Worst of Warcraft, Shadowlands Season 2 Review

Community General Discussion
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Hey, I am Ronjambo…

You may remember me from such topics as:
" Worst of Warcraft, Shadowlands Review"
End-Game is a Full-Time-Job (Not for casuals)
or [Critical Review] Division is Destruction!

Here I am, back once again as a renegade master, with another cynical review full of negative feedback for the Blizzard developers. Well someone has to stand up and point out the bad parts of WoW. However, contrary to how it may seem, I don’t particularly like to complain. Perhaps if more people bothered to complain, (instead of just quitting the game as they do) then I would not have to. Even though players quitting the game is the most negative form of feedback, it is silent feedback.

I remember when I studied games development in a guided learning environment, the main development model was a kind of spiral paradigm, a feedback loop. You had to develop a thing, be it a program, an animation, a website or a full game… And then you had to gather feedback about your creation from several sources. On from that, you had to make improvements to your creations based on the negative feedback.

Sadly, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft developers seem completely incapable of accepting any negative feedback about their creation, never mind making improvements based on it. So why do I bother to continue to give negative feedback? Well, because I would like for the game to improve.

~ The number 1 most complained about thing in season 1, from my point of view, was Torghast. Rather than remove it, as endless amounts of people called for, they made some changes to it and added another overly grindy currency to be farmed from it.

~ Now, new age players love their legendary items, it seems. Not sure why, perhaps it is just that they like the golden colour. But I look at the legendary items of Shadowlands and I ask, what is the actual point to them? Other than to make people grind, there is no point. The so called “legendary Power” that they have, could just as well be an extra row on the talent tree.

~ Aaaa the Talent tree… half of it is called a talent tree, the other half of it is called “soulbind”… Blizzard want us to (quote) “work for the factions of the shadowlands” and to make this grindy grind seem significant, they host half of the talent tree as a “soulbind” to some NPCs.

These are the main things that Blizzard could have improved on, going in to season 2, but they totally failed to make any improvements here. Just added a few bits on to make it seem like they actually did some work outside of their board meetings.

The legendary power, may seem pointless from that perspective yes, but it is crucial for high end game play…

so- Take for example, a low population server, where there are not many WoW millionaires who could afford to craft legendary base items. One example of such a server would be the 5 server group Nagrand/Kilrogg/Runetotem/Arathor/Hellfire-EU. This server group is listed as “High Population” because people go there, make a character, check the auction, then go to play on a server that actually does have a living high population.

~On such low population servers, the few millionaires who can actually afford to craft top level legendary base items, get to choose the price. There is far more demand than supply. They post items at extortionate prices. Now, people have a choice to farm gold for someone else, or buy WoW-Tokens just to give all of their gold to someone else. OK, if that is fair trade, but when everyone on the server is being FORCED to give all of their gold to the few richest players on that server, I do not see that as fair. It might even be cheaper to pay to transfer all of your characters to another server, than to kit them out with legendary base items.

Add on top of that gold cost - the soul ash and soul cinders… this makes it so that you literally have to take WoW as a full time job in order to play it at a level higher than “raid finder scrubs”. Especially if you want to play more than one character!

So are we really working for some shadowlands faction here? Nope, we are working to make the few richest players in the game even richer. Enchanted by a fancy UI of misplaced powers which should by default be a part of the talent tree.

The developers had a chance with season 2, to open the game up once again for the casual gamers, the altaholics, but nope, they failed to deliver. They failed to take on board any of the negative feedback that plenty of people gave to them in season 1.

People were sick to death of Torghast in season 1, why make it a main part of season 2?

So, unless you are already a part of a raiding team on your “high population” server, or already hoarding a few gold capped characters, Legendary items are not for you, Raiding is not for you, Dungeons and PvP are not for you… So what is for you? Well they did add a ton of mundane daily quests in yet another NO-FLY-Zone.

What is the point in allowing players to fly in zones which they no longer need to do quests in, whilst not allowing them to fly in the new zone? Some people don’t want to fly on small maps? So, Make bigger maps, or if they don’t want to fly they can use their ground mounts. It is pathetic not being able to fly where you really need to. It isn’t a 2D game.

Basically, all these things together (and i could go on about some other stuff), yea, they make it so that there is just no point at all to starting to play this game at this point. So from my perspective, (a casual player on a dead server) there is no point at all to playing Season 2.

Just when you thought WoW could not get any worse, it did.

Let’s hope the devs actually bother to listen to negative feedback, and stop ruining this once great game. Can we expect them to fix these things in some kind of emergency update… Nope, because enough people just don’t bother to give critical reviews or negative feedback. When more people start to give negative feedback, then Blizzard will listen.

So, if you are looking to try WoW for the first time or if you are a returning Casual player, just wait to see if there are any improvements in season 3, because season 2 is not for you. You will not enjoy it.

Thanks for reading another critical review by Ronjambo. Maybe we will meet again after the launch of season 3. Let’s hope I could actually give a positive review for once, but until then, goodbye for now.

EDIT: Sorry I just remembered that someone said to me in my last review topic, that it isn’t a real review unless I say something positive… The artwork and voice acting is outstanding and enticing as always. Just a pity that everything else lets it down.

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Riiight, so your point about servers is not something i can comment on cuz i play on a highpop server, but can’t you get the mats and craft the 262 legendary yourself?
I agree with thorgaust and the overall vibe of season2 being lazy and not friendly to allts.
You don’t need the 262 legendary for KSM or heroic raiding, sure it will help out but is it needed? no… I got KSM the 2nd week of season2 with ilvl 230 and 235 legendary. So hidding behind gold and gear is a lame and not true about the current stat of the game. Sure Pugs will kick you for not having the 262 legendary, but this is an easy fix. Don’t pug m+ or raids. Find people that you like and are at the same level and push, alot more fun and easy. Overall thou i agree, wow right now is really really bad. I liked season 1 alot but after half a year you want something else.

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No, I can’t afford to. I did ask in trade for someone to craft with my mats, nobody would do. But why would they if they make so much gold from the auction?

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do the grind to get it?

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Well, the problem is, those few millionaires who currently craft legendary base items… they live on the auction house, on a mount, on top of a mailbox. They have an addon which notifies them the instant their auctions are stacked out by someone else, and they repost them within 30 seconds.

So unless you want to quit every other part of the game and become an auction bot yourself, there is no point in even trying to sell the legendary items to recover your gold from crafting.

I found a load of legendary plate armours in season 1, that someone had dumped onto the auction for 1s each, because they were sick of it. I made about 50k from selling them at seriously undercut prices.

There is no point in trying to craft them, unless you already have enough gold to throw away. I am just not stupid enough to do that, or stupid enough to farm gold for some millionaire. A lot of other people on the server feel the same, and so the end game scene on the server is just very bad.

I am a guild leader, and currently we do not have enough players to make groups for raids. It isn’t possible to recruit good players to build a team because they come with high expectations. I am not going to build people up only to let them down, and I am not going to spend all my time boosting people.

Blizzard really should do something about dead servers. Like offer free transfers. Or stop updating Classic - which divides the players even more and makes the problem worse. I don’t even see why they made Classic servers, and then added the Chromie npc to modern WoW, because like, now people can just talk to Chromie and party sync if they want to do old content in modern WoW. It was a stupid move by Blizzard if you ask me.

But that is a different topic all together.

So in short, there is simply no point in grinding to craft legendary items, which are only good for 1 season, when I can just save my gold and have something to spend in a later season or expansion.

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yes and no. depending on what profession, the grind can be really, really annoying and its not like you usually can buy the mats cheap on the auction house. given how legendaries seem to change from season to season for most people…to be honest, i wouldnt want to spend the time farming all the leather stuff. i tried but gave up, its way too tedious.

if we only had to level one legendary rank which covers all the slots…fine. but every individual slot? screw that.

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If we only had to craft 1 item to gain a rank…

But even still, what a complete waste of time it is to grind Torghast for 2 hours per week on each character that you want to play with.

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Wow SL is complite waste of time …

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I have been raiding with your guild before. But everytime the raid was atleast 10min late. No real raid leader and you guys stoped after normal not going into heroic that much (from my understanding) and your suprised people change guild or server change? Making people that play wow classic get less updates and server maintenance cuz you play on a dead realm sounds really weird and down right stupid.

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what has any of that got to do with the current topic? I am not going to take a group of people into a raid if they would just wipe constantly on it. Not going to waste my time or theirs.

So, if they can’t afford to get top level legendary items… There is no point.

Updating Classic and ripping half of the players out of low population servers but then not offering the remaining players of those servers a free character transfer or connecting more realms to them, is pretty stupid, that’s on blizzard, not me.

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Did u not read my first post? You don’t need the 262 legendary right now, unless your really pushing the 235 legendary is fine. My point was that the raid environment was not for people that wanna push and improve, they got to raid normal and kill bosses then they where done with that.
This is probably my last post don’t see the point in arguing about server pop when all you need to do is transfer, sure it sucks but this is blizzard. They wont make anything free…

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I read your post, I just don’t see what last season’s raids have to do with this topic…

except that people could not even afford the 235 legendary then, and they certainly can’t afford the 262 now.

If you read the original post here, one of my main points is that other than raid finder, end game content is not for casual players at all, because of the legendary items, which are essentially just an epic item with a talent strapped to them (which should just be on the talent tree). That legendary power (talent) is crucial for progress, so is item level.

Character transfers to low population servers used to be free. Joining more servers together is free to blizzard. Maintaining the population of servers is a part of their job.

Modern WoW and Classic WoW are 2 competing products made by the same company, which is just stupid and makes no business sense. If adding a new update Classic sucks players out of Modern WoW, then it is up to them to fix that problem.

It seems to me that you only posted to talk about my casual guild’s raids from last season.

I am going to go watch a movie, thanks.

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Sorry if it came out that way, but just wanted to point out my point of view cuz you mentioned both you being a GM and raids.
Like i said, i love talking about improving the game, but the AH on a dead server aint for me.

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Well it’s not the auction. If people can find a way to rip others off for 500k gold (as some legendary items were priced a few weeks ago) then they will.

The crafting system for these items is the problem. Blizzard made a big mistake with this. It literally stops people from playing the game. It stops others from playing more than 1 character. Grinding for the Legendary items, (crafting and runecalving together) takes the game away from the casual player.

They basically tailored this aspect of the game to suit only the richest players, most elite gamers and social butterflies.

It should not be like taking on a 30 hour per week job to play a game.

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how is Coronel Mohn Jatrix?

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Hii. I agree with most of what you said, I’d only like to point out that I don’t necessarily think the final endgame parts of the game should be too easily accessed by casuals. I do think expecting others to put some level of effort into it is warranted.
…
Hmm. Actually as I’m typing this I have to change my mind. I hadn’t thought it through yet, haha, my apologies. I’ll leave this in because an epiphany during a conversation requires you to know the first part to make sense. I actually now DO think endgame should be casual accessible. Because of one simple reason. We would, as a COMMUNITY, solve this ourselves. Bad players don’t get invites to the challenging parts, good players do. Bad players can get better, and then get invites as trials. And thus endgame is solved.

It’s exactly as you say, Blizzard has removed player freedom from the game. In all these years, they’ve gone completely backwards on what the majority want. They might, in their folly, have thought that any increase in their player base was a good indication that they were doing everything right. But that assumption would be wrong, as it doesn’t account for better marketing, computers good enough to even play the game becoming more normal (I started my first years playing on a barely functioning laptop for as long as I managed before I gave up for a time, in fact I only later at the end of WoD got a computer good enough to play without a hitch, specifically so I COULD play without a hitch), and just the general influx of new online users worldwide. It is little wonder that WoW would experience natural growth, having been widely accepted (I say widely, I do not say by everyone) as the best experience of this kind there is for many years now.

I believe, now, that the ones in charge of development and what is actually put into the game think the endgame is all people care about. That it’s all they should balance the game around… that it’s the only carrot they can dangle in front of our faces, and the only thing they can do well. And they think it’s good enough that they can force players to spend more time, more effort, more MONEY, by making it harder and harder to access. By locking it behind more and more walls, because in their minds, anyone who enjoys that content WILL do the work (and I mean work) to get there. And they’ve designed the entire game by this logic. The POINT of WoW now is to beat the endgame, and anything else is just how to get there, in their minds.
And you know, they’re partly right. Partly. I consider myself one of those people who, having already spent so much time in this game, in this WORLD, I am now most concerned with doing the endgame, and for that to be fun. With doing the mythic dungeons well, with doing the raids and performing well in them (because they’re hella good). But they’re also missing a key point. The fact that I most enjoy doing it, not getting there, and this does not mean I do not enjoy the rest of the game.
I have no issues levelling a character. I’ve done it enough, and I love the world they’ve made (okay so Shadowlands is far from my favorite, it’s just so weird to me but that’s subjective, I still got engaged in the story for a bit and explored most of it). I’m a bit tired of doing it again and again and again for any other class than my main I’d like to play, since you can only watch the same story that many times before it stops being fun, but okay. The gaming world will accept account-wide progress more at some point in time.
I also have no issue progressing my character in the game, or ANY game I play. I think we need some sort of progression and reward system, after all we do brave these perils in the hopes of a reward, in the hopes of reaching a goal we have. But I DO have issues with just how much of it there is. And not only that, how utterly dull and simple most of it has become, not to mention repetitive.
I think gear progression is a good system, in that we enter a dungeon, it drops gear of X power, we beat the challenge, get that gear and then we’ve progressed. And we progress all the way until we’re done. We have what we need, we’re now as powerful as we can get in this content. SUCCESS! Now on to the next bit!
On the other hand, these… legendaries. I do not understand them. So many powers, and different ways to play your character, and they lock them all away. Stored behind lock and key and timegates, and on the lock on that gate it says “you must be insane to do this, and we expect you to be”. ONE legendary? We’re arguing how hard it is to get ONE legendary. While each class has, like, over a dozen? Nobody’s gonna get all of those! That’s SO much work and balancing, AND FUN, right out the frigging window. We’re forced to get only the BiS now, and we’ll be locked into it for ages because it just takes too much time to get the others, and it simply isn’t worth.

Unless you’re a high-end player, this game no longer is for you. The content for the casual player, the ones who play for the story and a vibrant world full of exciting stories and characters, the ones who enjoy setting their own goals, at their own pace, is mostly gone in my opinion. At least any content actually fun, and there’s just so little of it compared to what it used to be (partly because anything not endgame is now so easy anyone can breeze through it just as fast as they can make their character run, like literally, I can autorun casting instants and clear most content and that doesn’t leave much room for gameplay). And if you ARE a high-end player, it’s a miserable time mostly doing things you don’t enjoy, just to access the parts you do. You don’t get to do dungeons until you can progress. You don’t get to just start on the normal raid and progress to Heroic. Because every day, before any of the fun, you now have to finish the checklist.

Game is simply more work than fun now. Easy as that.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Good to see that I am not the only one who can see these things.

I mean, if i have 30 hours per week to play the game, then I would rather spread that time playing across several characters and not be forced to spend it all on one character. It is just work as you say, job like work, and that takes the fun out of it.

Thanks.

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