Excellent point.
I hated Argus but the Maw makes Argus feel like a picnic park.
Shame they didn’t learn the lesson of Argus. There was plenty of feedback that we didn’t like it. Perhaps enough of the playerbase played it enough for them to think that we’d tolerate such zones even if we didn’t like them.
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That place was hell before the skip to korthia opned up and made the maw redundant. Literally hell.
How do you skip the maw?
By going through hell. I might heve changed now and they removed all restrictions by now as this is now 2 expansions ago and legacy content.
The skip was this : Your first character in SL has to go through everything.
Main story, so all 4 zones, torghast and maw, then korthia and 9.2 zereth mortis zone at the end for way easy gathering as the expac was over by then.
Once through it all in logical order, then the skips open up for your alts. That is the skup.
There are a few skips in SL as i remember. I think one was Torghast opened up already the other was Korthia opened up. One skip i do remember was that korthia on alts started at chapter 4 with the first three done and checked off already. That helped a lot as the first three were a pain.
i forgot the zereth mortis skip at the very end. You could skip, once you have your convenant, torghast and the maw and go straight to 9.2 zereth mortis contnet. 9.2 made the maw and torghast redundant and skipable content as the currencies to make legendaries was bought with another currency farmed in zereth.
Zereth was actualy quite fun of a zone.
But this all came late game SL. This was not at the start of the SL expansion. We all had to drag all our alts indivdually through molasses doign the whole SL content for each alt.
Why do you think we were asking for what we have now which is called warbands. Cos dragging each of your toons though that mess was demoralizing at best and tedious at worst. The slog was seriously offputting and many stopped doign it and only kept one main and no alts at all.
If you want to do any proffs at all you had to at the very least do all 4 zones, torghast and the maw as well as korthia for easier mats when it came to gathering.
I loved SL dearly but it was a drag.
I think I’ve done all 4 zones other than the rep grind and the maw, went through the maw once till they send you back to pick a renown
Leveling the renown tells its own story as there are chapters to complete. The story continues when you do renown. The story at the start of SL was timegated behind renown each week. So there is anotehr whole campaigh to do when you level renown.
There is also a skip for renown as you can instantly get your alts to renown 60 by buying an item from an NPC in oribos that stands next to the flighmaster.
If you buy the item do you get the renown mounts etc?
You earn each level’s rewards with that, yes
Does said item cost gold or?
600 gold or something like that. cheap compared to how much time you save on your alts
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They did a really good job to make it look and feel like hell. A place where you dont want to spend too much time in. It was great, everything about it. Ofc people seen this as a negative and they eased up on a lot of things and it become extremely boring after that.
I liked the Maw. I might be a bit biased because i main a Guardian Druid with engineering though 
Benefits of that, travelform and goblinglider making traveling less of a hassle. Also stealth and very tanky 
Apart from that i liked the atmosphere in the Maw and there actually being some hard mobs all around.
I do admit it got better once they Eye was removed so you could spend more time there. I really wouldn’t have mind if the place had been bigger even.
I think the biggest issues it had was;
- No mounting
- Death = Delete of progress unless you can recover it
- Clustered with mobs
That along the fact that the SL lore messed up lots of loved things brought a veil of resentment, disapointment and/or dislike.
I didn’t like being there for long as it was a bit dreary, and I hated not being able to use mounts initially (loved my Druid), but I liked that the maw existed, and I didn’t mind going if it was was for something quick. It kind of offset the overdoses of Bastion and Lady Moonbery a bit.
A lot of people were annoyed about the fact that you couldn’t use mounts, and I somewhat agree - the zone was too small and that was the cause here, and also they’ve basically destroyed how dismounting is supposed to work. I do like the overall effect they were going for, but it didn’t work out that well.
But I actually rather liked the start of it. It was nice that every week I got to unlock more and more and the story unfolded.
However the problems soon became apparent. It was full of chores - you had to do something easy every day and if you didn’t do it you couldn’t get your sockets.
It was also generally uninviting - now, this stands to reason. You could see how literal hell wouldn’t be terribly inviting, but that doesn’t mean it has to be uninteresting. There are many games that have managed to create a vision of hell you wouldn’t want to be in, but can’t peel your eyes away from.
Then there was the penalty for dying and the timegated activities.
So besides the somewhat interesting very early exploration, it was basically one giant collection of everything the original devs of this game hated, and for good reason, clearly.
Yeah us druids had it easy compared to others. A mount from day one. I remember reading the hate. It was funny. But i always play with stealth to negate the billion mobs on your way to quests.
The eye was the timegate of the maw. No other purpose th atthing had apart from makign your life miserable if you dared to want to get rep. Just the mechanic itsself was a punishment. A punishment for wanting rep. Vial philosophy. And they seriously wonder sometimes why they have player retention issues? Yes wow is not top dog of the gamign world and blizzard a logn time ago stopped publishign numbers of their subs. I wonder why…
I liked it
How to sum up the maw… Oh and Choreghast. Actually my explanation will cover the most of Shadowlands.
You know when you are desperate for the bathroom and you don’t know if you’re going to make it but you finally do and you get that instant sense of relief. And after you finish your business and you clean yourself up… Well alot of Shadowlands is the bit when your finger goes through the paper.
I hated that it was time gated.
If you’re going to be in a zone to be immersed, it needs to feel like you’re immersed in hell, putting in a system like the stupid Jailer Eye immediately annihilated whatever social experiment this wanted to be.
For being hell, it was SO small.
It felt like everything you hated of Ultima 8, unfinished grey cave. Even if it’s a floating rock, it’s still grey.
Blizzard is incapble of comprehending the concept of their players actually playing their game when there are no time gates. They think we will all run and stop paying if there are not timegates.
While some players might actually quit out of boredom for completing it there are still quite a few players who would stick around to get the next key ect. Timegates do not make this game. The dungeons, raids, stories do.
But they are so intent on metrics they are totally blind. Totally blind.