Is Shadowlands redeeming WoW for you after BFA?

[Hashtronaut]

I dont think I can enjoy shadowlands at all.
There is just so much unresolved baggage and frustration with BFA i cannot move forward until I see them addressed.

All the new customizations and pretty zones are very expensive makeup and lipstick for a 400 pound hog.

This is the first expansion I’m not pre-ordering OR even planning to buy until things settle in.

[Healing Rain]

No. And if the level squish is forced on players I'll be leaving WoW.

[Toybox]

The promise of it has me resubscribed for the first time in 18 months & raiding mythic again with my old guild, but I can hardly call it a redemption arc until I've actually clicked a button in Shadowlands itself. I will say this, though - If the requirement for raiding is as insanely tedious as it has been recently then you can count me out. As much as I love raiding, playing 30 hours to raid 10 makes no sense when there's much better things to be doing with that time.

[Nemah]

Too early to tell. I don't hate BFA - I'm mostly lukewarm to it. It's definitely not their best work.

I am not regularly raiding anymore either, so the impact of some of the systems on me, like corruptions, and essences, and Azerite, and blah blah is lost on me. It's just unimportant to my level of involvement in the game at this point. I can easily see if I was raiding mythic again how annoying it would be.

The concept of Shadowlands is compelling enough. Who wouldn't like to fart around in the afterlife basically. In theory, it should be fantastic, since the sky is literally the limit. There shouldn't be any cool thing off the table that they decide to do....the question for me will be ...... if they actually let loose and do it. Make it fun again, not yet another grind fest.

[kaminaris]

To me, just from the first cursory glance, the up'n'down expansions trend is continuing. It's a "theory" I agree with, even though some people dont.

Classic: Great! (Cause it was new and exciting)
TBC: Poo! (... storywise, anyway. Kael is evil now, by the way, for reasons.)
WOTLK: Great!
Cataclysm: Poo!
MoP: Great!
WoD: Poo!
Legion: Great!
BfA: Poo!
Shadowlands: Looks like it'll be Great!

Some people? More like there is a handful of people who share your views. In my case:

MoP: Mediocre, boring
WoD: Had potential, but it was even more boring than mop
Legion: Worst expansion ever
BfA: Best expansion ever
Shadowlands: Looks like it'll be boring again

Believe it or not, people play for progression, namely gear progression. And they are going back to static loot with more drop RNG which is going back to TBC (probably) issues running the same instances over and over again until eventually you will quit due to burnout or quit due to having everything "completed".

[Lurker1]

Personally I absolutely hated BFA.

I don't think any game or movie has ever pissed me off so much. Now with Shadowlands there are new features that I do admit look nice but after BFA it feels... wrong to me.

Especially since everything in BFA felt as though was pushed through so we can get this expansion.
How do you guys think about Shadowlands?

Was it all worth it with all these spoilers?

Im different i loved BFA and im sure im going to Love Shadowlands as well that tower!

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Some people? More like there is a handful of people who share your views. In my case:

MoP: Mediocre, boring
WoD: Had potential, but it was even more boring than mop
Legion: Worst expansion ever
BfA: Best expansion ever
Shadowlands: Looks like it'll be boring again

Believe it or not, people play for progression, namely gear progression. And they are going back to static loot with more drop RNG which is going back to TBC (probably) issues running the same instances over and over again until eventually you will quit due to burnout or quit due to having everything "completed".

I have to agree i don't think people noticed it yet but the drop rates will have to be nerfed very hard for the no forges expansion to work and thats going to lead to burnouts for sure!

[Accendor]

Too early to tell. I don't hate BFA - I'm mostly lukewarm to it. It's definitely not their best work.

I am not regularly raiding anymore either, so the impact of some of the systems on me, like corruptions, and essences, and Azerite, and blah blah is lost on me. It's just important to my level of involvement in the game at this point. I can easily see if I was raiding mythic again how annoying it would be.

The concept of Shadowlands is compelling enough. Who wouldn't like to fart around in the afterlife basically. In theory, it should be fantastic, since the sky is literally the limit. There shouldn't be any cool thing off the table that they decide to do....the question for me will be ...... if they actually let loose and do it. Make it fun again, not yet another grind fest.

Even if we ignore all the other bullshit story I would still prefer to let the dead stay dead and focus on NEW characters.

[Doffen]

Some people? More like there is a handful of people who share your views. In my case:

MoP: Mediocre, boring
WoD: Had potential, but it was even more boring than mop
Legion: Worst expansion ever
BfA: Best expansion ever
Shadowlands: Looks like it'll be boring again

A lot more people share his views than yours though. Lol BfA best ever and Legion worst ever. It's a valid opinion sure(like every opinion), but BfA is Legion 0.5. If you hated rental power in Legion, you objectively gotta hate it in BfA because it's worse.

Just admit it already, it's because you think Demo lock is so fun in BfA that you ignore the rest of it. Which is actually a fair view, but if you really dislike Legion so much because of rental power and RNG, BfA, and specifically 8.3 is your worst nightmare.

like I did with BFA (I liked what i heard before release so I thought it would be good).

I had the same mindset. Then it took few months in and I realized all the problems it had and how it was a huge letdown from Legion. Doing things halfway while in Legion they had a proper reasoning behind it. Took break that first winter during BfA, and now unsubbed. Essences were nice, but it was practically a lesser artifact weapon. Then 8.3 and it became very boring fast unfortunately. Azerite Armor, neck and the corruption being the big baddies. So unimaginative and full of flaws. Half assed content straight up, with overall bad class design which makes doing said content even worse.

With the Artifact Weapon you were done in few months if you did it in start, from 7.2, 8 months in, you did a few World Quests and you were practically done with it. In BfA they added more power every patch, which you had to regrind(azerite armor), and another system upon system.

At least with Shadowlands they are testing stuff, and in good time. Let's hope they get it right again.

[Morae]

Personally I felt like everything in bfa was designed to waste your time. Then for all that wasted time, you only received things that blizzard did not really put much effort creating.

That was my general feeling of bfa.

I hope that is gone in SL, but probably not.

[Lex Icon]

the expansion does nothing for me. the theme is meh at best and the new stuff don't really sound that interesting.
the stuff i'm interested in have nothing to do with the expansion and are just QoL stuff like the level squish,class & cosmetic changes.

[Isilrien]

How in the world can I say if I haven't even played it yet?

[crusadernero]

"I will consume all the content then stop playing"

Any developer would consider this a tremendous success by any standard.

Personally I have never cared about the narrative whatsoever, I play for m+ and raiding. The latter is always good, but I am considered about what they may or may not do with affixes and dungeon design. A bad m+ experience will ruin the expansion right away.

after 15+ years of playing this game, I have grown tierd of staying subbed month after month(or years) while most times doing the same thing over and over again. I've stayed longer if the gameplay or raids/dungeons/pvp been very good and fun.

Dont have the time to stay current with gearing and all that anyway, so I take what I can get hehe. The days of grinding out gear, rep, titles, mounts are more or less over.

[Nak88]

I think so, but I'm not sure. Let's wait and see, but this time I'm hyped and I think Blizzard will make Retail great again for the first time since early 2018.

[arkanon]

BFA is the first expansion ever i have taken a break for a reason other than "ima check out this other MMO for a few months". This time, i just straight up got EXTREMELY bored pretty early on. I didnt like the theme, i didnt like the story, and i didnt enjoy the classes. I dont like the majority of gear, i dont like essences, traits, or corruption, and personally, i dont like timed content. My job has me essentially on call 24/7, and i have a wife and kids, so being stuck with a timer just doesnt work for me, which basically rules out M+ other than late evenings when the calls stop.

Im not suggesting they change M+ just to suit my needs, just explaining why its not something i have invested much time into. I didnt like the split zones, i didnt like warfronts or expeditions at all, although i feel like they are both massive missed opportunities.

Looking at SL, the tower interests me to some extent, although 'hype' is not the word i would use. SOME of the class changes look alright, but watching a lot of streams etc, im hopeful at best.

I have been saying this for so long its like a broken record at this point, but the pursuit of balance perfection and their focus on pushing competitive gaming due to the high exposure has pushed the classes in a direction i dont enjoy. The two main culprits in my opinion are Arenas and M+. Arenas meant every spec needed to have defensives & self heals, as well as "smooth" damage output to avoid glass canons globalling people. M+ means all dps need to have high cleave / AOE. Now, to be clear, im not saying those things should not have been introduced or should be removed, im just explaining why i believe we have the bland and extremely similar specs / classes we have now. I miss the "OH SHIT! HELL YEAH!" moments specs used to have, most raids had a fight where certain classes would shine, but the balancing was not so tight that you HAD to bring those specs.

Sure, this meant the overall difficulty of the high end content was lower compared to today (in general), but i believe it fostered a healthier environment for the overwhelming majority of players who sit around the middle. I dont really have a solution for this, but personally, i found the difficulty around Wrath / Cata to be the sweet spot for the overall health of the game.

[kaminaris]

A lot more people share his views than yours though. Lol BfA best ever and Legion worst ever. It's a valid opinion sure(like every opinion), but BfA is Legion 0.5. If you hated rental power in Legion, you objectively gotta hate it in BfA because it's worse.

Just admit it already, it's because you think Demo lock is so fun in BfA that you ignore the rest of it. Which is actually a fair view, but if you really dislike Legion so much because of rental power and RNG, BfA, and specifically 8.3 is your worst nightmare..

Nope, you are wrong. BfA is legion 2.0 (BfA is legion done right), everything that was bad was improved in BfA even blizzard acknowledged it with their apology for legiondaries and decision making in shadowlands which is a lot closer to BfA. Hell, we even got static gear now.

You are also wrong about rental power, gear enchants is not really a rental power because it doesn't integrate within your class. That's basically what corruption is. Overpowered gear enchant. Which has pretty much the same effect as boosting gear ilvl by 100 or 200.

Rental power is in it's purest form was artifact weapon, period. That alone made 60% of your power AND integrated directly into your class AND also gave you another spell. It made up 30-50% of your class design, a single item.

BfA neck is just a tiny speck of that (which is good decision), shadowlands is just that spell.

[munkeyinorbit]

I'm still waiting on more class changes, I play warlock and warrior so it's good so see they're working on them! (and i really like the changes)

plus considering the trend of: bad expansion, good expansion, bad expansion. this should be the good one

Then how do you explain the shit show in WotLK, panda and legion? The correct way to look at expansions are
1. Yay new xpansion
2. You've got to be fucking kidding me blizzard
3. Well I guess you've fixed X and Y but Z is still pretty bad
4. Can't wait till next xpac.

Except Cata. That's the one they fucked up from begining and never fixed and just assigned to the bin.

[Capultro]

Well, I think that Shadowlands is going to be another filler expansion just like BFA, and probably even worse ... to begin with, I never asked for more customization. What I have asked for have always been more hero classes and more armor and legacy weapons. of race and class. That is more important than having black blood elves, or "popeye" humans or "fat" humans. Blizzard always fixes on the most geeky things to bring them to wow ... now this is going to be full Black and Chinese, you'll see how cool .... and in a expansions of filler just like bfa ... I think that Shadowlands is going to be more hated than bfa.

I don't know what the hell is wrong with blizzard, it just changes the game so that there are blacks and Chinese, surely the next thing will be gypsies, transvestites and gays ... blizzard is starting to disgust me but seriously ... this is a game there is no reason to reflect the races of reality or sexual orientations, especially those anomalous and indecent, the product of a dark vice ...and a mental imbalance

I will tell you a thousand times .... clases heroe, 4ª specs, heritage raze armors, heritage class armors, heritage raze / class weapons, there are lots of nice things that blizzard dont bring, i dont know why ... i must be more clever than them sure .... or sure their devs are monkeys ...

[Gotural]

If by good content you mean rehashed short questline then yes, we don't have that short questline anymore.
But we also don't have to farm AP for each spec separately, farm relics, arcanocrystal and legiondaries anymore.
Azerite and essences is fraction of effort of legiondaries, hell, even corruptions with vendor are easier now.





More like people didn't forget all the crap that happened in legion. Like AP farming and ripping classes apart.

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Seconded, honestly people don't realize how much effort you would have to put in legion to even get average power for your alt. Meanwhile i geared up alt in 2 weeks and killed M Nzoth with it while being in middle of the pack.

I'm going to double down on this one, I think too many people forgot how horrible Legion was.

I remember the dozens of thread on forums, people all over the place complaining about legendaries (and they were right). I remember top level guilds actually leveling and gearing up to 5 copies of the same character to have a better chance of dropping your BiS legendary on one of them.

Having your BiS instead of a low tier cross-class legendary was huge, like really huge. Up to 10-20% DPS difference.

Legion was also the first expansion which removes one third of everyone spells, nuked CC all around (RiP Rogues having Gouge and Garrote in Sublety spec, the list is huge). Instead it gave you more pewpewpew dps power with 0 gameplay thoughts. The whole setting was more Diablo than Warcraft, everyone was the "Champion" of their order.

Also first expansion to remove PvP vendors and creates the magnificent AP grinding system, which basically forces you to play a few hours everyday to not fall behind, etc, etc.

Imo it was super cringey. But I could understand why many people liked the epic setting.

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Even Cataclysm, while I hated it back in the days because it was the first time the game became worse to me (like Classic 8/10, BC 9/10, LK 10/10, Cata 8/10, purely subjective), was amazing compared to the WoW we have now. I would love to have that level of skill ceiling and class design again.

Imo,
Classic = Great
BC = Amazing
LK = Amazing+
Cata = Great
MoP = Great (only expac in which there were too many CCs imo, Fire Mages could CC you indefinitely alone, + battle fatigue was cancer for % regen classes like warlocks and DKs)
WoD = Great+ (best gearing system, no more Battle Fatigue)
Legion = Really really terrible.
BfA = Better than Legion, but same concepts sadly.

[Malix Farwin]

Have to see what they do with Shadow Priest but so far not yet. The complaints i had with BFA are still there.

[Donald Hellscream]

For me personally, wow doesn't need to be redeemed since I don't hate BFA, I do hope Shadowlands is gonna be better though.