where SL goes wrong to me (leaving out social issues)

[Louz]

What would make up for 3 or 4 different world quests in Legion/BfA is one world quest in SL.

Like that one in Bastion:
- Kill some enemies
- Collect items from different enemies
- Assemble collected items into another items
- Use assembled items on objects placed across the area
- Go talk to an npc
- Go on a scripted flight path to collect some items (can only collect 1-2 at a time because the rest is out of reach and you need to wait)
- Complete, here's your 70 Anima!

At least the "fill-a-bar" callings can be completed by boosting a bunch of lowbies through a normal dungeon, but then, those callings only get you some grays to vendor.

[Yriel]

They're literally dailies without the time wasting of having to go to point A which might be on the other side of the zone, manually pick it up, fly to where it needs to be done, then return to point A to turn them in. They're better than dailies, which we've had since BC, in every way.

Nah, not true. Dailies mostly had some kind of progression, the zone and the quests changed at certain rep levels. Plus you could actually complete a daily zone, when you had max rep and all rewards you were finished with them, they were not the neverending grind that WQs are.
I liked dailies better.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Nah, not true. Dailies mostly had some kind of progression, the zone and the quests changed at certain rep levels. Plus you could actually complete a daily zone, when you had max rep and all rewards you were finished with them, they were not the neverending grind that WQs are.
I liked dailies better.

That was only the case in MoP, other dailies were at best randomized or just unlocked more than the same ~3/day over time. Old dailies were just rep grinds in disguise, that much is true, but if all you care about is rep than you can treat the current system the same way. Grinding netherwing eggs/crystals on the side while doing dailies is certainly not much of an upgrade over grinding any other currency, like anima today, by just finishing the actual quest.

[Mackwiss]

surprised maybe no one mentions the screw up of old content... Old content became harder to solo. So when you'd get bored with the expansion there's always 7 expansions of old content to try to achieve or farm for mogs and mounts... now that's gone too, so without content to keep one going outside the main expansion, might as well unsub...

[Cosmic Janitor]

surprised maybe no one mentions the screw up of old content... Old content became harder to solo. So when you'd get bored with the expansion there's always 7 expansions of old content to try to achieve or farm for mogs and mounts... now that's gone too, so without content to keep one going outside the main expansion, might as well unsub...

This has happned so many times already it's practically par for the course. Though you are right, it would be nice if I could easily solo Antorus mythic by now, as I was almost there in BfA already and got nerfed pretty hard with SL.

[Grimbold21]

I'm starting to think that people complaining about WQs are similar to those complaining about when dungeons were too hard.

You sitting here talking about how WQs taking so long are injecting so much hyperbole into it, reflecting of how much you want BFAs in and out style WQ. Which, in reality, isn't that accurate because Bfa also had plenty of WQs that had you grounded for more than 30 seconds

[tomten]

Um... what? 30 anima? What world quests are you doing, considering the minimum amount they give is 35 anima, which is one single rare anima item. Anima WQs usually give around 2-3 of those, which totals 70/105 anima. Then there are WQs that give 4, which is 140 anima.

But no WQ offers the green quality anima items, that give 5 anima.

Only do the ones that give 3x35, 4x35 and 1x250. With warmode enabled for extra bonus that makes it worth it for me. Its usually only 3-4 of them available over all zones.
Thats 126-161(250) anima per world quest that usually is done in less than 3 minutes but very rarely much more.
Add the weekly events and you get 500 free if you capped souls (which you have if you didnt use anima...) 350 for dungeons and pvp for another 250-1000 depending on skill.
If you also raid you get 10 bosses that will give you about 1200 anima.
You also have end of chest giving anima from m+. So if you play the game, you already get 2000-3000 anima alone from literally just playing the game.

It's not really hard to farm anima if you want it, 10k takes little more than a week doing max 4 WQ per day.

[Yuli]

1. Disagree, WQ were chores in BfA because they were too many. And lazy af, most of them were re-used quests.
2. Disagree, love my covenant armor set and the leather raid armor set.
3. SL has the best gearing ever present in WoW and I've played since LK. It feels rewarding and well to find the optimal pieces.
4. Agree, though Castle Nathria feels fresh with its asthetic imo. I'm a bit concerned about the Torghast Raid though.
5. Subjective. Disagree.
6. Which fucking build-up did Kel'thuzad have besides his phylacterium mysteriously missing?

Also, typical "WoW is dead" post, just weird coming from a 10 year member tho.

Leaving out social issues - Shadowlands has nothing wrong with it.

^this

[Archibalde]

isn't that what they were going for though? in Legion and BfA you felt obligated to do every single world quest; because doing that would not only give you shitloads of AP, which boosted your performance, or you would get the Paragon chest quicker which gave you more AP. Now it's more relaxed; you literally don't have to do any world quests. The Calling system I think favours non world quests too - the only ones that require world quests are the "complete 3 with your trainee in X zone"

It's not any more relaxed, instead of spending 30 minutes doing 15 world quests like you did in Legion or BFA, you spend that 30 minutes to do 4 in SL. There are much fewer of them but they take much longer to complete on average, they are way more spread apart and the rewards are... well, unrewarding.

Sure you can get 5000+ anima a week by playing fairly casually, but what does that actually get you? It takes 91 500 anima to fully upgrade your sanctum. Most transmog pieces are 2-3000 anima. Weapons are 3500. Some full sets cost up to 30 000 anima. There are toys and mounts as well for anima. And that's assuming you never heal your followers for missions and instead choose to be patient. You don't have to do any of it of course, but if you do want it, it takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort. There would be absolutely no downside to reducing all the anima costs or at least increasing the anima gains. 99% of it is cosmetic. But just because it's cosmetic doesn't mean it needs to be a pain to acquire.

[Yriel]

That was only the case in MoP, other dailies were at best randomized or just unlocked more than the same ~3/day over time. Old dailies were just rep grinds in disguise, that much is true, but if all you care about is rep than you can treat the current system the same way. Grinding netherwing eggs/crystals on the side while doing dailies is certainly not much of an upgrade over grinding any other currency, like anima today, by just finishing the actual quest.

No that started much earlier, even in TBC you had the isle of quel'danas dailies that changed the zone. The tournament dailies in WotLK, Firelands dailies in Cata. There were a lot of those daily zones and i personally liked them.

[MrLachyG]

It's not any more relaxed, instead of spending 30 minutes doing 15 world quests like you did in Legion or BFA, you spend that 30 minutes to do 4 in SL. There are much fewer of them but they take much longer to complete on average, they are way more spread apart and the rewards are... well, unrewarding.

Sure you can get 5000+ anima a week by playing fairly casually, but what does that actually get you? It takes 91 500 anima to fully upgrade your sanctum. Most transmog pieces are 2-3000 anima. Weapons are 3500. Some full sets cost up to 30 000 anima. There are toys and mounts as well for anima. And that's assuming you never heal your followers for missions and instead choose to be patient. You don't have to do any of it of course, but if you do want it, it takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort. There would be absolutely no downside to reducing all the anima costs or at least increasing the anima gains. 99% of it is cosmetic. But just because it's cosmetic doesn't mean it needs to be a pain to acquire.

well first off obviously collecting everything from your covenant is meant to be an expansion long process. I would say that we will almost certainly see an anima increase as we progress through the expansion, just like we had AP increases in Legion and BfA. as for the world quests I do very few of them. the only world quests I push myself to do are the 3-4 anima ones; gold wq's depends on what the world quest is and I do the Pet Battle world quests which give pet charms.

I do find it interesting that you are lauding the world quest rewards of Legion and BfA while saying the SL ones are unrewarding... when they give basically the same rewards; gear, AP, Pet Battle shit, gold. and yeah they've removed a lot of the "kill this rare" world quests but those were very low effort. now the world quests have some variation. almost every world quest in Legion or BfA was either "kill this rare" or "fill this bar" - which is fine, but boring after a while. and yeah there are a few "fill this bar" world quests in SL but there are also others which are very different.

it's all meant to promote a relaxed gameplay - instead of HAVING to do world quests to get AP in Legion/BfA or to get rep so you could get more AP from Paragon rep chests now you can choose to do it or not.

[Cosmic Janitor]

No that started much earlier, even in TBC you had the isle of quel'danas dailies that changed the zone. The tournament dailies in WotLK, Firelands dailies in Cata. There were a lot of those daily zones and i personally liked them.

These were all just progressive unlocks in the zone and patch content on top of that. The original batch at launch in every one of these expansions was the same boring daily grind.

[Garymorilix]

Of course the in-game community is dead and its a massive problem and torghast is bad and the maw zone is terrible. Let's set those aside. Other issues to me.

1. World Quests got completely destroyed. People whined about them were they were perfectly fine and now they are ruined.
2. Lots of mogs but almost ALL of them are ugly which kills the desire to collect them. I think every single mog set locked behind covenant rep is ugly.
3. badge bookkeeping 1000% sucks compared to WF/TF. Another step backwards.
4. raid settings are getting extremely repetitive with almost every single one of them in dark, dank caves or antiseptic buildings. We need more varied raid settings. On a beach, on a snow capped mountain or snowy woods, forests, etc.
5. almost all of the characters in SL are constipated and wooden. I don't care about the first ones. I don't care about Zovaal. They spew out these bland, boring slow-witted diatribes that put me to sleep. Its a complete disaster. They are as horribly written and acted like characters from the Star Wars prequels. Characters like Baine, Anduin, the Winter Queen, Zovaal, the Primus all fit right in with Qui-Gon, Anakin, Padme, etc. Even Sire Denathrius is more about just spewing boring diatribes out his mouth than anything (I don't know why they praise him).
6. Looks like they will throw away KelThuzad as a minor miniboss instead of actually doing something with the buildup he's had over the years. Another waste. That's a billboard advertisement to not get invested into the new characters in SL.

1) Disagree. WQ's are just as useless or useful as they were before. I don't see a difference in WQ's now or WQ's before.

2) Gotta agree. Some covenant sets are better than others (necro leather is a joke) but there are like 4 recolors and that's it. They require way too much anima anyways, they could have done some elite versions at least of the basic covenant sets.

3) Don't care.

4) I personally hate the Revendreth vampire bullshit aesthetic but other than that I think raids are okay.

5) Disagree. The characters are okay, they are just as good as any character ever. The issue I have here is that Blizzard decided that we need big over-arching mysteries throughout the expansions to keep us entertained.
The il'gynoth thing was okay in Legion because that wasn't Legion's story.
BfA was the first time where everything was "but wait, you'll see this later" and it was fine because this was the first time they did this.
But SL is basically them taking BfA's mystery based plot and applying it again. It's good to not know where the story is going but being in the dark even after months of covenant campaigns is just too much.
Give us SOME conclusions and by that I mean actual events that end and start new ones.

6) Hard disagree. I don't know what build up Kel'Thuzad had in the past years in your eyes but it was exactly none since WotLK.

[Venziir]

I really do HATE world quests in Shadowlands. They take for-frickin-ever.

I really, really, miss the whistle. Without flying it was worth a metric ton of QoL.

Anima gains are waaaaaaayyy too low. I still haven't maxed out my 9.0 covenant and I won't do it in the next couple of months either. I refuse to grind anima in awful WQs, and now that I maxed all the reps to exalted I'm not even doing callings anymore. That's a major part of the expansion I'm not experiencing. This should be have been tuned to finish before the player hits max reps everywhere. Seriously, anima rewards could be multiplied by 5 and that would be great. They're not just a bit under, they're WAAAY too low.

And finally, there's a ton of story locked behind covenants that most players will never experience, because the penalties and opportunity costs for switching are so high. I hear about Kael'thas, Kel'thuzad, Uther, etc, and I have no clue what the hell anyone is talking about. I watched the 9.1 cinematic and I have no clue who that dude in chains was who stared at Anduin. Sure I could read spoilers on Wowhead or whatever, but screw that. They should allow players to join all four covenants but pick one as primary for abilities/dailies/adventures/etc.

Couple of years* unless they seriously buff anime drop rates or nerfs the amount required to upgrade anything in your sanctum.

As for "the dude in chains", that has nothing to do with covenant quests, you are clearly shown who and what the Jailer is througout the leveling experience - though mostly the Maw intro. And as for the story being locked, just make 4 characters and do each of the campaigns - that is neither hard nor does it require any effort whatsoever.

[Sunderella]

really, whats the problem oeople havewith the necro leather set? I like it for my rogue and am wirkin on getting the black recolor

[Marrilaife]

2. Lots of mogs but almost ALL of them are ugly which kills the desire to collect them.

I don't agree they're all ugly, but I agree there's a low desire to collect them for another reason - they're convenant and armor type locked which means most of your alts will not be able to use it. I hate mogs that require profession, race, rep, covenant or anything outside of your class (class sets I can justify, but many of them have recolors that aren't class locked luckily), it's too restrictive and while I used to play a lot of alts having 4 armor types x 4 covenants is just too much grinding to unlock something only 1 character can use and often it can lose it if it switches covenant too.

Worst part is you can't even pick the best mog for your class because that often clashes with how covenants are balanced and some of them outright suck for some classes so you're gimping yourself big time if you want to choose and keep desired transmog. You have zero reason to pick necrolord for a hunter or night fae for a paladin for example. So if you like that mog / back attachment / mount, tough shit.

[Zyrinx]

Might sound silly but what i really dont like is the fact the zone are all split instead of forming a big continent, it feels really disjointed and killing the feeling of open world

Not remotely silly, this is a major failing. One they saw coming because it sucked in Cataclysm, but they tripled down on it here.

For the story. I guess. They've managed to make flying much less relevant before it's even released.

Also removing the Whistle was beyond stupid.

- - - Updated - - -

really, whats the problem oeople havewith the necro leather set? I like it for my rogue and am wirkin on getting the black recolor

If you wanna cosplay a zombie, it's great! Obvious this is subjective, but I despise that set. I can't even imagine it for a Monk, Druid, or demon hunter.

More on topic tho, putting four barely noticable (in many cases) recolors of covenant bound sets behind epic long grinds just seems like a faceslap. No way I'm chasing those.

[Alanar]

I played through all 4 covenants and you don't miss much story.

Uther? He got evil because he didn't want to forget his past life and then got good again because.... he didn't wanted to be evil anymore? Now he is somewhere meditating about his past life.
Tyrande? Is probably/maybe/probably not dying because of the night warrior curse and after 3 quests we completely forget about that and fight some drust for the rest of the campaign.
Kel Thusad? Was sent by the Jailer to conquer Maldraxxus, couldn't do it, gets pulled into to maw again.

The quests for Necrolords overlap strongly with the quests of Kyrian and Venthyr, half of the quests are identical for Necrolords and Venthyr.

Covenant quests could have been cool but they were lazy and boring imo.

Let alone in the ingame cinematic that are so cringe that you just cancel them. Blizz still cant do ingame stuff. The wooden animation from 1998 when kel thuzad is dragged back took 2 sec before he got pulled, while we are just waiting in the back.

Its all kinda... not realy cool.

[Schizoide]

Count me as another person who hates the current WQ system. I don't dislike the idea of accumulating anima for cosmetics either. I just can't find any motivation to do any of those quests, after I tried a few of them for the first time. Needlessly long and drawn out, and it gets even more annoying to do if more people are around.

Agree that SL WQs are waaaaay too long and the rewards are way too low. However rewarding a currency that's only used for cosmetics is perfectly fine, IMO. The problem is those rewards are waaaay too stingy. You might get 105 anima for a WQ that takes 15 minutes to complete when a single piece of transmog costs 3000 anima or a covenant upgrade costs 10,000 anima. That's ridiculous, and I simply won't do it.

If WQs took 60 seconds like previous expansions, kill one elite, and daily callings rewarded more anima, then I would probably do them. Or if the 15+ minute WQs rewarded literally 5 times as much anima, that would probably incentivize me to do them too.

People saying Legion and BFA had long WQs too are somewhat correct; none of them were comparable to Shadowlands, but there were a bunch that took 5 minutes to kill 12 mobs or whatever. The difference is in those expansions there were many more WQs active at any given time so you could just skip those. And that is exactly what I did. I never, ever, did them.

[Soon-TM]

Agree that SL WQs are waaaaay too long and the rewards are way too low. However rewarding a currency that's only used for cosmetics is perfectly fine, IMO. The problem is those rewards are waaaay too stingy. You might get 105 anima for a WQ that takes 15 minutes to complete when a single piece of transmog costs 3000 anima or a covenant upgrade costs 10,000 anima. That's ridiculous, and I simply won't do it.

WQs anima rewards should yield 4x or 5x their current amount, if you want anyone to bother with them. After all, it's all cosmetic, isn't it?