It was mandatory to do every week. And it was not fun to do on my holy paladin and resto druid, my first 2 chars in SL. My resto shaman got some quite cool powers though so that helped. But i leveled my shaman later in s1 since i already had 2 chars. It is very powers (and RNG) depended.
Honestly… hard to do worse than Visions.
Mandatory content which at launch had no balancing for character role, with limited entries resulting in dps mains intentionally avoiding grouping up with healers or tanks because it would reduce their chances of a good run. What an awful, divisive, hurtful concept.
Quite separate from all the points here is the mystery of how they managed to make Torghast’s atmosphere so repulsive when compared to its original model, ICC.
I’ve done ICC hundreds of times now, but every time I enter, even now, I feel a chill and a sense of awe. Entering Torghast feels like a back-alley mechanic’s workshop. How did they even do that? The barely-an-effort music and sound certainly has an effect, but it isn’t the whole story. The whole team collaborated in the effort to make it Another Shadowlands Place I Don’t Want To Be In. 
Rewards: The rewards of Torghast were both mandatory and narrow. Does anybody like either of those qualities? When I say “narrow”, I mean “good for only one thing”. There was no gear, no professions, no gold, no story or (outside) buffs or talents or rep to be gained there, So you HAVE to do it every week for this one thing, but that one thing is all you will ever get from it. It tied into nothing else.
Objectives: There was one objective - finish. That’s still the case, but now they have added timing and “quality” to it as well, which means “finish the way WE want you to”. This derives from the lack of alternate rewards.
I despise the Box of Many Things mechanic. Despise it. They had the same kind of crap in Visions. It’s a lazy designer’s trick.
I will acknowledge that Jailer’s Gauntlet is a much better experience. If they added more reasons to do it, that could be a good late-season activity. If they fixed the aesthetics and ambiance.
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Good idea. But making it mandatory even for morons that cannot handle it resulted in said very very loud minority comming to forums and crying about it… so they nerfed the living hell out of it and reduced floors you had to go trough, endless mode stayed on beta, even gauntlet or twisitng corridors were nerfed to oblivion …they werent mandatory but there was a mount = these loud morons went ape poop again on forums…so they nerfed those aswell.
So ye …great idea…i loved it…but when you finaly got stronger…it ended…no endless mode…and completely abandoned feature that was promoted as main pillar of expansion.
All because of loud minortiy of moronic players that needed legendary on all of their 75 alts to farm mounts in old content.
- Because it was boring
- Because it was tied to the legendary
It was already no fun and too much for 1 char. And maybe you want to remove your offensive language.
this and that there is no reward
Well one of the main problems wow has had for years now is that without these legendary items, artifacts or whatever they decide to slap in next your character is so damn boring to play on any content that you kind of need those things.
Same goes with warmode on my shadow priest it was a game changer in BFA if it was on or not when the big damage button was either slow butt cast or instant.
Its not just these “morons” that are to blame the shared blame goes to blizzards developers too and i would say its mostly for them for adding crap to the game nobody asks and then removing it immediately when the new patch/expansion hits.
On a idea level Choreghast was nice but the execution of it was piss poor from the get go with thinking majority of players enjoy hard content to timegating stolen/new powers from players behind it.
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The big problem with Torghast was the reward structure. It just didn’t feel fun. While the moment to moment gameplay was fine, great for some specs, the reason why people had to engage with the system was not.
You didn’t get loot, you didn’t get gold, you didn’t get anything useful from it. You just got soul ash, and you were forced to do it to get your legendary. This type of game design literally never goes down well.
Personally, I thought island expeditions were great content - little, 3-man dungeons, with cool open designs where you just blast. Fun objectives to do, it was great! PvP island expeditions were awesome! What wasn’t was the reward structure, which literally killed the feature.
And Blizzard consistently fails to understand it’s not the features that are failing, but the rewards and reasons to engage with them that is the failure. Why couldn’t island expeditions drop gold and trash loot? Why don’t enemies in Torghast drop gold and some catch up gear? Looting is fun, it makes a mode feel way more rewarding. Why did Torghast only drop a niche resource, which basically made the mode a waste of time the moment you get your legendary? The fact that Torghast had only 1 (one) resource as a reward set it up for failure.
So that’s why. Torghast is fine. Island expeditions were fine. Reward structures aren’t. And the reason why reward structures aren’t fine is a general lack of depth to the game and its mechanics. Dragonflight is looking to address that.
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I was looking forward to it when i saw it in the beta and you pushed as high as you could go but then they changed it for launch to limit it to 8? Floors i kinda liked the idea of a challenge mode version of torghast that were not going to be easy regent grinds and just there for the fun of trying to do a challenge, locking soulash behind torghast and limiting the amount of floors ruined it for me tbh well the imense power creep too but less so than the others
Simple: It wasn’t fun to play, and I hated every single second of being inside thorghast
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I enjoyed twisting corridors and jailers gauntlet more
I liked the idea of it, especially the way it had flex pary size numbers. But the implementation wasn’t so great.
Even though you could do it solo it seemed to be tuned for a party meaning solo players were at a disadvantage.
As a non Raider / M+er my gear early on was just the campaign gear upgraded so ~190ish. Both The Maw and Torghast didn’t feel good with that gear so I decided I’d hold off on doing Torghast (I didn’t need lots of legendaries) until I had better gear. But by the time I had reasonable gear they had changed Torghast to require Box of Many Things and included a score and timer.
The Box of Many Things really put me off Torghast, which character should I do it on? (I’m not doing a grind on five or six characters, not even on two characters) I still haven’t decided on that yet. Torghast should be a place to try out alts and see what crazy powers they can get but I’m grinding the Box thingy multiple times (I somewhat resent having to do it once, this should be fun crazy powers not chores).
I hate timers and scoring. I’m not the best player but I’ll muddled through at my own pace generally. A timer doesn’t let you muddle through
Apart from Legendaries (which I don’t particularly need, still wearing my 190 boots) there wasn’t much by way of rewards.
TLDR
Not great for solo.
Not great for rewards.
Timers and Scores aren’t fun for a lot of us.
Box grind should be Account Wide.
It should have been fun, not chores.
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I kinda liked torghast towards the end when the focus shifted from mandatory weekly to challenge and transmogs.
because legendaries were locked beind thorgast
if it wsnt for that nobody would mind thorgast. but the fact that you had to run it on each alt to get leggos ? horrible horrible game design
I much prefer them to implement something new for DF. Only do it better this time, learn for the mistakes of SL.
Keep Torghast there (like Islands) to be soloed for fun to get what little reward there is.
I found it boring, while some classes got insane fun powers, mine were mostly meh.
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The instance itself in thorghast was also trash. Not just the idea. The mobs had very stupid unfun mechanics, and their game design philosophy was anti-fun, thinking we would look back at the chore happily, once we are finally done, but in reality, most quit instantly, because wow is not a job. It’s supposed to be a fun game. They even nerfed some minor movement speed ability things for some reason.
Their main concern in the trash mob design seemingly has been to prevent us from aoeing all the trash at once, and having fun.
The only semi good part were bosses, because it wasn’t trash, even though they also weren’t fun imo. The trash was horrific
I mean, you pretty much wrote the worst issues in your post. Most people hated those cons enough to make it fail because they took away more fun from the game than the pros added. Especially those who played the less optimal classes for it on release.
What made me sad is that for a few months during beta, they actually listened to feedback and Torghast was actually fun there, that’s why everyone streamed it. But then not long before release they just said f*** it, changed what made it fun and we got that miserable first impression with it, which matters a lot.
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Pretty much this, when the best powers were “Demon gets stronger” which changed nothing gameplay wise it was hard to not want to only make a tanky demon build to get torghast over and done with.
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