So is Shadowlands good?

[GrossOnToast]

A great Xpac so far, for sure... But ive honestly enjoyed every xpac ever released.

[Kokolums]

A lot of very strange design decisions in Shadowlands. So many quirky gimmicky quests. I don't even care about chests and secret unlocks most of the time because when I go to do one there's always some quirky "requires 3 players to summon" or puzzles that you'd never figure out without looking up. WQs take too long to get to and to do for the meager rewards. Pvp being the best way to gear up. Some really awful rep grinds. The scaling makes it not feel like your character really gets stronger as you gear up.
Just a whole lot of strange design decisions where I out loud said to myself, what Blizzard intern came up with this idea?

It's not all bad. The game looks great. The music is beautiful. There's a lot of Blizz reference humor mixed in. To be fair also it's difficult to compare the full content of other expansions such as BfA and all of it's patches so 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 to just the content in SL 9.02. Kind of like evaluating player trades in sports, we'll really need to wait until 10.x and SL is done with all of it's content to compare it fairly to BfA or other expansions. Otherwise it's kind of like evaluating MoP without taking Timeless Isle into account.

They have destroyed retail. They also destroyed classic with massive core changes that make it extremely different to the original release so you cannot go and enjoy that, either. Its a mess.

[oldgeezer]

Shadowlands? Anima drought? Loot drought more like, amirite folks??

[Kokolums]

Depends on your or the definition of a community. A community can (IMHO) have different goals....and still count as a community. So...yeah...I think that we all who play WoW are a community...just like we all disagreeing and arguing here are the MMO-C community....

Everything else that you wrote is totally up for debate (possibly in another topic?) - I mean...apparently SL sold 3.7 million copies and there are ppl playing Classic who won't touch retail..so..whatever your claims mean that we only have 1-2 million ppl and about to be driven below 1 million.

If you can elaborate, preferably with data other than "I think Blizzard lied and everybody quit because trust me"...that would be awesome. As it stands, I would put estimates of people active in WoW at 4 million right now. Conservative.

I'd say 4 million counting China. But another topic for discussion would be what if the playerbase in EU/US fell way under 1 million but millions played in China. Does Blizzard turn WoW into an asian MMO?

[kaminaris]

Raids are far from the main focus of the game if you consider the reward structure. Rated PVP is.

I guess thats true. But you can clearly see which features are usually most polished and gets fixes fastest, that would be raids.

[Paperfox]

Wait before buying it. I wish I had. BfA was far superior.

Why?
Leveling to 60 is quick, far too quick. They offset this by putting a significant chunk of character progression behind the covenant campaign. If you want a decently geared alt, then you need to run that alt through the covenant. If you don't then doing world quests, and dungeons will not offer any gear upgrades. Or be prepared to spend lots of gold buying gear from AH.

Due to scaling, if you want to run old content like raids, then stick with a level 50 toon, as scaling affects mobs health so even though they still say their lvl 50, their health will match a lvl 60 mob. There are many threads on Wow's forums, so they must know about this.

Travel: This adds a lot of friction to the game. Zones are a 3D puzzle, and it can be frustrating simply to get to a world quest. Flight points and graveyards are few and far between. Once you've upgraded your garrison, sorry your order hall, sorry Covenant Sanctum then you will get an additional transportation network in one zone.

Maw/Torghast: Ugly and slow. Designed to limit your time there by the Jailor's Eye mechanism. No riding, and Torghast is a slow grind with very little reward, and you have to do it to get soul ash.

Loot: Everybody seems to be praising Blizz for drastically cutting back on loot. So be prepared to run many dungeons with no loot. Some people get lucky, but I haven't seen that and so for me it is a long, unrewarding grind.

Your mileage may vary.

I've cancelled my sub. If I start to enjoy it again, then I'll re-sub.

[Osmeric]

Aside from the story, setting, gearing, tuning, systems, balancing, and game play loop, SL is great!

[Tic Tacs]

Torghast was an interesting idea but lack of rewards and complexity felt more like a routine than fun after a fortnight.

[Kokolums]

Torghast was an interesting idea but lack of rewards and complexity felt more like a routine than fun after a fortnight.

Torghast is competing with rifts in D3.

You can either pay a monthly sub to run Torghast and be limited in the number of times you can run it, or buy D3 one time and run rifts as much as you want. Oh and the graphics are vastly superior in D3 compared to WoW.

[MrLachyG]

So far it’s better than BFA... but I’m still finding myself logging in less and less.

Is that an indication that it’s not a necessity to log in every day? BfA and Legion you had to log in every day to get AP. But that’s not the same in SL which is really good.

[Tradu]

Torghast is competing with rifts in D3.

You can either pay a monthly sub to run Torghast and be limited in the number of times you can run it, or buy D3 one time and run rifts as much as you want. Oh and the graphics are vastly superior in D3 compared to WoW.

You can run Torghast as much as you want as well.

[Mightytasty]

Did Torghast get old quicker than even Visions? I think so. They have a lot of work to do there.

No variation in gameplay between floors, bosses are gear/anima checks instead of having challenging mechanics (remember 5 mask Thrall/Alleria?), anima powers are unbalanced & therefore boring, lack of cosmetic rewards, etc.

During beta, I heard lots of people say it had the potential to be the “fourth pillar” of WoW endgame. Right now it’s falling into the “weekly chore until you get BiS” category.

[Tradu]

Did Torghast get old quicker than even Visions? I think so. They have a lot of work to do there.

No variation in gameplay between floors, bosses are gear/anima checks instead of having challenging mechanics (remember 5 mask Thrall/Alleria?), anima powers are unbalanced & therefore boring, lack of cosmetic rewards, etc.

During beta, I heard lots of people say it had the potential to be the “fourth pillar” of WoW endgame. Right now it’s falling into the “weekly chore until you get BiS” category.

Pretty much agreed. The powers are generally lame and the "difficulty" comes from the amount of unavoidable incoming damage(auto attacks, spammy/uninterruptible spells). Now, I'm not ready to judge rewards until Twisting Corridors is available, because that does give cosmetic rewards etc. I'd expect Twisting Corridors to help a bit with the lack of variety in gameplay within a run as well, because it picks floors from any of the 6 "regular" wings. Will it be enough? I highly doubt it, the powers are still either too weak(basically every monk power except Vivify, most priest powers except stacking int per Word cast), uninspired(wow your ability does more damage or you get free stats) or impractical(Polymorph, Mind Control, SW: D consumes SW: P, Entangling Roots, SW: D gaining damage from last hitting with it, ToD making Fort Brew bigger)

[oldgeezer]

No idea what rewards you expect though?

Just to add a modicum of interest I'd like to see trash have at least a chance of dropping BOEs. It can be green, I don't care. Just something.

And the final boss...have a chance of dropping some BOP item. It doesn't have to be spectacular. Something on or around you item level, maybe slightly higher. Higher chance as you increase difficulty Just anything in addition to Soul Ash, which I'm done collecting for now. (I have my legendary...I'm not motivated to increase its item level).

[Unholyground]

Not better than BfA, not even close. There are fundamental problems with game design decisions that will ultimately led to either swift change or mass exodus of more casual players.

Just because loot is now rare doesn't make it meaningful. Frustration of loot starvation is going to lead players away.
Just because travel is slow doesn't make it more fun because ultimately it just wasting time.
There is absolutely no bad luck protection and ultimately RNG is much more prominent.
Raids are again main focus of the game, its time to stop this (raider saying this).

yeah but then when you have a system were loot is being thrown at you all the time you're expected to do everything to get the best of the best and that is bad for actual human health and mental health. I like being able to feel like I'm done with my character for the week and can actually do other stuff other than wow.

- - - Updated - - -

Did Torghast get old quicker than even Visions? I think so. They have a lot of work to do there.

No variation in gameplay between floors, bosses are gear/anima checks instead of having challenging mechanics (remember 5 mask Thrall/Alleria?), anima powers are unbalanced & therefore boring, lack of cosmetic rewards, etc.

During beta, I heard lots of people say it had the potential to be the “fourth pillar” of WoW endgame. Right now it’s falling into the “weekly chore until you get BiS” category.

It's going to get a lot harder believe me, we only have access to layer 8 right now and the first two wings, they also only nerfed these two Wings because they're the beginner wings as far as I know.

- - - Updated - - -

Torghast was an interesting idea but lack of rewards and complexity felt more like a routine than fun after a fortnight.

I think the main issue is that you can't randomly group for it, it's the one instance where a random groups would probably be not so bad since everybody is there for the main goal of progressing to the end.

[Doffen]

Did Torghast get old quicker than even Visions? I think so. They have a lot of work to do there.

No variation in gameplay between floors, bosses are gear/anima checks instead of having challenging mechanics (remember 5 mask Thrall/Alleria?), anima powers are unbalanced & therefore boring, lack of cosmetic rewards, etc.

During beta, I heard lots of people say it had the potential to be the “fourth pillar” of WoW endgame. Right now it’s falling into the “weekly chore until you get BiS” category.

To me Torghast needs to be harder, have more variety and to be shorter. It just takes way too long imo. I am barely in there because it doesn't give you more than some soul ash, or do the weekly quest and I am done for the week. Looking forward to the Twisting Corridors, hopefully it gives me more of an incentive to do it. Rest of the game is to my liking, so I much much much rather do that than do Torghast as it is now.

[kaminaris]

yeah but then when you have a system were loot is being thrown at you all the time you're expected to do everything to get the best of the best and that is bad for actual human health and mental health. I like being able to feel like I'm done with my character for the week and can actually do other stuff other than wow.

Not really, nobody was expecting from me to farm shit in BfA. Now we have situations where officers are asking people "why you are not gearing? You havent done M+ yet?" then the dude links them his 20 M+ runs in which he got jack shit.

[kamuimac]

If Preach - ultimate whitekinight out of all people is making video about how loot is destroying SL you know something is horribly horribly wrong with game.

im proud - it took him 3 weeks to get the same arguments as i did in week 1 gg Mike

[kaminaris]

If Preach - ultimate whitekinight out of all people is making video about how loot is destroying SL you know something is horribly horribly wrong with game.

im proud - it took him 3 weeks to get the same arguments as i did in week 1 gg Mike

where is that video?

[Kel_Sceptic]

Not really, nobody was expecting from me to farm shit in BfA. Now we have situations where officers are asking people "why you are not gearing? You havent done M+ yet?" then the dude links them his 20 M+ runs in which he got jack shit.

Dude, you are the one that says "4 hours in wow everyday is not even much".
Ofc with that ammount of play time, you won't feel azerite power as grindy as it felt to most population that are having max 2h per day, and that not everyday.

Stop trying to make your experience look as a default for everyone since it surely doesn't work.
During 2 topics there are more then 80% of people, liking Shadowlands and disliking Shadowlands, that wrote that BFA was sh17, one of the lowest, and so on.

Try to understand that because you've started playing during Legion/BFA, you got to experience a whole lot of different experience then what WoW was about for the first 12 years.

That is not a bad thing at all, and I respect Dev's decisions. When WoW will not be for me anymore, I'm gonna quit and that's it.

We will see if the majority of WoW players is made of Generation Z people that want that kind of Legion/BFA grinding style while gear is trowed at them in high useless quantities with RNG over RNG over RNG layers, or if it still has the majority of players from Vanilla/TBC/WotLK/Cata/MoP times.

From my PoV, there is nothing wrong with going 1-2 weeks without a new item gear, but hell thx for the bad luck protection Great Vault, you will still get 1 item every week, even if you are the most unluck person on earth.


We will need to just wait and see.

Here's the video:



Listen carefully to what he says from 1:50 My man.
Sure he does says that M+ is kind of unrewarding for casuals. ... that do M+15

There's just something that counters casual .... M+15 ))))