So I started playing retail 4 weeks ago for the first time in my life. I have been playing on private servers since 2011, enjoying the game so far. I have never in my life played Shadowlands, completely skipped the expansion. And I was wondering like, when Shadowlands just came out I remember many people and famous WoW players cheering it and saying everything nice about it how it was a saviour of WoW. A couple of months later, what has happened? Everyone hates the game? I have been trying to look up a yt video but everyone is talking about how lore is bad, I donât care about that. Iâm just curious to why gameplay-wise people stopped playing it? I have had transmog runs playing sanctum of domination, seplucher and castle nathria - and hooly in my opinion, those are the coolest looking raids Iâve ever played. The Maw looks dope, so does the main city, dungeons are pretty decent no? What went wrongâŚ? If someone can list all the bad things about SL Iâd appreciate it, tryna learn. Thanks guys
People like crying over minor issues. The main thing was that you couldnât change covanants easily cos how dare a choice matter in wow.
A lot of the things people have been complaining about have been remedied to an extent over the course of the expansion.
Some things:
- The big selling point, the covenants, have been very hard to switch out of once you had made your choice. But due to balancing issues some covenants were simply a lot more powerful than others. If you made the wrong choice for aesthetic or other reasons you basically locked yourself out of performing at your best
- Leveling up covenants was a pain in the early days. Player power was locked behind covenant levels, and that was locked behind timegating (only 2 levels per week I think) and basically rep grind
- You had to grind Torghast to get a legendary, and the crafting process for the legendary armour templates was locked behind a very expensive grind for mats.
- Shadowlands basically made a mockery out of the entire lore around the afterlife so far. Lots of retcons
- The Jailer as a villain was a poor choice. In order to prop him up they had to - again - rewrite a lot of the existing lore to make him appear super-duper-powerful
- SL managed to put the final nail into the coffin of what was the Hordeâs #1 waifu up to then, Sylvanas. Her character got completely annihilated in BfA and Shadowlands.
- The season affixes overall were a bit of a âmixed bagâ to put it politely
- Dungeons themselves were more poorly received than BfAâs dungeons
Thereâs probably a lot more things, but SL was one of the worst expansions for WoW. People assumed it would be great, as Blizzard has had a fairly reliable âTick Tockâ cadence, where a bad expansion would be followed by a good one. After BfA was pretty much regarded as a trainwreck, people hoped that it would be followed by another good expansion. This expectation had led to many people judging SL more harshly than they would have otherwise.
The raids depended on class setups and there was a ton of player power locked behind repetitive, gated open world grinds that were meant to be a carrot for casuals, but ended up hindering alts. In short they managed to piss off every part of their audience.
Ion said covenants will provide the same player power so people picked the one they liked (it was impossible to make an educated decision right at the start anyway), and that went swell.
Players need to realize that time gated content is a disgusting design. If you need daily, artificial incentives to play a game then that game is trash.
I think by SL people were fed up with the borrowed powers design. Legionâs artifact traits and legendaries were swapped for Azerite powers in BFA and then for covenant abilities, soulbinds and conduits and new legendaries. If you played alts it was a real hassle to keep track of them all only to know theyâre gone after 2 years. The premise with the new talent trees is that they wonât see major changes unless necessary.
It was also accompanied by the feeling you have to do stuff you donât want to get the rewards you want.
- You had to do Torghast for Soul Ash and its variants to make a legendary.
- You had to either spam dungeons for an rng drop, go to raids, grind reps, or again go to torghast (where not all sections were available each week originally) for certain legendary memories (again necessary to make a legendary).
- You had to grind renown to unlock soulbind rows
And yeah some people didnât like that covenants werenât easily switchable.
you nailed it perfectly.
My biggest problem is the lore, SL does not explain a huge part of WOW lore. I was in permanent âwhat aboutâ mode: what about wisps, what about undead spirits (like tomb of Sargeras), what about Aegwynn, Mediev, souls in Frostmourne, Bwonsamdi, all spirits on all continents we met so far, there is no end to the list.
So not to be in permanent âwtfâ mode during the quests I decided that SL was just some new planet with a weird social system. I enjoyed quests about Venthyr and partially Maldraxis, but the others ⌠were too lame and goodie-goodie, which surprised me even more because i am all for druid lore and thought i would love night fae.
Shadowlands was good. You, likewise the majority of players donât understand it.
WalsĂŹngham
would you care to elaborate how the existence of Bwonsamdi fits in SL lore?
âIâm a new player, why was Shadowlands so bad gameplay-wise?â
And I think Shadowlands was good gameplay-wise.
Leonsija. 
Thing is you can finish all this in matter of few hours. Then all you are left with is to spam m+ or mythic raiding while your progress resets every 6 months. Apathy kicks in and people start quiting.
The zones were not connected so travelling from one to another was a mandatory 2 minute flight path.
If you wanted to do all the zones, youd be spending 10 minutes afk.
They made the daily calling quest something you had to go get instead of being given to you automatically like in legion and bfa. This only added to your travel time.
Large amounts of AP was needed for everything, but until the end of the expansion came in at a snails pace. It felt like you would be grinding forever.
World quests were changed from short fun activities into long multi stage drags. They just werent fun any more. And the rewards were awful. Not worth the time or energy.
And the expansion had a very long patch cycle with underwhelming new zones. Took nearly a year for the first patch to come out.
By that point, all the annoyances of the expansion stood out like a sore thumb.
Then we got korthia which wasnt overly amazing.
And then zerith mortis which had 20 minutes of activities per day.
Borrowed power system, as well as the required reputation aka renown farm.
Tons of money to craft legendaries, and on top of that to upgrade them.
Torghast, a hell in game.
Content? What it is? Never heard of it.
Lore? Sylvanas decided not to serve⌠Hmmmm⌠Tyrande decided to be a Illidan but without being a demon hunter⌠Hmmmm⌠Who on earth writes these?
You thought Torghast was a hell? Hah! Korthia awaits, and we introduce new way of rep farming! Kill rares and get reputation. (WHICH WAS MANDATORY FOR THE SOCKETS).
There are endless minuses, I just do not want to write them all down. As I have PTSD.
Overall, the SL had very good aesthetics, as art team as usual carries the game on their back with it, just these stupid things which they implemented was annoying.
I enjoyed its dungeons, enjoyed first 2 raids. The rest? Meh.
Ah uh, not to forget, Kyrian thighs 
Indeed and you even needed different covenants for different activities, specs also often required different covenants and although switching was made easier later it wasnât something you could do instantly. It required two weekly quests.
The whole concept was flawed, you helped all the covenants while l levelling but suddenly you were disowned at cap.
A huge amount of feedback was given about this but Blizzard really wanted to stick to itâs guns and make it a âmeaningful choiceâ. It was anything but meaningful.
It should have been an aesthetic choice.
Great post Elysia, you summed it all up so well.
Everything above and Id also add class fantasy breaking was at its highest level.
Covenants and their abilities didnât sit right with many classes. Shamans that looked like necrimancers, warriors in wooden armour etc. (this one might be subjective I know but it was so not Warcraft at all aesthetically)
And OribosâŚa horrid soulless placeâŚ
Imagine designing a city in the afterlife, thereâs soooo much imagery. City of souls, gates of heaven, etc but instead we got a cylindrical geometrically aligning monstrosity.
for me personally the things that made shadowlands entirely unenjoyable were the following features;
- player power attached to covenants with 0 attempts to make all options viable (it wouldâve been unrealistic to try to be fair)
- penalties for switching covenants
- Conduit farming
- Torghast having the legendary grind tied into it.
- Needing to craft 10 of a singular legendary base item to get access to the next rank (there were like 8 ranks in the end? 4 to start with and 2 added, oh and remember thats for every individual slot you could craft)
- Anima grind was a chore
- World quests took way longer but were not made more rewarding then their BFA counterparts
- Open world gameplay loop was afking a rare spawn for 3 hours in zereth mortis because even if you were in the center of ZM youâd still not make it in time for most rares.
- The insane price of catchup in season 4, I only had 5k of the 10k when it hit and I could not be bothered to farm 5k more, so even the season 4 of SL was to me a dead season.
If youâre a new player then you wonât have to deal with any of this, the majority of shadowlands flaws lied in the systems you had to engage with once you hit max level.
If you hit max level now, you just move on to the dragon isles.
It wasnât bad, at the last part of the expansion it was really fun gameplay, especially with the talent system too.
Destro rain of chaos+grand warlock design was super awesome for example.
But overall, the covenants, and pre tier sets, it just wasnât great gameplay.
While i personally only played at the start of SL and very slightly more later on, i canât say i personally disliked anything except for the borrowed power system, which personally didnât affect me either not playing alts in SL. I was never someone who runs keys or raids for leaderboards so my class choice never seriously mattered either.
The main issue with covenants was that A: Their power difference was massive in more cases than one. In extreme cases the difference was easily more than 30%. Fire Mages and Boomkin as well as WW Monks completely took the cake where you either picked Covenant A or you dealt tank dps.
B: They all had lore behind them and if you liked a specific covenant more from a story perspective then you better pray that this covenant was good or at least bearable or otherwise your performance would potentially be non existent.
C: Conduit Energy. Which conduits you used changed in more cases than not on the area and the scenario. Raid ST, Raid AoE, M+, PvP. Given the atrocious long CD you were easily locked out of changing conduits for a longer period of time if you swapped between the mods too often. And thats already ignoring that covenants even changed between modes where like Covenant A is bis in Raid ST, Covenant B in Raid AoE, Covenant C in M+ and Covenant D in PvP while changing between covenants came with a gigantic cooldown. Also ignoring how painful they were to level at the start.
Korthia was nothing short of a grinding mess with player power attached to it combined with the double rng mess that were shards of domination. Torghast was regarded a chore rather than a fun activity in the early stages. Legendary drop sources being a mess at the start for several classes. Legendaries being made by players being a death sentence on low/mid pop realms.
Prideful was one of the worst seasonal affixes we ever had since Prideful spawns were a âhit or ripâ point whenever they spawned. You couldnt utilize the prideful or even worse you wiped with it (especially during Tyrannical)? Yeah you may now leave the key since its rip.
Sanctum of Domination being nicknamed âSanctum of Holddpsâ since 6-7 bosses required you to hold dps during progress with KT quite literally taking the cake. Sepulcher being tuned and designed specifically for the world first guilds (this was admitted and admitted to be a massive mistake) and had to be nerfed so hard into ground its unreal. It may even be the raid that had received the most nerfs in WoWs history.
âminor issuesâ my butt.
Apart from what has already been mentioned in this thread, my main issue with Shadowlands was the Maw and Torghast, as well as the Covenant system. Being forced to choose a Covenant you didnât necessarily vibe with did not feel good, and the Maw had a number of very tilting mechanics in it, such as not being able to mount unless you were a Druid or Worgen, the random elites that would get pulled, the Maw dailies (need I say more).
Not to mention the story. The story just didnât make sense, especially with the Jailer. It felt like Blizzard had two different directions they were trying to go with the Jailer, but one ended up winning out but they didnât have enough time to change or remove elements of the other. So we ended up with a very contradictory villain that had no buildup whatsoever.
That said, Shadowlands became a much better game by 9.2, but by then, a lot of good will was burnt.
Too many mounts, like more than any other 2 expacks combined. And most of them were just different tints. Really cheapened the whole mount collection process when you were getting on average a mount a week.