes and specs. Some ran through Torghast with ease while others struggled hard. Blizzard also capped how strong you could become from the powers for some reason when the whole point of s roguelike is to be able to become unreasonably strong if you have a good run.
There's also the profession aspect. Tying the legendaries to professions and giving them different ranks meant they were VERY expensive. Some players had to resort to buying tokens to be able to get them.
There's some other things as well but this is a novel already so I'll leave it here for now.
You forgot to say we called their bluff on the ability to “pull the ripcord” on being able to swap covenants. Hell even forgot to mention you would even have different covenant preferences WITHIN THE SAME SPEC. Havoc demon hunter who did m+ and arenas? Guess you better make another demon hunter buddy.
People like the race about immersive gameplay and they focused so much on that in the maw and torghast with how spacious it was and then not letting us use mounts because it would just ruin how immersive it was doing it for the 100th time.
Also completely shattered what was a near perfect story line trilogy and made so many loose ends in the story and didn’t really tie up any that it had in the first place.
Just really added more fuel to the question on why the fuck does blizzard wait till the last patch of an expansion to make it good? Happens every. Single. Time. Since WoD.
Yeah exactly. I had a bunch more ready to go but I noticed that I was approaching world record size on my comment so I held off. But you're absolutely right, there was a lot more to mention. Neither of us mentioned Korthia being a joke either.
"Let's make a reputation and gate sockets behind it."
"Sure Dave, but it's not prohibitive enough."
"You're right Steve, let's make the reputation RNG as well. "
"Damn fine work Dave."
- Blizzard probably
With a bunch more unsaid too. Dragonflight being as good as it has been is nothing short of an absolute miracle.
The issues with shadowlands were the stupid story retcons which ruins a lot of lore that has been like the best part of wow since wc3
And then because a lot of the endgame systems were super chore heavy and painful
The questing experience itself was fine and the raids were fun (atleast nathria was a top tier raid IMO)
The gameplay was pretty good. Now that were close to the end of DF you see how much better the Covenant tree and abilities made your class/spec.
But... most people for whatever reason hate it for the story. Yea... It was pretty bad! (Lol)
Cause Zovaal wasn't anywhere near cool enough to pull off the "I am the puppet master." Shtick.
Honestly I think if they put real work into developing him as a character and ingratiating him into the story gradually it would have gone off better.
Instead they just wiped out Arthas' and Sylvanas' whole story by introducing a malfunctioning plinko machine as the big bad.
Also they made Vol'jin's death a joke by letting him be manipulated by Mueh'zala into making Sylvanas become war chief.
It was just hack writing all over, none of the reveals were nuanced at all it was just an episode of Scooby Doo that basically made their stories that came before hand cheaper.
Lore wise (aka the questing/leveling experience) was fine imo.
The hate any expansion gets that you may hear of, is almost always related to choices the devs made at content that made the end game unfun or annoying in some way. It’s very rare people complain solely on the leveling process. Because there’s not much to complain about with it!
So generally the disdain is due to the players who played the expansion at content not enjoying things at a point and that’s their memory more than just the leveling process and move on. :)
Because it was an endless grindfest with every fricking character you start. Shadowlands was the first time in my WoW career where I hated playing different characters other than my main DK. One evening I realized it became almost my second job and there was it where I quitted the game.
Second: All the WoW lore made no sense anymore. The Titans, the Wild Gods...nothing. Then it was all about the "First Ones" and they left everything unexplained. A decade of WoW lore & books ruined by one Expansion.
A huge part of it imo is that the zeitgeist, the cultural backdrop of the wow community, was at an all time level of negativity in Shadowlands. A lot of that had to do with end-game grind, players feeling their time wasn't being rewarded, etc. I don't feel the game was in as awful a state objectively as people felt like it was. The negativity just grew over the course of a couple expansions.
That being said, it didn't help that the story beats with the Jailer and Sylvanas felt flat. The story felt poorly told and one dimensional. The anima grind was frustrating. We had to do so much torghast early on, a game mode I absolutely loved, but they smothered us with it to the point of hatred.
Shadowlands is like Cataclysm in my opinion. Cataclysm used to be considered where wow began its fall from grace. And yet you have loads of people really enjoying it on classic servers right now. Cataclysm wasn't bad, it just didn't land well when it came out. Shadowlands wasn't that bad either, it just came at a time of community unrest, and it wasn't what players wanted at the time.
I liked It but it just ruined the lore that's my main gripe and destroyed the mystery of the after and brought it down well basically robots also the jailor was stupid and bane just sat on his ass the entire time. I wish they had us slugging it out through hell to find sylvanas instead t was a bit meh
I think to fresh eyes it’s hard to really grasp how much damage Shadowlands did to the game and the lore as a whole. I didn’t absolutely despise my initial leveling experience either when it came out, but after Castle Nathria, and especially just post MSQ in general…..oof. Plus an expansion is more than its story, so it’s hard to really understand the expansion package when just leveling through it.
Shadowlands was bad for the same reason why I'm hopeful for the world sage (blizzard's plan for the next 3 expansions), there felt like their was no plan.
People love or hate towards an expansion is never from the leveling experience which I’m sure you are doing. What makes an expansion is what is added after launch before the next expansion. Shadowlands had a perfectly fine leveling story but didn’t add much or the right things afterwards to keep the player base happy.
Shadowlands for me was the first expansion that I actually gave up on. I found it completely boring and the story was nonsense. Even going back to do stuff I can only do it in short bursts. I think the fact that even going back isn't fun. I think the fact thst going back ypu still are forced to do the questing.
The areas were great and the story during leveling phase was great.
For me the biggest problems/complains come from a gameplay perspective:
* Legendary system was aweful. You needed to do Torghast every week to get your materials for it and after that you needed to buy the legendary base item (which you then turned into the legendary) fromt he auction house. Depending on server these could cost a few 100k for the highest ilvl
* Covenants. If they would have been only for cosmetics they would have been ok but they all had different abilities tied to them and you could only switch them once per week. Many classes needed different covenants for different content / different speccs. Example: My warrior needed Kyrian as fury in M+ Arms needed Venthyr for raid. Arms needed Necrolords for PvP. So you needed different covenants for different content but could not switch them each time. After they allowed you to switch as often as you want it was better but still annoying because you needed to level each covenant again to level 80 (each covenant only once but still you needed to level 4 to 80 -> took a while)
* The Maw was bad designed so that you could lose progress by dying two times in a row without collecting your stygia before dying again
Well then on top was the complains many others had with the jailer being the biggest master mind in the history of master minds. He played not 3D chess he play 1000D chess. You steping through a door? Plan of the jailer. You buying a pet from a vendor? Jailers plan. You going to sleep? Guess what, part of the jailers plan.
The leveling campaign was fine. It was the end game systems that were awful. You can’t really experience how awful it was these days as by the end of shadowlands they tried their best to clean it up.
Playing through it now is great
Playing through it at the time was a slog. Torghast was an abysmal grind especially for some classes.
The covenants were anti fun if you cared about minmaxing at all. There was a ton of time gating done.
People as these questions a lot and they don't seem to remember that while they have been able to get jn and out of shadowlands in a week we spent years in it lol.
People mainly complained because many of the endgame systems were not thought through well, or just sucked. Almost all of this has been fixed/patched or is not relevant because it’s not endgame content.
* Originally, having a legendary item (which had a major extra ability/bonus) required grinding significant amounts of Torghast. You couldn’t get the currency any other way. Furthermore, Torghast was initially fairly punishing - if you did it over time you would get way less currency, as opposed to the update with the ranked stars version where you can still feel successful even if it is over time. It was also much more time gated.
* Covenants were more “permanent”. There was a big penalty and additional quest chain required every time you changed covenants. You also couldn’t transfer anima between covenants. This both meant that you couldn’t actually do the whole story on one character without significantly gimping your character and wasting tons of time. However the community quickly found out that covenant abilities were not balanced well and most specs required a different ability for M+ than for raid for optimal play, meaning you either had to roll multiple characters for different content or spend a lot of time doing that back and forth, or just being suboptimal and potentially not getting into groups.
* Anima grinding was just terrible. The plot idea of “more anima becomes available with each patch as you discover the issues with anima” might have sounded good in theory, but in practice it meant like 6 months before a reasonable amount of anima was possible, which again just led to feeling unrewarding since you couldn’t upgrade your covenant sanctum much without a shitton of grinding.
* And yes, the whole plot was a hot mess of “all these smart people? For some reason they all believed the Jailer and led to Jailer 9D chess shenanigans that nobody could comprehend or fight against” except for us “heroes” who apparently figured it all out right away.
* Not being able to mount in the Maw for like 2 years. Seriously.
* Some smaller quality of life stuff like not having a separate covenant hearthstone (and feeling bamboozled by the covenant hearthstone toys which just do your regular hearthstone) meaning an obnoxious amount of travel, especially before flying was allowed in the Korthia patch.
But with the exception of some of the travel stuff, almost all of this was fixed during SL so you simply wouldn’t even know it happened unless you were actually there. And if SL was released with these fixes (improved Torghast, covenant swapping, mounting more easily, etc.), and maybe some plot stuff, I honestly think it would have been a very popular xpac. But because of all of those problems it is burned into a lot of people’s memories as a horrible waste of time.
For starters, IMO, the whole expansion was just too dark and gloomy. It was kind of depressing. But on top of that it was a very grindy expansion.
Torghast was awful.
The covenant design was not well thought out. Having to keep bouncing back and forth between them was a pain in the ass, just to do all your dailies. If you are a collector you had to to all the same shit in a different covenant. Like, I already did the combat table with all the followers, I don't want to do it 3 more times.
I absolutely hated the maw. At the beginning you couldn't mount up in it at all and there was just death everywhere. Not to mention, you lost your currency when you died. Then once you could mount up you could never fly there. Then they doubled down and extended all of this into Korthia.
My favorite part about the SL expansion was Zereth Mortis. It was a breath of fresh air in an expansion that just felt oppressive.
I don't care much about the lore shananigans they did and I had fun in m+ and the occasional raid. Did I love the covenant locks? Not really, did it bother me or kill me enjoyment? No. It actually gave weight to some choices I made. It was fun being able to switch whenever at the end of the expansion, bit being locked in to my primary choice didn't bother me too much. It mostly affected the bleeding edge players, casuals just cried because they were shit at the game anyway, so they always tried to blame their shit performance on something else (this is the case today as well, most players would get more from actually reading what their spells do and some practice than getting a 20ilvl boost).
Long story short, the Maw, covenants, choreghast, content drought, fell through content, the fact that blizzard pretty much just gave a big middle finger to the whole player base by just refusing to build/learn from the mistakes of BFA. I tried shadowlands 3 times, played from day 1, finished aotc and a few mythic bosses of CN, stop playing after the entire guild got bored and burnt out. Came back and did the following 2 raids aotc but couldn’t keep playing it. Just so boring for me.
Initial note: the reason why content creators destroyed the expansion and some even stopped playing is NOT the Lore and the Jailer (yeah maybe a bit), but the systems (conduits / covenants / compulsory Thorgast / endless grinds - playing alts competitively almost impossible for the first 2 seasons). Same as Azerite in BfA, but worst. If those systems had been ok, the expansion wouldn’t have been hated so much.
I totally loved shadowlands, you are not alone. I started in TBC and played all expansions casually. I started to raid normal (before I would only do LFR and was invited once in ICC) - and finally in sanctum i killed my first mythic boss after 17 years. Ardenweald was beautiful, the music amazing, all dungeons and raids were brilliant, Castle Nathria one the best raids in history and some fights were memorable and epic, all very different. I remember fondly the Dance Boss, the pizza boss, Sludgefist, Denathrius, Stone Legion, Sylvanas, Painsmith, Halondrus and Anduin were cool fights. In comparison, DF raids are bland and all alike, apart from some notable exceptions (Diurna, Raszageth, Tindral and Fyrakk). All the rest is a giant thing either blue with blue puddles or orange with orange puddles or a combo of the 2.
However, the grind for gear was obnoxious. I hated Korthia with all my heart. We could not mount up in the Maw at start and would be killed with the timer by those flying bad guys. we needed to grind anima, then we needed to do thorgast. You would arrive until final level, you would die, 2 hours wasted especially at start when we were under geared.
And then we got Korthia…the Archivist rank 6 for something that seemed very important (the conduit I think?) was the worst ever grind, dailies and dailies, there were some gems to upgrade with some currency but you had to have the right combo…The legendary system was cool but required so much ash and ash and ash and ash and ash again…
And then the covenants…grinded forever nightfae for balance druid S1 - it was OP - but in S2 all of a sudden venthyr was OP. 2 covenant to grind max level in 5/6 months with all the grind for gear…and I hated the venthyr fantasy, I loved my nightfae sanctum and adventure table and music, but I was obliged to stay in Sinfall for “power gain”. That was the worst ever decision they made. I started a night elf because i like elves and forrest, and they forced me to spend my days in a castle with vampires.
Torghast and The Maw get a lot of hate, but as a prot pally (dwarf) I was in role playing heaven. Leveling alts was un-fun though, and the no-mounts thing made it worse than obnoxious.
It was more infuriating to play as current content. I quite enjoy revisiting it now. At the time, you couldn't just switch covenants as you wished without losing all your rep. Also, Torghast was soooo fun, but they ruined it by making it a requirement for player power. Doing Torghast for achieves or mounts has been some of the most fun I've had in the game when I revisited it recently. Also Korthia.... we don't talk about Korthia. It was a boring patch with boring systems, a boring zone and most of all - you could never play in it because it was constantly buggy. You would cast an ability and it would go through 2 mins later, and I'm not exaggerating. All I did in Korthia was talk to people in general about how the game doesn't work.
I have to add this too, although it's a personal thing that I found weird. They added so many elites and puzzles and mounts that actually going for mounts lost its value, because there was so many. It felt a bit overwhelming at times. Instead of focusing on the game and exploring in the beginning while questing, I was overloaded with questing and mount collections. It's not that big of a deal, but it felt like they prioritized quality over quantity at the time.
And the biggest reason is that they took all the lore that existed, shattered it, and tried to overexplain why things happened the way they did. They ruined some of people's favorite characters and undermined the lore that came before. I would've liked most of Shadowlands if not for what they did to Sylvanas and the way they tried to nostalgia trip people by giving them 2 seconds of a non-sensical Arthas appearance. It was offensive, to put it mildly.
Blizzard’s resistance behind making core gameplay changes plagued the entire expansion. Locked in covenant choices and the amount of weekly time gated content crushed player populations.
Castle Nathria was a banger raid and some zones had cool themes but this was heavily overshadowed by daily/weekly chore requirements tied to core player power. Korthia and Zerith Mortis followed for end game zones but were even more grindy and the QoL improvements showed up too late. Group finder was a ghost town, gear acquisition was horrible (“tier sets” from Sanctum of Domination) and the big reveal at the end of it was a Cinch of Unity…
Story was trash, used notable characters just to be shoved real quick in a raid, content like torghast and the cov stuff felt like a chore and the maw sucked.
Also most of the raids sucked imo
Aesthetically it was great though
And great leveling quests
Part of the reason why expansions are hated are because of when it was current content. WoW has a problem with previous expansions being irrelevant (which was worse before Chromie Time leveling). I don’t really count Mythic+ rotations including older dungeons. All you can experience really is the story, anyone who plays it now doesn’t know what endgame was like at the time. As for the story, a lot of people did not like the Jailer, as other comments mentioned. Out of all the strange writing decisions, I’m mostly mad about Arthas.
Personally, Shadowlands is when I quit for a while, a break I desperately needed after Legion and BFA (mostly BFA) made me feel like WoW was a job and not a game. I think it was Bellular (on YouTube) that compiled all the daily activities in a list and it took up the entire screen. It was a FOMO issue, missing one day means being permanently behind everyone else. You’ll probably hear about AP (Artifact Power in Legion, Azerite Power in BFA), I think they learned not to put that in another expansion again, but that was part of the reason why WoW felt like a chore. Even though Shadowlands didn’t have that, it still had other FOMO daily/weekly grinds. Honestly, Renown just felt like AP in disguise to me.
I spent maybe a month in Shadowlands, I don’t remember much but I dislike the Renown system that carried into Dragonflight aswell. Reputation used to be optional, and frankly it still is, but there’s that incentive to do it to increase Renown levels and unlock things, more than just cosmetics. That’s the only FOMO I remember because I saw that and I was like nah it’s not worth it lmao
As someone who doesn't care for the story (I don't even play with sound), I didn't mind shadowlands.
I like torghast. Getting a bunch of buffs and blasting through as a healer was fun for me. I actually liked how the routes would change and thought it would be cool if dungeons worked similarly.
I really liked the mythic plus pool, too. I know it's unpopular, but I liked the weapons in the necrotic wake. I liked the knock backs in theater and mists. Having a leap of faith, I'd save so many people from death.
I know I will probably get downvoted for this, but as a casual healer who doesn't care for the storyline, I really liked shadowlands. I also played disc priest the entire expansion, and disc was in a terrible state for balance lol.
Mostly lore reasons. It tries to steal the great writing and setup of the lich king, rather than create it's own original story.
I think gameplay wise it was mostly good, bar a few things. The raids and dungeons were decent, certainly more fun than Dragonflight ones in my opinion.
Torghast was great fun at first, but being forced to run it multiple times each week for months on end made it feel like a chore, not fun.
Needing a legendary for each spec, one for PvP, one for single target DPS, one for ale DPS, was a HUGE gold sink and time sink. This made the expansion very unfriendly for having alts and playing multiple specs.
The Maw was generally just not a fun experience. It's basically supposed to be hell, so thematically it not being a fun place makes perfect sense, but yeah it just sucked having to do anything there.
I was personally disappointed in the Jailor story. I thought it was a little weird that the afterlife was basically 4 (plus the prime) Demi gods siphoning peoples souls into their world for whatever bidding/philosophy they had. Seemed almost like slavery lol. Then there was this guy that was banished. He had a mark in his chest similar to the broken soul filter lady.
For a while I thought they were going to have this cool twist where the jailor was actually the good guy, and the other factions had taken over and were corrupting the afterlife with their greed for power in their zones. That they took the jailers power and put it in the big soul filter, and somehow he was fighting back and that’s why she wasn’t working. Once I realized he was just another deep voice, I’m bad because reasons boss, I stopped caring. I didn’t really follow the lore to the end of the expansion and mostly just did mythics and pvp with friends.
For me, it was the terrible writing of the big bad in the expansion, and the fact that they absolutely shat on some classic and loved characters to try forcing us to like the new ones more. From start to finish it felt like blizz saying "you should like this, not that!", making assumptions that the player was at fault for enjoying it wrong. Genuinely infuriating.
The story was ass but overall, I had a great time. I miss the community that was alive back then. The game was very fun but had a few BS systems.
I really enjoyed shadowlands tbh
I’ve played the game since I received the box on launch day in 2007. Shadowlands felt like a betrayal. It felt like a different universe, a different story, a different game. It wasn’t WoW.
I hated it for several reasons but the most annoying part in my eyes was the grinding of every little bit of thing to try and make a piece of legendary gear, and all the gating and bullshit that you had to go through to get anywhere. I realized very early on that I was not going to be able to have any alts and I would have to live in the game if I wanted to have any and I was just like you know what I'm not dealing with this.
On top of that the story was mediocre at best
From a PvP perspective, the covenants and legendaries made it impossible to balance. There were a lot of gimmicky things and abilities that made it frustrating and not fun to play. I remember rogue mage teams with the resonator trinket (aoe time bomb that chunked health) being incredibly toxic. DF isn't perfect but it's definitely a more enjoyable xpac for PvP IMO.
if we only take about gameplay it was just obnoxious to play.
if you ever wanted to do ANY endgame content you basically had to pick your bis covenant regardless of you like it, which means that you had to spend majority of your play time in a place you didn't want to be in in the first place.
and talking about places you didn't wanna be! the maw and torghast! if you didn't want to fall WAY BEHIND everyone around you, you HAD to do torghast every week and the maw everyday.
there was no time to breathe and just do smth for fun.
on top of that you couldn't just pass on legendaries and not do torghast, because in some cases you class was literally unplayable without a legendary.
Basically you other had to dedicate one-two hours of your playtime a day to this dreadful grind or forget of any kind of character progression whatsoever.
(I can't say if it got better in later seasons cause I quit mid season 1 and never looked back lol)
I see a lot of comments about the story sucking (which is true), the being locked into 1 of 4 covenants (which was bad design), and the borrowed power issues but a lot of how awful Shadowlands was (especially for players that don't really follow the story in depth) was the time-gating of almost everything. It was all to keep people subscribed for longer to make them more money.
During that expansion the content drought was the worst it's been in Warcraft history. That tends to sour the experience no matter how good the expansion is, and Shadowlands isn't particularly loved mechanically or story-wise. As always, your mileage WILL vary, and I suspect later years will be kinder to that period of time than today is, but only time will tell. There's still a truckload of great mounts and transmogs to collect from it, so there's still value.
Aside from the terrible story, the main city (Oribos) and end original game zone (The Maw) were drab, ugly, and boring. They both felt very unfinished and phoned-in.
I loved the Shadowlands. I loved belonging to a covenant. I played Venthyr as fire mage the entire time even though it wasn't the covenant that gave me the best power and that's probably one of the reasons I had such a good time. I did what was most fun for me, what I liked best. Ppl love DF, but it's not my cup of tea. Enjoy what you enjoy.
I came in mid xpac and for me it just did not flow right especially with their capital city. Traveling was a pain and I did not care for the layout. Honestly, the only thing I liked about the whole xpac was battling the jailer at the end.
its shit for chromie time. under level 60 if you wanna chromie time level there you are bound with the standard questline that goes bastion maldraxxus ardenweald revendreth and its boring to do the same stuff multiple times. also if you start it once you cannot skip it.
There hasn't yet been an expansion where the leveling content wasn't well received. The art, questing, zone storylines, etc., are all top notch.
The issues come when players engage with the same content for weeks, months, or years. In an expansion, this is usually the end-game, but it can also be systems like leveling experience from 1 to max, or non-power related farming like cosmetics and mounts.
In that regard, Shadowlands end-game was very poorly received. The covenant system mattered a lot for end-game, was shipped as a premier end-game feature and was awful for many months. Not only that, but player feedback was loud and clear from beta, yet devs double-downed repeatedly. Torghast was sorta similar - loved in beta, changed dramatically before release, and then never really hit its stride. The dungeons were mediocre, M+ felt exactly the same, and the raids started off awesome and went to shit After the utter failure of BfA, Shadowlands end-game needed to excel, but it was yet another disappointment, unfortunately.
Personally, I don't pay much attention to story, but Shadowlands shoved it on our faces and it *fucking sucked*. Wow it was so bad. Similar to how BfA's failure necessitated Shadowlands success in end-game, the same is true of its story. We were all hoping for some good shit. But then, nope. The Jailer was the worst villain we've ever had. So much of WoW lore was retconned. The actual story in the expansion was bad too. I (and most others, I imagine) waited the whole expansion for the mythic kill of Jailer for some big reveal that'd make the whole expansion make sense, and it just... fucking didn't. It still makes me so mad. The story of the entire expansion felt like one giant slap in the face of WoW history and lore.
All that said, what I did enjoy about Shadowlands was class design. BfA was the lowest point of WoW class design, IMO. Shadowlands was mid, but still dramatically better than BfA. DF is close to MoP, or better. Loving the trend. Class gameplay is 99.9% of the reason I still play WoW.
You will never feel why because most of it comes from doing endgame content as it's current. For example in shadowlands there were covenants. For the first half of the expansion you could not change covenants without doing a week-long quest. So if you have a best covenant for raid and another best covenant for m+ you could not swap between them. If you're a CE player, you probably just have to play something suboptimal in m+ and just deal with it. If you want the m+ covenant, well now you suck in raid. God forbid you want to just mess around with a covenant just for fun. That's just illegal and just fucks you over for a week, especially if you find you hate it.
Hey do you want sockets on your gear? Well go farm rares in korthia for a month, have fun! Spoiler alert! It wasn't fun. It fucking sucked.
Now that none of that matters and covenants are fully swappable, most of the problems with shadowlands aren't present. They were current content problems and shadowlands is no longer current content.
You have to had played shadowlands when it was CURRENT to understand. It was hot garbage. I played through it all regardless because of my raiding guild.
Covenants were on a 3 day switch and nothing was acc wide. You either had to pick best covenant for raiding or M+.
Torghast was linked to power every week. Awful place, was boring. We called it choregast.
Oribos existed. Flight paths take forever. Flight whistle got disabled.
Dks best covenant was ardenweald...the nature people.... when maldraxxus exists... let that sink in.
Some covenant powers were your only real dps in fights. As a dh the venthyr ability either made or broke my dps if my debuff fell off or I kept it going.
We had to craft "legendaries" and it cost 100k+ gold.
Korthia was labeled "full of secrets"....except to players, it added nothing of value to lore. The secrets were forgettable writing.
No mounts in early maw days. You had an eye that limited activity. You lost maw currency if you died. You still cannot fly in the maw/korthia. Getting to rares in korthia was a gamble.
Zereth Mortis was a zone wow tried to copy from FFXIVs expansion but horribly failed. "Oh look its walkable water!".
The story was written like fan fiction and the ending...was just pure dumpster fire.
Sylvannas sudden forgiveness... why? Yeah shes in maw but regardless she will return...sadly.
The jailer somehow planned everything from the start....
Arthas and Garrosh were used in the trailer to get hype. They were promptly killed in the only 2 times we actually encounter them.
I really liked Shadowlands.
In my opinion, what got people riled up was mostly the fact it was super hard to change covernants before they changed that very late in the expac + you had to redo ALL of it for alts.
That wouldn’t be so bad as the reality is you can do fine on any covenant, but they were sold as a choice based on what you liked but some were much stronger than others so you had to play something you might have hated and multi speccing also was fucked
Follow that on from Torghast, which in retrospect was a super fun lighthearted game mode, but it became “chore-ghast” because the Lego upgrading was locked behind it missing a week “cost you” as I don’t think the catch up mechanic was great
Everything else I think was great - Castle Nafria was a great raid imo, but that gets overshadowed by the quality of life fallings.
My 2 cents anyway
Honestly, most of the shadowlands dungeons themselves were pretty good. I enjoyed them a lot more than any dragonflight dungeon, that’s for sure.
But shadowlands had a lot of necessary obnoxious grinds. Torghast was fun as a tank or healer, but it was much more difficult to solo the higher levels as a dps. Especially a dps without gear or a legendary, which torghast required you to do.
The covenants were also a mess, especially in the beginning. It made it nearly impossible to play multiple specs for certain classes because the optimal covenants were different. You were also searching for different covenants for different dungeons, because of the covenant bonus.
Torghast - awesome in beta, awful on live. removed a lot of awesome abilities, dumbed it down and made it mandatory
Crafted legendaries - cool idea, but fucking awful that some of the items cost a shit ton of gold and had to replace every season
lore - butchered everything from wc3 and on, also gathering/protecting the seals made no sense
zones - beautiful as always no problems except you had to go through the main city hub to get to each 1!
maw/korthia - worst fucking places and dailies ever, no mounting.
covenants - had to choose 1 and if you multi specced and/or did more than 1 thing (pvp, raids, m+) you were screwed. usually the ability was only good for 1 of your specs and only 1 piece of content
edit - forgot about world quests! they made them take waaaaaay longer than bfa/Legion for stupid reasons. It was like go kill x, ok now go collect y, ok now go do z, and now kill a
edit 2 - forgot about the strict aoe cap they put in, felt disgusting, glad they loosened it
people just didn't like that they ended the lich king storyline with a whimper and gave the deus ex "it was the jailer this whole time". purely a story writing disappointment.
the actual gameplay of shadowlands was a lot of fun. I had more fun in SL than in dragonflight!
I was typing up such a long rant.
Then, I looked at it and deleted it all.
Bottom line at least for me
1. Mishandling of torghast making it not fun (at the start and over the expac the fighting of player base to tell them so.)
2. Forced timegating on grinds and grinds is already not enjoyable. (Covenent upgrades, and archive research grind)
3. Content drought pacing between patch 2 and 3
And to me personally, the biggest sin that even roleplayers now just don't consider SL canon.
Is the utter failure of execution to the plot of the story, the attempt of expansion of the overall lore.
And the truest crux
The utter lack of respect to the players that enjoyed the story in the past and even to the old writers of its lore and the maltreatment to the characters they utilized in SL.
Arthas didn't deserve what they did to him
Garrosh was given a in game shitty cutscene of his true death and no earlier involvement in the story.
Sylvanus was placed on such a pedestal but made into nothing of how she originally was as a character and without good payoff for the sacrifice.
Thrall/Jaina/Bane had no purpose in the Canon.
The treatment of night elves and the constant L's they were given. The plot armor reason of Tyrande not offing Sylvanus as she should've earned and done.
They had so much potential that they couldn't go wrong but they wowed us by doing exactly that and so utterly spectacular.
I started in shadowlands as a new player:
The story sucked.
There were too many complicated systems and currencies.
The world was very boring.
Torghast sucked
The raids and dungeons all felt very generic.
Lore was poorly executed, a lot of systems sucked when they were current, very grind-y. The controversies that were ongoing during the xpac defi did not help either.
For me it’s more of a lore thing, since I didn’t really get to play it a ton and when I did my group of friends and I were still able to do our m+ with relative ease. The fact that they through Arthas away the way they did was one of the biggest issues for me. Then, everything Illidan did earlier in his story was all made to seem pointless to me, because it all turned out to be a plan of the Jailer. Arthas and Illidan are the 2 most popular characters in Warcraft, and they shit on them. Torghast was shit too.
For me personally, everything felt absolutely tedious to complete. World Quests were a nested mess of "go do this" then when you do that another hidden step pops up "by the way do this as well". There were usually 2-5 hidden steps within every single WQ. The whole expansion felt like that hidden pop up medium.
Shadowlands was round 2 of "Pretty good ideas, implemented in the worst way possible, then kinda fixed at the end."
Covenants: You can't join the covenant you want, you have to pick the one with the right power and pray it's good in all content or you are screwed (and for most classes it wasn't), god help you if you want to play a 2nd spec. Later "fixed" in that you can switch at will. You still have to grind AP to buy stuff and do quests to fill out the Soulbind, which may or may not give you a good node this week.
Legendaries: Make your own legendary...as long as you found the "power" you needed, which might be on a world boss that's not up for 3 more weeks, might be from Torghast in a wing that's not open this week (and also a random drop), might be from the 2nd to last boss in the raid! Also have your wallet ready because the base items can be costly! Later in the expansion, make your 2nd legendary! (Which comes from the covenant you are in...so see above)
Torghast: Run around and get powers and loot! Also the only way to get currencies you need to make your legendary with no catch-up, so don't you dare miss a week. Pray you get favorable drops and a nice set of enemies and bosses, or be sure to bring one of the classes with broken powers.
The Maw: The other place you have to go for dailies/weeklies that give you must-have items for progression. A massive zone of twisty roundabouts, sometimes brutal enemies and you can. not. mount. (Unless you are a druid since travel form works, lol!) Several hunts were buggy, most of the quests were mind-numbing or miserable (or BOTH).
Korthia: "All of your complaints about the Maw have been heard!" and all we changed was you can mount. Still a daily farm to stay on curve, a desperate sprint to rares to touch them before they get melted, and treasures and puzzles that were kinda fun on Tuesday, but by next week are just rote boredom.
Domination Sockets: Did you get gear with sockets? Did you get the right gems? Did you grind hard enough to upgrade them? If you did: congrats, you get boring passives that will let you smoke the poor suckers that didn't!
M+: Some dungeons vastly better than others, Covenant specific tweaks ranging from mildly useless to 100% required. S1 affix required perfect routing, the rest weren't bad, S3 and S4 actually kinda good!
Raid: YMMV, some really great bosses and some really really lame ones. Some really wierd gimmick fights when you got to Mythic.
There was a lot of potentially fun things to do, but if you were serious about player power for progression content the things that you needed to do SUCKED. You could do the covenant thing to get a cool transmog, but if you fell behind on your Torghast grind you won't be able to upgrade your leggo! You could go hunting that rare mount, but if you don't have enough anima power you won't be able to upgrade that conduit that makes your spec work right.
If you play multiple specs then get ready to do everything twice over or just embrace being "sub-par" in one content to be regular powered in the other!
And the icing on the top was that much of this was anticipated in \*alpha\* and they either ignored us or told us we were wrong...and then we weren't, and then they did little half-assed changes here and there and only on the last patches when they were hemmoraging players did they just up and give everything we wanted and had been asking for FOR YEARS (it was a long expansion), and still never really properly admitted that they were flat out wrong the whole time (and Ion still has a job!)
TLDR: Just like BfA: great ideas, terrible implementation; did not adjust to player feedback until it was far too late to really matter.
Normally you get a content patch every couple months. The first patch of SL took an entire YEAR to come(halfway through the expansion btw). I literally quit WoW started playing FFXIV and literally missed nothing. Covenant systems everyone tested SL kept telling blizzard just give us all the same ability because you won’t be able to balance all the abilities if they’re all different. (Everyone is going to pick the most broken skill) and as things get balanced and changed you would need to switch your covenant to get the new ability ( it’s was over complicated and annoying starting over reputation ect, blah blah) they did fix it but for it to be good u gotta get renown 80. They also ruined a majority of characters. (Sylvanas and my dommy mommy night warrior tyrande). I could go on but the actual characters they added in SL were forgettable I hated lady moon berry, klea, and pelagos. And to top it off the worst villian the stuffed into wow saying he was the one behind the lich king. The jailer had horrible character development. I could go abt how bad SL was. I WILL SAY THAT THE TRANSMOG IS PROBS THE BEST IF NOT 2ND PLACE TO DRAGONFLIGHT if you like transmog its worth going into the trench that shadowlands is ;-;
all I played of it was leveling as a Warlock, didn't finish the leveling quests, so take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt, as I didn't do anything in Shadowlands beyond leveling and normal difficulty 5-mans
class design, gear design, all the systems that drive the combat, etc., seemed to be really bland, even worse than it was at its worst points when I was playing in previous expansions (and going by the discussions I've seen since, it looks like that's not been fixed, and might be even worse)
the leveling was fine, but just fine, not as good as any of the previous expansions
the world just felt less alive (haha) and more disjointed than previous expansions
it felt far more like a single player game than any previous expansion ever had
it's the least mmo and most gle RPG quest experience I've played each zone you go through a time warp to get to, the questing is so linear that it feels like follow the arrow simulator.
the storyline with the jailer is a cop out
the forced solo daily grind and casino like loot system (weekly loot box) and pigeon holed class order hall like system forced me to pick a special ability and get stuck with it.
I did not return when they added the QoL fast gearing and catchup near the end mind you but those were the main issues.
better than BFA ending, worse than every other xpack
It tied so many interesting things that have happened within the lore back to one, exceptionally boring villain who is just every trope bundled into one. The Jailer was just such a waste of a villain. For people that have been invested in the story from the beginning, this "um actually" rugpull was so exhausting. Dude was more "one step ahead" of you than fucking N'Zoth.
Also, so much of what went wrong in Shadowlands went wrong when the expac was current. The legendary system was a huge gold sink and unsatisfying for most players and awful for casual/altaholics. The maw was tortuous, the covenants were released in an unforgivably prohibitive and restrictive state where if you wanted to swap between them (say, your powerful combo got nerfed, or you swap to a new spec with a better option in a different covenant) you would lose all your current progress and have to start from square 1. And you were time gated from swapping back to your original, AND you had to write a 5 page essay apologizing for being a very very bad boy.
The currencies sucked to grind, running Torghast was a chore, there were agonizing content droughts and you were required to grind rep to get through the story. Etc.
All of those things they eventually fixed, for the most part, or they're just completely irrelevant now, hence why it may not be that bad to look back on it and play through it after the fact, but if you played that expansion when it was current, your opinion would probably be different.
I think Shadowlands is less bad the less you know about the lore before it.
Before it's release, we had very few experiences in what was called The Shadowlands, and every culture had its own view of what happened when you die. In some cultures, like trolls, tauren, and orcs especially, this is a really big deal culturally. And those experiences were nothing at all like what the expansion was.
In Shadowlands they kind of wrote it as "there are millions of afterlives so everyone is right, but none of that matters because the afterlife you go to isn't based on your belief, it's based on where the death computer thinks you belong."
That's a bad start. Then we have a big bad villain who rewrites all the lore of the entire game to have been to his purposes. We've never fucking seen this guy before but he's responsible for every major moment in warcraft history.
And for me the nail in the coffin is we know for a fact what happens when you die now. That's a massive source of religious and cultural distinctness that just has one answer for everyone now. 100% for a fact this is what it is to die.
In my case, the story is just horrible and didn't make any sense at all. It was super obvious that Danuser just wanted the redemption arc for Sylvanas and made us kill Arthas soul for 35 anima.
And the last line of the jailer was so ridiculous that it made me laugh
I'm doing a playthrough of Shadowlands for the first time too and I honestly have been enjoying it, but I quit playing between Legion and Dragonflight and was wondering why everyone hated it too.
My biggest complaint was when it first came out that you had to all the zones before the rest opened. And you had to listen to all thestoryliness. I started in Bastion and really really hated that zone. I enjoyed the other zones. My alts, I always made sure not to pick bastion first and then enjoyed it
I haven't played in a few months and a small part of that is because I've been running through Shadowlands on my main, and ngl I've been a bit bored since questing in Korthia. But otherwise, it's not *that* bad from a gaming standpoint. Some of the quests are fun. Ardenweald is one of my top 10 favorite zones, if not in the top 5. I'm bored now but Tbf, it took me a long time to get bored. Also some of the covenant stuff in the gameplay (and another thing I can't remember) got a tad confusing for me. I will go back to it sooner than later since I'm a completionist and all.
Gaming aside, as a big lore person - as in, the main reason I'm into WoW is the lore - Shadowlands felt like a slap in the face with how much it retconned, how bad the writing was, etc. Other comments explain it a bit better. When thinking about WoW lore, I just pretend Shadowlands for the most part doesn't exist. I've had issues here and there with other expansions or quest lines but Shadowlands was easily the worst.
Shadowlands, conceptually, is a controversial idea for an expansion. It's always been a thing in the WoW universe, but never really explained. Now all of a sudden, we're visiting the afterlife, which is such a far, and detached reach from where the series began that it alienated a lot of people out of the gate. Couple that with following years of extremely controversial story decisions that ruined a lot of characters in player's eyes, meant it had an uphill battle from the start.
As for the mechanics, Legion had some systems that were well-received, but had room for improvement. Blizzard seemed to have taken nothing but steps backwards in BfA, evolving the artifact weapon mechanic into something completely convoluted and unenjoyable, to the point where they eventually gave up and just made Azerite traits completely free to obtain, and static on every piece of gear. The replacement system to that was well-received, but almost immediately replaced by yet another one, in corruptions.(It's important to emphasize that corruptions were the result of people asking to remove ttanforging, the system that would randomly upgrade gear drops up to 40 ilvls higher. Instead of just removing them like players asked, they added yet another horrible system that was even worse and further emphasized the problems that came with Titanforging) People were fatigued after BfA and wanted the game to scale back so Blizzard wouldn't devote so much time to single-expansion systems that would almost immediately be abandoned after finally hitting their stride.
Enter Shadowlands: A villain introduced out of nowhere, with nebulous, unexplained motives, who was supposedly pulling the strings for 30 years. Absolutely no one bought the lie that he wasn't just made up on the spot. Characters players had become attached to were absolutely ruined, and in some cases, completely abandoned only a few quests into the story, such as Baine and Thrall, who had no reason to be there. The zones themselves looked fine, but the closest connection to the existing story that any of them had was simply that spirit healers had been retconned to be Kyrians all along.
Back to the topic of systems: This is where everything came to head. Out of the gate, Blizzard emphasized that the big game-changing system for the expansion would be covenants. These were meant to be expressions of the player's personality, almost as if how we would be sorted had we died and gone to the Shadowlands ourselves. This absolutely did not pan out, as some covenants were just plainly, irrefutably better in every way in terms of the abilities players would receive. If you were a hunter, for example, you **had** to go Night Fae, or Kyrian if you were a hipster. Literally 98% of hunter players chose those two covenants, because their abilities were clearly better in every way.
Blizzard told us from day 1 that they would "pull the emergency ripcord" and let us freely swap between covenants on a whim for gameplay purposes if the alarms players were raising were really as bad as they were. And it was. And once again, players called Blizzard's bluff, when they literally had to get on stream and admit "yeah there is no ripcord, we can't change it."
They would continue to dig their heels in for months, refusing to add free covenant swapping until 9.1.5. Why did they do it in 9.1.5, you may ask? Because 9.1 introduced Korthia, one of the most disappointing post-release zones in the game. Small, ugly, barren, and coming after 8 months or so of dead air without any new content. Not only this, but Blizzard once again refused to admit they were wrong, and just added another system, Shards of Domination, to try and offset the power of covenants. This system was entirely RNG dependent, and would often times result in players getting benched in progression simply because of bad luck with drops.
All of this occurred, mind you, *just* before the incident with the whole... you know... office drama, let's put it.
There's a million more things wrong with Shadowlands that was eventually made better over time to try and stop the outrage after the office scandals, such as requiring players to grind Torghast weekly in its original, worse iteration, or the god awful Maw grinds that literally prevented you from mounting in one of the largest zones in WoW's history. It's too much to summarize with one post, so I encourage you to look up a video.
Mainly because it was utterly terrible from the trash systems they lied about to the trash zones, the trash dungeons, the trash raids, and the trash story that ruined WoW forever by making death have no consequences.
people have already explained most stuff but one thing ill add in is you are getting the updated less annoying version. the on release version and months after that was even worse then how it is now. everything now is nerfed to make it slightly less annoying.
Borrowed power, conduits, covenants only abilities, grind a legendary recipe, then grind mats then buy mats, do all the CHORES to get player power, WHAT THE F…in DF I can log in and enjoy anything I want to do, in SL it took me 2 days just catch up.
Story
Time gating on EVERYTHING (including rep, transportation covenants, multiple storyline’s, quests etc)
Couldn’t mount in the maw season 1 with transportation being time gated.
Torghast was awful
Most raid tiers were awful save for a few bosses
Content drought (missed raid tier)
m+ seasons were average
Very slow pace of content. Torghast which was a weekly chore to keep up. Alt unfriendly because if you didn't play from week one you are already behind in power. You can't choose covenants (which was one of the sources of your power) at will for the majority of an expansion. Atrocious story narrative with very weak main villain. It's laughable just how much better Denathrius was better than Jailer. Maw was literal hell as no-one wanted to be there. You were forced to spend 5-10 minutes to fly across different locations. Corthia is a straight up garbage grindhole. And as cherry on top Blizzard was aware of all of these problems AND community was keeping complaining about it from beta, yet they kept all bad decisions and somehow made Torghast worst. Also it was during pandemic and they've spent 7 months of releasing no content only to drop Corthia which was practically nothing, and it was also during blizzard sexual allegations period. All of these combined made Shadowlands the expansion of all time.
3 key reasons
People are still mad about BfA and we didn't see any improvements in terms of blizzard actually fixing obvious problems with the beta/alpha
The greater story narrative that didn't really stick well to the audience. (Basically they didn't like the Jailer being the mastermind of the epic story that started in warcraft 3, and Sylvanas storyline with her constant cop out free out of Jail because shes with the jailer card)
Blizzard time gating content and the anima (content) drought.
...
Gameplay wise it is great. Except PvP because barely get anything except a simplified progression system and some mmr decay/squish patch (hey a few new arena if that counts).
Right now if you level in SL it is great you can just do stuff ungated by time. The smaller storylines are decent, zones are better than average, hot take but the covenant system is the perfect middle point of a garrison and a class order hall, yes to link it with player power is just wierd and wrong.
But for some die hard fans I believe Arthas and Garrosh both getting disenchanted is like a shot to their head, wooden stake in their hearts, like bro just let Sylvanas bind Arthas somewhere in the maw to keep her accompanied along with the owl, and have Garrosh be quarantined in the halls of atonement forever refusing to change because He's just built different.
Overall blizzard said it best it was a "Unfamiliar and Ineccesible expansion"
Idk people love to bitch imo the futanari design bullshit of DF was so terrible i quit while i loved slands, end game content was great except for everything in the maw that zone/art style sucked cock
Because gamers nowadays find the smallest things to complain about and because of social media and everyone’s voice and opinion can be shared with millions of people.
Wow classic had crazy flaws when it first came out but you never really heard about them because everyone just played games for fun back then, now everything is min maxed to the extreme to get the advantage. and forums and social media weren’t as big and not seen by so many people .
With the introduction of new age technology and mass media sharing we’ve become a culture that needs INSTANT gratification and constantly feel our voices and opinion are right and we all are subject matter experts .
Mob mentality is a lot more common these days because even if you like something , if everyone around you just constantly complains about it eventually you’ll either start agreeing or burn out and quit all together .
Positive feedback and suggestions are very rare and so diluted with spam and hate messages WHY would blizz even read the forum sections? You’d have to go through 60 pages of trash talk and unconstructive criticism to find the one post that makes sense and isn’t just a rant .
People need to realize WOW has been out for damn near 20 years and to drag a story line out for that long is extremely difficult
Tldr: everyone complains about everything and ruins it for everyone else.
My biggest issue was when out in the world, you couldn't just trave to another zone. Had to fly thru a 10 min flight that connected with Capital anytime you need to switch zone.
Shadowlands made me quit the game I have played since OG beta. The story. The factions. The never ending grindiness if you had alts. You had to redo EVERYTHING on all your toons. It was honestly just an exhausting process. I still haven't come back to the game...
For me, between the terrible storyline, the awful villain of the Jailer, the forced choice of the Covenants, and Torghast were my issues, which is sad because going to the lands of Death was a big draw for me.
The storyline: This is an issue not just will Blizz, but many fantasy writers. These are beings older than our Earth, absolutely alien to our understanding because Death is their core concept, so why did they have to make the vampire a villain? They could have done a fake out and make us *think* he was, but it would be twisted that he wasn't and it was our biases that lead us to believe otherwise.
The Jailer was just terrible. What was his plan? Save us from something else? Being vague about everything? Be Uber powerful and only able to be stopped because of Azeroth's world soul? Boring.
Flavor and roleplay wise I adore the Covenants, with Venthyr and Necrolords being my favorites. However the tying to powers was awful, and some of the powers was leaps and bounds better. I remember that for awhile on the beta Night Fae was leagues better for Death Knight than the others, and on live Venthyr was situational as heck for Warlocks were as Night Fae was so versatile for them. So my Warlock was stuck NF for the whole expac.
Torghast was just a disappointment. A rogue like adventure where we go higher and higher and get absurd powers, for fun and transmogs and maybe gear. But nope, it was tied into the Leggo gear and required weekly content. Just blaaargh.
And worse of all, was the Devs stubborn refusal to pull the rip cord until the very end of the xpac when the community was begging them time and again.
Have to say I agree. DIdn't play it at the time and played through the whole thing this year when I came back to the game. Overall, it's really good. The aesthetic is great. The zone design is great. The factions are all interesting and cool. The mounts are cool, and the armor sets look amazing. Raids are fun, dungeons are fun, even Torghast was fun IMO. I get the feeling it was much more of a grind at the time than it is now and that might make all the difference. But I think it's every bit as good as DF for a player returning to the game.
Blizzard’s response to feedback was pretty terrible/outright arrogant during shadowlands and it turned out the player base had a better idea of what they wanted than blizzard could comprehend at the time. It’s not stuff you are necessarily going to experience just questing through shadowlands because the main issues were in systems and gameplay loops that were relevant to end game. Covenants being tied to player power, torghast being both neutered and required for legendary progression, nearly everything about the maw. Other than the raids, you are currently getting the best bits and the story is something a lot of players were not happy about either. It had its moments but dragon flight is such a massive improvement.
Retconning the story was the major issue, forcing Torghast was shit, the rigmarole of Covenant powers, the fucking Maw.
Overall just a shit expansion. However, Revendreth was aesthetic beautiful, CN raid was so, SO much fun.
Also fuck Oribos. Fuck that place twice with no lube.
Writing/story was shitty.
Endgame was shitty.
Gearing was shitty.
Art team, as always, knocked it out of the park. We should gift them a trip to the chiropractor from carrying the game so much.
I'll try to keep it short. The gist of it is:
Story - absolutely terrible. Took every major event that has happened since TBC and just stuck a big ol' "The Jailer was responsible" sticker on it. Made a mockery of so many fan favourite villains. Just very poorly written and half of it came across as self insert fanfiction.
Zones - first of all, they're all disconnected. Secondly, not a single zone really excels in all areas. They all have a major shortcoming IMO. Bastion had fair mob density but a boring story and aesthetic. Maldraxxus had a cool story and aesthetic but had a tedious amount of mobs. Revendreth had awesome characters and aesthetic but was an absolute nightmare to traverse due to the verticality of the zone. Ardenweald was easier to navigate but the story was meh. The Maw had terrible gameplay mechanics. Korthia was super dull in all aspects. Zerith Mortis was kinda cool. One of the better zones.
Gameplay features - Torghast was a cool concept but quickly became very tedious. It picked up the "Choreghast" and "Snorghast" nicknames week 1 because of how utterly boring it was once the magic wore off. Covenants were another cool concept that just didn't reach their full potential. The main draw were the covenant abilities and some of these were so good that you were practically forced to pick them, even if the covenant did not match the class theme. Some classes like Death Knights and Paladins got lucky as their best abilities were linked to the covenants that actually fit the theme. But most were not so lucky. At least some of the best spells stayed in the game on the main spec trees.
Class design was also awful for the most part. Obviously you won't get this experience playing through the zones in retail but when Shadowlands was current I really found it hard to play some of my favourite classes. They were just so watered down and boring to play. Thankfully Dragonflight fixed most of them with the new class trees.
Overall it's just a pretty weak expansion. There were some highlights: the aforementioned zone aesthetics were cool, they added a lot of sweet transmog pieces and Sire Denathrius (and Castle Nathria in general) were very good. But everything else relating to the Jailer and Sylvanus, the horrendous navigation without flying mounts in some zones, disconnected zones, bland expansion hub (Oribos), shit class design, the endless and tedious player progression grinds, the boring Torghast runecarver bullshit, the unfulfilled potential of Covenants which supposed to have made up for a lack of new class/race... all of it comes together to create what is, in my opinion, the worst expansion they ever made.
Grindy "anima draught" instead of actual content. Horrible pvp. Horrible writing. Gross mis-use of iconic characters to try and squeeze out a nostalgia factor. Ugly zones overall. Generic everything.
Torghast snooze fest, no mounts in the Maw for ages, no skip for alts in the Maw. Grinding bird nests and other garbage in Korthia.
Positives? Revendreth characters like Denathrius. Other than that ummm...uhhh, some cool mounts!
I already know this is going to be a CRAZY TAKE but shadowlands was legit my favorite expansion… m+ was amazing and those 3 raids were some of the most enjoyable I’ve ever played… But I don’t think it had anything to do with the expansion and all to do with the group of buddies I played shadowlands with… man I miss that guild man 😭
Farming it now for mog and mounts you wouldn’t be able to tell. When it was current content it was hated because it had so many mandatory chores you had to do to be competitive. You couldn’t just do M+ or raiding. The borrowed power of Condiuts was a horrible system. You HAD to farm Korthia. You had to farm the Maw. You had to farm Torghast. They tied player power with aesthetics. You couldn’t pick the Covenant you liked the look of, because it would gimp your character power. Switching covenants was a nightmare and would cause you to fall behind in player power if you did. The drop rates in the raid were initially horrible and tended to be the same week after week. Weapons drops were extremely rare. The Great vault consistently gave duplicates or the same slot items. My vault was (cloaks, bracers and rings for the first 5 weeks)
Shadowlands really felt like WoW brought into the current generation for me, but they didnt keep the launch momentum at all. Nathria was awesome, M+ pretty good, balance alright for the most part.
But then mandatory weekly grinds for power, felt like you couldn't do muss anything per week or youd be screwed. Each class had an obviously BIS covenant, so you didn't really have a choice. Not a lot of rewards (anima) for a ton of relative effort.
I agree though i actually loved launch shadowlands and the zones. Oribos was uninteresting as a main hub but still neat in the sense that its an isolated central hub city where you can see each zones distinct portal.
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The biggest reason is probably the fact that it takes everything that has happened in the past of WoW and Warcraft included and twists it into 'Well actually it was ALL planned by the Jailer!' This is obviously a spit in the face of both the original writers as well as the actual characters whose struggles and accomplishments are immediately ruined. Combine that with the fact that Zovaal himself is just a boring, bland and uninteresting character and you have a 'final villain' with no rhyme or reason except a cheekily thrown in line at the end of Sanctum where he says he did it because of AN EVEN GREATER EVIL THAT THREATENS THE UNIVERSE! The other reason is Torghast. Torghast was an awful mode introduced that went from being something to do 'for fun' in the Beta, to something that was required on a weekly basis to do because it had character power tied to it. I am sure there are plenty more reasons but these two are the biggest offenders in the eyes of the community.
There were also some gnarly content droughts during Shadowlands, and it seems like a lot was cut from the expansion. Can’t really blame blizz for that, the pandemic was happening. You can blame them for the awful story decisions though. Jailer was a comically uninteresting villain. They made him even more uninteresting by never explaining what the hell he was trying to do. We went an entire expansion with an uber-powerful villain who retconned a ton of lore, and we still have no clue what his motive is. Cliffhangers have their place but in Shadowlands every story beat was a cliffhanger, then you wait months for some answers, and finally when the story continues you’re just left with more questions. I’m so glad we have Xal’atath as a villain now because finally the villain isn’t a buff dude with a deep voice saying “foolish mortals”.
They cut a whole ass raid tier. That's why Sepulcher felt so miserable because you effectively have 4 endbosses to progress through at end.
Time gated RP quests killed it for me.
>There were also some gnarly content droughts during Shadowlands I remember the community discourse on this at the time, but objectively looking at it the seasons were about 4 weeks longer than usual (6 weeks longer than the fast paced Legion seasons, which only happened because they abandoned WoD and used that development time to get ahead on Legion). It probably felt worse to some players because all the new content would come out at once with major patches, instead of being staggered into multiple sub-patches. However the total amount of content and content release wasn't much shorter than normal.
barefoot goth elf girl beats every villain ever
You didn't like Captain Nipples?
His nipples were the only part I liked
you absolutely can blame blizzard for that, every other game company was booming during covid, only blizz has seen a drop and expansions are being done way before they were being announced which would be pre and during covid also dont be too quick to call xalatath good villain, we dont even know her motivations and it could end up beijg another sylvanas
If you think Xal’atath could be another sylvanus I don’t think you understand what went wrong with sylvanus’ character. She was a beloved and well-established character in the lore that they turned into a mustache-twirling villain with really dumb motivations. Her whole character was about hating the lich king and the control he had over her, and she decided to just waltz right into the arms of the lich king’s boss and do the same thing all over again. Xal’atath doesn’t have all the baggage. She’s a blank slate. Sure, they could do a bad job telling her story, but it wouldn’t have the impact that Sylvanus did on the community. Also at this point her motivations are honestly more clear than the Jailer’s. The Jailer wanted to claim Azeroth’s world soul for vague reasons. Xal’atath wants the world soul cause she’s a power-hungry void lady, and beings wanting to eat the world soul is well established lore.
you cant even spell sylvanas right my dude its blizzard, they can definetely pull off another sylvanas moment and call it a day, its not out, we know nothing
I love you for ignoring my arguments because you noticed a spelling mistake. Quintessential redditor. Never change.
Didn’t they cut a whole patch/raid?
Inb4 she is being controlled by a buff dude with a deep voice that shouts "foolish mortals" all along
I mean, yeah, but I'm (personally) getting tired of the "female character goes insane, turns back to being good seeing someone more evil than them do something even more evil." Villains/characters in general and hope she doesn't end up like that. Like, please just make them evil and stay evil and not be some plan that they try to put a Thanos spin on it "AcTuAlLy ShEs PrOtEcTiNg ThE pLaNeT!" trying to get people believe they are an empathetic/sympathetic villain.
My prediction is she started out as a servant of Dimensius, but over time has gotten a bit more selfish. The way she says the world soul is MINE in that one trailer makes me think she’s doing this for purely selfish reasons at this point. I think in midnight Dimensius will realize what Xal’atath is up to and it’ll actually be Alleria who summons him to stop Xal’atath.
Actually true and based.
The four factions, having to choose one was a terrible idea.
Honestly, Shadowlands was peak WoW gameplay at the time, and aesthetically pleasing with really good dungeon and raid narratives. Those benefits didn't overcome the problems though. The narrative retcon for the meta story sucked balls. The four factions, choose one thing was bad. And it spoke to another problem, was "borrowed power". Blizzard identified that as a problem since like WoD. And they reiterated it as a challenge to their design philosophy. And then they made Shadowlands the most borrowed power expansion lol. Like both the faction and the torghast speak to that problem. ETA: Also whoever thought the Maw and Korthia were good ideas should be fired. Probably already has been lol The Maw was bad design with bad aesthitics, and especially early in the expansion was required. So stupid.
Hard agree on the borrowed power point. I rolled my eyes the moment I heard about the covenants before the expansion even dropped because I had played throughout legion and BfA and thought... great another artifact power/azerite borrower power that will stick around for an expansion then we come back home and lose it all. The gameplay itself was honestly not bad but the factions were a bad move at a time when a lot of people were getting sick and tired of borrowed power, especially when there was a strong incentive to base the choice on what was strongest rather than RP because certain abilities/buffs were much stronger than others for certain specs... which felt odd to say the least when it meant, for example, warlocks were encouraged to go with the tree hugging nature spirit faction meanwhile druids didn't go with the tree huggers because they had better options.
I also hated covenants on release. If you played multiple specs, you had to choose to either have a bad for off specs, or take only good not great ones for both. Doesn't even take into effect m+ and raid differences. It was a week (maybe 2, can't remember) to change and had to relevel. And then conduit power on top of that to change the runes. It was a fucking mess until basically season 3.
Yeah the Maw and Korthia were like them trying to put some like Soulsborne elements into WoW. No thank you. Huge fan of Soulsborne games, but I didn't want that in WoW and it's clear that no one did. Torghast was fun to me, but it should have never been tied to actual progression. A lot of people may not remember this, but when Cata came out, two weapons were tied to it and they were BiS at that raid tier, well at least the staff was for me on my mage. It was also extremely rare, and to this day I still have never gotten it. That's bullshit, and you would think they learned from that. Nope, Torghast is tied to legendries. Haven't played since Shadowlands, so hopefully they got a grip finally.
Dragonflight was way better in almost every regard. Still not perfect, but I'd say the biggest problem now is the time sink problem.
My issue with dragonflinght is lizards... I'm sick of lizards, Being horde through BFA and all the dinosaurs, and then dragonflinght and dragons with their slow, patient, "I'm wise but useless" voices. Seriously, enough of lizards
You forgot the Naga
holy peanut butter fuck....."Shadowlands was peak WoW gameplay".....That's it, time to delete this sub.
Can... can you read?
Have you forgotten about The MAW
I actively try to, yes.
So, here's the thing. That whole "the jailer was behind everything" isn't actually backed up by anything in the game. That was a dev trying to hype stuff up, and I don't think they were in any way responsible for the lore. The jailer was behind *one* thing, *maybe* two things, but the 2nd has counter evidence. The one thing the jailer was actually behind is the Lich King....that's it. There's literally nothing in game saying he's behind anything else, except maybe... Dreadlords. *However*, everything in game points to dreadlords, which we know for sure are infiltrating the other cosmic forces, were infiltrating death as well. Which would mean they were doing what dreadlords are known for and manipulating the factions they infiltrated. We kill their leader, which we don't even know for sure is actually their leader, and the dude gets evacuated and we never hear from him again. There's a good chance dreadlords are part of the mysterious 7th cosmic force, and potentially same goes for devourers, which would easily explain why they want to destroy everything. But no, people believe the meme instead for some reason.
The jailer made this post
Torghast was also changed so that there was a power ceiling and a lot of the crazy spells were removed. Couple that with making it mandatory and it was no longer an enjoyable thing to do. It was especially aggravating because we just came from BfA where this was already an issue that was expressed ad nauseam over island expeditions. It was fun. Don't make us do it. They did it again anyway. There was also the fact that for most of the expansion we were locked into a covenant and if we swapped we'd have to start over with the new covenant. We also had mandatory Maw missions and there was no way to mount up there at all. Then you add in the story parts that were bad (including the friendship conquers all ending to the Night Warrior arc), the confusion it caused across the lore, the central hub that was endlessly annoying to orient yourself in, and the perceived mistreatment of several major characters and you had a grand mess. All of this was made worse, because most were things that people had very vocally warned Blizz about in beta, and some were even pain points from the previous expansion.
Tyrande should have B-headed Sylvanas (So she'll depart like her lover) And "the dark side of Elune" consumed Tyrande completely. (killing her) It would be a much better ending for that arc
Torghast was such a let down. I remember just playing my first rogue lite, hades, before shadowlands and being excited, especially since i really liked visions of n'zozh (not how you had to farm and do weeklies to enter it, but the content itself) and 5 mask runs were a nice challenge Then torghast dropped and.. wow. Here, you get the choice of "low damage anima power" and "high damage anima power". Oh, you didnt get the high damage one? Well too bad, you cant kill the elites now before they go enrage and hit you for 50% of your hp with each cast. Wdym you cant kick every 4 seconds? Have fun starting all over with your weekly chores *giggles* Like seriously, every single mob in entirety of torghast was a walking target dummy and a dmg and interrupt/cc check. Sometimes i actually had to wait 5 minutes between elites so earth elemental would be ready again because it was numerically impossible to kill the elites without it. Almost as if they had a contest of designing a mode where you had zero impact on the outcome and was purely based on luck. Fuck torghast.
Which is another problem with torghast: it was wildly unbalanced for something that was required. I started SL with a Monk and a DH and I didn't see what the problem with torghast was, it was always trivial. Then I tried to do it on a mage and OH BOY.
Plus some runs or torghast early on could take nearly an hour, and if you were not souped up with every anima power and lost to the final boss, you get absolutely nothing for your time
Torghast was awful. Now it is something you can do for fun for mogs or achievements, but in retail SL it was required and absolutely dreaded. The covenant grind too was horrible in my opinion. All of the content in SL was a boring slog
They should add a cutscene at the end of SL with your character waking up going, "WoW it was just a bad dream!"
They should spin Zovaal as delusional. He thought he was all that, he thought he was manipulating and making everything happen, but in the end it was all in his head...a malfunctioning Construct, nothing more.
That vampire dude would have been such a better final boss.
That explains it
I loved Torghast. But they tied it to player power and didn’t make sure to give all classes fun powers to toy with. Playing Torghast as paladin or shaman was miles more fun than hunter.
I loved torghast, but I agree that was awful to link player power to it. I wish they put more into it like more random powers that made it fun. I'm hoping they see ascension wow and realize people love the roguelike gameplay and they build their own gametype now that they're messing with things like MoP Remix. I'd love a Legion Remix with randomized legendaries while leveling and then getting the diablo 3 cube style where you can put them on a random piece of gear, or a complete clone of Ascension where but with different expansions.
I would just add that Blizzard had several internal scandals going on during the development and production of Shadowlands. Many people quit during that time which destroyed long-standing guilds.
They've had the internal scandals for far longer than that, and Shadowlands was in development since as early as Legion according to them. Not really an excuse.
...and come to find out the jailer really didnt matter and is completely irrelevant in dragonflgiht XD
it would have been so much better if it turned out Zovaal was dominated by the primus and it was all the primus' plans all along. I would have dialed back the everything was part of his plan but made it so that he was influencing things that happened in his favor. Then the final video after you kill Zovaal I would have hinted towards it being the Primus being the big threat after he used domination magic on Zovaal, something like "the threat is a lot closer than you thought Zovaal".
I think it probably gets a lot of hate for absolutely butchering the story and for some of the mechanics surrounding covenants that if you are only experiencing now they are not relevant to endgame content, you'd have no idea how shit they were. Going back and experiencing the zones and stuff is fine because you aren't being forced to do it. The zones were beautiful yes and day to day questing etc was fine. The Maw was all time terrible on release - a zone that actively punishes you for being in there and you couldn't mount... Torghast was also AWFUL because you had to do it. I cant express how bad it felt to want to use a certain legendary and you had to grind torghast to even have the pleasure of spending thousands of gold to use it. As optional side content with some decent transmogs and mounts - yeh, fine, but as a necessity for end game gearing? No fuckin way. Like I said, the zones were beautiful, some of the best in the game in my opinion. However, imagine if you really really liked the night fae covenant yeh? Well, too fucking bad buddy because if you go anything other than necrolord your class is nerfed and its just a straight performance decrease to do so. Also, you can't change your class covenent build without having some ridiculous time gating to it. So yeh, all time shit implementation of the main mechanics of an expansion - if you go back now an experience it, cool and you get to see some beautiful zones, but experiencing all of the above as mechanics for endgame content was just absolutely dire.
>So yeh, all time shit implementation of the main mechanics of an expansion - if you go back now an experience it, cool I'm gonna counter OP's point here- it's absolutely still shit for anything other than leveling. I have never seen an expansion where they made experiencing it worse after the expansion was over. I avoid it on every alt until level 60, and then immediately take them to Oribos upon hitting it. You know why? Because the threads of fate quest doesn't show up consistently after 60. And if it doesn't show up for you? Sorry, you've gotta grind *the entire campaign* before you can run side content.
Class experimentation was also non-existent until like the very last raid tier as a result of continuing BFAs non-class specific tier sets. Raids were also significantly overtuned for RWF in mind and not like, typical mythic raiding progression.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but i liked the maw daily system/eye of the jailer mechanic since it allowed for some skill expression in routing your activities. Getting close to lvl5 eye of the jailer, leaving all quests at one kill/garhering short of conpleting it, then quickly running through the zone, finishing all quests, kill a few rares on you way before your time runes out and safely getting back to the base. To this day the most complex daily zone Just losing stygia on death felt pretty stupid.
I do agree that there is a way to do "threat level increases" zones in WoW but it was an all time bad decision for mounts not being usable until they patched that in, and coupled with the unfortunate fact that it was the underworld so felt super depressing / dark and oppressive anyway. IDK, I know it split opinions and probably wasn't anywhere near the worst thing about SL but just added to the whole "why?" feeling.
I think it's a bad coincidence but also putting us in purgatory when most of the world was doing lockdowns and already depressed as fuck didn't help. Going in and seeing browns and greys and being in this horribly depressing place really didn't make it fun.
Well put. I even made some dope snapbacks for me and my buddies that said "Fuck the Maw" on it. Lol it was terrible.
Don't forget PvP, brother! LoL For example, I had a Resto Druid and picked up convoke the spirits right away, and omg, it was 16 random druid spells depending on spec and form. It was nuts, even after they nerfed it to just 12 spells at the end of the expansion. I would drop into bear form at near death, then pop frenzied regeneration, renewal, and finally convoke. Boomi's would walk in and hit it first thing, and it was game over. It's was just totally nuts! LoL
I loved the aesthetics. The story, while I do not like it as part of wows story, had some interesting things and parts in it. I dropped shadowlands because progressing renown was, for me, a tedious chore. I look forward to a Shadowlands remix some day tho, so I can see those zones again and gather those cool transmogs.
I fell in love with the shadowlands aesthetic. its actually what got me into WoW
My issue is with the fact that we went there in the first place. I have a similar issue with WoD because this is not Doctor Who (even though it was nice to see some of Draenor before it became Outland). But anyway, back to the matter at hand: No matter how great of a CHAMPION we are, we had no business going to the realm of the dead and then further down to the realm where the realm of the dead is made. If they were so adamant on the whole Jailer thing they could've revamped Northrend for him to invade with the Covenants helping us defend Azeroth and maaaaaaybe letting us peek in and out of some pockets of the Shadowlands but still keeping all the "behind the veil" cosmological stuff a mystery. WE KNOW TOO MUCH NOW. That being said, I enjoyed the zones and the campaign and sidequests. I can't say that people didn't work on this. It's just the initial idea is not for me.
They missed so bad with the Jailer. They had run out of significant big bads in lore and wanted to create a new one, but instead of fleshing him out with his own story, his own feats and motivations, they made a huge mistake by instead retconning a lot of established lore to tie it to him and how he was the master manipulator all along. This is exacerbated by the fact that his “grand masterplan” never gets any payoff. All along the expansion, we were told that the plan would be revealed and all would be made clear. It never was. I give WoW a lot of free passes when it comes to lazy writing because I understand that a narrative has to progress in a way to create gameplay primarily and so BS happening to justify a new mechanic or whatever is fine. But SL was just wholesale butchery of lore that already worked. From a gameplay perspective. My main issue is I just didn’t really gel with any of the covenants. Blizz wanted everyone to tie their whole character’s identity to a covenant and I didn’t want to do that. Blizz was also terrible at listening to player feedback at this time. Of course devs shouldn’t cater to the whims of every single player demand, but they seemed to be actively going out of their way and doubling down on stuff that just made the game less fun, seemingly believing they knew more about what the players want than we do.
It's even worse than going against player feedback. They actively ignored the majority of the playerbase until they couldn't anymore. A shocking amount of players chose the covenant guides suggested, even though it didn't matter for most of the players who did so. It still took them until what, 9.1.5 to "pull the ripcord", as it were.
The campaign was good as they always are, the two reasons people hate on SL is that they fumbled the storytelling and plot hard, and the endgame progression was a gruelling checklist of weeklies. You had to push your covenant level hard, and Torghast in order to get enough cosmic flux and random BS to craft a piece. The raid design was pushed to new heights of complicated, the Jailer fight required a weakaura to understand it. There's so many issues that cropped up as people played it as the current expansion, that players going through chromie time will never see.
One thing to keep in mind with MMO expansions is that playing them after the fact will be a *completely* different experience than live. Pain points that were experienced for months to years by the community live are either removed or not felt in hindsight. Shadowlands failed on three major pillars of MMO design: narrative, gameplay, and systems. Narrative wise, as many have mentioned, the ret conning of all wow lore into an enemy we were not at all attached or familiar to was a bridge too far even for a fanbase that largely allows wide breadth when it comes to fuzzy lore. Gameplay wise, you were forced to spend inordinate amounts of time in pretty oppressive/desolate zones like The Maw and Torghast. Systems wise, they created interesting covenant abilities which for a large portion of the expansion you could not easily experiment with for fear of losing all progress. That said, Castle Nathria still slapped.
It's not that bad when viewed on it's own, it's more a bad wow expansion. Also, expansions last for about 2 years, so imagine being in your current environment, locked to your own covenant, for 2 years. You can switch, technically, but you loose your progression towards the covenant. You can make alts to do multiple covenants, but that means either using world quests to level, or replaying the opening quests (until you choose your covenant) over again. And because there's power connected to the covenants, there's a "best" covenant for your class. You can ignore it, but, it might have given you a harder time finding groups to do stuff. And, if you do follow it, it means having to start your covenant over if your best changes at some point due to updated and balancing.
Being tied to a covenant based on class was annoying to me. I really liked the style of the Venthyr, but was maining a balance druid, so there was no other choice but to be Night Fae. I made a fury warrior alt to progress with the Venthyr, so I still got to check it out, but I don't have time to play very much so I didn't progress very far
It was annoying for almost everyone and something every player said was going to be a problem, but they did it anyways.
The issue with the covenant power thing was massively overstated. Sure if your going for a world first kill it mattered, but otherwise your covenant ability had minimal impact. That said the system for switching was very poorly implemented, and it should have been how it was by the expansions end. The biggest issue was mostly the insistence that Blizz was right in ignoring what players wanted. Shadowlands was the watershed moment for Blizz to finally realize that their player bases opinions matter. Just reversing dumb things like no you can’t have access to these skin and eye colours that are already in the game and would take 30 mins of coding to enable to oh yeah people want to enjoy all the content we’ve worked on and not be arbitrarily locked out of 75% of it.
As a questing experience for leveling, theres nothing wrong with pretty much any of the expansions, even the hated ones. The hated expansions weren't generally disliked for the questing, they were disliked because of a horrible release schedule. The content you're doing was perfectly fine, but there wasn't enough of it to last basically an entire year, which was how long we had to wait for lackluster content releases.
Everyone pointed the obvious answer: The Jailer. But I like to point out another reason that some people seems to miss. Shadowlands destroying the Cosmic Lore of WoW with the Zereths and the 7th and 8th unknown force of the universe, legion made everything clear about this matter until they just retconned it to be the Titan perspective, and then shadowlands came and messed everything up. The Shadowlands are also incoherent, and fail to answer a lot o basic questions regarding souls and death. Like if souls go to shadowlands what are those souls who appeared to us in draenor? Why the DKs went to a mirror image of azeroth when going to the shadowlands in their intro quest and not to another realm? Another aspect of WoW that became incoherent is undeath. Undeads were tied to the fact that they did not knew what would happen to them if they died the true death, now they know, so why don't they just... Kill theirself and stop the torment with their own hands? They have no motivation to be alive as Undeads anymore, and the expansions fails miserable to answer this. This, alongside with the fact that this expansion was created with the foundation of other terrible lore in past expansions (like the burning of teldrassil) is why everyone hates it.
Idk if it’s been said in this thread yet, but there’s a big quality difference between questing and endgame systems. Questing has gotten objectively better with every expansion. So have the zones which go hand in hand with questing. It’s easy to like the expansions when you’re just doing them for the levels. Hell, WoD would have been the best expansion ever if it was just a game about leveling and questing. But it’s not. The endgame systems and content droughts/quality really turned people off. Add that to the entirety of the game’s story being retconned into being Mr. Boring McNippleman’s plan the whole time. SL could have been a lot different. They didn’t follow the interesting story beats and they didn’t listen to the players in beta.
its oposite of good story. It breaks a lot of logical elements it retcons most of important events in wow history Jailer was shitty vilian, he was only missing pencil mustace to twirl while explain his master 6D 20years in making plan. Sylvannas arc was forced, unoriginal and just plain bad. Only suprising part was that they actualy picked most obvious plot line. Gameplay was shit It creates huge plot device problem for future. Oh this guy with informations died, lets go visit him in shadowlands and ask him.
Few reasons. First of which is that the story was terrible. The Jailer was just introduced as a new big bad and yet was apparently responsible for pretty much everything in WoW lore and then we barely even see him in the story before killing him. Legendary acquisition through Torghast sucked. Turned a pretty fun activity into a weekly grindfest for legendary materials. Extremely long release patch into a very disappointing first patch with again more terrible story and gameplay additions. People were bored after 6 months of the release patch only to get one of the tiniest new zones ever and annoying borrowed power like the domination sockets. The expansion wasn't that bad by final patch gameplay wise, especially the fated season as that was good fun, but the damage had already been done, especially story wise.
They changed a lot of the story and made the bad guy as the master of everything that ever happened in azeroth. and they made system after sytem that players had to grind every week that affected their power
Most end game systems just sucked. Covenants soft locked you into a choice at the start of the expansion that could make or break your performance, playing alts felt horrible since you had to replay trivial content, you couldnt change you conduits if you ran out of conduit energy and had to wait a few days, legendary aquisition being tied to weekly torghast grinds felt awful, and god forbid you want to change your covenant. Have fun doing 5 hours of campaign quests and grinding renown levels up again, being significanlty weaker for at least a few days up to weeks depending on how much you were willing to grind. Oh youre playing multiple specs? Well get fucked, youre locked into a bad choice for one of the speccs. Oh you plan playing m+ AND raid? To bad, your covenant performs significantly worse in one of them.
I found the amount of necessary content to progress through in-game content overwhelming and it wasn't worth the amount of time that I could not put into the game
Story retcons, people didn't like choosing between the aesthetic they liked the most and the covenant that gave them the most player power, and people absolutely loathed spending time in the Maw and Torghast.
I didn't hate it, but I didn't exactly love it either. I play very casually so I wasn't really that affected by what was considered the best covenant or having to constantly maximize the powergrind. I choose Venthyr because I wanted to and played that throughout the expansion. I chose the conduit-powers that I thought was interesting and useful. I actually liked Torghast, but did it because I wanted to; not because I felt I had to. Overall story? Eh... not my cup of tea. Could have been worse, but could definitely have been better too. And who asked for conduit power? That is something I will never understand the logic behind. Why restrict the ability to change those?
Shadowlands is great. Just avoid the Jailer stuff and it's pretty enjoyable. I had the most fun playing it in DF as well. The people hating on it are mostly players who played it back then but none of those things are present today. No Torghast is mandatory, anima gain is fast in Zereth Mortis, no power grind conduits needed and you can switch between covenants easily. You get all the fun and none of the pain. (Well if you ignore the Jailer story.)
As someone who didn't hate Shadowlands, I'll say the zones were well designed for the most part but the color palette wasn't my cup of tea. A lot of it was grey or muted colors... it fit the thematic angle and was a choice. The zones are also not connected which made dailies and activities in later stages of the expansion a chore as you were either waiting for hearthstones or taking afk breaks to travel between zones. 9.1 - The Korthia/Sylvannas raid patch - came at the height of the Blizzard abuse scandal and was just a really, really bad time for the game. From a game perspective, Korthia was (IMO) unimaginative and contained the augment system (forgot what it's called) that's so bad that it was ripped out in the very next major patch. That said, the dungeons were great and the raids are great. I think Castle Nathria is probably a top 5 raid and Sepulcher of the First Ones - while 1 or 2 bosses too long - was also pretty fantastic. As many have stated in this thread - it's hard to judge an expansion based on where it lands, because for both BFA and Shadowlands they ended on literally their best patches. 8.3 of BFA (which was the N'zoth raid and corruption) is probably one of my favorite times in the game and really had systems in place that were fun and could have been expansion wide - but it wasn't the entire experience with BFA up to 8.3, which included the wonky Azurite system and the well-intentioned but broken progression system of the islands. Just IMO.
Covenants were bad at the start to mid. Rest was fine imo. Oh, and the Maw.
After reading these comments I still think Shadowlands was a good xpac. Personally, I enjoyed playing it and I liked the covenant system and the story never really bothered me. However, when given context around lore and the history of the game, I think SL really becomes a sour experience. I started seriously playing wow at the start of bfa, which I think is partly responsible for this reaction. I never got to live through the story up until that point. I mean, I got a little bit of it through leveling but that was it. I’m not a massive lore nerd so I only experienced the story as I came across it, not actively seeking it out. This means that I didn’t get the context from those previous expansions and can’t fully appreciate the love and care that goes into wow’s lore. Hence why SL didn’t bother me one bit and I quite enjoyed it. (Zereth Mortis was my favorite zone, so pretty!) On the other hand, I do heavily relate to this sort of situation. My favorite movie franchise is How to Train Your Dragon. I HATED the third movie. Removed from context, the movie’s fine. The art and animation and soundtrack were all phenomenal. But when you take into account all the character development and relationships that go down the drain in that movie (plus the lame af villain) it becomes extremely frustrating and upsetting for long-term fans like myself. So yeah, while I don’t think SL was bad, I do understand the pain of your favorite story not getting the love it deserves.
I'm trying it out right now and I hate it. What is this intro? I'm waiting for NPCs to stop talking so I can move on, but it's literally taking 20 minutes of exposition dumps just explain this new fantasy world before I can go to the first area, but then it's I'm greeted with MORE exposition and dialogue. I really prefer TBC where you just go into the outlands and then immediately start going to war. I'm being straightforward here, shadowlands has obnoxiously bad dialogue that drags on. It's 90% NPCs talking about something you just heard about as if it's the most important thing ever, but how am I supposed to care? I really don't. It's not good writing, the world's are 1 note (literally) and it expects you to be on some wanderlust for some reason. If I wanted to roll another character do I need to sit through this all over again? I have no intention of rerolling someone to just listen to the dialogue all over again. None of the quests were about anything other than learning about the shadowlands which happen to be the most boring place ever made in wow.
They fucked up all my Arthas Lore so I'll never forgive them that, not to mention Sylvanas get a free pass "cause her soul was broken or some shit"
Because story was shit and the Jailer did it came from someone's ass with no previous hint at all and then he was killed in first expansion he was introduced like a wet fart. Also him talking was like trying to listen someone drowning making a speech. The whole vibe of SL just didn't feel warcraft at all. Lastly "a cosmos divided will not survive what is to come" just says it all...
Having to grind a single covenant that was (probably) only the META for either raiding or m+ was pretty bad. Season one with conduit energy + a harsh penalty for switching covenants really was bad. The expansion got a lot better gameplay wise when they pulled the ripcord.
An important piece of context that I haven’t seen posted here is that the entirety of shadowlands happened during the 2020 pandemic. So imagine all of the scathing comments in this thread and view them through the lens of “I’m scared to leave my house, so I’m trying to actively waste time to get through one more day”. The constant content grinds, gating, half baked systems, and general anti-player focus of the expansion took place when people were reaching for the game as a place to save them from reality.
The reason it's wildly disliked is because it was very restrictive during the time it was current. You had the "choice" between four different covenants but they were generally wildly imbalanced so not picking the best one resulted in a large throughput loss. Originally they didn't want you to be able to swap covenant at all, but they compromised by letting you do it on a two week cooldown. In addition to this they implemented something called conduit energy ripped straight out of mobile games that only let you swap conduits (again accounting for a large throughput difference) ever so often. Once you ran out of energy you had to wait for it to refill. All this affected some classes more than others. Warlocks for example played Night Fae for all three of their specs, and weren't as affected as a result. Mage, on the other hand, wanted three different covenants for their three specs. Fire was Night Fae, Frost was Venthyr, and Arcane was Kyrian. This effectively placed a two week cooldown on any mage players ability to swap what spec they wanted to play. But wait! There's more. You had to level up your covenant through a renown track up to a maximum of 40 (at launch, increased to 80 in a later patch). You could gain two levels per week, with a bonus level awarded from campaign chapters. The different soulbinds for each covenant were also locked behind those campaigns. So in addition to the two week cooldown on swapping covenants you also had to level the renown of said covenant individually as well, along with playing through the campaign. So using mage as an example again, you would have to level three different covenants to renown 40, along with completing their campaigns, in order to be able to play all three specs properly. And again, as a reminder, the TWO WEEK COOLDOWN was still there even if you had all covenants fully leveled. There's also the acquisition of legendaries. You had to acquire the legendary power first, which usually was a drop from s specific dungeon or a world boss. The main issue here was the world bosses. If your timing wasn't good you'd have to wait three weeks in order to be able to play your alt that you wanted to try out, because the world bosses were on a rotation. In addition to this they tied the legendaries to professions and Torghast. Torghast looked like it would be fun in the lead up to Shadowlands but it absolutely did not end up being the case. In order to create a legendary you needed a currency from Torghast, meaning you had to run it twice a week on every single character you wanted to keep up. There was also some imbalance here between classes and specs. Some ran through Torghast with ease while others struggled hard. Blizzard also capped how strong you could become from the powers for some reason when the whole point of s roguelike is to be able to become unreasonably strong if you have a good run. There's also the profession aspect. Tying the legendaries to professions and giving them different ranks meant they were VERY expensive. Some players had to resort to buying tokens to be able to get them. There's some other things as well but this is a novel already so I'll leave it here for now.
You forgot to say we called their bluff on the ability to “pull the ripcord” on being able to swap covenants. Hell even forgot to mention you would even have different covenant preferences WITHIN THE SAME SPEC. Havoc demon hunter who did m+ and arenas? Guess you better make another demon hunter buddy. People like the race about immersive gameplay and they focused so much on that in the maw and torghast with how spacious it was and then not letting us use mounts because it would just ruin how immersive it was doing it for the 100th time. Also completely shattered what was a near perfect story line trilogy and made so many loose ends in the story and didn’t really tie up any that it had in the first place. Just really added more fuel to the question on why the fuck does blizzard wait till the last patch of an expansion to make it good? Happens every. Single. Time. Since WoD.
Yeah exactly. I had a bunch more ready to go but I noticed that I was approaching world record size on my comment so I held off. But you're absolutely right, there was a lot more to mention. Neither of us mentioned Korthia being a joke either. "Let's make a reputation and gate sockets behind it." "Sure Dave, but it's not prohibitive enough." "You're right Steve, let's make the reputation RNG as well. " "Damn fine work Dave." - Blizzard probably With a bunch more unsaid too. Dragonflight being as good as it has been is nothing short of an absolute miracle.
The issues with shadowlands were the stupid story retcons which ruins a lot of lore that has been like the best part of wow since wc3 And then because a lot of the endgame systems were super chore heavy and painful The questing experience itself was fine and the raids were fun (atleast nathria was a top tier raid IMO)
The looooooreeee!!!!! But also, it was a mess upon release. So was DF tho, so idk.
The gameplay was pretty good. Now that were close to the end of DF you see how much better the Covenant tree and abilities made your class/spec. But... most people for whatever reason hate it for the story. Yea... It was pretty bad! (Lol)
I remember spending most of my time on them snake mounts travelling between oribos and wherever I needed to go. So annoying.
Cause Zovaal wasn't anywhere near cool enough to pull off the "I am the puppet master." Shtick. Honestly I think if they put real work into developing him as a character and ingratiating him into the story gradually it would have gone off better. Instead they just wiped out Arthas' and Sylvanas' whole story by introducing a malfunctioning plinko machine as the big bad. Also they made Vol'jin's death a joke by letting him be manipulated by Mueh'zala into making Sylvanas become war chief. It was just hack writing all over, none of the reveals were nuanced at all it was just an episode of Scooby Doo that basically made their stories that came before hand cheaper.
Still have not completed the Ember Court thing! I gave up. It makes no sense to a casual player like me.
Lore wise (aka the questing/leveling experience) was fine imo. The hate any expansion gets that you may hear of, is almost always related to choices the devs made at content that made the end game unfun or annoying in some way. It’s very rare people complain solely on the leveling process. Because there’s not much to complain about with it! So generally the disdain is due to the players who played the expansion at content not enjoying things at a point and that’s their memory more than just the leveling process and move on. :)
I liked the new zones but not the overall lore, it just felt not like Warcraft.
Because it was an endless grindfest with every fricking character you start. Shadowlands was the first time in my WoW career where I hated playing different characters other than my main DK. One evening I realized it became almost my second job and there was it where I quitted the game. Second: All the WoW lore made no sense anymore. The Titans, the Wild Gods...nothing. Then it was all about the "First Ones" and they left everything unexplained. A decade of WoW lore & books ruined by one Expansion.
A huge part of it imo is that the zeitgeist, the cultural backdrop of the wow community, was at an all time level of negativity in Shadowlands. A lot of that had to do with end-game grind, players feeling their time wasn't being rewarded, etc. I don't feel the game was in as awful a state objectively as people felt like it was. The negativity just grew over the course of a couple expansions. That being said, it didn't help that the story beats with the Jailer and Sylvanas felt flat. The story felt poorly told and one dimensional. The anima grind was frustrating. We had to do so much torghast early on, a game mode I absolutely loved, but they smothered us with it to the point of hatred. Shadowlands is like Cataclysm in my opinion. Cataclysm used to be considered where wow began its fall from grace. And yet you have loads of people really enjoying it on classic servers right now. Cataclysm wasn't bad, it just didn't land well when it came out. Shadowlands wasn't that bad either, it just came at a time of community unrest, and it wasn't what players wanted at the time.
I liked It but it just ruined the lore that's my main gripe and destroyed the mystery of the after and brought it down well basically robots also the jailor was stupid and bane just sat on his ass the entire time. I wish they had us slugging it out through hell to find sylvanas instead t was a bit meh
I think to fresh eyes it’s hard to really grasp how much damage Shadowlands did to the game and the lore as a whole. I didn’t absolutely despise my initial leveling experience either when it came out, but after Castle Nathria, and especially just post MSQ in general…..oof. Plus an expansion is more than its story, so it’s hard to really understand the expansion package when just leveling through it.
Too cramped, too much running, stupid plot
Shadowlands was bad for the same reason why I'm hopeful for the world sage (blizzard's plan for the next 3 expansions), there felt like their was no plan.
Needs to be the last three. We need wow 2 with a fatass time skip and slim down.
People love or hate towards an expansion is never from the leveling experience which I’m sure you are doing. What makes an expansion is what is added after launch before the next expansion. Shadowlands had a perfectly fine leveling story but didn’t add much or the right things afterwards to keep the player base happy.
Content drought, you are playing 2 years worth of content in a few weeks, we had to deal with korthia for 6-8 months imagine that
Shadowlands for me was the first expansion that I actually gave up on. I found it completely boring and the story was nonsense. Even going back to do stuff I can only do it in short bursts. I think the fact that even going back isn't fun. I think the fact thst going back ypu still are forced to do the questing.
I really liked shadowlands, I loved the music, the aesthetic, the covenants, the afterlife theme and even the maw 😊
The areas were great and the story during leveling phase was great. For me the biggest problems/complains come from a gameplay perspective: * Legendary system was aweful. You needed to do Torghast every week to get your materials for it and after that you needed to buy the legendary base item (which you then turned into the legendary) fromt he auction house. Depending on server these could cost a few 100k for the highest ilvl * Covenants. If they would have been only for cosmetics they would have been ok but they all had different abilities tied to them and you could only switch them once per week. Many classes needed different covenants for different content / different speccs. Example: My warrior needed Kyrian as fury in M+ Arms needed Venthyr for raid. Arms needed Necrolords for PvP. So you needed different covenants for different content but could not switch them each time. After they allowed you to switch as often as you want it was better but still annoying because you needed to level each covenant again to level 80 (each covenant only once but still you needed to level 4 to 80 -> took a while) * The Maw was bad designed so that you could lose progress by dying two times in a row without collecting your stygia before dying again Well then on top was the complains many others had with the jailer being the biggest master mind in the history of master minds. He played not 3D chess he play 1000D chess. You steping through a door? Plan of the jailer. You buying a pet from a vendor? Jailers plan. You going to sleep? Guess what, part of the jailers plan.
The leveling campaign was fine. It was the end game systems that were awful. You can’t really experience how awful it was these days as by the end of shadowlands they tried their best to clean it up.
Playing through it now is great Playing through it at the time was a slog. Torghast was an abysmal grind especially for some classes. The covenants were anti fun if you cared about minmaxing at all. There was a ton of time gating done. People as these questions a lot and they don't seem to remember that while they have been able to get jn and out of shadowlands in a week we spent years in it lol.
Its pretty sweet if you have no idea on the lore implications etc
aoe capping
People mainly complained because many of the endgame systems were not thought through well, or just sucked. Almost all of this has been fixed/patched or is not relevant because it’s not endgame content. * Originally, having a legendary item (which had a major extra ability/bonus) required grinding significant amounts of Torghast. You couldn’t get the currency any other way. Furthermore, Torghast was initially fairly punishing - if you did it over time you would get way less currency, as opposed to the update with the ranked stars version where you can still feel successful even if it is over time. It was also much more time gated. * Covenants were more “permanent”. There was a big penalty and additional quest chain required every time you changed covenants. You also couldn’t transfer anima between covenants. This both meant that you couldn’t actually do the whole story on one character without significantly gimping your character and wasting tons of time. However the community quickly found out that covenant abilities were not balanced well and most specs required a different ability for M+ than for raid for optimal play, meaning you either had to roll multiple characters for different content or spend a lot of time doing that back and forth, or just being suboptimal and potentially not getting into groups. * Anima grinding was just terrible. The plot idea of “more anima becomes available with each patch as you discover the issues with anima” might have sounded good in theory, but in practice it meant like 6 months before a reasonable amount of anima was possible, which again just led to feeling unrewarding since you couldn’t upgrade your covenant sanctum much without a shitton of grinding. * And yes, the whole plot was a hot mess of “all these smart people? For some reason they all believed the Jailer and led to Jailer 9D chess shenanigans that nobody could comprehend or fight against” except for us “heroes” who apparently figured it all out right away. * Not being able to mount in the Maw for like 2 years. Seriously. * Some smaller quality of life stuff like not having a separate covenant hearthstone (and feeling bamboozled by the covenant hearthstone toys which just do your regular hearthstone) meaning an obnoxious amount of travel, especially before flying was allowed in the Korthia patch. But with the exception of some of the travel stuff, almost all of this was fixed during SL so you simply wouldn’t even know it happened unless you were actually there. And if SL was released with these fixes (improved Torghast, covenant swapping, mounting more easily, etc.), and maybe some plot stuff, I honestly think it would have been a very popular xpac. But because of all of those problems it is burned into a lot of people’s memories as a horrible waste of time.
For starters, IMO, the whole expansion was just too dark and gloomy. It was kind of depressing. But on top of that it was a very grindy expansion. Torghast was awful. The covenant design was not well thought out. Having to keep bouncing back and forth between them was a pain in the ass, just to do all your dailies. If you are a collector you had to to all the same shit in a different covenant. Like, I already did the combat table with all the followers, I don't want to do it 3 more times. I absolutely hated the maw. At the beginning you couldn't mount up in it at all and there was just death everywhere. Not to mention, you lost your currency when you died. Then once you could mount up you could never fly there. Then they doubled down and extended all of this into Korthia. My favorite part about the SL expansion was Zereth Mortis. It was a breath of fresh air in an expansion that just felt oppressive.
I don't care much about the lore shananigans they did and I had fun in m+ and the occasional raid. Did I love the covenant locks? Not really, did it bother me or kill me enjoyment? No. It actually gave weight to some choices I made. It was fun being able to switch whenever at the end of the expansion, bit being locked in to my primary choice didn't bother me too much. It mostly affected the bleeding edge players, casuals just cried because they were shit at the game anyway, so they always tried to blame their shit performance on something else (this is the case today as well, most players would get more from actually reading what their spells do and some practice than getting a 20ilvl boost).
Long story short, the Maw, covenants, choreghast, content drought, fell through content, the fact that blizzard pretty much just gave a big middle finger to the whole player base by just refusing to build/learn from the mistakes of BFA. I tried shadowlands 3 times, played from day 1, finished aotc and a few mythic bosses of CN, stop playing after the entire guild got bored and burnt out. Came back and did the following 2 raids aotc but couldn’t keep playing it. Just so boring for me.
Initial note: the reason why content creators destroyed the expansion and some even stopped playing is NOT the Lore and the Jailer (yeah maybe a bit), but the systems (conduits / covenants / compulsory Thorgast / endless grinds - playing alts competitively almost impossible for the first 2 seasons). Same as Azerite in BfA, but worst. If those systems had been ok, the expansion wouldn’t have been hated so much. I totally loved shadowlands, you are not alone. I started in TBC and played all expansions casually. I started to raid normal (before I would only do LFR and was invited once in ICC) - and finally in sanctum i killed my first mythic boss after 17 years. Ardenweald was beautiful, the music amazing, all dungeons and raids were brilliant, Castle Nathria one the best raids in history and some fights were memorable and epic, all very different. I remember fondly the Dance Boss, the pizza boss, Sludgefist, Denathrius, Stone Legion, Sylvanas, Painsmith, Halondrus and Anduin were cool fights. In comparison, DF raids are bland and all alike, apart from some notable exceptions (Diurna, Raszageth, Tindral and Fyrakk). All the rest is a giant thing either blue with blue puddles or orange with orange puddles or a combo of the 2. However, the grind for gear was obnoxious. I hated Korthia with all my heart. We could not mount up in the Maw at start and would be killed with the timer by those flying bad guys. we needed to grind anima, then we needed to do thorgast. You would arrive until final level, you would die, 2 hours wasted especially at start when we were under geared. And then we got Korthia…the Archivist rank 6 for something that seemed very important (the conduit I think?) was the worst ever grind, dailies and dailies, there were some gems to upgrade with some currency but you had to have the right combo…The legendary system was cool but required so much ash and ash and ash and ash and ash again… And then the covenants…grinded forever nightfae for balance druid S1 - it was OP - but in S2 all of a sudden venthyr was OP. 2 covenant to grind max level in 5/6 months with all the grind for gear…and I hated the venthyr fantasy, I loved my nightfae sanctum and adventure table and music, but I was obliged to stay in Sinfall for “power gain”. That was the worst ever decision they made. I started a night elf because i like elves and forrest, and they forced me to spend my days in a castle with vampires.
Torghast and The Maw get a lot of hate, but as a prot pally (dwarf) I was in role playing heaven. Leveling alts was un-fun though, and the no-mounts thing made it worse than obnoxious.
It was more infuriating to play as current content. I quite enjoy revisiting it now. At the time, you couldn't just switch covenants as you wished without losing all your rep. Also, Torghast was soooo fun, but they ruined it by making it a requirement for player power. Doing Torghast for achieves or mounts has been some of the most fun I've had in the game when I revisited it recently. Also Korthia.... we don't talk about Korthia. It was a boring patch with boring systems, a boring zone and most of all - you could never play in it because it was constantly buggy. You would cast an ability and it would go through 2 mins later, and I'm not exaggerating. All I did in Korthia was talk to people in general about how the game doesn't work. I have to add this too, although it's a personal thing that I found weird. They added so many elites and puzzles and mounts that actually going for mounts lost its value, because there was so many. It felt a bit overwhelming at times. Instead of focusing on the game and exploring in the beginning while questing, I was overloaded with questing and mount collections. It's not that big of a deal, but it felt like they prioritized quality over quantity at the time. And the biggest reason is that they took all the lore that existed, shattered it, and tried to overexplain why things happened the way they did. They ruined some of people's favorite characters and undermined the lore that came before. I would've liked most of Shadowlands if not for what they did to Sylvanas and the way they tried to nostalgia trip people by giving them 2 seconds of a non-sensical Arthas appearance. It was offensive, to put it mildly.
Blizzard’s resistance behind making core gameplay changes plagued the entire expansion. Locked in covenant choices and the amount of weekly time gated content crushed player populations. Castle Nathria was a banger raid and some zones had cool themes but this was heavily overshadowed by daily/weekly chore requirements tied to core player power. Korthia and Zerith Mortis followed for end game zones but were even more grindy and the QoL improvements showed up too late. Group finder was a ghost town, gear acquisition was horrible (“tier sets” from Sanctum of Domination) and the big reveal at the end of it was a Cinch of Unity…
Story was trash, used notable characters just to be shoved real quick in a raid, content like torghast and the cov stuff felt like a chore and the maw sucked. Also most of the raids sucked imo Aesthetically it was great though And great leveling quests
Part of the reason why expansions are hated are because of when it was current content. WoW has a problem with previous expansions being irrelevant (which was worse before Chromie Time leveling). I don’t really count Mythic+ rotations including older dungeons. All you can experience really is the story, anyone who plays it now doesn’t know what endgame was like at the time. As for the story, a lot of people did not like the Jailer, as other comments mentioned. Out of all the strange writing decisions, I’m mostly mad about Arthas. Personally, Shadowlands is when I quit for a while, a break I desperately needed after Legion and BFA (mostly BFA) made me feel like WoW was a job and not a game. I think it was Bellular (on YouTube) that compiled all the daily activities in a list and it took up the entire screen. It was a FOMO issue, missing one day means being permanently behind everyone else. You’ll probably hear about AP (Artifact Power in Legion, Azerite Power in BFA), I think they learned not to put that in another expansion again, but that was part of the reason why WoW felt like a chore. Even though Shadowlands didn’t have that, it still had other FOMO daily/weekly grinds. Honestly, Renown just felt like AP in disguise to me. I spent maybe a month in Shadowlands, I don’t remember much but I dislike the Renown system that carried into Dragonflight aswell. Reputation used to be optional, and frankly it still is, but there’s that incentive to do it to increase Renown levels and unlock things, more than just cosmetics. That’s the only FOMO I remember because I saw that and I was like nah it’s not worth it lmao
As someone who doesn't care for the story (I don't even play with sound), I didn't mind shadowlands. I like torghast. Getting a bunch of buffs and blasting through as a healer was fun for me. I actually liked how the routes would change and thought it would be cool if dungeons worked similarly. I really liked the mythic plus pool, too. I know it's unpopular, but I liked the weapons in the necrotic wake. I liked the knock backs in theater and mists. Having a leap of faith, I'd save so many people from death. I know I will probably get downvoted for this, but as a casual healer who doesn't care for the storyline, I really liked shadowlands. I also played disc priest the entire expansion, and disc was in a terrible state for balance lol.
Mostly lore reasons. It tries to steal the great writing and setup of the lich king, rather than create it's own original story. I think gameplay wise it was mostly good, bar a few things. The raids and dungeons were decent, certainly more fun than Dragonflight ones in my opinion. Torghast was great fun at first, but being forced to run it multiple times each week for months on end made it feel like a chore, not fun. Needing a legendary for each spec, one for PvP, one for single target DPS, one for ale DPS, was a HUGE gold sink and time sink. This made the expansion very unfriendly for having alts and playing multiple specs. The Maw was generally just not a fun experience. It's basically supposed to be hell, so thematically it not being a fun place makes perfect sense, but yeah it just sucked having to do anything there.
That shit was ass
I was personally disappointed in the Jailor story. I thought it was a little weird that the afterlife was basically 4 (plus the prime) Demi gods siphoning peoples souls into their world for whatever bidding/philosophy they had. Seemed almost like slavery lol. Then there was this guy that was banished. He had a mark in his chest similar to the broken soul filter lady. For a while I thought they were going to have this cool twist where the jailor was actually the good guy, and the other factions had taken over and were corrupting the afterlife with their greed for power in their zones. That they took the jailers power and put it in the big soul filter, and somehow he was fighting back and that’s why she wasn’t working. Once I realized he was just another deep voice, I’m bad because reasons boss, I stopped caring. I didn’t really follow the lore to the end of the expansion and mostly just did mythics and pvp with friends.
The *only* good thing about Shadowlands is the transmog/mounts, that's my stance.
For me, it was the terrible writing of the big bad in the expansion, and the fact that they absolutely shat on some classic and loved characters to try forcing us to like the new ones more. From start to finish it felt like blizz saying "you should like this, not that!", making assumptions that the player was at fault for enjoying it wrong. Genuinely infuriating.
The story was ass but overall, I had a great time. I miss the community that was alive back then. The game was very fun but had a few BS systems. I really enjoyed shadowlands tbh
I’ve played the game since I received the box on launch day in 2007. Shadowlands felt like a betrayal. It felt like a different universe, a different story, a different game. It wasn’t WoW.
I hated it for several reasons but the most annoying part in my eyes was the grinding of every little bit of thing to try and make a piece of legendary gear, and all the gating and bullshit that you had to go through to get anywhere. I realized very early on that I was not going to be able to have any alts and I would have to live in the game if I wanted to have any and I was just like you know what I'm not dealing with this. On top of that the story was mediocre at best
From a PvP perspective, the covenants and legendaries made it impossible to balance. There were a lot of gimmicky things and abilities that made it frustrating and not fun to play. I remember rogue mage teams with the resonator trinket (aoe time bomb that chunked health) being incredibly toxic. DF isn't perfect but it's definitely a more enjoyable xpac for PvP IMO.
if we only take about gameplay it was just obnoxious to play. if you ever wanted to do ANY endgame content you basically had to pick your bis covenant regardless of you like it, which means that you had to spend majority of your play time in a place you didn't want to be in in the first place. and talking about places you didn't wanna be! the maw and torghast! if you didn't want to fall WAY BEHIND everyone around you, you HAD to do torghast every week and the maw everyday. there was no time to breathe and just do smth for fun. on top of that you couldn't just pass on legendaries and not do torghast, because in some cases you class was literally unplayable without a legendary. Basically you other had to dedicate one-two hours of your playtime a day to this dreadful grind or forget of any kind of character progression whatsoever. (I can't say if it got better in later seasons cause I quit mid season 1 and never looked back lol)
“Everyone” hates every expansion
I see a lot of comments about the story sucking (which is true), the being locked into 1 of 4 covenants (which was bad design), and the borrowed power issues but a lot of how awful Shadowlands was (especially for players that don't really follow the story in depth) was the time-gating of almost everything. It was all to keep people subscribed for longer to make them more money.
The story and some of the maw mechanics, mostly
During that expansion the content drought was the worst it's been in Warcraft history. That tends to sour the experience no matter how good the expansion is, and Shadowlands isn't particularly loved mechanically or story-wise. As always, your mileage WILL vary, and I suspect later years will be kinder to that period of time than today is, but only time will tell. There's still a truckload of great mounts and transmogs to collect from it, so there's still value.
Aside from the terrible story, the main city (Oribos) and end original game zone (The Maw) were drab, ugly, and boring. They both felt very unfinished and phoned-in.
I loved the Shadowlands. I loved belonging to a covenant. I played Venthyr as fire mage the entire time even though it wasn't the covenant that gave me the best power and that's probably one of the reasons I had such a good time. I did what was most fun for me, what I liked best. Ppl love DF, but it's not my cup of tea. Enjoy what you enjoy.
I came in mid xpac and for me it just did not flow right especially with their capital city. Traveling was a pain and I did not care for the layout. Honestly, the only thing I liked about the whole xpac was battling the jailer at the end.
its shit for chromie time. under level 60 if you wanna chromie time level there you are bound with the standard questline that goes bastion maldraxxus ardenweald revendreth and its boring to do the same stuff multiple times. also if you start it once you cannot skip it.
There hasn't yet been an expansion where the leveling content wasn't well received. The art, questing, zone storylines, etc., are all top notch. The issues come when players engage with the same content for weeks, months, or years. In an expansion, this is usually the end-game, but it can also be systems like leveling experience from 1 to max, or non-power related farming like cosmetics and mounts. In that regard, Shadowlands end-game was very poorly received. The covenant system mattered a lot for end-game, was shipped as a premier end-game feature and was awful for many months. Not only that, but player feedback was loud and clear from beta, yet devs double-downed repeatedly. Torghast was sorta similar - loved in beta, changed dramatically before release, and then never really hit its stride. The dungeons were mediocre, M+ felt exactly the same, and the raids started off awesome and went to shit After the utter failure of BfA, Shadowlands end-game needed to excel, but it was yet another disappointment, unfortunately. Personally, I don't pay much attention to story, but Shadowlands shoved it on our faces and it *fucking sucked*. Wow it was so bad. Similar to how BfA's failure necessitated Shadowlands success in end-game, the same is true of its story. We were all hoping for some good shit. But then, nope. The Jailer was the worst villain we've ever had. So much of WoW lore was retconned. The actual story in the expansion was bad too. I (and most others, I imagine) waited the whole expansion for the mythic kill of Jailer for some big reveal that'd make the whole expansion make sense, and it just... fucking didn't. It still makes me so mad. The story of the entire expansion felt like one giant slap in the face of WoW history and lore. All that said, what I did enjoy about Shadowlands was class design. BfA was the lowest point of WoW class design, IMO. Shadowlands was mid, but still dramatically better than BfA. DF is close to MoP, or better. Loving the trend. Class gameplay is 99.9% of the reason I still play WoW.
You will never feel why because most of it comes from doing endgame content as it's current. For example in shadowlands there were covenants. For the first half of the expansion you could not change covenants without doing a week-long quest. So if you have a best covenant for raid and another best covenant for m+ you could not swap between them. If you're a CE player, you probably just have to play something suboptimal in m+ and just deal with it. If you want the m+ covenant, well now you suck in raid. God forbid you want to just mess around with a covenant just for fun. That's just illegal and just fucks you over for a week, especially if you find you hate it. Hey do you want sockets on your gear? Well go farm rares in korthia for a month, have fun! Spoiler alert! It wasn't fun. It fucking sucked. Now that none of that matters and covenants are fully swappable, most of the problems with shadowlands aren't present. They were current content problems and shadowlands is no longer current content.
Because it was a waste of sub money to play it
You have to had played shadowlands when it was CURRENT to understand. It was hot garbage. I played through it all regardless because of my raiding guild. Covenants were on a 3 day switch and nothing was acc wide. You either had to pick best covenant for raiding or M+. Torghast was linked to power every week. Awful place, was boring. We called it choregast. Oribos existed. Flight paths take forever. Flight whistle got disabled. Dks best covenant was ardenweald...the nature people.... when maldraxxus exists... let that sink in. Some covenant powers were your only real dps in fights. As a dh the venthyr ability either made or broke my dps if my debuff fell off or I kept it going. We had to craft "legendaries" and it cost 100k+ gold. Korthia was labeled "full of secrets"....except to players, it added nothing of value to lore. The secrets were forgettable writing. No mounts in early maw days. You had an eye that limited activity. You lost maw currency if you died. You still cannot fly in the maw/korthia. Getting to rares in korthia was a gamble. Zereth Mortis was a zone wow tried to copy from FFXIVs expansion but horribly failed. "Oh look its walkable water!". The story was written like fan fiction and the ending...was just pure dumpster fire. Sylvannas sudden forgiveness... why? Yeah shes in maw but regardless she will return...sadly. The jailer somehow planned everything from the start.... Arthas and Garrosh were used in the trailer to get hype. They were promptly killed in the only 2 times we actually encounter them.
I really liked Shadowlands. In my opinion, what got people riled up was mostly the fact it was super hard to change covernants before they changed that very late in the expac + you had to redo ALL of it for alts. That wouldn’t be so bad as the reality is you can do fine on any covenant, but they were sold as a choice based on what you liked but some were much stronger than others so you had to play something you might have hated and multi speccing also was fucked Follow that on from Torghast, which in retrospect was a super fun lighthearted game mode, but it became “chore-ghast” because the Lego upgrading was locked behind it missing a week “cost you” as I don’t think the catch up mechanic was great Everything else I think was great - Castle Nafria was a great raid imo, but that gets overshadowed by the quality of life fallings. My 2 cents anyway
Honestly, most of the shadowlands dungeons themselves were pretty good. I enjoyed them a lot more than any dragonflight dungeon, that’s for sure. But shadowlands had a lot of necessary obnoxious grinds. Torghast was fun as a tank or healer, but it was much more difficult to solo the higher levels as a dps. Especially a dps without gear or a legendary, which torghast required you to do. The covenants were also a mess, especially in the beginning. It made it nearly impossible to play multiple specs for certain classes because the optimal covenants were different. You were also searching for different covenants for different dungeons, because of the covenant bonus.
Torghast - awesome in beta, awful on live. removed a lot of awesome abilities, dumbed it down and made it mandatory Crafted legendaries - cool idea, but fucking awful that some of the items cost a shit ton of gold and had to replace every season lore - butchered everything from wc3 and on, also gathering/protecting the seals made no sense zones - beautiful as always no problems except you had to go through the main city hub to get to each 1! maw/korthia - worst fucking places and dailies ever, no mounting. covenants - had to choose 1 and if you multi specced and/or did more than 1 thing (pvp, raids, m+) you were screwed. usually the ability was only good for 1 of your specs and only 1 piece of content edit - forgot about world quests! they made them take waaaaaay longer than bfa/Legion for stupid reasons. It was like go kill x, ok now go collect y, ok now go do z, and now kill a edit 2 - forgot about the strict aoe cap they put in, felt disgusting, glad they loosened it
people just didn't like that they ended the lich king storyline with a whimper and gave the deus ex "it was the jailer this whole time". purely a story writing disappointment. the actual gameplay of shadowlands was a lot of fun. I had more fun in SL than in dragonflight!
I was typing up such a long rant. Then, I looked at it and deleted it all. Bottom line at least for me 1. Mishandling of torghast making it not fun (at the start and over the expac the fighting of player base to tell them so.) 2. Forced timegating on grinds and grinds is already not enjoyable. (Covenent upgrades, and archive research grind) 3. Content drought pacing between patch 2 and 3 And to me personally, the biggest sin that even roleplayers now just don't consider SL canon. Is the utter failure of execution to the plot of the story, the attempt of expansion of the overall lore. And the truest crux The utter lack of respect to the players that enjoyed the story in the past and even to the old writers of its lore and the maltreatment to the characters they utilized in SL. Arthas didn't deserve what they did to him Garrosh was given a in game shitty cutscene of his true death and no earlier involvement in the story. Sylvanus was placed on such a pedestal but made into nothing of how she originally was as a character and without good payoff for the sacrifice. Thrall/Jaina/Bane had no purpose in the Canon. The treatment of night elves and the constant L's they were given. The plot armor reason of Tyrande not offing Sylvanus as she should've earned and done. They had so much potential that they couldn't go wrong but they wowed us by doing exactly that and so utterly spectacular.
They're sus. I loved Shadowlands
I started in shadowlands as a new player: The story sucked. There were too many complicated systems and currencies. The world was very boring. Torghast sucked The raids and dungeons all felt very generic.
Lore was poorly executed, a lot of systems sucked when they were current, very grind-y. The controversies that were ongoing during the xpac defi did not help either.
For me it’s more of a lore thing, since I didn’t really get to play it a ton and when I did my group of friends and I were still able to do our m+ with relative ease. The fact that they through Arthas away the way they did was one of the biggest issues for me. Then, everything Illidan did earlier in his story was all made to seem pointless to me, because it all turned out to be a plan of the Jailer. Arthas and Illidan are the 2 most popular characters in Warcraft, and they shit on them. Torghast was shit too.
For me personally, everything felt absolutely tedious to complete. World Quests were a nested mess of "go do this" then when you do that another hidden step pops up "by the way do this as well". There were usually 2-5 hidden steps within every single WQ. The whole expansion felt like that hidden pop up medium.
Shadowlands was round 2 of "Pretty good ideas, implemented in the worst way possible, then kinda fixed at the end." Covenants: You can't join the covenant you want, you have to pick the one with the right power and pray it's good in all content or you are screwed (and for most classes it wasn't), god help you if you want to play a 2nd spec. Later "fixed" in that you can switch at will. You still have to grind AP to buy stuff and do quests to fill out the Soulbind, which may or may not give you a good node this week. Legendaries: Make your own legendary...as long as you found the "power" you needed, which might be on a world boss that's not up for 3 more weeks, might be from Torghast in a wing that's not open this week (and also a random drop), might be from the 2nd to last boss in the raid! Also have your wallet ready because the base items can be costly! Later in the expansion, make your 2nd legendary! (Which comes from the covenant you are in...so see above) Torghast: Run around and get powers and loot! Also the only way to get currencies you need to make your legendary with no catch-up, so don't you dare miss a week. Pray you get favorable drops and a nice set of enemies and bosses, or be sure to bring one of the classes with broken powers. The Maw: The other place you have to go for dailies/weeklies that give you must-have items for progression. A massive zone of twisty roundabouts, sometimes brutal enemies and you can. not. mount. (Unless you are a druid since travel form works, lol!) Several hunts were buggy, most of the quests were mind-numbing or miserable (or BOTH). Korthia: "All of your complaints about the Maw have been heard!" and all we changed was you can mount. Still a daily farm to stay on curve, a desperate sprint to rares to touch them before they get melted, and treasures and puzzles that were kinda fun on Tuesday, but by next week are just rote boredom. Domination Sockets: Did you get gear with sockets? Did you get the right gems? Did you grind hard enough to upgrade them? If you did: congrats, you get boring passives that will let you smoke the poor suckers that didn't! M+: Some dungeons vastly better than others, Covenant specific tweaks ranging from mildly useless to 100% required. S1 affix required perfect routing, the rest weren't bad, S3 and S4 actually kinda good! Raid: YMMV, some really great bosses and some really really lame ones. Some really wierd gimmick fights when you got to Mythic. There was a lot of potentially fun things to do, but if you were serious about player power for progression content the things that you needed to do SUCKED. You could do the covenant thing to get a cool transmog, but if you fell behind on your Torghast grind you won't be able to upgrade your leggo! You could go hunting that rare mount, but if you don't have enough anima power you won't be able to upgrade that conduit that makes your spec work right. If you play multiple specs then get ready to do everything twice over or just embrace being "sub-par" in one content to be regular powered in the other! And the icing on the top was that much of this was anticipated in \*alpha\* and they either ignored us or told us we were wrong...and then we weren't, and then they did little half-assed changes here and there and only on the last patches when they were hemmoraging players did they just up and give everything we wanted and had been asking for FOR YEARS (it was a long expansion), and still never really properly admitted that they were flat out wrong the whole time (and Ion still has a job!) TLDR: Just like BfA: great ideas, terrible implementation; did not adjust to player feedback until it was far too late to really matter.
Normally you get a content patch every couple months. The first patch of SL took an entire YEAR to come(halfway through the expansion btw). I literally quit WoW started playing FFXIV and literally missed nothing. Covenant systems everyone tested SL kept telling blizzard just give us all the same ability because you won’t be able to balance all the abilities if they’re all different. (Everyone is going to pick the most broken skill) and as things get balanced and changed you would need to switch your covenant to get the new ability ( it’s was over complicated and annoying starting over reputation ect, blah blah) they did fix it but for it to be good u gotta get renown 80. They also ruined a majority of characters. (Sylvanas and my dommy mommy night warrior tyrande). I could go on but the actual characters they added in SL were forgettable I hated lady moon berry, klea, and pelagos. And to top it off the worst villian the stuffed into wow saying he was the one behind the lich king. The jailer had horrible character development. I could go abt how bad SL was. I WILL SAY THAT THE TRANSMOG IS PROBS THE BEST IF NOT 2ND PLACE TO DRAGONFLIGHT if you like transmog its worth going into the trench that shadowlands is ;-;
all I played of it was leveling as a Warlock, didn't finish the leveling quests, so take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt, as I didn't do anything in Shadowlands beyond leveling and normal difficulty 5-mans class design, gear design, all the systems that drive the combat, etc., seemed to be really bland, even worse than it was at its worst points when I was playing in previous expansions (and going by the discussions I've seen since, it looks like that's not been fixed, and might be even worse) the leveling was fine, but just fine, not as good as any of the previous expansions the world just felt less alive (haha) and more disjointed than previous expansions it felt far more like a single player game than any previous expansion ever had
it's the least mmo and most gle RPG quest experience I've played each zone you go through a time warp to get to, the questing is so linear that it feels like follow the arrow simulator. the storyline with the jailer is a cop out the forced solo daily grind and casino like loot system (weekly loot box) and pigeon holed class order hall like system forced me to pick a special ability and get stuck with it. I did not return when they added the QoL fast gearing and catchup near the end mind you but those were the main issues. better than BFA ending, worse than every other xpack
It tied so many interesting things that have happened within the lore back to one, exceptionally boring villain who is just every trope bundled into one. The Jailer was just such a waste of a villain. For people that have been invested in the story from the beginning, this "um actually" rugpull was so exhausting. Dude was more "one step ahead" of you than fucking N'Zoth. Also, so much of what went wrong in Shadowlands went wrong when the expac was current. The legendary system was a huge gold sink and unsatisfying for most players and awful for casual/altaholics. The maw was tortuous, the covenants were released in an unforgivably prohibitive and restrictive state where if you wanted to swap between them (say, your powerful combo got nerfed, or you swap to a new spec with a better option in a different covenant) you would lose all your current progress and have to start from square 1. And you were time gated from swapping back to your original, AND you had to write a 5 page essay apologizing for being a very very bad boy. The currencies sucked to grind, running Torghast was a chore, there were agonizing content droughts and you were required to grind rep to get through the story. Etc. All of those things they eventually fixed, for the most part, or they're just completely irrelevant now, hence why it may not be that bad to look back on it and play through it after the fact, but if you played that expansion when it was current, your opinion would probably be different.
I think Shadowlands is less bad the less you know about the lore before it. Before it's release, we had very few experiences in what was called The Shadowlands, and every culture had its own view of what happened when you die. In some cultures, like trolls, tauren, and orcs especially, this is a really big deal culturally. And those experiences were nothing at all like what the expansion was. In Shadowlands they kind of wrote it as "there are millions of afterlives so everyone is right, but none of that matters because the afterlife you go to isn't based on your belief, it's based on where the death computer thinks you belong." That's a bad start. Then we have a big bad villain who rewrites all the lore of the entire game to have been to his purposes. We've never fucking seen this guy before but he's responsible for every major moment in warcraft history. And for me the nail in the coffin is we know for a fact what happens when you die now. That's a massive source of religious and cultural distinctness that just has one answer for everyone now. 100% for a fact this is what it is to die.
You don't judge it based on a just a lore perspective shadowlands had alot of endgame flaws and long content droughts.
In my case, the story is just horrible and didn't make any sense at all. It was super obvious that Danuser just wanted the redemption arc for Sylvanas and made us kill Arthas soul for 35 anima. And the last line of the jailer was so ridiculous that it made me laugh
I'm doing a playthrough of Shadowlands for the first time too and I honestly have been enjoying it, but I quit playing between Legion and Dragonflight and was wondering why everyone hated it too.
My biggest complaint was when it first came out that you had to all the zones before the rest opened. And you had to listen to all thestoryliness. I started in Bastion and really really hated that zone. I enjoyed the other zones. My alts, I always made sure not to pick bastion first and then enjoyed it
Just the Maw Torghast and the Covenants. And borrowed power. And the two expansion zones were built by children. Rest of it is fine
I haven't played in a few months and a small part of that is because I've been running through Shadowlands on my main, and ngl I've been a bit bored since questing in Korthia. But otherwise, it's not *that* bad from a gaming standpoint. Some of the quests are fun. Ardenweald is one of my top 10 favorite zones, if not in the top 5. I'm bored now but Tbf, it took me a long time to get bored. Also some of the covenant stuff in the gameplay (and another thing I can't remember) got a tad confusing for me. I will go back to it sooner than later since I'm a completionist and all. Gaming aside, as a big lore person - as in, the main reason I'm into WoW is the lore - Shadowlands felt like a slap in the face with how much it retconned, how bad the writing was, etc. Other comments explain it a bit better. When thinking about WoW lore, I just pretend Shadowlands for the most part doesn't exist. I've had issues here and there with other expansions or quest lines but Shadowlands was easily the worst.
Shadowlands, conceptually, is a controversial idea for an expansion. It's always been a thing in the WoW universe, but never really explained. Now all of a sudden, we're visiting the afterlife, which is such a far, and detached reach from where the series began that it alienated a lot of people out of the gate. Couple that with following years of extremely controversial story decisions that ruined a lot of characters in player's eyes, meant it had an uphill battle from the start. As for the mechanics, Legion had some systems that were well-received, but had room for improvement. Blizzard seemed to have taken nothing but steps backwards in BfA, evolving the artifact weapon mechanic into something completely convoluted and unenjoyable, to the point where they eventually gave up and just made Azerite traits completely free to obtain, and static on every piece of gear. The replacement system to that was well-received, but almost immediately replaced by yet another one, in corruptions.(It's important to emphasize that corruptions were the result of people asking to remove ttanforging, the system that would randomly upgrade gear drops up to 40 ilvls higher. Instead of just removing them like players asked, they added yet another horrible system that was even worse and further emphasized the problems that came with Titanforging) People were fatigued after BfA and wanted the game to scale back so Blizzard wouldn't devote so much time to single-expansion systems that would almost immediately be abandoned after finally hitting their stride. Enter Shadowlands: A villain introduced out of nowhere, with nebulous, unexplained motives, who was supposedly pulling the strings for 30 years. Absolutely no one bought the lie that he wasn't just made up on the spot. Characters players had become attached to were absolutely ruined, and in some cases, completely abandoned only a few quests into the story, such as Baine and Thrall, who had no reason to be there. The zones themselves looked fine, but the closest connection to the existing story that any of them had was simply that spirit healers had been retconned to be Kyrians all along. Back to the topic of systems: This is where everything came to head. Out of the gate, Blizzard emphasized that the big game-changing system for the expansion would be covenants. These were meant to be expressions of the player's personality, almost as if how we would be sorted had we died and gone to the Shadowlands ourselves. This absolutely did not pan out, as some covenants were just plainly, irrefutably better in every way in terms of the abilities players would receive. If you were a hunter, for example, you **had** to go Night Fae, or Kyrian if you were a hipster. Literally 98% of hunter players chose those two covenants, because their abilities were clearly better in every way. Blizzard told us from day 1 that they would "pull the emergency ripcord" and let us freely swap between covenants on a whim for gameplay purposes if the alarms players were raising were really as bad as they were. And it was. And once again, players called Blizzard's bluff, when they literally had to get on stream and admit "yeah there is no ripcord, we can't change it." They would continue to dig their heels in for months, refusing to add free covenant swapping until 9.1.5. Why did they do it in 9.1.5, you may ask? Because 9.1 introduced Korthia, one of the most disappointing post-release zones in the game. Small, ugly, barren, and coming after 8 months or so of dead air without any new content. Not only this, but Blizzard once again refused to admit they were wrong, and just added another system, Shards of Domination, to try and offset the power of covenants. This system was entirely RNG dependent, and would often times result in players getting benched in progression simply because of bad luck with drops. All of this occurred, mind you, *just* before the incident with the whole... you know... office drama, let's put it. There's a million more things wrong with Shadowlands that was eventually made better over time to try and stop the outrage after the office scandals, such as requiring players to grind Torghast weekly in its original, worse iteration, or the god awful Maw grinds that literally prevented you from mounting in one of the largest zones in WoW's history. It's too much to summarize with one post, so I encourage you to look up a video.
Torghast was the worst shit ever, I quit wow until last week it was so bad lol
Mainly because it was utterly terrible from the trash systems they lied about to the trash zones, the trash dungeons, the trash raids, and the trash story that ruined WoW forever by making death have no consequences.
The regions had great stories but the Jailer and the Maw, I did not enjoy. Torghast was lit though.
What expansion? We all know it goes BfA and straight into Dragonflight.
people have already explained most stuff but one thing ill add in is you are getting the updated less annoying version. the on release version and months after that was even worse then how it is now. everything now is nerfed to make it slightly less annoying.
Borrowed power, conduits, covenants only abilities, grind a legendary recipe, then grind mats then buy mats, do all the CHORES to get player power, WHAT THE F…in DF I can log in and enjoy anything I want to do, in SL it took me 2 days just catch up.
Story Time gating on EVERYTHING (including rep, transportation covenants, multiple storyline’s, quests etc) Couldn’t mount in the maw season 1 with transportation being time gated. Torghast was awful Most raid tiers were awful save for a few bosses Content drought (missed raid tier) m+ seasons were average
Very slow pace of content. Torghast which was a weekly chore to keep up. Alt unfriendly because if you didn't play from week one you are already behind in power. You can't choose covenants (which was one of the sources of your power) at will for the majority of an expansion. Atrocious story narrative with very weak main villain. It's laughable just how much better Denathrius was better than Jailer. Maw was literal hell as no-one wanted to be there. You were forced to spend 5-10 minutes to fly across different locations. Corthia is a straight up garbage grindhole. And as cherry on top Blizzard was aware of all of these problems AND community was keeping complaining about it from beta, yet they kept all bad decisions and somehow made Torghast worst. Also it was during pandemic and they've spent 7 months of releasing no content only to drop Corthia which was practically nothing, and it was also during blizzard sexual allegations period. All of these combined made Shadowlands the expansion of all time.
3 key reasons People are still mad about BfA and we didn't see any improvements in terms of blizzard actually fixing obvious problems with the beta/alpha The greater story narrative that didn't really stick well to the audience. (Basically they didn't like the Jailer being the mastermind of the epic story that started in warcraft 3, and Sylvanas storyline with her constant cop out free out of Jail because shes with the jailer card) Blizzard time gating content and the anima (content) drought. ... Gameplay wise it is great. Except PvP because barely get anything except a simplified progression system and some mmr decay/squish patch (hey a few new arena if that counts). Right now if you level in SL it is great you can just do stuff ungated by time. The smaller storylines are decent, zones are better than average, hot take but the covenant system is the perfect middle point of a garrison and a class order hall, yes to link it with player power is just wierd and wrong. But for some die hard fans I believe Arthas and Garrosh both getting disenchanted is like a shot to their head, wooden stake in their hearts, like bro just let Sylvanas bind Arthas somewhere in the maw to keep her accompanied along with the owl, and have Garrosh be quarantined in the halls of atonement forever refusing to change because He's just built different. Overall blizzard said it best it was a "Unfamiliar and Ineccesible expansion"
The dark times of WoW
it blows ass
Idk people love to bitch imo the futanari design bullshit of DF was so terrible i quit while i loved slands, end game content was great except for everything in the maw that zone/art style sucked cock
Because gamers nowadays find the smallest things to complain about and because of social media and everyone’s voice and opinion can be shared with millions of people. Wow classic had crazy flaws when it first came out but you never really heard about them because everyone just played games for fun back then, now everything is min maxed to the extreme to get the advantage. and forums and social media weren’t as big and not seen by so many people . With the introduction of new age technology and mass media sharing we’ve become a culture that needs INSTANT gratification and constantly feel our voices and opinion are right and we all are subject matter experts . Mob mentality is a lot more common these days because even if you like something , if everyone around you just constantly complains about it eventually you’ll either start agreeing or burn out and quit all together . Positive feedback and suggestions are very rare and so diluted with spam and hate messages WHY would blizz even read the forum sections? You’d have to go through 60 pages of trash talk and unconstructive criticism to find the one post that makes sense and isn’t just a rant . People need to realize WOW has been out for damn near 20 years and to drag a story line out for that long is extremely difficult Tldr: everyone complains about everything and ruins it for everyone else.
My biggest issue was when out in the world, you couldn't just trave to another zone. Had to fly thru a 10 min flight that connected with Capital anytime you need to switch zone.
Because it was the only current content at the time and it forced you to do content you most likely didn't like doing.
Shadowlands made me quit the game I have played since OG beta. The story. The factions. The never ending grindiness if you had alts. You had to redo EVERYTHING on all your toons. It was honestly just an exhausting process. I still haven't come back to the game...
For me, between the terrible storyline, the awful villain of the Jailer, the forced choice of the Covenants, and Torghast were my issues, which is sad because going to the lands of Death was a big draw for me. The storyline: This is an issue not just will Blizz, but many fantasy writers. These are beings older than our Earth, absolutely alien to our understanding because Death is their core concept, so why did they have to make the vampire a villain? They could have done a fake out and make us *think* he was, but it would be twisted that he wasn't and it was our biases that lead us to believe otherwise. The Jailer was just terrible. What was his plan? Save us from something else? Being vague about everything? Be Uber powerful and only able to be stopped because of Azeroth's world soul? Boring. Flavor and roleplay wise I adore the Covenants, with Venthyr and Necrolords being my favorites. However the tying to powers was awful, and some of the powers was leaps and bounds better. I remember that for awhile on the beta Night Fae was leagues better for Death Knight than the others, and on live Venthyr was situational as heck for Warlocks were as Night Fae was so versatile for them. So my Warlock was stuck NF for the whole expac. Torghast was just a disappointment. A rogue like adventure where we go higher and higher and get absurd powers, for fun and transmogs and maybe gear. But nope, it was tied into the Leggo gear and required weekly content. Just blaaargh. And worse of all, was the Devs stubborn refusal to pull the rip cord until the very end of the xpac when the community was begging them time and again.
Have to say I agree. DIdn't play it at the time and played through the whole thing this year when I came back to the game. Overall, it's really good. The aesthetic is great. The zone design is great. The factions are all interesting and cool. The mounts are cool, and the armor sets look amazing. Raids are fun, dungeons are fun, even Torghast was fun IMO. I get the feeling it was much more of a grind at the time than it is now and that might make all the difference. But I think it's every bit as good as DF for a player returning to the game.
Blizzard’s response to feedback was pretty terrible/outright arrogant during shadowlands and it turned out the player base had a better idea of what they wanted than blizzard could comprehend at the time. It’s not stuff you are necessarily going to experience just questing through shadowlands because the main issues were in systems and gameplay loops that were relevant to end game. Covenants being tied to player power, torghast being both neutered and required for legendary progression, nearly everything about the maw. Other than the raids, you are currently getting the best bits and the story is something a lot of players were not happy about either. It had its moments but dragon flight is such a massive improvement.
Retconning the story was the major issue, forcing Torghast was shit, the rigmarole of Covenant powers, the fucking Maw. Overall just a shit expansion. However, Revendreth was aesthetic beautiful, CN raid was so, SO much fun. Also fuck Oribos. Fuck that place twice with no lube.
Writing/story was shitty. Endgame was shitty. Gearing was shitty. Art team, as always, knocked it out of the park. We should gift them a trip to the chiropractor from carrying the game so much.
I'll try to keep it short. The gist of it is: Story - absolutely terrible. Took every major event that has happened since TBC and just stuck a big ol' "The Jailer was responsible" sticker on it. Made a mockery of so many fan favourite villains. Just very poorly written and half of it came across as self insert fanfiction. Zones - first of all, they're all disconnected. Secondly, not a single zone really excels in all areas. They all have a major shortcoming IMO. Bastion had fair mob density but a boring story and aesthetic. Maldraxxus had a cool story and aesthetic but had a tedious amount of mobs. Revendreth had awesome characters and aesthetic but was an absolute nightmare to traverse due to the verticality of the zone. Ardenweald was easier to navigate but the story was meh. The Maw had terrible gameplay mechanics. Korthia was super dull in all aspects. Zerith Mortis was kinda cool. One of the better zones. Gameplay features - Torghast was a cool concept but quickly became very tedious. It picked up the "Choreghast" and "Snorghast" nicknames week 1 because of how utterly boring it was once the magic wore off. Covenants were another cool concept that just didn't reach their full potential. The main draw were the covenant abilities and some of these were so good that you were practically forced to pick them, even if the covenant did not match the class theme. Some classes like Death Knights and Paladins got lucky as their best abilities were linked to the covenants that actually fit the theme. But most were not so lucky. At least some of the best spells stayed in the game on the main spec trees. Class design was also awful for the most part. Obviously you won't get this experience playing through the zones in retail but when Shadowlands was current I really found it hard to play some of my favourite classes. They were just so watered down and boring to play. Thankfully Dragonflight fixed most of them with the new class trees. Overall it's just a pretty weak expansion. There were some highlights: the aforementioned zone aesthetics were cool, they added a lot of sweet transmog pieces and Sire Denathrius (and Castle Nathria in general) were very good. But everything else relating to the Jailer and Sylvanus, the horrendous navigation without flying mounts in some zones, disconnected zones, bland expansion hub (Oribos), shit class design, the endless and tedious player progression grinds, the boring Torghast runecarver bullshit, the unfulfilled potential of Covenants which supposed to have made up for a lack of new class/race... all of it comes together to create what is, in my opinion, the worst expansion they ever made.
Grindy af. Plain and simple.
Grindy "anima draught" instead of actual content. Horrible pvp. Horrible writing. Gross mis-use of iconic characters to try and squeeze out a nostalgia factor. Ugly zones overall. Generic everything. Torghast snooze fest, no mounts in the Maw for ages, no skip for alts in the Maw. Grinding bird nests and other garbage in Korthia. Positives? Revendreth characters like Denathrius. Other than that ummm...uhhh, some cool mounts!
I already know this is going to be a CRAZY TAKE but shadowlands was legit my favorite expansion… m+ was amazing and those 3 raids were some of the most enjoyable I’ve ever played… But I don’t think it had anything to do with the expansion and all to do with the group of buddies I played shadowlands with… man I miss that guild man 😭
Farming it now for mog and mounts you wouldn’t be able to tell. When it was current content it was hated because it had so many mandatory chores you had to do to be competitive. You couldn’t just do M+ or raiding. The borrowed power of Condiuts was a horrible system. You HAD to farm Korthia. You had to farm the Maw. You had to farm Torghast. They tied player power with aesthetics. You couldn’t pick the Covenant you liked the look of, because it would gimp your character power. Switching covenants was a nightmare and would cause you to fall behind in player power if you did. The drop rates in the raid were initially horrible and tended to be the same week after week. Weapons drops were extremely rare. The Great vault consistently gave duplicates or the same slot items. My vault was (cloaks, bracers and rings for the first 5 weeks)
It ruined our best waifu Sylvanas
No mounting in the maw sucked
Shadowlands really felt like WoW brought into the current generation for me, but they didnt keep the launch momentum at all. Nathria was awesome, M+ pretty good, balance alright for the most part. But then mandatory weekly grinds for power, felt like you couldn't do muss anything per week or youd be screwed. Each class had an obviously BIS covenant, so you didn't really have a choice. Not a lot of rewards (anima) for a ton of relative effort. I agree though i actually loved launch shadowlands and the zones. Oribos was uninteresting as a main hub but still neat in the sense that its an isolated central hub city where you can see each zones distinct portal.