There is the answer 
in the OP 
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I didn’t like or dislike it. There were ideas but it’s not for a daily hub. It’s the type of zone you go through in a single player for a few hours and continue on.
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For me personally I was hoping for so much more as the Maw as supposedly WoW’s version of Hell. The only thing that came close to it was the Nightmare in Legion, it just screamed the “Violent to themselves and the Violent to their own sustenance”
All the Maw did was just murmur “yeah… half arsed attempt at Limbo.”
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Prior to end campaign of the zone you had limited time there before you had to leave due to the eye… one of the worst mechanics ever, especially if you’re a Rare hunter.
And you couldn’t mount…
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… gosh yes, when you are dragged up into the air and dropped to your death … used to swear SO much when that happened! … 1st time it happened I was in shock for awhile 
The place was meant to be unpleasant and it lived up to it… I would go in and get out as soon as I could 
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It was really well made, we could feel we are not welcome there.
The zone was evil and i was happy to leave it every single time.
Pvp in maw was great tho
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It wasn’t. I can to understand that it was tedious for some because of renown. (click on souls quest)
Could have been bigger zone.
No mounts.
You are hoofing it everywhere on foot.
Looks depressing.
Depressing subjects, death.
World boss area hidden behind long quest progress. You cant enter the zone till you have done some quests and this is not apparent at first when we started doign this.
If you enter the area priot to gettign this buff you would randomly be subjected to the fear effect and run in random directins pulling anything and everything there. Dead.
So you have to do the quests if you want to do the world boss down there. That is just one of many time gated features that the maw had.
If you do the questline you are sent as a blue geared toon into an area jam packed with elites so thick they are even flying on patron, to get items. As a solo player it would take you all your best CD’s and at least 2 min of fighting to take down one elite that has ten times the health you have. Do this enough times to get six items to use to pull down more elites. More leites that also drop items you need but they are also on a RNG drop pattern. So RNG layered in RNG and you need to fight elites to get the items.
All the while you are hoping you can avoid the patrols and not pull anything else while th emobs pass you.
The items off of the elites you kill are on a random drop rate, of course. Metrics rule this game from start to finish. The item you get from that elite is used to pull down another elite that is flyign this time. They also have ten times your health and thsi also takes all your CD’s to kill over the span of minutes.
In that time you are praying to dog that no player in the game actually comes through there with their mouts (druids or later when you can mount uo) and drags mobs to you. Cos if they do, and it does happen as this is on the way to the world boss, then you die and have to start all over again. The only real safe spot to pull one single mob at a time is right at the start.
What should be a doable quest becomes a nightmare of 2 hours to do. You are barely in blues at that point taking on elite mobs with ten times the health and it is the only path to get to the world boss. That is the door to an area. I tried to find other sports to pull single mobs but there are so many patrols there its insane.
Mind you, you have 2 NPC’s with you that are also killing the mobs you target. You get Thrall and Drogba i think is her name. Still take stwo hours.
That is without a doubt the worst design quest in all of wow. All of it.
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This, extremely frustrating mechanic. Basically timegating, but in a very aggravating manner. Dunno why, but I really liked the neighboring zone added later named Korthia. Despite sharing a similar aesthetic, I think I liked the quests there better.
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Go and have a walk around Korthia to get the true Maw experience. Explore the beautiful vistas and check out the interesting scenery and activities, and you’ll have the answer to your own question pretty quickly.
In all honesty though, I actually quite liked the OG Maw as a zone. I just wish that there was better stuff that you could get for spending your time there.
The part I hated the most was the stupid assassins chasing you 24/7, and the AoEs were annoying as heck too especially because everything in there had the potential to kill you, even regular enemies were difficult compared to other expansions.
Aslo yeah what everyone else said, timegating, no mounts, etc.
Oh don’t even remind me of the Maw.
I do remember the ones who liked it;
- Immersive
- Sense of danger
- …
All that kind of nonsense, covering for the fact that every single aspect of The Maw just either crippled you or hindered you in doing what you wanted to do.
What happens when you attach a ball of concrete to someone’s leg? They feel imprisoned. Not a very nice state to be in when playing a game for fun and leisure.
I personally don’t know anyone who enjoyed it. It was even a serious point to consider whether one wanted to level up more alts; ugh gotta go through the Maw again…
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If i remember corrently, some players felt the need to race change to worgan just because of the maw…that should sum up the maws bad design.
Not only was it dreary, slow, boring, yet also rushed due to the presence of the Eye of the Jailer, and a zone where you could lose currency if you died and couldn’t get back to your corpse - but it lasted for nearly 9 months.
Two people can make a functioning baby in the time it took Blizzard to make patch 9.1.
Even if it had been good on day 1 (wasn’t), people would not remember it fondly after being stuck in it for so long.
All that piled up on top of an annoying expansion which didn’t have flying at the start, featured zones with impassable walls and cliffs to make us run convoluted routes, was filled with mandatory systems we had to engage with or miss out on character power, and in which we got pigeon holed into certain covenants no matter what our personal preferences.
The Maw might have been tolerable in a good expansion. Unfortunately it was the icing on top of the poop cake that was Shadowlands.
Here is the thing.
We came from BFA and Legion. And after years of complaining that we had to do WQ to farm AP and other borrowed power, they decided to remove it in SL.
But to “convince us” to do WQ, they put other rewards forgetting that we dont WANT to do them to begin with. So. As others explained, it was a mandatory grind in a place made specifically to bother you while you do your “daily grind”.
And eventually, people got their rewards and never went back there again. Same thing happened with ALL the zones released since SL. Nobody wants to do Open World content, so nobody does it after they got all the rewards you need for M+/Raid.
They tried different approaches with Korthia, with Zereth Mortis, and ALL the zones of DF. No amount of special events, fancy quests or rare mobs could convince people to go and do them. And The Maw just happens to be the most annoying of them all.
I mean there was a Pandemic going on, hard to blame them.
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I love the Maw and played Shadowlands regularly until the War Within. I even named my mage Mahhwalker.
Horrible terrain.
High mob density (with tough Elites mixed in with them).
No mounts (not even ground ones).
A count down that when it reached its limit would try to kill you all the time.
When you died you couldn’t run back to your corpse you basically started again so no corpse dragging yourself to tricky areas.
It wasn’t fun being there. I think the devs sometimes forget that games are meant to be fun.
Oh yeah, I forgot the:
That was horrible too. You lost chunks of the currency you’d manage to scrape together in the time you could tolerate being there.
Actually it would not have been so bad, if it did not last so long.
The things you mentioned gave the zone a really feeling of being out of bounds, being actually dangerous and overall the player character not being welcome there at all (and no powerful entities to protect them there).
If it has ended in 9.0.5 with some progression in the story that makes it make sense we can mount and stay hidden from the eye of the jailer or at least stay longer, then I think it would have been overall cool.
I don’t think it would have been, at least not for me.
Because Legion, as awesome as an expansion it was for me, will always have the stigma of the horrible experience that was Argus. And the Maw is basically Argus on steroids and then some.
2 Likes