Shadowlands: Rapidly Climbing the Ladder in Popularity

[Cracked]

I look forward to reset day again after about 7 years of not caring too much. It's great so far.

[darklogrus]

and it will rapidly fall, if they dont add real content

9.1 follows 9.0 in how it handles content I have no doubt the masses will leave til late 9.3..

[tru]

I enjoy it more than BFA, but not as much as legion. By this point I had 2 or 3 max level characters in legion. I can't be bothered to get past 52 on my alts for some reason.

Same here I know I'm getting older and more real world things to do but SL more than any xpac imo forces more questing and chores to do once max level than any other has. I miss hitting level cap and going through the paces of crafting and dungeon grind and going to raid from there. I spend so much time on covenants for conduits (mandatory) then maw and tower for more renown and leggo stuff it doesn't leave much time for me to do anything else. 1 system (and a type of catch up) with 1 goal in mind worked so much better, at least for me.

Now it's system upon system upon system just to be somewhat up to par.

Just thinking about a alt gets me stressed. And I do want to have at least one toon for every covenant.

[Klingers]

Same here I know I'm getting older and more real world things to do but SL more than any xpac imo forces more questing and chores to do once max level than any other has. I miss hitting level cap and going through the paces of crafting and dungeon grind and going to raid from there. I spend so much time on covenants for conduits (mandatory) then maw and tower for more renown and leggo stuff it doesn't leave much time for me to do anything else. 1 system (and a type of catch up) with 1 goal in mind worked so much better, at least for me.

Now it's system upon system upon system just to be somewhat up to par.

Just thinking about a alt gets me stressed. And I do want to have at least one toon for every covenant.

You're not wrong in the slightest, but if it helps I've got three 60's so far.

One, my main, I've been playing seriously each week (Thorghast unlocked, capped renown, level 3 leggo etc) and two other alts I got up to 60 and pretty much parked except farming LFR each week. Both those alts I haven't even finished their covenant intro quests, and just from catch-up mechanics in LFR I'm already sitting around renown 9-10 on both of them.

Torg is going to be a pain, but I can get them viable pretty quick and miss a lot of time gating.

[Radaney]

This is the first expansion I have quit Mythic Raiding entirely and solely do PvP with close friends.

Although this is mostly due to growing up and more real life priorities because I don't want to keep a fixed 2 - 3 day raiding schedule, I want to be able to play whenever I want.

If they didn't make the PvP gearing changes they did I would no longer be playing the game at all. So I guess it's a good thing they did.

[Brewhan]

Same here I know I'm getting older and more real world things to do but SL more than any xpac imo forces more questing and chores to do once max level than any other has. I miss hitting level cap and going through the paces of crafting and dungeon grind and going to raid from there. I spend so much time on covenants for conduits (mandatory) then maw and tower for more renown and leggo stuff it doesn't leave much time for me to do anything else. 1 system (and a type of catch up) with 1 goal in mind worked so much better, at least for me.

Now it's system upon system upon system just to be somewhat up to par.

Just thinking about a alt gets me stressed. And I do want to have at least one toon for every covenant.

Yeah I feel the same. I think shadowlands is pretty good for 1 character only because with multiple characters and some player mentality like myself you feel compelled to grind a lot more and keep up with alts as best as you can. One of the reasons I picked druid this expansion as my only 60 was so I could play every role without that feeling of "man wish I had a ranged spec or melee spec". Hybrids seem to be a good pick in times like this for me.

[Dastreus]

come on guys, blizzard is a small indie company, you can't expect them to put out 5 content patches worth of content every expansion (2 years) like Square Enix does with FFXIV.

[Kel_Sceptic]

Yeah I feel the same. I think shadowlands is pretty good for 1 character only because with multiple characters and some player mentality like myself you feel compelled to grind a lot more and keep up with alts as best as you can. One of the reasons I picked druid this expansion as my only 60 was so I could play every role without that feeling of "man wish I had a ranged spec or melee spec". Hybrids seem to be a good pick in times like this for me.

Without wanting to make it sound it comes from really high sky, but there is a difference in the game being bad, or people not knowing how to cope with it.

Please take a look at a 3-day old alt. Dinged on 10.01.2021, we are on 14.01.2021. No dungeons, no LFR raiding, no m+. just PvP, WQ, covenant story.


10hours in:


1day 18hours in:



2days 16hours in:


If you still think this game is grindy, or has systems in top of systems ... look beter at bfa:

The systems in BFA were inter-dependent on each other. You couldn't wear azerite gear unlocked without azerite power. You couldn't be relevant without farming those 3 week essences, which you couldn't obtain without going to Naz, Mecha, PvP, raid, M+. You couldn't be relevant without farming those assaults for the visions for the corruption gear. You couldn't progress in War Campaign without mission tables. And so on.

That was the damnable part, since they were systems that were inter-dependant and were forcing you to do them.

In SL, most stuff in place is optional. If you don't want to play any covenant buildings, you can. If you don't wanna raid, do myrhics, you just can PvP and still be relevant.

The only forceable-doable things is choosing a covenant, leveling renown, do torghast 1 week for legendary, end of story.

You really need to know what to do, where to do, and it is fast.

[Uurdz]

So far I'm enjoying it. Will save final judgement for how it is at the end. WoD was also super fun for the first 2 months, but they did nothing interesting with it for the next 2 years, which is why everyone seemed to hate it by the end. Some expansions are fun the whole way through (like Legion), others have high points and low points that need to be evened out for a final evaluation.

Week 1 in Garrisons: "Omg player housing? this is awesome. Garrison invasions are cool"
Week 10 in Garrisons: "Get me the fuck out of this shit-hole"

[Nyel]

The first 4 weeks of Cataclysm have been a blast as well and that expansion isn't remembered fondly overall. It's too early to tell for Shadowlands.

[Eli85]

come on guys, blizzard is a small indie company, you can't expect them to put out 5 content patches worth of content every expansion (2 years) like Square Enix does with FFXIV.

Someone really over values FF XIV content patches, and this is coming from someone who loves FF XIV.

Every single time FF XIV drops a patch, you can do all the non-raid content in 2 hours, 3 at most. In fact, if you don't care at all about raiding, you can stay unsubbed until they offer the player callback campaign (3 free days) and do everything that patch has to offer comfortably over 3 1 hour sessions. If you like raiding? It stretches a bit more, but 4 bosses every 6 months is underwhelming for so many people. And let me be clear on this: for the raid bosses with actual difficulty (not trials, not 24-man raids) there are 12 bosses over 2 years. 12 bosses. 2 years. WoW often does this with a single raid patch.

I'm not defending Blizzard here, but 1 content drop from Blizzard (outside of WoD's selfie patch) is arguably equivalent to all 5 of FF XIV's patches.

[chiddie]

I enjoy it more than BFA, but not as much as legion. By this point I had 2 or 3 max level characters in legion. I can't be bothered to get past 52 on my alts for some reason.

I made the terrible mistake to choose Threads of Fate for my first two alts, boi leveling them by simply wandering the maps in search for yellow dots without a proper story to follow feels really bad.

[Smash Adams]

I’m still enjoying it for the most part but the issues have become far more glaring. The Maw as everyone(or most) point out, is a disaster. Just being there puts me in a bad mood. Thankfully, I can avoid going there for the most part, but when the campaign does drag me there it’s unbearable. It’s an awful layout. It suffers from the same “walk two inches, pull fourteen mobs” that SL has specialized in. And the Eye of the Jailor is by far one of the worst mechanics I think I’ve ever seen in a video game. Considering it’s such big part of the expansion, going there shouldn’t make you want to log out. It’s not even that it’s a difficult zone, it’s just tedious and not fun.

Beyond that, I wish the WQ’s had some more variety and I wish I felt more connected to the story instead of just rolling my eyes a lot.

[exochaft]

I've actually found the expansion is exhausting me, but it's more of a combination of things.

Loot is probably a central factor, and it kind of ties into multiple things. I'm all game for loot being more rare, but the uniformity across all forms of content is not there. PvP is a way more satisfying and deterministic way to gear, and a huge improvement over BfA... and this is a great thing. However, M+ and to some extend raiding have just swap places with PvP in terms of gear acquisition that was in BfA, and that's not a good thing. When it comes to M+, lower ilvl end-of-dungeon rewards is alright, lower loot drop rates is alright, both at the same time probably isn't. When it comes to raiding, the reduced amount of gear that drops on top of personal loot locking in minor upgrades that you'd want to give to others is insanely frustrating. Both M+ and raiding both feel extremely RNG-oriented when it comes to gear. Now this isn't a "destroy the PvP gearing system" sort of comment, I'd rather Blizz bring up all forms of content to have similar methods of gearing. All in all, the paradigm has shifted from BfA's M+ dominating all end-game gearing content to SL's PvP dominating it.

Another tangential issue that keeps coming up with the reduced gear amount is that loot drama is WAY more of an issue now. Unless you're lucky, weapon drops can be very rare, and while you can do rated PvP to get a weapon if you've saved up currency, one shouldn't *have* to rely other forms of content to get moderately decent gear. I've had multiple instances of guild disputes solely because things like weapon tokens can be very rare, and personal loot binding in weapon tokens you'd want to trade just compounds this issue.

Final piece is the timing of the release of this expansion and the mountain of bugs that are still present on live. The release date put some stress on the raiding scene due to their occurrence on the holidays, and this has always been bad when Blizz has done it before. Furthermore, it was obvious a skeleton crew was put in place during the holidays, which means that addressing/fixing bugs would be minimal for weeks. What irks me more is that many of the game-breaking bugs or issues were known on the beta for months, and they still went live despite feedback. If you were on the beta, it was painfully obvious that the release was too soon as many systems were broken or not tested very much, and the release reflects this. Throw in the server instabilities, disconnects, and high lag/latency problems that still happen, things were rushed to release, and the player experience suffers because of it.

Everything together has just made this expansion thus far fairly frustrating overall, as we should expect more from Blizz at this point. I'm more mentally exhausted this far into an expansion than I've ever been.

[Alyajna]

I'm playing a lot. Much more at this point then I was playing BFA. I disliked BFA from the very start, even leveling which I usually enjoy.

But, I'm frustrated. Covenants are a big part of the problem. I like to PvP and PvE and I typically like to play a healer/dps class. There are a few classes where the covenant is the same no matter what you're doing, but I didn't enjoy playing them.

It's not fun and it's not a meaningful choice. Not one time while leveling an alt have I went with what I thought. I went with what the guides told me to. I miss the expansions where all I needed was another set of gear to be viable in certain content. It started in Legion, with artifacts and legendaries, but it's getting worse and worse. This feels like the worst idea so far, because you can't just swap out your gear after weeks of grinding for it like you could in legion/bfa. You are stuck with your covenant.

The Maw is annoying, and not in a good way. I get that they wanted to make it feel oppressive and scary or whatever, but it doesn't, it's just irritating and not fun gameplay, which is bad.

Threads of Fate needs to be adjusted. It is so much slower to level this way, and having to drag an alt through the linear path every time is getting very old.

Those are my MAJOR complaints. If they fix them, SL is on track to be up there with my favorite expansions. I enjoy the zones, the stories, and even the covenants themselves just not the "meaningful choice" part.

I also really, really, really wish they would somehow address the imbalance of factions. I wanted to play Alliance this time, and I really tried for a while. Even after something like 6 servers merged together with my home server, there are two alliance guilds with mediocre progress. And neither of them have been accepting members for over a year, with a firm "friends and family" policy in place. There simply wasn't anyone to play with. I'm not one to just pug everything, I want to join a community with familiar faces when I log in. I would have to server change, which I'm not paying for, I have way too many characters on my home sever.

[Huntermyth]

i like the general pace and vibe of 2v2 arena. i am nowhere close to being an even semi-skilled pvper but our team ( me and my wife ) is at 1050 rating atm

we are having fun after a considerably long time in pvp and this is what matters in the end.

[Sughs]

I got bored of it in less than 4 weeks. Cleared normal two times and half of the raid in HC, a few +9 keys and Thorgast till layer 8 and was bored to death.

[Gadzooks]

Vanilla had the weather patch and BC had the voice chat patch.

Vanilla was a massive ongoing content drop that had extensive amounts of content added before TBC dropped. Comparing two minor patches in vanilla to WOD is hilariously seedy.

- - - Updated - - -

I can only speak for myself, but so far, this expansion is on par to be my new favorite. It has already knocked TBC out of 2nd place and is heavily breathing down the neck of WotLK for first. I came into this game Jan 19, 2006, and after Cataclysm, have just not been impressed with the DLCs that followed. Granted, that is just my personal, subjective opinion. I am speaking for no one but myself, nor am I claiming my opinion to be imperical data on the state of the other DLCs.

Is anyone else either seeing Shadowlands move into their number one spot, or at least rapidly climbing the ranks? I know we still have a ways to go in this expac, but if 9.1 and 9.2 are anything like the launch, I have no doubt this expac will apologize for the last 4 in my book and become the new number one on my list.

There are always going to be people who like it. I played the beta, and it just wasn't the game that would bring me back from my retirement in WOD. Parts of it were good, but the grind revealed itself early on, and I'm just not that kind of gamer anymore. I'm just one data point, like you're a data point on the other end of the graph - and it's fine.

The game is still in the honeymoon phase - BfA was so bad, I think players will coast on "It's not BfA" for quite a while. And that's fine, too.

Me? I've been hanging around to see where the story goes. That's over with, Danuser is not someone who I'm a fan of, at all, and his writing for this expansion is awful. I had no clue Afrasiabi was gone, which makes sense now, it explains the drop in quality. And there will be people who disagree with this, and I'm okay with that.

[HawkonBloodeye]

I think this is one of the better expansions for sure. So much different content to swap in between. In PvE you got M+ and raids who give good loot if you know how to play at top level, and same with pvp with RBGs and Arena. For me TBC and Wrath were the best, but its not fair to comprate this one at this point in time when things have evolved and changed. Both community and online gaming in general.

I love how the vault works if you compare it to the RNG chest from last expansion so thats atleast a major improvement. You dont get what you want every week, but you atleast get to pick - and how many choices you want depends on how much effort you put into the game.

I only play one char, so I dont care much about how alt friendly it is - but I mean, if there is a lot of content its hard to catch up no chars. For me thats a point in the right direction if you guys with 1+ chars are struggling to keep up and feel like its all a big grindfest from the maw to coventants and renown.

I also like how they gate the mounts for the collectors - so not everything is available right away. You gotta unlock content to get more stuff. Timegating itself sucks hard, but again - makes it fit my casual life more aslong as I do a little once in a while.

[cparle87]

Vanilla was a massive ongoing content drop that had extensive amounts of content added before TBC dropped. Comparing two minor patches in vanilla to WOD is hilariously seedy.

Not at all. People love to bash on the WoD voice patch even though it also had tuning, quests, bug fixes, and other things. Go look atBut forget that other expansions had patches that were exactly the same, they were named after just one feature the patch release and people latched onto it like that was the only thing it added. Go to wowpedia and look up 6.1. Look at all the changes. Yet people go "lol all we get is twitter and they call it a major patch, gg blizz"