Shadowlands: a budget version of Legion?

Community General Discussion
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I used to love Legion, it was probably one of my fav expansions! I did not play in BFA that much, but I was ready to get into it when Shadowlands came out. Personally, I feel like Shadowlands has been stripped of a lot of things that made Legion rich and entertaining… I will go over a few things that, in my opinion, changed a lot and make the game feel a bit poor in it’s current state.

Order halls: For those who chose to play a specific class for the aesthetic of that class, the Legion order hall was a beautiful place to hang out! The mission table was fun because the rewards were actually useful; a substantial amount of AP, gear from raids (if you did the raids that is) and even a mount. There weren’t that many followers, but they felt meaningful because those were the NPCs you have encountered in previous expansions. As a druid, I loved the fact that Mylune was back, her quests from Hyjal were so cute! And the follower upgrade items that dropped made me want to make them all max level and purple!

Shadowlands Covenant order halls are beautiful too. But, for me, if I play a rogue or a warlock, I don’t really want to choose, say, Ardenweald, even if it is OP. I know that some people are ‘forced’ to make that choice and they are not particularly happy with it. Mission tables feel a bit lackluster. 6 anima as a reward just does not feel… rewarding enough? The followers are just random new NPCs you rescue from Torghast? A bit meh… Also, I feel like there’s too much going on with the daily quests/anima power gathering. The NPCs give me quests that I cannot abandon. Ysera sends me to the maw to rescue 5 souls, I complete and hand in the quest, and she gives me the same quest again; this time to rescue 8 souls from the maw… but I just did that! So, there’s definitely a lot to do in the new order hall, but it all feels random or too repetitive.

Transmogs & gear: The best part of Legion was the abundance of beautiful transmogs! The artifact weapon and all of its forms and recolors offered so much content. The class-specific sets from raids offered really amazing & flashy mogs, even from LFR. I still wear the Mythic druid Nighthold set because nothing that amazing and flashy was released yet… Plus, you had some random amazing items that could drop, like those red shoulders from Xavius and the gear from creatures from Argus. Personally, I loved the fact that a lot of gear would drop from M+ and raids. When I invest a lot of time to complete something, I would like to get a rewards at the end of it. A small selection of gear per week is not enough for me (the vault). And I used to like TF - it was fun and it even made WQs and clearing normal raids fun. Not to mention, my fav thing - having a 6-set :slight_smile:

I don’t know what happened in BFA and Shadowlands that made class-specific sets redundant. As a druid or a monk, I don’t want to look like a rogue! Currently, the generic leather gear from raids makes all classes look like rogues. Good for rogues I guess! It just feels like it was too expensive for them to hire extra people to create beautiful class specific sets for raids? Apart from plate gear. Plate gear in Shadowlands is really beautiful.

The overall lack of loot atm is sad and extremely unrewarding. You do a full raid clear and get 1 item? Meh. Pugging and raiding with your guild, especially when progressing, is painful (unless your guild consists of 20 polite, chirpy and soft-spoken people) and some people, like myself, need to get some sort of a reward in the end… Otherwise it feels like a chore.

Professions: Legion professions started with quests that you had to complete to progress further. This was fun and easy. Fishing had an artifact fishing pole and there was really a lot you could do in fishing. I did not fish that much in Legion due to lack of time, but my friend did and he really enjoyed it. I did Herbing and Alchemy instead. I noticed a huge change in gathering professions… In Legion, Herbalism was so rich: there were quests, ranks, random bonuses when herbing and you could plant seeds! When farming Starlight Rose, I was SO happy about that withered spawning and giving me a few extra herbs :slight_smile: Planting seeds was so fun and rewarding! We used to collect the seeds and then plant all of our seeds in a group of 5 and collect SO many herbs together!

In Shadowlands you just gather herbs. And that’s it! Completely stripped of all bonuses and herbing-related activities. Fishing - you just BUY a fishing pole and bait for gold… That is pretty lame. You go from Pandaria & Nat Pagle to this?!

Personally, I feel like Shadowlands is like a ‘budget’ version of Legion. But the price is still the same.

Torghast is really fun though, it’s a shame that you don’t really get any rewards apart from the currency to upgrade your legendaries. Maybe if they made Torghast a single player mythic-raid-type of experience that would drop good gear, it would be cool.

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That’s what it is basically. BFA was Legion but downgraded in every major way, and SL is the budget, B team version of Legion with none of what made Legion fun imo.

We still have all the features introduced back then like M+ and WQs but less fun and more tedious, which would be the case even if they were just as good as back then since it’s 4 years of that type of content with no improvements at this point. World quests are objectively worse and M+ has fewer dungeons than ever and they aren’t remotely as fun as Legion ones.

Class and spec fantasy which is the most important thing in the game, is non-existant with Covenants as they take over everything about your character. Professions worse than ever, nothing remotely as fun as artifacts, Dalaran>>>>Oribos, disconnected zones, Torghast i a repetitive atrocity after the first few runs which are fun, etc etc etc.

If anything I’m impressed by how many people are loving the expansion, because I honestly see nothing it does better than either of the previous ones unless you’re in love with Torghast or hated Legion/BFA storylines/aesthetics. Even less mandatory grinds is questionable as Torghast is to me more boring than AP grind ever was, but that’s very subjective so likely not indicative of others.

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Yes! I don’t know why exactly, but WQs atm feel somehow worse. Maybe they just take too long? I feel like WQs in Legion were a bit more light and easy and offered better rewards. Or, perhaps, the chance of a legendary dropping made me want to do ALL WQs in Legion…

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Cause they took like 2-3 average Legion/BFA world quests and combined them into one, without offering any extra rewards to offset the time it takes to do them. There are so many quests that could’ve been split into 2 parts and double the rewards like the Bastion one with mirrors and then flying to pick up scrolls as an example.

There are fewer, take longer, and have worse rewards. Also no flight whistle which is what made world questing feasible in the first place.

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Shadowlands feels like a tedious job for which you don’t get paid basically.

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Better yet, you pay for it.

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Yeah, we’re paying to get crapped on by greedy shareholders and clueless devs.

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it’s more like clueless management, the devs are crying inside and also just following orders.

On the topic: If SL would have been anything like Legion, i would have had fun.

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I would really love to know how the insides of projects like this work. Knowing that devs are getting explicit orders from above to slow everything down to the tedium we’re now in, making less content, etc, would remove so much frustration and anger that people have towards devs.

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do you REALLY think people who are passionate about their jobs would come up with such uninspiring content as Oribos and that pathetic attempt at a scenario they call the Shadowlands leveling experience?

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Didn’t they lay off 800 people before/during BFA or smtng like that? Maybe those were the people that were hired to do small tasks that made the game rich. It’s just greed of the shareholders, that’s it. Reducing the costs of everything. I used to work for a company that did not allow staff members to order neon colored post-its because of cost-cutting (just the cheap plain ones) :slight_smile: I feel like this is what’s happening.

I don’t think it’s the devs fault, they are probably just not given a good budget and they have to really think about what to keep in the game and what to remove. I don’t wanna sound like an old hippie, but it’s the corporate greed that destroys all the good stuff!

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Management sets the limits, devs operate within those limits.

If you limit creativity, you’ll get to see broken hearts or how you call it, uninspiring content. Passion and creativity can’t be limited, it dries out and then you get to see what SL is now.

Management will be pulling the strings even harder cause more ppl will quit. They are spiraling downwards and with that killing the world of warcraft as we knew it.

Jobs in game-development, i don’t know for sure but they might be more spread thin than you think.

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Tbh I don’t think the current team has much passion regardless of the budget, but lower budget definitely made an impact. The biggest features of both SL and BFA were hugely system driven as opposed to content driven, and that’s what causing boredom.

Look at Torghast, art-wise it’s as dull and uninspiring as it gets just like all procedurally generated content. It’s held together by systems of anima powers and soul ash/legendaries, because systems are cheaper to produce than actual content. However they are horrible to balance, so they spend most dev time on correcting mistakes and endless tweaking and balancing instead of pumping out new stuff.

8.3 was a prime example of this, literally everything except for the raid was reused content with various systems added to keep you grinding it. Slap 5 new currencies, new number crunching borrowed powers and call it a day.

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I tbh like different things about legion and shadowlands but I’d say far put em on par I think both have done different things better then the previous.

The largest problem with SL is they started its development when they launched BFA effectively. Which means it was built upon 0 feedback as all feedback was ignored concerning BFA prior its launch.

Which effectively means SL was gonna be just like BFA and that sharp turn to take it away from that effectively woulda smashed their budget in itself

SL does alot of things right and imho if they polish up the loot system abit, polish up some of the more irritating things and classes

It stands a good point for the future really, SLs in the right direction. It’s just unfortunate that it was built on the same direction as BFA which is hugely holding it back.

Devs fixed what they could but I think the direction change mid SLs beta testing is what caused the problems more then anything.

The issue with expansions that completely change direction is their first iterations never amazing. Hopefully we don’t see a repeat of this as I feel alot of their expansions problems have been caused because of this. They have a tendency just to bin entire features and restart again.

Blizzard are basically better at polishing old systems then creating new ones.

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This is true yet they always keep making new ones and removing old ones that worked pretty well. Class Halls were like Covenants without the downsides of forcing people into some they don’t want to go to and homogenizing all specs under 4 categories visually and environmentally.

Systems that do carry over like WQs and M+ are getting almost no polish and some like WQs are even being downgraded. I don’t think I’ve yet seen a single person praising these new ones comapred to previous iterations.

M+ faces fundamental issues that started back in Legion like certain affix combinatiosn being insanely harder in some dungeons/weeks than others, but are more pronounced in SL/BFA due to the tryhard design of the dungeons compared to a bit more relaxed Legion style.

I’m not sure about this. How do you fix the Maw and Torghast? At best you can make them completely optional which isn’t a fix as much as it lets people ignore content (still better than forcing them to do it tho). Torghast would require a huge amount of dev time to go through boring and useless anima powers for certain specs and turn them into something better, even then it would still be the same dull repetitive grind through samey environments.

You can’t even fix the world design or Oribos or the lack of overall content unless they start adding 1-2 dungeons per patch and huge new zones which very rarely happens.

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Easy put some actual content in there. put some mount drops in there. Make the item which puts gem sockets on items BOE so u can send em to ur alts.

torghast overall is fine… some of the classes need anima ability revamps to make em fun however.

i dont rly find there to be a overall lack of content your forgetting this is what alot of us asked for. minimal Mandatory content outside M+/PvP/Raiding.

I dont wanna spend 4 hours in the open world… i wanna knock out a hour a week and get on with the things i wanna do. and SL allows that.

I do the maw when i can be bothered to do the maw.
i ignore dailies i dont wanna do.
i ignore the weekly covenant event As i dont wanna do it
I gett to ignore WQs.

I can just log on do my torghast at some point, do some maw when i wanna do it and do lots of M+. which is why i play WoW to begin with i se no problem

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It doesn’t even need gear, just SOMETHING you can keep if you aren’t interested in sould ash (anymore). Even “grateful offerings” (and anima) would be a nice addition; adds another option to get those if you don’t want to waste tons of anima simply to upgrade your sanctum.

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That’s not gonna cut it, what you’re describing is making the game friendly to raid logging, which isn’t enough in and of itself since there has be lots of content in addition to M+/Raiding/PvP to keep people hooked.

In Legion for example we had:

10 M+ dungeons at launch and Karazhan that has already launched by the point in the expansion where we’re now at in SL, and added one huge revamped dungeon or 2 more M+ ones.

Suramar as a whole with its mini progression system and the withered scenario

Profession quests

12 Order Halls and their questlines and a unique artifact for every spec

A LOT of artifact skins and questlines through the order hall after the main one that lead you through the dungeons/raids and the world as well as hidden ones with different unlock conditions

WQs and Emissaries

Legendaries making all content relevant throughout the expansion

For comparison in SL we have:

8 dungeons out of 12 we had in Legion by this point

4 Covenants instead of 12 order halls and all cosmetics and progression reduced to Anima grinding that comes nearly exclusively from WQs

WQs and Callings which are essentially Emissaries but worse as WQs are fewer and more tedious and Callings require unnecessary backtracking. Gold is the only reward.

Maw instead of Suaramar which is ridiculous to even compare

Torghast as a mandatory grind and the only real new content that half of the player base likes while the other half hates it.

Legendaries that are more boring and weaker than Legion ones across the board.

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Now that is something I don’t hear often past the first few runs.

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Pretty much, I would rather replay Legion than Shadowlands at this point, let’s hope next major patch brings something new…

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