This is mostly just a rant, but I needed to put it out somewhere.
At the start of Shadowlands, I went to The Maw maybe three or four times, nothing significant. I wasn’t interested in Venari rep, and beat Torghast fairly early on, so there was no reason for me to go besides standing by the lava to get the 5/10/15/20 Lost Souls for the weekly. After upgrading my covenant sanctum (Night Fae) to level 3, I found I needed more spirits for the 3-day-lootboxes in the garden, and knew Venari quests was the way to do it.
My Maw experience this afternoon is possibly one of the worst gameplay experiences I’ve had in WoW, if not in gaming. The lack of mounting is passable at first, since I play a priest with decent mobility (Angelic Feather, Spiritshape), but the more time I spend in The Maw the more unpleasant it becomes, and that’s a part of the design. What sort of developer designs a zone that is supposed to become less fun the more time you spend there?
If the Eye of The Jailer stages were health/damage debuffs, I could maybe see the appeal (enemies get more powerful the longer you stay), but instead the focus seems to be solely on mobility. You are nuked from orbit if you stand still too long; if you are running, you can get shackled down, and have to manually disable every single shackle; if you are fighting an enemy, an assassin will appear from behind and daze you; and, to top it all off, even if you do everything right, an angel of death can just decide to halt whatever you’re doing and carry you off.
The fact that The Maw already by design removes the one major form of player mobility (mounting) makes these stacking forms of mobility halters an utter nightmare to play against. Sure, the lore is that The Maw is an oppressive and awful place to be, but why in God’s name would this mean the zone is designed to be a terrible gameplay experience? Hades is set in The Underworld, and doesn’t decide that, because of this, the gameplay must be atrocious. Doom is set in Hell, and doesn’t try to enforce a fantasy that you are being strangled alive by your computer. These games focus on an oppressive atmosphere as opposed to an oppression gameplay loop.
The fact that 9.1 is also focusing on The Maw can only lead me to believe Blizzard was developing 9.1 simultaneously with Shadowlands (and thus was too far along to scrap the main concept), or they genuinely believe this nightmare was a success and want to double-down on the system. It’s plain ignorance, and if anyone reading this has gotten enjoy out of The Maw, I’d appreciate knowing what it is about this zone you find fun. Because, ultimately, that is a game’s goal; to be an enjoyable investment of time.
None of these arguments are new or unique, but after the hours I spent trying to get just a few seeds for my garden, I’m already feeling done with WoW for the week. No game should design itself around causing player fatigue. I’ve played this game since Cataclysm, and Timeless Isle did everything The Maw wants to be, so, so much better, nearly a decade ago.
