The Shadowlands were wasted

Community General Discussion
1

So despite whatever might come in the new subpatch, it is safe to say that for the most part, it is doubtful that this expansion will go down as anyone’s absolute favorite.
It might be difficult to believe now, but Shadowlands had generally triggered quite some hype, and the launch was quite decent, despite a certain amount of cringe.

Likeable/Interesting secondary (patch) villain? :ballot_box_with_check:
Nice transmogs? :ballot_box_with_check:
Beautiful environment? :ballot_box_with_check:
Nice raid? :ballot_box_with_check:
Interesting new characters/ story for the old ones? Kinda :ballot_box_with_check:

It was basically a decent patch, despite many flaws like the covenant lock, the Maw being a mess, etc.
But at that point. did it seem like it was going to suck? Wouldn’t say that.

The decline actually started, imo, with the huge delay for the first patch, which in the end turned out to be a boring mess with a whole lot of cringy dialogues, the ‘City of Secrets’ envisioned by the writers as a weird forest with debris here and there, tiresome covenant campaigns and the ‘plot point’ of Sylvanas, depicted as a complete idiot, putting 2+2 together and coming to the realization that the person who was all about domination and who created everything that made her the thing she is, actually wanted everyone to serve him. HEH! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?

And then we got 9.2, a chance to explore the very workshop of the First Ones which was used to make the Shadowlands, and get this, there is water we can walk on!
In all seriousness though, Zereth Mortis didn’t look bad, although the content in it is questionable. But let’s look at the story now.

Lets begin with addressing that some random background character gets to become the very Arbiter of the dead just for the sake of it. Uh, okay sure… whatever.

Sylvanas, thrown even more at the screen, (as though the writers can’t get enough of her) giving a speech when Arthas turns to 35 anima (who, for some reason, had to be in Kingsmourne or whatever the heck they called it), while his former master and fiance are just there silent, because we just can’t get enough of her quick wit and her snarkiness! Then, we defeat the Jailer using only our forks, spoons and brooms and he dies saying that he wanted to protect us from something.

Anyway, since we don’t have the guts to just kill Sylvanas altogether, we just go the safer route of condemning her to do [Return Lost Souls] for all eternity. Well, that IS a pretty harsh punishment, but mounts are allowed in the Maw now so it shouldn’t take that long.

Yeah, I might be forgetting something, but that’s it.

So, I think what killed Shadowlands was the painfully long time between content and the awful continuation of a somewhat decent script that got flushed down the toilet.
Mhm.

6 Likes
2

Its not all eternity
Shell be back in an expansion or two and given a clean slate.

3 Likes
3

I still think Shadowlands is a good expansion. I’d even say great, were it not for the huge delays.
I even liked most of the story, apart from the Sylvanas thing, but even that it was mostly set up during Battle for Azeroth, her development during Shadowlands is as good as it gets with those premises, and I really liked the book.

Shadowlands’ main problems were the extremely bad PR, the delays and the Afrasiabi sabotage.

3 Likes
4

That is one opinion.
The main problem with shadowland is, that it’s not connected to Azeroth at all. We talked ghosts with previous expansions, but not one ever mentioned, this stupid eternal fight as some monstrosity, or deranged cults.
The main boss is a malfunctioning automata, who is older and mightier than the titans, but there are more older and mightier first ones, who are missing. This is no sense.

4 Likes
5

I have rly enjoyed SL! Beautiful zones like Arden, Bastion, rev, drax and so on. I even like the storytelling quite a bit.

The only problem is that if you have played WoW for a long time you feel disconnected from the core game and it is almost like you are thrown into a new game. And in a MMORPG where the progression and development of the character is important, you feel completely cheated.

Thing’s that did hurt WoW and SL (IMO): The level squeeze where you lost all power, the new big threat the invalidate all other thing that we have done in 16 year. Does you character gain power with progression NO you borrow it from different sources and when the patch or expansion is over you lose a whole setup of character ability’s and your class become a wet spaghetti.

List could go on forever but you guys get the point :stuck_out_tongue:

Absolutely worth playing imo tho!

2 Likes
6

i dont know. i hate SL. im scared just to level another toon in these zone. And im levelling toons tru bfa and legion that werent so ancient, so isnt a exp burnout.
i just… just… cant do it. Is like playin another game… totally deetached to the game i love with alien environment and enemies.
I loved at first Zm cuz it was grassy and green but its just good to hunt rare and the questline was quick.

1 Like
7

Hehe, seem like we have same experience if you see my post above :stuck_out_tongue: SL is quite good but feels disconnected to the core game.

Feels good that it isn’t just me that experience SL thru this glasses :nerd_face:

2 Likes
8

Not with me personally. I was never hyped for that setting.

True. Leveling for the first time was cool (except for the Maw bits; I hated those right away).

Sure, but not THAT interesting.

Nope. Hated almost everything. There’s a few nice individual pieces which can be used to mix into some nice transmog, but as far as complete sets go; everything, literally everything, in Shadowlands was ugly imo.

Nope. Dark, edgy, depressing zones. I liked Ardenweald for a bit, but even that began to grate on my soul. It’s all so depressing.

Not my thing. Wasn’t excited to see the content for any of the raids in Shadowlands.

Disagree.

It wasn’t. I was literally bored 2 months after launch. It was horrible.

It looked better than the Shadowlands zones because it wasn’t depressing.
I wouldn’t say it looks good though. It’s still too alien and mechanical for my taste.

Sure that’s a big part of it. But for me it was also the entire aesthetic of basically everything. I thought from the start that going to the Shadowlands was a mistake. Stuff like that should have remained a mystery. And I still believe that is true in hindsight.

But it’s too late. They opened Pandora’s Box.
Hopefully we can just ignore everything that happened in Shadowlands for a long time and just get back to exploring ‘real’ places and not deal with cosmic robot gods.

3 Likes
9

Think alot of the problems from day 1 of Shadowlands were problems because they didn’t listen to players on beta. E.g. Players wanted free covenant swapping from the get go and it took far too long to be added. Thats just one example, but if they dont listen to players beta testing, the player base will never be happy.

I also think they underestimate how many players would return to WoW if they invested more time into PvP, balancing classes and really pumping their efforts into class design instead of systems.

Looking forward to Dragonflight, looks like they’ve listened to feedback from Shadowlands and class strength will make a return, and new, much need talent trees to switch things up after the MoP talent change. In MoP it was good, but the longer we’ve had it, its become outdated and unfun. So the newer talent system will be around for a few years, and should be an overall decent change going into Dragonflight. Also the gear changes are what we want. Only other thing I hope for is to see item level gaps drop when new patches are released. The power gap from hitting level 60 to gearing up throughout an expansion loses a lot of new players. Even with catch ups in place, it still doesnt feel good. They should look at changing the item level of questing gear in line with patch updates, so no matter when you begin, you have the same pathway throughout, instead of running catch up systems in order to play.

Anyway, not sure where I was going with this, just started rambling.

10

The thing is with statements like this.

Although I would have rather had a better theme and story, a faster content cycle, and better time invested : reward received ratio.

The expansion has kept me playing it for the most part. Which is the first expansion since TBC which has achieved that.

So as much as I want to hate it, it’s kept me playing and invested.

11

Here is my issue with the expansion. If i want to switch spec, i might have to switch covenent. I have to grind to be able to craft a new legendary or 2? I don’t know how it works with the second one.

Then when it comes to alts. I have been leveling a alt a little bit. But then i get reminded of the stuff i have to do, to set up my char. I have to grind mats for legendary, and i despise torghast. I have to get the right memories for the legendary. I also have to get the right conduicts. The expansion just doesn’t seem alt friendly. A reason why i wanted to level an alt, was because i feel like the class i’m playing now, isn’t working to well for me. But with all these extra things you need to do, to be ready for mythic’s/raids just becomes to much. Some might just give up and unsubscribe instead. Then if i want to be able to increase the ilvl of my secondary legendary, i have to reach revered with The Enlightened. Will i also have to do that with an alt? It’s to much, just to be able to do dungeons/raids

12

You can buy renown and conduits and the Unity legendary is account wide. You can even buy all the currencies needed for legendary crafting and mail them to alts, if you step into Torghast in May 2022 it’s because you want to.
The only real obstacle to alts is if you don’t have money for the legendary base items, apart from that it’s just normal gearing as usual and it doesn’t take long at all.
In fact, I think SL right now is very alt-friendly compared to both BfA and Legion, especially once you factor in the 1-50 speed.

2 Likes
13

tah… i find you… changed.

14

thx for that information

2 Likes
15

Ehm… MoP says hello. I was around for MoP, it was mostly lolpandas. Then mid way through WoD it was the best thing ever.

My issue with Shadowlands is that it didn’t feel different.

Instead of the afterlife it was an eternal second life. I understand the similarity was intentional but they felt too similar to other zones in Azeroth.

Blizzard didn’t learn from their past mistakes: we knew the sheep would flock to a specific covenant and they did; there is ALWAYS a BiS choice. The spells should have been the same with a covenant specific graphical effect. A spell skin basically.

With two content patches, feels like we’ve been conned. We pay more for an expansion and we get less content. We didn’t get to explore the Eternal Ones properly, we found out they are all robots… like everything else in the Warcraft world.

16

The Shadowlands feels like a wasted expansion for me as it was released at a time when I was unhappy with life. An expansion about death and the afterlife is just depressing. I will be glad to get away from thoughts about death and the Shadowlands and hopefully a more positive next expansion! Looking forwards to Dragonflight.

What I did like about the Shadowlands was the varied scenery, the art team always do great work and I appreciated that. Originally I had hoped the covenant system would be cosmetic, four choices to pick from and pick whichever theme suited my character.

I haven’t managed to get many of my alts through the quests but I will try to complete it as things have been made easier for alts.

1 Like
17

Disagree with all of these.

After CN everything was just concrete and the same metal looking mobs/bosses over and over again. If you took people that haven’t played in the last 2 raids for the first time, they would think it was the same raid.

Tiny empty zones, they look worse than the last 3 expansions zones to me? And feel lifeless (ironic comment I know)

Nice transmorgs? This is the one I disagree with the most, Minus the green poison backpack from the rare in Maldraxxus.

18

Seem to remember the same being said at the end of WoD. The we got Legion. Kind of feels SL was setup to be WoD 2.0 so they can try recapture the success of Legion. But I am very skeptical that DF is going to be that successful. I fear it may just be another nail in the coffin. I hope I am wrong and only time will really tell.

1 Like
19

How so? :relaxed:

1 Like
20

They can’t even keep an expansion relevant in that expansion. As you new player you can’t even play the story as intended.
And basically all mechanics are, to say the least, stupid. From PvP gearing to equipping in general, the lack of balancing between the covenants, the conduits.
The stories are unfinished and never sound a bit interesting.

I cannot agree that this is a good or even mediocre expansion. It’s a huge accident if I want to be positive.