So now that SL is over, what were the mistakes made during SL.

[Wyrt]

Lorewise everything was a complete disaster. Having Arthas' soul consumed in the Anduin fight, Uther forsaking everything he was and basically becoming a free lawyer for Sylvanas, Sylvanas chilling with ther boyfriend in the Maw while Arthas and Garrosh get their souls obliterated (it's like the Warcraft universe operates on some weird elven girl privilege), every major event from WotLK to BfA becoming part of Bald Man's 4D chess keikaku, the redundancy of the First Ones (literally just Titans from vanilla bumped up by an order of magnitude)... I swear the best lore moment in SL was when we decided to leave it for good.

Ner'zhul too. He's a huge villain in draenei, orc, and human stories and he just was a raid boss and that was it. No story to go with him at all.

[Soimu]

boost sales really boomed in the start of SL, also legendaries and how expensive they were. I'm sure they made ALOT of money from wow tokens throughout and it really plagued the gameplay.

Also conduits and how dysfunctional the covenant system was b4 and after they opened it up. And the gameplay in general being way more cd centric than previous expansions.

First time i did not bother with a legendary. Mine is still 213 ilvl.

[Just Passing through]

The "Obsession" with it being forced is that the playerbase has basically gone into since BC maybe even vanilla a mindset that "If it increases player power even 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001% its forced, if it doesn't then fuck it, that piece of content doesn't exist and is a waste."

Yeah...this is an impression ever since I started hanging out in forums.

Only I wouldn't call it "playerbase". To me, the playerbase is the million (s) who play, not the hundreds on forums....and even those on forums do not speak with one voice.

- - - Updated - - -

Torghast could've been so, so much better than it was. Blizzard's obsession with forcing players to engage with content they spend a lot of time developing really bit them in the ass this time.

No idea why it went wrong here. At first, the idea of a "dungeon crawler" seemed nice (even with the "5 deaths and you are out" rule...and I could see myself doing it. But it would have to be Diablo style, where I get stronger from loot in that content. The buffs inside was a good start....and obviously getting all the gear (possibly in raid quality) just from Torghast causes other problems.

But maybe make it drop gear that only works in Torghast and add just cosmetic rewards?

The moment it was clear that I could only get certain achievements and rewards by gearing outside of it in content like mythic+ or at least heroic raids, I just lost complete interest, as I soon encountered a brickwall that only so much skill could overcome until the next brickwall where just gear would help.

[Soimu]

What do you consider mistakes from the dev team/Blizz?

The only big mistake from blizz is not making the whole game account wide. I do not care how many systems it has and how bad they are but do not make me do the same boring thing again if i want to try a different class.

I have quit SL after 3 months when i saw i need to do that damn questline, covenant, conduit, etc on my alts.

[Just Passing through]

....people told em no mount in the maw was shit but they didn't add a mount for months.

On the other hand, "people" kept telling us others and Blizzard how epic Vanilla was....where...btw...you WALK everywhere for 40 levels. Gawd I hated that shit even back in 2005 and it was one reason, why I would never, ever touch a Classic server.

Just as an example (of which this thread and forums in general are full of) that some say so and others say so.....and even people who may be ok with walking on a Classic server would hate it in the Maw. Or people who just accept that you walk in dungeons and raids (yes, evenin the huge ones) do not accept it in the Maw.

[sam86]

1) story: it was butchered, beyond recognition
2) legos cost way too much to create
3) torghast: play it as rogue, enjoy every second, play as druid: boring painful anima bonuses, the design creativity is all the way here, and ironic for the most fluid class, it was the worst (hunter is also bad)
4) way too many cosmetics: why?
5) just 2 patches?
6) unlock flying in old zones... (u unlock flying to enjoy it in irrelevant content.. yay), why not flying in all zones?
7) exclusive to Cata and SL: each zone is just a solo zone, unrelated to other zones, u can't even fly between them, why? Why not make it like fly from Hellfire to Shadowmoon in TBC?

[Just Passing through]

The only big mistake from blizz is not making the whole game account wide. I do not care how many systems it has and how bad they are but do not make me do the same boring thing again if i want to try a different class.

I have quit SL after 3 months when i saw i need to do that damn questline, covenant, conduit, etc on my alts.

Again, different strokes for different folks. I looked forward, playing the questline for every covenant - that is how I actually approached the game. Level as a Kyrian first, then Venthyr, then Necrolord, then Night Fae. And ofc I wanted the armour sets.

Luckily, once my 5th alt came around we had Threads of Fate...but I still always did the maw intro, as it was just 20 mins for more than a full evel up.

That ssaid - with the increasing amount of account wide stuff, I think we will get even more in the future, hell maybe BoP becomes BoA eventually for armour and all. Might take until 12.0, but I can see eventually all the restrictions going.

[Thes]

the truth always offends, friend

tier is for raiding, tier is from raiding.

I mean the problem could be easily solved by disabling set bonus in PVP (and m+?)

That way tier would truly be for raiding

[Gasparde]

Legendaries with a significant gold price attached to them, that had to be re-crafted multiple times over.

Like, the expansion had its usual shitty shit, you know, the shit every expansion deals with. Like, Covenants were super shit, don't get me wrong, but it's not like they were extraordinary shit compared to BFA's Azerite Armor shit.
But much like the stupid cunt ass Azerite Armor respecs having stupidly scaling gold costs, legendaries just draining the average player of their money while doing fuck all to actually get the money out of the millionaire's hands, was just absolute ass shit fucking moronic.

These fucking continuous gold sinks hurt the average player, coerce people into buying tokens and do absolutely nothing to address the elephant in the room that is inflation. Mr Quintuple gold cap who runs the AH on 7 servers is not gonna give a fucking shit about 200k legendaries, Mr Raid Boosters who's making 1m gold per week from just selling boosts over and over and over and over again doesn't give a fuck if he has to spend 1m on legendaries every 6 months - it's little dipshit Timmy who just wants to try a different legendary but can't do so without first farming herbs for 6 weeks... or, you know, dish out some cash for a quick wow token fix.

Fuck this recent increase of gold taxation for the average player just so that they can sell more fucking wow tokens.

[Flizzle]

<insert cliché statement about playing since vanilla and have played every expansion>

Shadowlands wasn't terrible. But its like Stockholm Syndrome these days. If wow was a FTP MMO then it would be viewed differently, and I would say favorably because the content is more than would be expected.
But that's the thing, we pay for this two fold, by box and subscription. It shouldn't be just 'not terrible'.

I do enjoy most things from expansions, I am the 1 main and maybe 1 alt occasionally person. I raid weekly with the same guild, but I spend most of my time in M+.

---

-Covenants were great on paper, and executed terribly as most of the community will agree on.

-Torghast was never what it was supposed to be. Same as those RTS style instances in Arathi from BFA... the fact that I cant remember their name says enough about them.
Could have been better, but wasn't.

-Cant complain about story because there wasn't one. (being less facetious, its the quality I would expect from low budget movies, sometimes great but most of the time bad)

-Cant really say much on PvP because every time I go near it its usually half way through the expansion because PVE has died down and I get slaughtered by those with gear and those that are better than me (a decent chunk of the player base) and I just don't get involved past that and get turned away. (is there a way to make PVP more accessible without degrading the overall experience for those that play the content more?)

-Raids were actually good, the encounters themselves that is. Settings were actually good. Just needed more of it. The power creep was awful though, needing the whole jigsaw of borrowed power to be competitive. That in itself is just alt unfriendly.

-Achievements.. there are a lot of them, but I really for the first time didn't feel engaged to go do it. I have over 30k points and for the first time it felt like a chore, I don't know if that's me getting older now I am in my 30s or that the content wasn't engaging enough, but I never cancel my sub and will constantly just plough through them, but I just didn't want to this time around. Getting achievements need to be harder to do and require work, but it needs to actually be less of an absolute chore, the whole separate zones didn't help with that either.

-Mythic+ was the same in a nutshell. Bad affixes and good affixes. Its nice to see seasonal ones that make you change the route so you dont end up running the same one the whole time. I feel like the dungeon rotation may help this, but at the same time it takes content away from the player.. We shall see.

--

There are other things I would list like the maw but its just repeating others for the most part.

The one big thing I would want to be implemented is the timer in M+

Keep it as it is, 1/2/3 chest but remove the overall timer.
If you complete it then you get the higher key and two items
If you complete two chest+ then 3 items
Nothing else really needs to change.
Its really disappointing to go into a group for a 15-20+ key and for them to leave on the first wipe.
I feel like there should potentially be a repercussion to not get a key upgraded past a certain level, say 20+ (if 20 is the highest reward level - portals)
Those higher then are only chasing rating and that's then the detriment of going in. Don't downgrade the key, just don't upgrade it.

One of the bigger issues is the whole gaming industry as a whole, people want content yesterday and they want to have completed sooner. The days of slow grinding and suboptimal ways and experimenting are gone and MMO genre has declined because of the wider gaming demographic.
I am not upset by that, but that's the fact, so some of the complaints need to really take that into consideration.
That's not an excuse for blizzard to lower their standard. If anything that means they need smaller content patches more frequently.

Thanks for listening(reading) to my TED Talk.

[LemonDemonGirl]

Several things.
-The Jailer.
-Timegated content/Renown
-Pretty much the entire way Arthas was handled
-Ardenweald not having a jungle area for the Loa, and a Drust raid
-De Other Side being a tiny dimension instead of a sub area
-Needing ti have massive amounts of Anima/Stygia to do anything

[Bumbasta]

For me the only thing I really disliked was that every zone was comepletely disconnected from the other. Itfelt like World of instances, while the power of WoW has always been vast connected continents without loading screens.

[escalprillo]

-Torghast layers being timegated
-Torghast wings being on a rotation
-Legendary powers being inaccessible due to world boss rotation/torghast rotation
-Having 4 ranks of Legendary bases in 9.0
-Having soul ash be absolutely fucking dogshit to obtain and never being able to miss a week of torghast otherwise you were permanently behind
-Drip feeding of soulbind rows being unlocked by 3 renown per week
-Last soulbind locked deep into the 9.0 campaign
-Conduit energy
-The entire concept of the Maw -- stygia, limited time to obtain rep daily, RNG conduit item as your end reward
-The complete imbalance of covenants for every class
-Making people wait 8 months just so we could do Maw 2 and farm Korthia for more fucking RNG conduit upgrades
-Shards of Domination being totally RNG to obtain
-Upgrading a Shard of Domination 5 times
-Blizzard hotfixing in a guaranteed shard drop from Sylvanas instead of it being in at raid release
-Sylvanas being absolutely heinous to kill early because she was completely bugged
-Shard set bonus outweighing any gearing decisions (get it or do no damage in raid)
-Shard dev doing mid-reset nerfs and then reverting them with zero fucking notice
-MOVING YOUR LEGENDARY TO A NEW BASE AND SPENDING MORE CURRENCY just so you can use gear with shard sockets
-Not being able to destroy a legendary to regain the currency until November 2021
-Tier acquisition wasn't good at the start of Season 3 and neither was the six week wait for the creation catalyst

yup .

[czarek]

Except shards of dominantion system (im glad i skipped that patch) SL were good :P
there were some minor bad ideas like time gating and RNG but yeah thats just a game. Shards were totally nonsense.

[klaps_05]

Thorgast should have been a m+ dungeon with changing environments and normal loot instead of a mandatory chore for your legendary

whats funny is thats what Torghast was in alpha/beta and how it was marketed then, but for some reason, was completely changed going to Live.

[Loveliest]

Poor raid scaling for small teams. We had to wait for nerfs on almost every boss starting with Anduin. Several of my friends quit and are never coming back. This scaling is important because most people raid normal and hc and not mythic. These people don't do weeks of progression on a boss, they quit. And since this is your majority, you don't want to lose that...

Making gear obsolete in the second tier.

Taking 7 mins to fly from one area to another. Deterred me from going anywhere unless I really had to. Left alts at specific points and never moved them.

[Maljinwo]

Shadowlands being canon is its worst mistake

[Khaza-R]

Some other posters highlighted its short-comings very well. I'll just add my biggest grievances :

- Dragging their feet while implementing changes to problems that were well documented in the beta (e.g. covenants, anima, etc)
- SoD - One of the worst systems ever added
- Turning Torghast into Choreghast
- Abysmal storyline
- Korthia

[Breccia]

1) story: it was butchered, beyond recognition

I was willing to forgive most of the issues in the xpac...except this. In addition to what everyone's said about the Jailer being Blofeld from Spectre and the cringe Sylvanas arc, the idea of the Horde marching into heaven itself and killing the occupants never sat well with me. Oh look, we get to kill Garrosh again! (eyeroll)

Shadowlands tried to tell a cohesive narrative by forcing you to run the zones in order -- something we haven't had to do in a while. That's fine, I like a good, tight story. This wasn't it.

[SinR]

The ass-pull that this BIG BAD DUDE'S been the one, from the VERY BEGINNING of Warcraft's lore, pulling strings and plotting and scheming just to have it be "I was just trying to unite us against what's to come".

The big bad dude that, until the announcement, has never been even hinted at in the story.