[Feedback] Shadowlands

Soooo Shadowlands

I must say I enjoy the expansion so far but in a way it feels like I’m enjoying the hope of it fulfilling its potential more so than the actual implementation.


Mission Tables

I love the underlying ideas. They’re entirely optional, provide good income of mats and gold for those who want to bother and it’s more engaging than those terrible old missions everyone just used an add-on for to auto-send everything.

The reality however is that the mission tables seem terribly balanced, both as such and between Covenants. They are broken for people who progressed in the story beyond a point where the post-nerf troops are able to do anything – leaving you with … nothing to do but fail missions until the failed mission XP levels your followers? Terrible UI – I have no idea at all what my odds of winning are, what damage the enemy does on a normal attack or any indication at all for what would be a good strategic decision. It feels like a really complicated game with no manual. Followers you acquire late (locked by story for example) start at level one, bringing the level of your neutral troops down and being super hard to level since you got no low level missions anymore due to the way the mission table progresses…
And then there is this awful “heal all” button that costs like a gazillion anima of which you won’t have anything oozing out of your butt unless you do all anima world quests. And even then… The placement of that button next to the “start mission” button is just… give the guy who put that s*** there a slap on the back of the head please. Holy crap.

2 months into the expansion it feels like not much has happened to address these issues.


Gearing

So I’m not raiding this expansion, meaning the only thing I can add here is that the community seemed to be somewhat salty with raid drop frequency. It feels in line with what I will say about Mythic+, which is what I am doing 90% of the time.

So I just got my Keystone Master (all on 15+) and I am somewhat at a loss. My gear is mostly 207+ (overall ilvl 215), with 2 slots being 200 and 203. An M+ dungeon takes between 30-40 minutes with a real chance of someone leaving at any point during a single screwup. If you time it you get 2 items, otherwise 1. These are 30-40 minutes of nail-biting stress (like a 40 minute mythic boss battle) and if you make a single mistake you are rewarded with 1 item for 5 people.

Listen… I get you wanna slow down and all. Go a bit back towards classic. Take a chill pill. Don’t get everything day1 and then whine there is nothing left to do and all. I commend that. I like the slower pace. But at some point you just sit there, look at the 35 anima you got as reward for ageing twice the rate over the past 35 minutes and somehow are oddly happy that maybe at least your RIO got boosted to allow you into higher groups. What is that, you actually got a 20% chance item? Aww shucks, it’s a slot that I already got covered with better stats.

Like I know classic itemization is different and all, but since this change in loot frequency aligns with you saying that you tried to learn some lessons from classic I feel it is fair to assume that this is one of those changes and thusly feel justified in comparing them.
So when I do a 50 minute Stratholme run I got a good shot at getting some item (even if I cannot use it). Every run I see some 5 items drop and can roll for them. There is also trash loot and all sorts of worthwhile stuff in there, like essences, a mount, rares, random epics … there’s just a ton of reward bell ringing going on and it’s a lot less stressful than M+ is.

As it stands, doing additional M+ feels utterly pointless. It’s stressful and not absurdly fun. I LOVE dungeons but the whole
*RIO application for getting accepted into groups
*people leaving during runs
*runs feeling doomed or pointless after a single mistake (depends on the group obviously. If you got the DPS to plow through packs you can afford more mistakes but let’s not pretend like every group has 5 fully functioning brains in them)
getting crp all at the end of this mental marathon (it is a very stressfull experience for a prolonged period of time. I don’t care if anyone on the forums does not know what stress is or enjoys this particular kind of stress so much that they like it. It’s draining. It’s work. Even though it can be terribly fun it is also very stressful.)
*pouring over 1000g in consumables into every run, potentially entirely wasting it if someone leaves

stuff is just super unfun. And working through that pile of s*** for 35 f***ing anima? Really? REALLY?

It also brings along the “problem” of armor class stacking. Screws over certain classes in trying to gear because gear is so rare that people want to maximize their trading efficiency and thusly won’t bring certain classes.

At this point it seems to me like my best option to progress my char is PvP. Yay.


PvP Balance

I haven’t really enjoyed PvP since the introduction of Arena to be frank. I enjoyed rBGs but apparenty the community is not on my side with this so I don’t think I need to say too much about this. I’m not a fantastic PvPer but I am also not using my keyboard to turn.

Long story short: The PvP balance seems absolutely awful. Plenty of posts on this. PvP could probably benefit from losing Covenant abilities altogether but what I really wanna say here is that I’m not even a big PvPer and I’m frustrated at how slowly Blizzard fixes stuff. We just got a nerf to Convoke. After like 3 months. And that was an insta deleto button like holy shoot.

I wonder if my Priest will ever stand a chance against 3 Sub Rogues CCing my mates and deleting her in a global. It’s just terribly unfun. Maybe you don’t care about my opinion but alas here it is.

For what it’s worth, I do enjoy the bursty nature of Shadowlands PvP. If there is healers around at least. Obviously as stated some classes feel totally out of line but outside of the cheese it feels kinda good.


Mythic+

So I’ve talked a little bit about M+ before related to gearing but there’s something else I’d like to toss out there: Lose the f timer

Now I do know there are a lot of people who enjoy the competitive ranking and that’s fine and I believe there is absolutely a place for that with idk maybe the keystone master achievement and mount reward, huh. But for your normal every day M+ run, the timer is so utterly toxic.

Benefits of a timer:

  1. A way to gage player skill to assess what +level they can or cannot do
  2. A competitive score board
  3. Possibility of big emotional pay-off when beating timer
  4.    ….     ???
    

Downsides of a timer:

  1. Elitism isn’t even bad at this point anymore, it’s encouraged. You don’t wanna take chances of Donald to screw up your key so you go with people who have proven that they can do the content you wanna do. Frankly, no blame on the players here, but it’s a pretty bad experience to try and bring RIO up when people constantly reject you out of the warranted fear of losing their timer.

  2. A stressful experience. Like even when you set out to “just complete the dungeon and take your time” there is this ticking clock in the corner of your eye. I won’t harp too long on this. Timer = Stress. If you like adrenaline that’s cool (I do certainly, but I also like the option of crawling through a dungeon). Taking your time is disincentivized by downranking your key and reducing the loot you get, so while there might be some stoics out there who genuinely aren’t bothered with the timer, I’d wager for the vast majority of people it’s nothing that fills them with joy.

  3. Possibility of big emotional let-down when failing the timer

  4. People leaving after mistakes cause they are playing for RIO and finishing not on time is not worth it

  5. Small mistakes can ruin runs. This is especially detrimental to players who still need to learn. The whole experience is anti-learn. Make 1 mistake, key is trash. Find a new group.

Now player skill can be gaged in more ways than their ability to rush through content and a scoreboard could be built out of other factors than a success-determining timer (maybe a timer that isn’t tied to anything but a scoreboard and the +5 +10 +15 in time meta achievements). The emotional pay-off goes both ways and then I just wonder if a timer is actually the thing to go for here.

Imagine no timer. The M±Waldo opens a Thorgast-like layer selection menu in which you can select any difficulty you have unlocked (by completing the former - with some dungeon-wide spillage so someone with NW+15 would never be required to do TOP+2 to progress or whatever - details). Then a totally normal dungeon (think M+0) starts. With normal trash loot, boss loot, being able to replace a player if they suck too hard or their house is on fire.

The limiting factor in this mode is just the difficulty. If you think slogging through a +15 waiting for bloodlust between every pull then getting some 4 items for that 4 hour investment seems like a good idea then go for it! The difficulty scaling would be harsher so that a +15 would be harder, but you’d have all the time in the world to figure it out.

My best experience in past years has been my first +10 run in Legion. We just wanted to finish it for the chest and we were all trash geared (as you can see with my char I’m usually ahead of the curve a bit so my first +10 was I think second week so gear was still kinda meh). It was a Halls of Valor with Tyrannical and the first and second boss were just so cutting edgingly hard! But we all wanted this, so we stuck around and learned those fights to perfection, using personal CDs and whatnot. It felt so good to overcome that. With a timer? First wipe, screw that I’m out. 0 learning, 0 reason to stick together. Dungeon is ruined.

I am aware that that was also a timed dungeon but special circumstances made people wanna stick around through the timer and get that done. Blizzard should fish for that experience. And every run could be like that if you could find a difficulty that your group is comfy with and then work through it. Make strategizing before pulls an option over learning a route by heart. I mean I’m not even an M+ hater, I’ve got several MoP server top rank titles. I can enjoy this. But I feel a whole lot of others cannot and furthermore 40 minute gauntlets are not exactly an every day relaxation.

I’ve got clips from the classic relaunch where some friends and I were laughing our asses off trying to jump up to a window in BRD for like 10 minutes. Failing can be so much fun but strict timers prohibit any sort of mistake and put pressure on people.

Imagine Mythic raiding being Heroic raiding with a timer that allows for 2 boss wipes and nothing else. “Sounds fun”. Yea? Sure as a challenge – but not as a main path to progress your character, week after week – having people leave mid first boss because he sees to many slackers in the damage meter and what have you not.

The whole concept of M+ derived from challenge modes. A mode meant to be played once (per char) and not for progression but solely for the leaderboard and the tmogs. So this was fine with a timer! But as a mode of end game progression I feel like this just isn’t a great way to do it.

Make it hard (scaling up with ++es that is). Make it tyrannical + fortified every week. And sure, keep the other affix rotation. And then just make it like mini raids where you can get together with your crew and earn some phat loot at whatever pace you desire. Feel accomplished when you finish instead of feeling frustrated if the tiniest thing goes wrong.

Please consider redesigning M+ without a timer. Thanks.


Thorgast

I’ve given that feedback before but I might as well put it here for completion’s sake.

Love the concept, love it on my mage, loved twisting corridors, but…

  1. Balance. Some classes’ solo experience is just a slog fest and some classes’ anima powers are boring and or weak.
  2. Time investment. It does feel very slow at times
  3. Replayability. I enjoy it when it’s at it’s best but I don’t see myself ever putting the time into e.g. twisted corridors again ever because even if playing with 100 anima powers is awesome, sinking like 2 hours into that for absolutely no rewards is just not an option. Have the end of layer bosses give 250 anima or sth (probably better 75-250-500 so people don’t just farm the first layer). Have the end boss have a chance to drop a random mount or anything. Why would you let this content be a one and done? The different mixtures of anima powers make for endless replayability but it’s just too much of a time investment for no payoff at all. Hell, even Ash isn’t a long time motivator seeing as you can only wear one legendary and once you got your BiS and maybe an off spec one the motivation to farm ash is dwindling.

The Maw (the what now? I amost forgot about it)

Loathed farming rep there. Was much smoother once I got the mount but at that point I was also almost done with the rep grind. Got 2 sockets out of it. Never going there again. 7000 Stygia for 1 socket? Why? WHY?

Like I could see myself do a Maw run when I get an upgrade, gather some 1500 Stygia to socket the item and cool. I felt like I had something to do, it’s no longer super arduous due to the mount and I get a small power increase from it. What’s not to like? But farming this utterly repetitive content every single day for a week to get 1 socket? Are you out of your mind? It’s really not that cool, guys. It looks bland, it’s somewhat hard to navigate, there is only so many different rares and dailies there… I don’t want this to be the content I have to farm every. Single. day. Now you can say “then don’t do it!” well I am doing just that but I find it kinda disappointing. Like even considering how slow upgrades seem to come if I get 1 upgrade a week I better have farmed that whole week for Stygia so I can socket it. And if I don’t wanna do it every day it feels like it’s hardly worth doing at all.

It’s hilarious that there’s also this conduit upgrade thing you can buy for 2000 Stygia as if anyone would waste that much Stygia when it’s so slow to farm.

6 Likes

Very Good and contructive post.

Better than some of these other trolls on these forums

2 Likes

Half agree and half disagree with you.
I still do them ‘mindlessly’. I just fill the slots and the only thing I pay attention to is to put shields and swords in the top row and healers and bows in the bottom row. I do fine.
But I’ve stopped caring an running missions because the fact that every new follower you earn starts at 1 and brings down your average is just beyond stupid imo.

I don’t raid either (besides LFR until I’ve done all the wings at least - and don’t get me started on that… The raid released months ago… we still don’t have all the LFR wings out yet… It’s insulting tbh) and I don’t run M+ or PvP. So gearing for me is down to getting the Covenant set and upgrading it and then hoping that a world boss will drop an upgrade once every thousand years. Fun. /sarcasm

I don’t PvP, so I’ll trust your word on this.

Okay, here I have a ‘thing’ …

How about just making the timer OPTIONAL?! :slight_smile:
You finish a run, it counts for the vault etc…
You finish a run within a certain timer and you get something EXTRA. Doesn’t even have to be ‘power’, it can be something cosmetic, but unique to this particular feat.

I hate it. I really, really, really hate it.
I want it gone. I don’t ever want to have to go there again. But I’m afraid I will have to, because that’s been Blizzard’s MO for years; forcing us to do their crappy content because ‘reasons’. :sob:

I’ll just copy paste myself:

I hate it. I really, really, really hate it.
I want it gone. I don’t ever want to have to go there again. But I’m afraid I will have to, because that’s been Blizzard’s MO for years; forcing us to do their crappy content because ‘reasons’. :sob:

Otherwise; nice post. :relaxed:

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I don’t know what you are trying to say.

I actually think Shadowlands is doing a somewhat good job at providing options for content without forcing people. Sure, some things are more mandatory than others (Thorgast Ash, ironically) but I feel like the whole idea of non player-power related rewards is something that fundamentally Blizzard should expand upon.

Don’t enjoy some content? - Screw it.

Frankly, Thorgast needs some non power related rewards and at the same time the “Thorgast only” reward (Ash) could be a lil more prevalent outside of Thorgast.

It’s such a good base idea (the whole you don’t have to do anything, do what you want the rewards are just cosmetic or whatever). Like… FANTASTIC. As if Blizzard finally listened. They’re so close, just need to go the extra few meters.

Thanks for reading the entire thing mate. Halfway through I was like “Whatever. It’s just feedback. It’s fine if only a Blizzard dude reads it”. You’re a trooper.

But half of the covenant quests sends you to the Maw, and the main storyline requires torghast, so the optional isn’t really optional.

There’s no point to m+ with the timer removed. It’d be like raiding without bosses. The timer is what makes the mode fun. If you find this stressful go with a group of friends and you can take as long as you’d like; there is nothing preventing you from spending 3 hours on a key. Instead to prevent people from leaving keys you could implement some kind of karma system like in ff14 or penalize those that leave keys with a time-out.

Torghast is a really boring experience, I only do it for the weekly ash pretty much. It probably should reward some form of gear. Getting a 185 piece doesn’t seem game breaking to me.

I think sockets at 7k stygia is fine. If you put it at 1500 mythic raiders and high end pvpers will have everything socketed within 2 weeks putting an even bigger gap between casuals and them.

Overall I agree with your post; yes, m+ is toxic, torghast is boring and the maw is really annoying and bland, but I don’t agree with your solutions.

This? They need to wake up now. People leaving after 1 min ruining your key is frustrating, just work out harder content like the affixes without timers blizz, it is not hard

270 gold plus 5 herbs, topkek

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Lose all your consumables
Get your key downranked
Get absolutely no pay off for the time invested until that person leaves - including the 30 minutes it took to find a group that is even willing to take you with your only +15 run being over time and you kinda regretting getting that stain on your profile by not being an utter dick to the key holder(great with the people who leave after a wipe at the last boss)

And all that ridiculousness for a 20-40% chance at an item. ONE ITEM. No trash greys to sell, no mats, no herbs no nothing. A 1200g consumable bill. And the odds of getting ANYTHING out of it are stacked against you.

Well, it’d be like raiding if you chose to play over a certain M+x difficulty for sure. So? What’s not to like about content that is challenging but doesn’t require some poor chap to try and get some 20 people to show up on time so 24 others don’t have to sit idly and wait for 30 minutes? If you want a less raiding like dungeon experience, do a lower difficulty with less affixes, less mob health and whatnot.

What do you think differs a heroic dungeon from raiding?

Wh … what? How? What? Have you done a high key in tyrannical week?

That is a highly subjective statement that I would assure you with near utter certainty is not true for the majority of players. And while I personally enjoy doing it once in a while, at the end of the day it’s my end game progression as I have 0 interest in the meta-game of raiding (reading up 3 dr thesis on boss mechanics, organizing with so many other people, having a video game unflexibly block one or more spots of weekly schedule). The huge amount of complaints about leavers and not getting into groups and whatnot to me is a good testament of how toxic it is for the community.

I very much could not possibly believe that a system with a timer attracts more players than one without a timer.

The time could stay, hidden or shown with addons, for those who want to play leaderboard. Reward seasonal rewards like WoD or MoP CMs. But having it as a repeatable form of end game progression just does not seem like the best approach at all for the reasons stated.

Yes there is. There is 0 reward in it. 1 item for 5 people and that is it. That is the definition of a waste of time beyond doing it once a week for a high level weekly chest reward. So yay I get to spend my in game time for a reasonable reward once a week.

Sorry but your arguments seem very baseless, subjective and sometimes downright absurd.

Totally baseless remark. No explanation. Just the most plain rhetoric imaginable.

Another absolutely unfounded and demonstrably false statement that you don’t bother to explain or anything.

A highly subjective statement presented as objective fact. Awesome.

I had already explored that option and earlier in my post outlined why this is just an absolutely terrible suggestion.

Instead, how about not designing one of the three options for end game progression in a way that is so fundamentally toxic? Again, I very much enjoy doing timed content from time to time, especially when the reward structure is done well. But the reward structure right now is terribly negatively stacked against the player and a lot of it has to do with the way the M+ concept works.

  1. The idea that you cannot invite someone else to finish the run. Not even if you wanna take as long as you want! And not just when some angry kid ragequits. If your friend needs to go to the hospital the run is over if you don’t outgear it to the point where you can 4man it.

  2. The idea that loot is distracting people from focusing on the timer and thusly there is no loot at all - barring the ridiculously slow chance to get the single item that drops for the group.

  3. The external system that is RIO, that can at it’s best help players build groups with proper experience to tackle the run and at worst make it unsufferingly hard to find groups for content that you can clearly do (like clearly having done 2 +14s but getting no invites for +14s because your RIO is more like +11 maybe), forcing you into a very narrow progression path and taking up a ton of time to find a group for a dungeon…

  4. Ignoring the timer is not only not progression, it’s degression. It sets you back. If keystone levels didn’t degrade if you don’t finish in time, this would be a better argument, as you could push to a difficulty you’re comfy at and then just have fun in that content. But this is not how it works. Once you ignore the timer the difficulty is gonna lower (negatively affecting the already very poor M+ reward system), because Blizzard really doesn’t want you to ignore the timer and play it at your own pace… FOR WHATEVER REASON.

Like really… you haven’t said anything but “you are wrong”. No basis for this, no explanation…

This is also somewhat irritable. Like this makes 0 sense whatsoever. You reason for thinking 7k Stygia is fine comes down to arguing that a lower price point would give people who can farm a lot an advantage over those who cannot. So putting aside the whole idea that WoW is and has always been designed in a way that rewards sinking a lot of time into, how exactly does a higher price point solve the gap between casuals and hard cores?

If anything it makes it worse, as the pretty long grind required to acquire even a single socket may be off putting to many. But moreover such a high price rewards steady high time investment way more than a price point that allows people to get what they need without having to farm for it 7 days a week without lapse.

Before my mission table broke (aka they nerfed the fae troops to the point where I cannot finish missions anymore with the disparity in follower power and offered missions) I was raking in enough cash to sustain my M+ grind by just doing missions once or twice a day and selling what I got from it. The higher level mission rewards are pretty generous tbh, especially considering how little effort it takes.

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What? ofc there is, it would be a normal progression via dungeon, You do not have to add timer to make it E-sport, just make the keys more difficult and it would be a naturall progression as you would not be able to complete until you progress in gear like Raiding, just you do not have the elitist aura around it with idiots rushing like wildmen and ruining keys if you do not follow they way they watched on Youtube. Sorry the m+ is starting to get outdated and they need to innovate. Timers suck and the only game that should have it is Rally games :stuck_out_tongue: and people can start a stop watch if the want to film speedruns!

2 Likes

What’s with you people misquoting me? Have you read my post? The reason I say it’s like raiding without bosses is because the bosses in dungeons are fairly simple and are similar to mini bosses often found between raid bosses. I feel the whole experience just becomes a waiting game at a certain point that’s lost all its purpose.

Then the reward structure might need to change, but as it stands you can spend as long as you like with 0 pressure if your group’s fine with it. You have that option, the reward structure is something that’s a bit messed up in all of shadowlands and even timing keys doesn’t net you with an item most of the time.

Okay, what do you think is the point of M+ without the timer? It just becomes a regular dungeon doesn’t it? It’ll just be 5-man raiding with way too much trash, the whole idea of getting through a dungeon as efficient and fast as possible is what makes M+, M+.

Okay I guess I should’ve stated this as an opinion, I just can’t really envision people getting much fun out of M+ without a timer.

Then stop quoting me multiple times, you even misquoted me before by only quoting half a sentence.

This actually prevents alot of toxic behaviour as well. Imagine a class is particularly good against a certain boss. What would prevent a toxic group leader from just kicking people to make room for the strong class? Kicking people would also become more prevalent. Like do you think PUG raid groups are great? Because this would create a mini-version of that.

Not sure what this even means.

I feel r.io is just a tool, I personally invite people based on their score for the dungeon I’m hosting, but I can imagine other people run their groups differently, it’s hard to blame the tool for that.

I feel not placing a timer on infinitely scaling content will just make it so the limit is the amount of damage your group can sustain, like if everything in a mythic+50 one-shots you there’s no way of refining your strategy or trying a different route, after a while it just becomes mathematically impossible. Sure, you could say the same about the timer, but I feel there are way more possibilities in terms of improvement when it comes to beating a timer. You could refine your route, you could use high mobility classes to your advantage, there might be skips that make the dungeon easier to complete etc etc.

This makes 0 sense as well huh? How nice, you see the high-end players will have maxed out their BiS slots way sooner than casuals. Making the sockets they can create more pertinent (they’d never have to replace them).

However if both the High-end player and the casual have to take a while to get their sockets it gives the casual more time to get their BiS items.

Also a lower costs would make it so that a casual player has to grind sockets forever (because a casual player is constantly upgrading gear) instead of a high-end player who’d be done after a few weeks.

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