Why does SL feel like end of expansion time?

[Uniqed]

I honestly feel like a lot of systems in WoW are going backwards.

World Quests is an example. 5 years ago back in Legion every zone had loads of WQs and it was a healthy mix of kill X amounts of mobs, kill an elite and minigames.
When you look at the World Quests in Shadowlands it feels weird that it has been 5 years of development since Legion and this is the result.

It feels like all 4 zones only have like 7-10 WQs each in them. For example, how often is the collect 10 Animacones up in Ardenweald? It feels like it has been up every single day since the expansion launched. I remember back in Legion the devs said that it could take weeks to see the same WQs since there was so many.

Not only are there fewer, many of them feels like they are designed to be annoying. For example a SINGLE WQ in Bastion plays out like this:
1. Kill 15 Manifistations of Pride.
2. Kill 9+ Humanoids to collect 9 shards of something.
3. Combine these 9 shards to 3 bigger things.
4. Find 3 different platforms to place these things.
5. Go talk to a named mob.
6. Run to a spot 100 yards away
7. Get slowly carried around bookshelves
8. Collect 5 different scrolls where every side of the bookshelf only have 1 or 2 scrolls that you can reach.
9. Congratulations, here is 35 Anima!

And thats when you realize that you need close to 200.000 Anima to upgrade your sanctum and buy all the collectables.

If this quest was back in Legion i could understand it since it was a new system. But 5 years and 3 expansions later im baffled they have not evolved more. And dont even get me started on the "Fill this bar"-WQs where a mob gives 3% progress.

[rhorle]

For example a SINGLE WQ in Bastion plays out like this:

There are a lot worse WQ's then that one and it is rather easy and quick to do. I could make anything seem long and boring by breaking down every little detail into a different numbered step. Why didn't you count the travel time to fly from Oribos to Bastion, then the mount up, then the port to a lower level, then the mount up, then the travel on mount to WQ area?

You can easily get an average of 1k anima a day with around an hour of work. Those WQ's are not really that bad. You would have been better off going with the spriggan size weaponry which is a lot more of a chore then aoe and group tag a few mobs which is the WQ you picked. Or even the one where you have to charge up the bell which is more annoying, but still not much work then the one you picked.

The fill the bar WQ's are also a lot quicker if you look for items. At least for most of them. Which is actually a nice touch since it sort of gives a bonus for doing more then killing. The cost to upgrade everything and buy the collectibles really isn't that big of a deal. If you play the game you come by the Anima. If you don't find interest in it then you won't get anima but also clearly don't have enough interest to put in a little effort.

Souls is really the bigger issue since it takes two more weeks to get all of the Sanctum Upgrades. Then it takes a few more weeks to cap it to get the Anima bonus added in the last patch.

[threads]

everything in this xpac is such a chore. i quit the maw after 1 week of the dailies. quit torghast when i finished 1 legendary. quit world quests after a week. just not fun.

[TENTACLELUVR]

Been waiting almost two decades for that WoW killer. Got any insider information for us?

Yeah, here's your insider info. It's pathetic that you call others low IQ. That's one way to let everyone know you can't participate in rational discussion. Your heroic forum martyrdom will be remembered fondly and laughed at.

[Uniqed]

There are a lot worse WQ's then that one and it is rather easy and quick to do. I could make anything seem long and boring by breaking down every little detail into a different numbered step. Why didn't you count the travel time to fly from Oribos to Bastion, then the mount up, then the port to a lower level, then the mount up, then the travel on mount to WQ area?

You can easily get an average of 1k anima a day with around an hour of work. Those WQ's are not really that bad. You would have been better off going with the spriggan size weaponry which is a lot more of a chore then aoe and group tag a few mobs which is the WQ you picked. Or even the one where you have to charge up the bell which is more annoying, but still not much work then the one you picked.

The fill the bar WQ's are also a lot quicker if you look for items. At least for most of them. Which is actually a nice touch since it sort of gives a bonus for doing more then killing. The cost to upgrade everything and buy the collectibles really isn't that big of a deal. If you play the game you come by the Anima. If you don't find interest in it then you won't get anima but also clearly don't have enough interest to put in a little effort.

Souls is really the bigger issue since it takes two more weeks to get all of the Sanctum Upgrades. Then it takes a few more weeks to cap it to get the Anima bonus added in the last patch.

The fact that you can come up with several WQs that are even more annoying kind of proves the point i was making. But it could just be me. People might find SL WQs more fun and engaging than previous expansions and i am the one way off on this.

[rhorle]

everything in this xpac is such a chore. i quit the maw after 1 week of the dailies. quit torghast when i finished 1 legendary. quit world quests after a week. just not fun.

But isn't that the great thing about optional content? You do it if you find it fun not because you are forced into doing it. I like how someone, in this thread or another on the same subject, said this is exactly what a lot of people asked for. Or at least were convinced by streamers that the game needed. I really do think the biggest thing working against Shadowlands is the delay in content (and the pandemic that is the cause).

With Renown done and sanctum upgrades 2-3 weeks away for those who kept up with it the content is really going to drop.

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The fact that you can come up with several WQs that are even more annoying kind of proves the point i was making. But it could just be me. People might find SL WQs more fun and engaging than previous expansions and i am the one way off on this.

There were always annoying WQ's in Legion and BFA though so your point is still silly. Just as there were daily quests before it that were more annoying then others. The only reason why SL stands out is because you are not just doing them for the Callings where you could pick the 3 easiest but because you need to actually do WQ's for a specific reward.

Some are more fun then others certainly and some are highly dependent on taste/personal-experience. Each zone has its good ones and bad ones which is no different then past expansions. There still are times where I can hearth after finishing the anima (I do gear and pet quests if not out of the way as well) before my HS is up. So I actually have to fly to the next zone. Sure it was a lot easier to do that in the past with the flight masters whistle and it is annoying it is gone for when HS is down and you have to run across half of Bastion.

[Doffen]

Example of what I'm talking about: Most top 100 guilds killed Heroic Sinestra 25 with some members still in blues from heroic dungeons, that wouldn't be possible today.

Heroic blues was also a lot more powerful relative to raidgear back then. Not the best example. I killed Maggy with blues, but those blues are probably heroic CN gear in relative to mythic CN today.

[Zorachus]

I honestly feel like a lot of systems in WoW are going backwards.

World Quests is an example. 5 years ago back in Legion every zone had loads of WQs and it was a healthy mix of kill X amounts of mobs, kill an elite and minigames.
When you look at the World Quests in Shadowlands it feels weird that it has been 5 years of development since Legion and this is the result.

It feels like all 4 zones only have like 7-10 WQs each in them. For example, how often is the collect 10 Animacones up in Ardenweald? It feels like it has been up every single day since the expansion launched. I remember back in Legion the devs said that it could take weeks to see the same WQs since there was so many.

Not only are there fewer, many of them feels like they are designed to be annoying. For example a SINGLE WQ in Bastion plays out like this:
1. Kill 15 Manifistations of Pride.
2. Kill 9+ Humanoids to collect 9 shards of something.
3. Combine these 9 shards to 3 bigger things.
4. Find 3 different platforms to place these things.
5. Go talk to a named mob.
6. Run to a spot 100 yards away
7. Get slowly carried around bookshelves
8. Collect 5 different scrolls where every side of the bookshelf only have 1 or 2 scrolls that you can reach.
9. Congratulations, here is 35 Anima!

And thats when you realize that you need close to 200.000 Anima to upgrade your sanctum and buy all the collectables.

If this quest was back in Legion i could understand it since it was a new system. But 5 years and 3 expansions later im baffled they have not evolved more. And dont even get me started on the "Fill this bar"-WQs where a mob gives 3% progress.

100% agree

[Uniqed]

Some are more fun then others certainly and some are highly dependent on taste/personal-experience. Each zone has its good ones and bad ones which is no different then past expansions. There still are times where I can hearth after finishing the anima (I do gear and pet quests if not out of the way as well) before my HS is up. So I actually have to fly to the next zone. Sure it was a lot easier to do that in the past with the flight masters whistle and it is annoying it is gone for when HS is down and you have to run across half of Bastion.

This is a great example for what i mean with that many systems feels like they are going backwards. Why would you remove a feature like that?

You are obviously right about that we all have different taste. Some objective thing about how the systems is going backwards is the current lack of variation compared to previous expansions. Bastion shipped with 15 different WQs + 4-5 Pet Battle ones. With 6-7 up at the same time the variety is pretty much non existent. Back in Legion only Stormheim shipped with whopping 52 different world quests. About as many as all 4 Shadowlands zones have combined. Then you had Azsuna, Suramar, Highmountain and Valshara.

[bash the fash]

Been waiting almost two decades for that WoW killer. Got any insider information for us?

There are a half-dozen "wow killers" in the sense of games that make mountains more money than WoW is making right now. They're not MMOs though.

[rhorle]

You are obviously right about that we all have different taste. Some objective thing about how the systems is going backwards is the current lack of variation compared to previous expansions. Bastion shipped with 15 different WQs + 4-5 Pet Battle ones. With 6-7 up at the same time the variety is pretty much non existent. Back in Legion only Stormheim shipped with whopping 52 different world quests. About as many as all 4 Shadowlands zones have combined. Then you had Azsuna, Suramar, Highmountain and Valshara.

A lot of the world quests from Legion though were simply the rares. Shadowlands just makes each rare daily. But does variety really matter when you already won't do the world quests that you have? You started off with saying a 9 step world quest was to hard. Now you move to but there were a lot more of those 9 step world quests in Legion!. What will be the next argument?

The flight master whistle was a little to convient which is why its loss hurts so much. It wasn't need that much in BfA because there were a lot of flight paths. There might be a place for it but once we have flying in 9.1, the next patch, it won't really be an issue. And it only slows you down a little now but you can avoid most of the further places where it would become an issue.

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There are a half-dozen "wow killers" in the sense of games that make mountains more money than WoW is making right now. They're not MMOs though.

So that would mean they are not wow killers. They are just successful games which was never the only definition for WoW killer. There were always super successful games that made money hand over first. Look at Fifa. Even Call of Duty makes more then WoW.

[Daymanmb]

Is losing over half your subs normal?

[Galluccio]

What are the half a dozen of wow killing games out there which are making more money than wow? Personally, I only play Ultima Online. In their best year, they had about 230,000 subscribers unofficially. Now, they have about 16,000 subscribers. They have exactly six "developers." Well... two are artists, one is an engineer, one is a quality control person, one is the director, and the final person is the person who does the coding.

But, I still play the game and enjoy it. I log into games like WoW or Elder Scrolls and I just can't play them. I don't care if they are Ultima online Killers or how many people play this game or that game. I play Ultima Online and it's fun. End of story.

[bash the fash]

WoW doesn't need a "killer" because it's dying all on its own on account of not generating new interest. The entire MMO genre is an aging relic, as evidenced by the fact that companies looking to make quick money by chasing trends aren't imitating it anymore. That era is over and has been for a while. People who play this game are predominantly the same people who've been playing MMOs since they were teenagers/twenty-somethings.

If young people and the game communities that drive them to spend money in the industry are playing other games and ignoring MMOs and playing Fortnite or w/e instead then yeah, WoW is going to be "dead" in the sense that it'll exist for the people who will literally never stop playing it until the servers are closed the way people still play FFXI and other ancient games. No one would call that a healthy state of affairs, though, unless they're deluded.

[bmjclark]

Everyone who's gotten a weekly chest this whole time is in full or near full BiS gear. Everyones max renown. Legendaries and by extension torghast were pretty much over as content 2 months ago. 9.0.5 brought no new content. World quests are entirely pointless. Anima is pointless outside of some cosmetics. Simply put, there's no character progression left for the people who have been playing semi actively.

It was easy to complain about titanforging and corruption but it really stretched out content by keeping you grinding for an extra month or 2. Same with legendaries in Legion. Or even artifact power/azerite power. If they want to not have those near endless grind systems they're either going to need to release content faster or we're just going to have to accept that there's going to be this lull every 3-4 months.

[Shiekyerbooty]

Where did this discussion come around to WoW Killers ?

There are No WoW killers, WoW will always be a decent game, compared to the rest, it has such a wonderful foundation that can't be destroyed... everyone has cash shops, grinds, boosts etc...

Would WoW be better off without them.... I think so, but gaming has changed

As long as WoW keeps making dungeons and raids, I will keep logging on to try them out

I have a million gripes with WoW.... but it's still the best game ever made

[Zyky]

I did not get SL until Xmas... Did doing 4 +5's give you 2, 210 items in your vault at launch ?

It gives you 2 options, you don't get 2 items. Loot acquisition is significantly lower than many expansions in the past, dating all the way back to BC. Not to mention a huge downside to loot is forced personal loot right now so you can't even properly allocate where largest upgrades are as a progression guild team.

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Heroic blues was also a lot more powerful relative to raidgear back then. Not the best example. I killed Maggy with blues, but those blues are probably heroic CN gear in relative to mythic CN today.

It is a good example though because it talks about the power creep of what I'm talking about in terms of tuning. They design raid encounters to be overtuned and, for the average guild, require a lot of gear to beat the overtuning. And then limit the loot that you can get to absurdly low amounts. At least in Cataclysm, where my example is from, you could spam heroics all day long because the LFG ignored daily lockouts of heroic dungeons, same for Wrath and you'd be fully geared in a week. M+ is significantly more obnoxious because of the difficulty tied to it and honestly I know in a lot of players cases it's monotonous and tiring to have to put that kind of work in.

[Chloe the Maid]

I truly despise retail's current design. The design of no content for 4+ months because "Mythic+ exists! Go do them!"
Mythic+ is the tumor that's killing modern WoW.

[rhorle]

It gives you 2 options, you don't get 2 items. Loot acquisition is significantly lower than many expansions in the past, dating all the way back to BC. Not to mention a huge downside to loot is forced personal loot right now so you can't even properly allocate where largest upgrades are as a progression guild team.

Slower is arguable since BC wasn't much different by any means. You can also force your raid members to trade for the good of progression but you ignoring that options shows that in reality most don't like doing that. The only restricted item is weapons still right? Though it is less restrictive then BfA.

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I truly despise retail's current design. The design of no content for 4+ months because "Mythic+ exists! Go do them!"
Mythic+ is the tumor that's killing modern WoW.

But that isn't the reason for the delay and Mythic+ has been one of the most popular things of Modern WoW. The only thing Mythic+ is killing is raiding since it is hard for a once a week lock out to compete with repeatable content.

[Shiekyerbooty]

It gives you 2 options, you don't get 2 items. Loot acquisition is significantly lower than many expansions in the past, dating all the way back to BC. Not to mention a huge downside to loot is forced personal loot right now so you can't even properly allocate where largest upgrades are as a progression guild team.

That's exactly what I said... simply doing 4 +5's will put 2, 210 item's in your vault to choose from

That's better than Normal Raid Gear, that's almost on par with Heroic raid gear

+5's are a joke, you can ignore most of the mechanics, they are easier than past xpacs normal heroics, and they only take 15-30 minutes

There is no way anyone should receive raid quality gear from doing M+, it's mind boggling