Too much friction to enjoy the game

[rhorle]

And I’d laugh at them and tell them to stop being hoarders when there’s a plethora of things to spend it on.

A plethora? Only if you switch covenants. Prior to the recent hot fix the only thing to continually spend Anima on was healing your companions at the mission table or doing a vendor shuffle. If you already have the rank 3 achievements you swim in Anima without really trying. If you do all the world quests for Anima then you'll be filling up your bank with stuff you can't deposit.

- - - Updated - - -

Is it just me who feels restricted in my ability to play Shadowlands the way I want and therefore unable to fully enjoy the game? Areas of friction limiting my freedom and enjoyment include:

You don't need the highest rank legendary to test them out. The proc/effect is the same across all ranks and the only difference is the stats that are on the item. So just buy a cheap rank 1 (or 4) and wait for prices to drop on ranks 5 and 6. The cost is the same and soul ash is easy to come by including being able to farm it repeatedly (though at a reduced rate the then first layer clear of the week). You can also go straight to rank 4, 5, or 6 if you want. The cost automatically adjusts.

Covenants are like a class choice. If you want to change that progress doesn't carry over. You lose that progress otherwise people would be switching at will to min/max in the moment. It really isn't that big of a deal to have to re-earn that stuff though over the course of the expansion. And you'll be swimming in Anima so the costs are not that big of a deal if you just play the game.

Conduit energy exists to limit min/max swapping for each encounter. It really isn't that big of a deal though as there isn't that big of a reason to be constantly switching them out. Balance and sims don't change that much that you really need to encounter it.

[lordjust]

...
If covenant choice had been a hard, unchangeable, choice I would have been in favor of that. I like choices that have consequences in my RPG. But since the ability to switch exists there seems to be no reason to not allow it to be a flip of the switch when a player wants to change, unless your goal is to punish and impede those players.

As long as there is power tied to the covenants, they can't make them permanent choices. After seeing so many arms warriors in the race for world first and some opinions why playing arms at the start makes more sense, I tried arms and switched from venthyr to night fae. The dps difference between venthyr arms and night fae arms simmed to be 10% for my warrior.

With that big of a dps difference it makes sense that they added the option to switch covenants because it isn't the 5% they're aming for or the 0.5% they wish for.

[Cosmic Janitor]

I really hope that the way the story is going we will just have all the covenant unlocked to us. We are now working side by side with them all anyways, why is it the other three are just telling us to F off when we go to them..

This was such a major failure, the covenants had already abandoned any conflict after the leveing experience before we even started to grind renown or do the story. Not to mention 3 out of 8 quest chapters were dedicated to be shared among the covenants. We only had to pick and choose because the most useless of all the eternals, the archon, said one single line and everyone else just went with it. There was never a logical reason why we couldn't have helped all 4 covenants. Another way to deal with them would have been to simply treat them like artefact weapons of offspecs, and after the first you simply unlock the others later. This would have elongated the story content for people who aren't altaholics by a factor of 3 and given people a tone more to do with different covenant features.

[Dazu]

If you want to see all the covenant storylines - level a new class for it. More alts can generate more gold/mats etc. Im sure almost everyone has 4+ characters at or near max by now if they are regularly playing. Keep your main raider/pvp/high M+ character as its BiS covenant and use the others for the other storylines if its not going to be max pushing content.
Worst case, farm gold to turn into tokens and buy a level 50 boost for alts. 1x alt at 60 can generate thousands of gold per day on the mission table and a few quests to gain Anima to keep it running smoothly (such as world bosses and Arena in Maldraxxus when its the 250 anima reward).

I think the covenants had far too much power tied to them, I think it should have been zone perks mostly and cosmetic/utility assistance. All should have gained a similar power output with a covenant theme/colour tied into it. Say chance on attacks/spells to launch a orb at the target healing or dealing damage - So for each faction it could be a different type of orb doing the same thing - Kyrian a holy bolt, Venthyr a Blood orb, Night Fae a star falling, or Maldraxxus a screaming skull etc.
All the soulbinds should have been mostly the same thing, even using the current skills in them just uniform but again with a covenant theme to them. Let the players then choose the paths and actual choose able soulbinds.
This solves the power need to change. Leave the current change method in place and now players can still do it if they want, or they can roll a new character for the other storylines.

[Lolites]

https://subcreation.net/top-covenants.html

The speed with which people have changed is also incredible. Discipline priest used to be like 95% venthyr and is now almost the same Kyrian.

its based on top parses... jeez people who performed best have covenant that perform best, what a surprise...
nobody EVER denied minmaxers will choose "the best", but they are not the only people playing the game...

"Based on 119750 top Mythic+ logs and 157294 top Sanctum of Domination parses."
so 120k of m+ logs, rio have 3,463,298 in database, so this is roughly top 3%... and even there its not ALL people in "the best" covenant...

[Lolites]

lol, nice catch! I'd been hearing his claim for awhile now and it's nice to see that it's easily debunkable when one simply looks at what the data is actually showing.

from the linked websites own FAQ:

"Yes. Because we're only looking at the top 100 keys per dungeon per affix for each region (since that's what the raider.io provides), we are necessarily biased toward the top end. We also don't look at keys below +16, and only consider timed keys."

yep, its like claiming everybody love comics because majority of people you asked at Comic-Con do...
but tbh, reading comments about latest Elune video i understood a lot of people have trouble understanding simple sentances, so understanding raw data is faaaaar beyond them

[Jamais]

Honestly I don't see how Shadowlands systems are that complicated. I dont think there was any malicious intent with covenants, soulbinds and conduits. Imho, it was just a way to make a throwback to old talent trees(soulbinds) and glyphs(conduits). As for covenant abilities, i think signature spells cant be compared to essences, which were the most borrowed of borrowed powers ever. They were literally extra buttons with no ties to our spec, unlike signature abilities which, for the most part, have good synergy with our spec toolkit and actually feel like a part of it.

As for the legendaries, this system is a vast improvement over Legion imho, especially compared to their pre Argus aquisition.

[vulfrika]

It depends on how you like to play the game.

None of this makes sense, because you can look up which conduit is the best, which covenant is the best and which legendary is the best. There is no need to swap and experiment - this is not the game for it(and will never be).

Why make more than 1 covenant and legendary then? As we can clearly see from the cov distribution data from Raider.io, over 80% of the playerbase simply default to "the best" option.

[Lolites]

As we can clearly see from the cov distribution data from Raider.io, over 80% of the playerbase simply default to "the best" option.

do we now? may i bother you for a link? bcs from all the statistics ive seen there is no way to come to that conclusion (and not only bcs statistics shown what people choose not WHY they did, or the fact that "best" covenant depends usualy on more things we have no clue about)

[Xalvia]

its based on top parses... jeez people who performed best have covenant that perform best, what a surprise...
nobody EVER denied minmaxers will choose "the best", but they are not the only people playing the game...

"Based on 119750 top Mythic+ logs and 157294 top Sanctum of Domination parses."
so 120k of m+ logs, rio have 3,463,298 in database, so this is roughly top 3%... and even there its not ALL people in "the best" covenant...

so bascially all relevant people that care about this problem, i doubt any casual strolling around farming mounts and pets cares about covenant balance.

balance is horrible which wouldn't be that big of an issue if you could swap around the abilities freely.

they are repeating the mistakes of the past, staying stubborn for no reason at all for most of the expansion just to fix it in the last patch, im sick of it.

[erifwodahs]

SL is just worse version of Legion in many ways. Legion brought in many things which felt fresh and cool and were certainly made to much higher standard. If brought now, WQs and AP grind would feel quite shit, but the other game elements were top notch and what we have in SL is huge potential things which were rushed and half assed to be boring and dull.

[fruitbasket102]

Is it just me who feels restricted in my ability to play Shadowlands the way I want and therefore unable to fully enjoy the game? Areas of friction limiting my freedom and enjoyment include:

1) Legendaries:
Blizzard appears to have put a significant amount of effort into creating all the different legendary memories (approximately 20 per class) and each can be crafted into 11 different slots and each slot can be upgraded by 6 item level tiers. To craft the legendaries requires a significant amount of gold or materials for the base item, x40 Korthite crystals which I receive around 2 per day (20days to farm), 1550 Soul ash, and 1650 Soul Cinders (4 weeks of torghast). What is the purpose of this design? How does Blizzard intend for the player to interact with this complex and restrictive process? I would enjoy trying them all myself but it appears that the only option is to carefully pick 1 or 2 to invest in and hope it remains a competitive choice. Why did they make so many options then restrict the player's ability to try them out?

2) Covenants:
I've spent around 4 months collecting and leveling max command table companions, 2 months collecting conduits, 3 months on the sanctum upgrades. Why do players need to forfeit this and start over in a new covenant to try another class-covenant combination and experience the rest of the shadowlands story? What is the intent of this restriction?

3) Conduit Energy: Why does this exist?

I understand some amount of friction to make game decisions seem meaningful but the amount of friction is too high that I feel controlled by the game. I make a decision then I'm stuck unless I'm willing to invest a tremendous amount of time grinding to catch up. It's opressive.

Your 1 and 3 bullet points are true they are so many but I'd have to disagree with number 2, command table and sanctum upgrade are just there for social retards like you so they spend time farming and they server no real purpose in any form of progression in the game

[Lolites]

so bascially all relevant people that care about this problem, i doubt any casual strolling around farming mounts and pets cares about covenant balance.

balance is horrible which wouldn't be that big of an issue if you could swap around the abilities freely.

they are repeating the mistakes of the past, staying stubborn for no reason at all for most of the expansion just to fix it in the last patch, im sick of it.

im sure if you ever had any busines and told 97% of your customers they dont matter they would be thrilled... but no, not only top 3% (who are not even unified by that source) are "all relevant people", they are tiny part of relevant people, who btw actualy DONT CARE about the system at all, casuals do, minmaxers only care about numbers, if the difference was 0.01% some people would STILL take the "best", so why fuck over everyone else, just so very few people could freely change if they will ANYWAY pick whats "best"...

[Wuusah]

there was always some kind of soft lock on what you had to take if you wanted to be competitive. i don't want to make it seem like there was never this sort of thing before but it was never to this extent.

Exactly this. Back in the days the biggest hurdle to switching spec was getting the gear for that other spec. They made that significantly easier so that you could just switch specs as you liked. You weren't as optimized as with your main spec but who cares. Now when I even think about switching specs, I get a headache. I don't have the right covenant for that other spec. Do I have the conduits? What are the conduits that other spec even uses? What soulbind should I use for this offspec? I don't have the legendary. Well, I could quickly make one but it will be ilvl 190. I don't want to waste 100k gold on a spec I don't even know how much I'll play it. And on top of that all you have also the interface stuff you have to manage with weakauras because the Blizzard UI is trash.

Planning to try an offspec nowadays feels like this meme

[MrLachyG]

A plethora? Only if you switch covenants. Prior to the recent hot fix the only thing to continually spend Anima on was healing your companions at the mission table or doing a vendor shuffle. If you already have the rank 3 achievements you swim in Anima without really trying. If you do all the world quests for Anima then you'll be filling up your bank with stuff you can't deposit.

actually they did just add a vendor where you can buy stuff using anima. https://www.wowhead.com/npc=181681/tukol

[cparle87]

Lol what. It caps at 35k. There are building upgrades that cost 15k, and transmog that costs 30k.

https://www.wowhead.com/currency=181...#items;0-18+19

The guy I was responding to was upset that anima takes us space in your bags, which you then deposit into your reservoir until it's full and the rest stay in your bags. I was spelling out what it would be like if it wasn't an item and just a currency you looted. Aka any you earned after you capped would be lost forever. Whereas now you can hold onto it in your bags until you spend stuff, then deposit some more in.

[Niwes]

I remember clearly, a year ago, when ATVI Blizzard aka Ion talked a lot about how SL is not the next BfA with Azerite and „Systems“ and when they talked about all the alt friendlyness improvements and the end of the treadmill WoW. At that time i did not believed a single word, because i had lost any trust in that fucked up company already. But i started SL nonetheless, just for curiousity and free time cause of the pandemic. Now, a year later, i look at SL, which is „systems“ wise factor 5 worse than BfA and horrible much „more of the same“ and see i was right to not believe a single word they say.

In short: WoW was and is going more and more and more in the direction they steered to since years. if you like that, is entirely up to you. but now, first patch into SL, i would be happy if its „just“ the systems from BfA. to me, that game and that company is factually dead. its a cheap implemented systems of systems of systems, sold as content, full with gating and shit to keep ppl subbed, without real content or any deepness.

its now 100% clear that the direction of wow ends my 15+ years wow career (without any sub interruption) with SL. as i said, its up to everyone on its own, if someone like that type of game design. i do not. SL WoW has nothing to do with the WoW i liked (and i could definetely say i played ALL of it). and i was also already proofen, regardless what they say, that they wether going away from this direction, nor that you can trust them. at this point its clearly for me, that this is the final stop sign.

[Zyrinx]

^^^ same. I'll consider 10.0 if and only if there's a major shift in direction.

I do not expect that to happen, but given the utter shitshow, it's at least possible.

[Martymark]

"Too much friction to enjoy the game" that's what she said.

[Johnjohn]

I agree completely.

Blizzard have frustrated me out of the game completely. There have been some big shifts over the 16 years, but for me the WoD/Legion era was where the game made a drastic shift away from what I wanted to do.

WoD was to me a pretty good expansion with the exception of garrisons. The main issue was the lack of content. While Legion fixed this somewhat, Blizzard also went overboard with it. It became obvious that there was a calculated attempt to get you to log in every day to complete tedious chores or fear missing out in Legion. This is also when systems started.

I could see it, I hated it, but I loved the Legion zones and artifact weapon system. Also loved the class halls and Suramar. I hated mythic + (minority I know) as it took dungeons away from casual players and gave it to hardcore players. Heroic dungeons became a joke.

BFA and SL have doubled down on the design philosophy except the good parts of Legion have long since been forgotten. Even more complicated and tedious systems got introduced. Game has also gotten significantly harder even from Legion.

I just feel the game has become more grindy and way more hardcore. Watching a Mythic 15 is insane with how much prep has to go into it. Its basically 5 man ultra hardcore raid. People say Cataclysm heroic dungeons were ultra hard, as an under geared resto druid who did them I can tell you you are 100% wrong that they are anywhere near the difficulty of Mythic +.

A lot of people say WoW was always this way but as someone that was there launch day I don't see it. Game was a casual "do what you want to do" game. Now its a "calculated watch many youtube videos, guides and be sure to get all the 15 addons" game. Words like Optimize and meta were never used in the old game.

I look at WoW now and I can see the accountant/lawyer sitting there coming up with cost effective, convoluted ways to keep you playing instead of just making more content. The game looks more like Diablo today than it does WoW in 2004. The fact that they made getting flying content as well really rubbed me the wrong way.

But worst of all Blizzard are the most stubborn developers I have ever seen. There are times where I genuinely think they would rather sink their game before they change anything. They will create incredibly boring grinds and then tell you you are wrong for not be having fun with it. I mean its ridiculous. Their arrogance knows no bounds, but then again being on the top for so long probably makes you this way.

Pity as the core mechanics of the game are still the best in the industry. Druids are the best designed class I have ever seen in a mmo as well. I love the game at a base level so much that I still post on a WoW forum 9 months after not logging on and playing ESO instead (which has given me 9 months of actual content).

Game is so amazing at a core level, but my god I hate the direction WoW has gone.