I absolutely loved Shadowlands and all the friends I played back then, loved it too. I know on these forums people tend to focus on the negative and blow out of proportion.
Shadowlands was great for me. I even like longer seasons, I love to get the best gear I can and then focus on the world content , quests, puzzles, pets , mounts and so on.
I think people got addicted to the treadmill and God forbid, there isnt a tone of content every 2 months that they can no life through in a day…
I agree with everything you said, Denathrius was a brilliantly made villain, but people just focus on the jailer…as I said , only focusing the negative
Not in my opinion. I loved all the cosmic lore explanations we got during SL and even about the Helm and domination magic in general. While some mystery is good, it’s also good to have a magic system that has a proper set up behind it, a structure, because it makes everything more believable. It’s like the difference between Harry Potter magic and a Brandon Sanderson magic system. While the first allows you to be more “crative” it’s also less believable, because you can come up with some “new spell” at any point to get the plot moving in the direction you want, while with the latter, that spell needs to work with everything else that has been established and actually fit the built world.
A current mystery - that annoys me to no end - btw. are the Reshii Ribbons; oh, we got a whole audio book series talking about them, how they were used by the K’areshi in the Devouring War… but they actually existed long before the crisis and are artifacts of their “old ways”. So where did those come from? I seriously hope we soon get an explanation for those, else they are just a lame unexplained plot device.
And most unexplained stuff is usually that: a lame plot device that can’t be explained because the story creator couldn’t be bothered thinking of a proper way of how their “magic” works.
That is something so many ppl utterly misunderstood about SL. The afterlives were NOT explained. A) we’ve only seen 4 (5) out of endless afterlives, the possibility of “our” soul ending up in one of the known afterlives is almost zero. B) There are enough hints in WoW left and that were further built upon after SL that clearly show what we learned during SL about “souls from all worlds ending up in the SLs” is clearly wrong; so, makes you wonder what the stuff we have learned actually implies. And now with the Shadowguard using souls led through pipelines as fuel to create armies and feed Dimensius? Doesn’t that sound weirdly suspicious? C) We know you can still die in the afterlive; so the SL afterlives are clearly not the actual end - what SL did is basically put a “in-between-life” before the actual afterlife, heavily implying the whole SL are “Death’s” shenanigans to get its share of cosmic power. D) Death hasn’t been trivialized, it still has the same meaning: you are no longer in the world you know and love, get parted from your family and loved ones - its still the same old thing you want to avoid if you love your current existence. E) WoW religions were rarely about the life after death, they are all about where you get your power from, nothing about that has changed - just chose your robot; and what’s the problem with that? Every god has to start somewhere, sorry you aren’t happy about the solution WoW picked for itself, but that’s a you problem.
Well, that happesn with every story, every series that has to go on. Learn to deal with it. Most of the time there is some point where it either gets too weird and absurd for those who have been consumers since the start; or you simply adapt. If you can’t do that - again a you problem. Most of the so called “retconns” are not actual retconns that really rewrite what was established. As you wrote, they added a layer - and that is all right. And the thing about “the Jailer having been behind everything” is just another SL trope that is grounded mostly in “fans” beeing to set in their old lore and too stubborn to actually deal witht he new one - the Jailer was an opportunist, not a 3D-chess-genius; all your precious old characters still did what they did out of their own chosing, nothing has changed about that.
That’s the only point where I can agree, depsite my dislike for that character from the start. And guess what? It’s official that her character was ruined by someone working at blizzard for exactly that reason - to ruin her, so you can hardly blame that on SL; they tried to salvage her character during that expansion after what was done; if it’s good or not is another question.