Ding fourth level 60 and here are my thoughts

Some beautiful but very cramped zones, horrible questing on rails experience. and a ‘story’ I couldn’t care less about. With a few exceptions, exactly the same cut n paste quests patterns in every zone. No one in chat and felt like a single player game. I don’t much like levelling in modern wow and prefer to find my own path rather than being led around by the nose.

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For me leveling will never be fun, no matter what they do. It’s just a mandatory chore that I have to do in order to get to the max level where all the good stuff is.

If I want to experience the story, I can just do the quests at the max level when I’m going for the Loremaster achievement. I don’t need leveling for that.

The side quest that irritated me most was the Bastion one ending with a choice between Larion or Phalynx. It both implies there will be a mount at the end of it or at least draws you to infer there will be but when you make your choice…nothing. There may be something from this in a future patch (looking at some Googled articles which were complete guesswork) but the way it’s left hanging feels like an unfinished chain.

I quite liked the variety of quest types in Nazjatar as there was a broad mix but we seem to have gone back a step with Shadowlands with just the occasional side quest that’s different from kill x of this, loot y of that.

I try to do everything on one char then pick and choose on others. Only levelling when time permits and grouped with my other half but in a few hours free today I’ve taken an alt to the exact same point just doing campaign quests. For me they would have done better to ditch such a strict linear approach to the campaign and let us start out in any one of the zones all converging to a conclusion.

I’ve only levelled one character, brought another through the Maw, and haven’t really done anything. I have a great lack of enthusiasm so far.

They mostly fixed the scaling problems of BfA. By making each zone have a narrow range of levels, they removed most of the awful effects of getting weaker as we level that were all over the forums in BfA.

Questing on Rails is BAD. Bad, bad, bad. I didn’t like having no choice the first time, and I dread doing the same quests, in the same order, again - but I hear that ToF is worse, so that’s a problem. Need to investigate further.

XP tuning was pretty good. I had heard that the mandatory campaign was just enough to get you to 60. So I did no dungeons, hardly any side quests, and just a few herbs along the way, and completed the campaign in Revendreth half a level short of 60. That’s pretty well measured!

There is no Zone I want to be in. Ambiance is a big thing for me. I find Ardenweald and Revendreth tolerable, but I’m not enchanted by them as I am by so many Warcraft zones. I actually had to turn the Gamma down to quest in Bastion, and yet Bastion has an inappropriately regretful, nostalgic feel. I have no idea how any team could have come up with that for the pinnacle of the afterlife. I would say the music was phoned in for everything but Revendreth, except that would be giving it too much credit; it has no conviction at all. Oribos is a bus station. :frowning:

The Maw intro was fine by me. I see a lot of complaints about it, and about having to go through it again. I get that, but it didn’t and won’t bother me. It’s not that long, and gives good XP. It’s also kind of funny, having Thrall tank, Jaina DPS, and Anduin heal, in their escort quest of making sure you reach your destination. :stuck_out_tongue:

The story and the world doesn’t feel like WoW to me. First content in the game where I would say that. I’m not sure that I can analyse it; maybe it will come to me later on.

The story didn’t make me care. So Baine and Tyrande are left behind. We have no need to worry about Tyrande in the Maw. She’s not locked in with them - they’re locked in with her! We knew Baine was going to be OK, because story. There was no Runas the Shamed for us to relate to, and while they did have to pack 4 stories into those levels, they never approached the involvement of Suramar. It wasn’t outright bad, like the BfA pre-story, but it didn’t hook me. My impression is that they depended far too much on cinematics for effect, and that’s not a good thing - like the writers said: “Get players invested in the characters??? You what? Not my job, mate!”

Mob density around the zones was good. There are some denser and many open areas, nothing likle the grid-paper layout of the mobs at Ashhvane in BfA.

Danuser and his pronounts just will not go away. For those of you who didn’t notice, I will say no more. Once you do notice, you can’t un-notice. Not important, just a constant reminder of his personal need to virtue-signal while making the world a little worse.

Questing proper felt weak. Not outright bad, just a bit tedious. I do not like gimmick quests. Not Kirin Tor, not Turtles, not Mad Whoozis, not Bejeweled. Our job is to kill things and take their stuff, not play whatever favourite childhood phone or console game some rookie designer wants to force on the rest of the world. And, thankfully, there were few gimmicks. Several places where the quest was unclear. I miss being told where to go, and just looking for an arrow instead. Ratio of messy kill-and-collect to straight questboss-kill was too high, though. This seems to follow through into WQ, from what I’ve seen.

I could go on, with good and bad points, but I already hear the piteous cries to stahp! :smiley:

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Got to admit I didnt like the forced feeling of the questing storylines this expansion. I mean I enjoyed doing them but there didnt feel like there were quite as many side quests or bonus objectives.
Personally I like having more choice to explore and choose how I level (Threads of Fate is a step in the right direction but it still ties you in to just one type of progression…I would of liked the option to replay different zones main story on different characters).

Although…4 level 60s already!!? Im quite happy taking it slow and stretching out my content!

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This was my thought as well. Almost nothing in Shadowlands feels like it’s part of Warcraft. Sure, we had some dead characters show up, but I don’t think that was enough to convince me. Remove those characters and Shadowlands could’ve been a completely different MMO and franchise imo.

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i felt like it was a good amount of content tbh.

8 M+0s.
Heroic Spam for left over spots
Clear the Maw every day
do all the avaliable torghast.
Reach Renown level 3
Daily Calling.

Kept me preocuppied for majority of the week. but then again im not a Player who booked time off, but the games content shouldnt be so great the game requires you to do that to keep up either.

Its their trademark no middle ground at all its always 0 or 100.

The leveling to me felt way faster then any of the other expansions to date. And then right on onto some forced grinding, oh joy. I could not care less about the story, they did not make me care about any of the charaters of feel a connection to the zones even. Extremely weak start to the expansion for sure.

I can’t believe some people would not have felt this when MoP launched… that asian wannabe pandaria wibe was as un-warcrafty as it possibly could, and beyond boring zones.

Personally MOP is my favorite expansion, so can’t really say anything there. Great raids, great music and fun quests and zones.

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I hate them the most, really disconnected from what wow feels to me… goes to show how much tastes can differ.

I was totally hooked on story and gameplay in Pandaria and had fun from start to finish this expansion though i just feel like i am still playing WoD/Legion because never ending WQ’s and tedious power of the season grind that only thing which is different from wod/legion/bfa is the name of the crap i am grinding.

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I for one like the grind better than doing same handful of daily quests in one spot day after day like it was before wq’s.

  1. Questing was way too easy and dumb

  2. I hated all the forced escort quests that were in between the (kill=10, loot=10, collect=6) quests.

There was no freedom.

  1. I had no sense of danger anywhere until my first mythic0, and even that was because group didnt know tactics or press interrupt.

  2. I have already very little interest continuing due to these forced anima/soul ash grinds. Got PTSD from azerite farm in legion and bfa

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That comes wth callings though?

Really liked levelling. I thought I’d be a Night Fae initially, but the Necrolord quest really clicked. Secutor Mevix is now my favorite character!

i think the problem with the questing is that none of the questlines are resolved in the zones because the rest of the story is locked behind the covenant campaign

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Questing in WoW always sucked. It’s not any different this time around.

There are just a few types of quests, even though you need to do hundreds of them in order to hit level 60.

-Kill quests. Pretty self explanatory duh
-Boss kill quests. Basically, kill one slightly stronger mob. This mob is just a HP punching bag, it’s not more threatening than regular mobs. You simply dps it 5 times longer than a regular mob.
-Loot quests. Another version of kill quest. It is basically a kill quest, you need to loot corpses.
-Use quests. These are usually another type of kill quests, you have to use an item on the corpse. The item usually has an annoying cooldown on it to make it more tedious
-Interact quests. Click on things in the world, that’s it. Also kill quests because these objects are located in zones densely populated with mobs.
-Escort quests. Travel along a npc and kill few enemies. A kill quest that is particularly annoying to do. Everyone loves escort quests.
-Vehicle quests. Mount a vehicle and AOE down a large number of mobs. They die in one hit.

And this goes on, on and on. There is no variance at all. Every one of those stupid quests plays exactly the same and they compose 90+% of all your quests that you have to do.

Even prior expansions had some variance to break the tedium:
-PROPER group quests. A mob that really requires 5 players to defeat and cannot be soloed. There is a variation of Ring of Blood in Maldraxxus but that’s the only group quest in the entire expansion.

-Dungeon quests from Legion that awarded a HUGE amount of experience. Like, 10 times the regular quest (on top of whatever you get inside the dng). This gave incentive to queue dungeons. Also those quests were required to get pillars of creation part done.

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