I’ve been trying retail WoW these past few days. This is my first time playing any post-Wrath content and it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Shadowlands in particular stands out as cool to me. I love the dark heavy metal aesthetic of the expansion and the contrasting Heaven-like hub area. It doesn’t seem any worse than TBC or Wrath in terms of levelling content. Did people not like the expansion due to bad endgame mechanics something?
>be warrior
>get sent to Maldraxxus, some hellish desolate land where you'll fight meaningless battles forever
And this isnt even supposed to be hell lmao
>Could have Grom or Broxigar as the orc rep in Maldraxxus
>Put Thrall's mom instead
Frick Shadowlands
>And this isnt even supposed to be hell lmao
Literally all of it was hell.
>die
>get judged by a literal troony
>have your soul sent off to one of infinite afterlives
>but in game there are only 5 because more than that would be unfeasible for the devs obviously
>if you're good boy you can go to greek angel hell - where you are tormented by the memories of your life until they are ripped right out of you and you forget all of your loved ones and who you are, and then you get some wings and can be a pretty angel!
>if you liked flowers you can go to forest hell - where you'll be reborn into... basically what you just lived through and this zone isn't really anything special. Also all the animals you killed and ate in real life get sent here so you can kill them and eat them again and they feel all of it.
>if you were a strong warrior of the alliance and fought tons of scourge you get to... do that for all of eternity because you're going to eternal undead nightmare realm! .... where all of WoW's biggest villains from the OG trilogy like to hang out and are just having the best time. The way it's written literally everyone who goes there loves it.
And those are supposed to be the GOOD afterlives. What I didn't mention is that if you die in any of them you die for real. It's not even an actual afterlife it's more that you get tuck-kun'd to the shittest isekai world you can imagine.
Fricking deranged writing.
I cant stress enough that even though they can fix gsmeplay issues between expacs they fricked the lore so bad in shadowlands that I refuse to ever invest in wow again. [Spoiler] not counting SOD[/spoiler]
This killed my interest in Warcraft lore. Exploring and explaining the afterlife should never have been attempted by the current dev and story team. ALL of them are horrible in their own ways AND aren't your eternal resting place since you can still DIE in the realm of death and disappear forever. Like, what is the point of life? All the afterlife does is rebirth the same Wild Gods forever and everyone else is essentially fuel to keep that machine running. There's no greater purpose, no deep mystery behind existence, every single person's ultimate destiny is to become a battery for mortal Hell.
>the afterlife is a futurama tier "you gotta do what you gotta do" but for eternity
I don't think i can even imagine a worse hell
>frick the lore by adding the jailer, a brand new villain who was secretly the mastermind of everything going back as far as warcraft 3
>frick the gameplay with multiple borrowed power systems on top of each other that arbitrarily restrict your ability to play alts by walling them behind massive grinds and RNG drops
>the rng was so bad that world first guilds were making their raiders level the same class multiple times to fish for these drops and benching skilled players because they had bad luck in getting them
>introduces the fated raid season, where instead of getting a new raid we instead get a rehash of the three raids they already released so the devs can be lazy fricksticks
i could go on but those are the biggest points
Not even going into the gameplay issues that covered well they completely butchered the lore. Retcons on retcons. Going to the afterlife is just a really bad idea for almost any story, it removes far to mystery from that universe and theres really no escalation from there. To top it off it is literally one of the most moronic afterlives ive seen in any media. Then to top all that off it was at this point that it became clear that wow had become anpther troon game.
Shadowlands is regarded as one of the best WoW expansions what are you smoking?
The greatest are probably WoTLK, tBC, Legion in that order. Never heard anyone praise the other expansions except maybe Cata.
Never played, seems a bit different from the rest of the content though.
Because people will kick you if you picked the wrong covenant and the timegated anima grind is fricking awful. Forced Thorgast run to upgrade your legendary. Blizzard breastmilk drama and Korthia looking like fricking dogshit. Zereth Mortis being robot shit instead of more death-themed shit. Jailer is a shit villain. Sylvanas is a fricking trainwreck now.
>Jailer is a shit villain
Come on he tried his best
>He is called THE JAILER because he got JAILED
Dead troony game
Because it was the "we ran out of ideas oh and frick arthas" expansion. It also relied on them balancing the borrowed powers to be equal power which would never happen because they seem to be allergic to balance mid expansions. The side event, Torghast, was required instead of just a fun side event so people hated it. The story devolved into the avengers.
Torghast could have been the best thing wow ever had if they put an OUNCE of grey matter into its design
>single player content could have been the best thing wow, an mmo, ever had
t. ftfy
WoW stopped being an MMO when Wrath came out, it's just an ARPG now
>Destroy all the lore
>SYSTEMS SYSTEMS SYSTEMS we love borrowed temporary power like covenants and bonds and soul ash
>Mandatory torghast
>linear questing
>need to use flightpaths to go from one zone to the other
>no mounted flying until 9.1 and unlocking renown 40 on your character
>people had to choose covenants based on power game rather than aesthetics, which lead to dumb looking things like Night Fae Warlock
>they wanted people to stick with their covenants and then ended up completely redesign certain spells like Necrolord Warrior
>you could only switch covenenants every 2 weeks until they stopped being stuborn a year later
>you needed to do torghast to get a legendary, which was 1+ hour a week per character
>no other rewards from torghast until a year later
>legendaries then cost a 20k-50k crafting fee per character, later on you had 2 equipped
>needed to do covenant campaigns every week to gain renown to upgrade your soulbind talents
>you had to do the maw every day to grind currency to get sockets on your gear
>but they limited how many bosses you could kill before it kicked you out
>you couldn't mount there but druids were allowed to use travel form for some reason
>korthia was the zone added after a year long content drought
>the zone was very small and bland
>it contained the poorest quest design ever made
>another grind for raiders to do
>m+ had the same dungeon pool for 3 seasons in a row
>tank meta during season 1 was to run away from the trash because it dealt too much damage
>no actual balancing happening for months after the expansion came out
>couldn't upgrade gear with valor until 3-4 months later
>mail room boss from tazavesh was bugged for months because it would wipe the whole group if you didn't kill it fast enough
>each covenant had a sanctum feature
>the guy developing the Kyrian one left mid development and it was left in a mess
There's playing through the expansions and then there's experiencing them as they come out. At the time of Shadowlands people were sick of Sylvanas and instantly rejected The Jailer and the first major Shadowlands patch took for fricking ever to come out and it was just another zone in The Maw AKA The Septic Tank
Gay blue angels
Gay unicorns
>he only found the gay ones
Because the first content patch came out a YEAR after the xpac launched and it was a timeless isle style grind spot. People fricking hated it and Torghast.
you're not wrong for wondering this if you never played it. there was a lot of hype for shadowlands initially due to the aesthetic and callback to lich king stuff. it all fell apart due to the forced systems and chore treadmills. BFA was just as guilty of this but i would argue shadowlands was worse, with some systems being so bad that they were removed after a single raid tier. torghast was "fun" for like a week because of how broken and absurd it could get so blizzard immediately removed any fun you could have with it forcing it to be the biggest repetitive slog ever. this is all without mentioning how moronic the story is or all of the literal troony and homosexual characters because imo none of that shit matters because i would never play wow for plot personally. also the raids and dungeons were maaaaassssssssssive downgrades from BFA imo. a lot of people praised castle nathria but it made me quit the xpac early because i got tired of killing trash just to fight subpar bosses in the most boring color palleted copy pasted hallways of all time. sire denathrius was the only good fight from this raid. BFA had good dungeons such as atal'dazar and freehold. shadowlands quite literally doesnt have a single good thing about it and blizzard deserved to fail. this is why dragonflight now has zero systems and required chores. u just hit max level and immediately you can run dungeons and raid. no bull shit required
>literal troony and homosexual characters
the best part about the troony character is that it was hailed as this huge win for inclusion, but if you actually read the character's dialogue they straight up say "I was never happy and never felt like I belonged anywhere until I died and went to the afterlife."
>How to frick up a concept
Story of WoW's life
>Introduce 4 new abilities per class
>Design the game around and assuming every player will pick one and use only that one for the whole expansion, across all their specs
Ion is a fricking moron.
It ruined the lore and the worldbuilding in ways you would think were completely intentional. Basically death doesn't even matter anymore. A loved one died? You can still go visit them any time you want. They brought along a new pantheon of mysterious progenitor gods to replace the Titan Pantheon who we're apparently cool with now. The Jailer was an INCREDIBLY boring villain with unspecified goals who died like a complete b***h by us despite allegedly being galactic-levels of power.
Even if you don't give a shit about the story of characters you still had every reason to hate Sneedolands. The grind was abysmal. The Covenant system was designed in such a way that you had to pick a specialization in one spec even if that specialization was dogshit for your other specs. Sepulcher of the First Ones was one of the most overtuned raids in the game's history. The Maw was a terrible endgame zone (kino environment though). The main hub Oribos, the City of the Dead, was a tiny airport terminal.
Regardless of what type of player you were, EVERYONE had a reason to hate Shadowlands.
Oh, and they absolutely SHIT on the memory of Arthas just so that Sneedvanas could have a YASS QUEEN moment.
Because Shadowlands turned from huge heap of potential into poor man's legion re-skin with shit load of annoying chores to top it off. It feels like an expansion made out of spite.
>can't play alts properly
>can't even play alternative specs properly
>can't even do both pve and pvp on one spec properly
the beginning of sneedlands was just next level when it came to player hostility. "oh players will be fine with being arbitrarily 5-15% suboptimal, they'll appreciate having meaningful choices of conduit energy" is so pants on head moronic it's genuinely baffling
also maw sucked gorilla dick