Quite a few of these out there, all locked, so here are my thoughts.
It’s a bit of a grind, I know some, a lot of people find it a major grind.
I’m not a fan of the disconnected zones. To get from one zone to another we have to go through Oribos, really not a fan of that. Seems to me that could have been handled a lot better. Really wondering how flying’s going to be affected by that.
This has to be the most disjointed expansion yet for travel. I know we had two disconnected islands in BfA, but they each contained three zones. And we had to travel via Gnome of Goblin transport to get to Mechagon. But it does feel like they took that idea and dropped it on the floor, then put all the travel mess and dropped that into the game.
Legion and BfA had great flexibility with how you approached the story, but that’s all gone. Everyone who plays through the story, goes along the same path from 50-60 and let’s be honest, that gets boring after one run through, never mind several if you have alts.
I know previous expansions were pretty linear with the story, but you always had something that would give you the opportunity to head off to a different zone for some fun before heading back to complete the zone you’re currently in.
TBC, head to Zangarmarsh for a couple of quests before heading back to Hellfire to finish mopping up the quests. Wrath, head to Dragonblight or off to Howling Fjord for a visit before jumping back to Borean Tundra to finish killing whatever’s left.
That’s all gone. If you follow the story you go Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, Revendreth. That’s it, no side quests sending you to visit another area before finishing in whichever zone you’re story is at.
I think they threw away a good thing by making it so linear and narrow.
On a hopeful note. Shadowlands has a lot of potential to involve all of the previous expansion zones, except maybe Draenor, the whole time travelling undead thing feels like it would stretch even our willingness to suspend belief a bit too far.
We have a zone taking in dead from Azeroth, the Outland, Argus and countless unknown worlds. We can only hope some of the conflict will spill over into these worlds and we get some pre-legion style invasions or even some missions sending us out to wipe out a Maw incursion.
Just some of my thoughts. I’m not going to talk about the god awful idea that was and still is Torghast.
Lastly, does anyone else think the view from Oribos is a bit like the world view (Mongo) from the 1980 Flash Gordon movie?
I’ve rarely played it now for weeks. I just can’t be bothered.
I’m usually really enthusiastic about new expansions and have played each and every one consistently, levelling all my alts. But this…I just can’t work up any enthusiasm.
I quite liked Torghast but it became too much work for little or no reward. If there was at least some reward as you reach different milestones in Torghast, I might want to continue but not now. I don’t need to. The fun of the super powers has worn off, I’ve got two legendaries and now I don’t need to work towards the mount so I’ve abandoned the Twisting Corridors.
I began levelling two alts and got as far as selecting a covenant for one of them but couldn’t see the point with the other. I think it’s odd having to take your character all through every zone, completing a huge number of quests before deciding on the covenant. It doesn’t leave much once you get there. It’s the same quests repeating over and over. And many are just irritating.
It looks great, the environments are superb but it’s just not grabbing my attention. I didn’t feel the same in BFA; I really enjoyed that. I felt like there was a purpose. I just don’t see a need to keep going in this expansion and this makes me really sad.
I’ll admit it’s not all bad.
Divine Toll is great and I do like the material bag drops that some of the souldbinds give. Those are useful. If I was to keep grinding away on my Night Fae alts, my leatherworker would have to open up a shop selling leather working mats. She’d have so much leather and bone.
That’s to reinforce the concept that, despite the map showing us one proximity scale, travelling through the In-Between uses a concept of timelessness that is beyond all previous comprehension we’ve experienced… hence it looking like something akin to hyperspace in Star Wars™.
TBC and WoD would like a word…
They were at least on the same land-mass.
Do they…? AFAIK, Bastion is a fixed start point, but Maldraxxus has replaced Ardenweald as the second zone for me, even prior to 9.0.5
… which is why it’s only mandatory to do it once - second and subsequent times it’s ENTIRELY that player’s option.
Linearity - all expansions from TBC to WoD had a fixed path to follow as far as what zones each level was tuned for; Legion was the first Expansion to offer a fully customisable Questing path.
I think you mean Orc…
What I take from your first post is that you’ve turbo-ploughed through the entirety of the content available in a shorter time than your achievement count would indicate; all the above ‘counters’ I’ve offered are based on experience I’ve gained from a first played date of over 13yrs ago.
EDIT:
OK, it looks like you first played north of 10 years ago, but some of your recollections are - or seem to be - anecdotal.
Would they? In TBC, I could go from Hellfire to Shadowmoon without travelling through Shattrath City. Same for WoD, I could go anywhere without flying through a central hub point.
If you follow the story without picking “Threads of Fate”, you go Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, Revendreth. I’ve run it five times so far, all in the same order. The only time it’s not that order is when you go down the “Threads of Fate” route. Which I have so far completed on one alt with a few others slowly working down that route.
No, I mean undead. Anyone from the Shadowlands travelling to Draenor would be undead. Even Draka while looking like an Orc is undead.
So “Whole time travelling undead” thing, if the went to Draenor.
You’ll have to explain why that’s a counter to anything I said about BfA. I was pointing out that while we had two disconnected islands that required travel by boat. We still had three full zones on each, that the player could travel around and quest in. Here we have distinct single zones. Four “islands” if you like.
I think you’ll also have to explain what my achievement count has to do with things?
I started this game during the early months of vanilla, all through TBC, Wrath, Cata, Mists, WoD, Legion and BfA, ending with this.
As for anecdotal recollections. Using my “recollections” of Wrath. Long before finishing in Borean Tundra where I started, I picked up quests to head into Dragonblight (Star’s Rest and Moa’ki Harbour). Now they weren’t the most exciting of quests, but they did allow you start questing a bit in Dragonblight while still questing in Borean Tundra.
Not something that’s available in this game when following the story and not using “Threads of Fate”.
My DK went to Ardenweald as a second zone, straight from Launch… I’m certain that Maldraxxus was third.
Nothing in WoD - the ‘time travelling’ Expansion - looked undead, to me; Shadowlands is the Realm of death, so it would be understandable for things to look deathly there; Shadowlands take place concurrently to whatever’s going on, on Azeroth.
As far as the Shadowlands zones are concerned, they could exist as four separate planetary bodies, for all we know… “The In-Between” is just a visualisation of how we get between them & Oribos; Zandalar & Kul Tiras were at least physically connected on the same planet.
You don’t “need” 13-or-so years - or more - to amass 21K achievement points, it 'could be done in 5 (?), even disjointedly.
Internal travel, within either version of Draenor is possible, sure… but can you take a single contiguous (unbroken by any other means) ‘flight’ from Stormwind to Shattrath City? No; their on different planets to Azeroth… THAT’S what I call disjointed, so Shadowlands wasn’t the first.
You’re certain and I’m five times certain. One of us is wrong and one my certains is on a DK.
WoD doesn’t though, time travel, alternate reality stuff there. Even if you take that away, anything except the players that went there from the Shadowlands covenants would be undead or even just dead.
If that were the official reasoning, it still wouldn’t be a good means of travelling between the covenant zones.
Still not getting the point of your statement on my achievement count. Doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the discussion.
That’s just travelling between expansions, you’d expect some sort of difference in travel between expansions. But inside the expansion, you’d hope for smoother travel routes.
Cataclysm used the existing travel infrastructure… no matter.
We have no physical frame of reference for the zones in Shadowlands - and I’d hazard a guess that as much as “We think we want to…” know, we really don’t. I would offer that the infrastructure design isn’t worse, it’s significantly different enough to feel uneasy.
As far as achievement count goes, we have similar enough level, but some parts of the game it looked like I remembered differently… and someone who could have power amassed achievements may have done so in a shorter timeframe than either of us has, adding to a difference of viewpoint.
I just capped my fourth, to have one for each Covenant - with a lot of resentment and naughty words - so it’s fresh in my memory, as well as from the other three.
Oh, I have, I’ve spent far more time in the Maw than I ever want to. It’s not a nice place to visit. I’m in for my weekly soul rescue and out as quickly as I can.
I ran the quests to set up the safe zone and some of the rep quests for a bit. But god it was rough.
Here’s hoping it improves when we can all finally mount up and get around quickly.
Ugh… I hate getting old, if that is the case.
I went through story mode once & that was enough; I started that way on others, but decided against it on 7 more (only two are at 60, so far).
I STILL swear my DK went to Ardenweald, from Bastion… THEN Maldraxxus.
I’m ok with “rough”. Also “threatening” and “dangerous”. My problem is with “depressing”. If I want to lose the will to live, I’m sure I can find something that doesn’t require a monthly subscription.
Actually, my memory may be going as well. I forgot that after levelling my first two, which I always do together, I put my third character through Threads of Fate - but that’s even worse than repeating the story.
Shadowlands is slowly turning into the expansion of small disappointments or it seems so.
All the “content creators” are disappointed that patch 9.1 have been released yet or at least a release date announced yet.
People doing mythic+ dungeons and mythic raids are disappointed in the loot drops on bosses and the content of the mythic+ chests.
Disappointment in the Torgast experience being totally different from the Alpha and Beta versions. Disappointment in Torgast being fun for some classes and suck for others and Sucky Torgast classes struggling to get soul ash.
Disappointment for people wanting to swop covenants and then loosing all their renown.
And these are just a few that I could pick up. I am sure I missed quite a few other ones.
After starting to level my army of alts (all 13 of them) I found a disappointment of my own. Now I level my alts via Threads of Fate and then gear them to the best ilevel that WQs (World Quests) can provide to try and keep them in touch with my main and able to fend for themselves if I feel like I want to play one of them more often. Therein lies the problem. The ilevel for WQ gear is gated behind renown. To be able to get ilevel 194 WQ gear I have to get to renown level 29. Now that is fine for 1 character, but not so much for 14 of them. The max WQ gear you can get with renown below 10 is ilevel 148. I can only hope they up the WQ ilevel in patch 9.1, but I don’t think they will.
Now vendor gear is a bit worst. To get all the vendor gear you have to do all the story-line chapters up to at least 8 to unlock the gear at the vendor. So not only is it to get renown up to at least 22, but also a bunch of story line quests up to chapter 8 and all of that X 13. You only start to unlock your first pieces of gear from chapter 3 onwards.
Shadowlands is turning into a not so alt friendly expansion.
