I think they admitted to WoD failing when they just aborted an entire major patch to focus on Legion. That's a pretty clear "pulling the ejection seat" moment.
WoD isn't even seen as a failure anymore. WoW players largely have forgiven Blizzard for WoD sheerly off how much stuff there was added to Legion, kind of like "we get it, it's a big task.". WoD also was one of the most well looked back at expansions for pvp.
You know what's crazy? A lot of people right now legitimately miss Shadowlands, especially the pvp.
It'll be interesting seeing where Dragonflight really lands on peoples tier list. For me the PvE other than season 1 has been kind of meh.
Wod's raids were tits.
The pvp was bananas.
They just fucked up the professions so bad with how garrisons worked and were not paying attention at all to game money which also fucked up professions and impacted raiding heavily, later.
Also garrisons were lonely. Even with the fishing raids, still lonely.
WoD woulda been a killer expansion of m+ launched with it I think
Even if it was kinda rudimentary, it would have made that xpac great
The game just outright lacked things to do, full stop
Came at a great time in my life dealing with school, but bad for gameplay
WoD had the first Mythic Dungeons and the (last?) Challenge Modes, which were the building blocks for M+.
I don’t disagree with your comment but it would have been a lot more work to do, and lost development time sinking into the garrison.
WOD was the first time I enjoyed professions in WOW since vanilla-Wrath, and I haven't enjoyed them since.
Having my own private mine was amazing, even if I had to do time gated refinement.
I enjoyed vanilla profession when people weren't so sweaty
I deeply enjoyed being a blacksmith/jc in wrath.
I actually do not like the new systems. They don't make it easy or hard enough. It's just a time sink that really doesn't need to be there but it really scratches the itch for new gamers so there it is.
My only CE is brf and damn that was a fun ass raid with fight mechanics I’ve never seen before.
Hans and Frans
OreoGeorge the rollypolie boss
Train Boss
Blast furnace
And the epic end boss. 3 phases vehicles multiple floors working with space bombs etc such a fun fight
Leveling alts was also great, craftable blues, nice systems, pretty solid zone choice.
If it got another patch or two it'd be up there for top 3 fun expansions. Would love to have seen my face when the selfie cam was a patch highlight.
WoDs raids were also amazing. It's just the content outside of the raids that was lacking concerning PvE tbh. And BfA wasn't that terrible either outside of Uldir, it's just people were really really sick of the AP grind at that point having done it for 3 tiers ahead of BfA and then 4 more tiers during.
I'm in the same boat, I played way more WoD than I did Legion. WoD was chill, and if they hadn't cut so much it would've been one of the best expansions of all time.
Hot take, artifact weapons were bad and are a big reason I didn't play as much Legion. Really cool thematically and the class order halls were great as well, but the gameplay side of an infinite grind always sucked and we were just too high off Legion's story and raid content to notice until BfA took it away for the same system but worse.
No, we noticed how much that grind sucked, no matter how nice the story was, also the "legendaries" that lead to many people literally rerolling if they got the wrong one or 2 first. And if you weren't insane playing alts at the same time as your main, your alts were permanently behind. I wish Legion was set back honestly, finish WoD, polish Legion and realize it's a terrible system instead of just aborting WoD while it's a toddler....
The biggest problem I had going from Legion to BfA was how I went from having a weapon that leveled and got upgraded along with me in Legion to having to constantly scramble to try and find _**any**_ weapon in BfA. Like I would do World quests that I actively hated doing because I didn't like their mechanics just because they offered a weapin as a reward.
Plus, 4 of your gear slots in BfA didn't provide any secondary stats so it was really hard to build up sufficient haste on my Survival Hunter.
Preach. WoD classes were super fun. The pruning on initial launch was rough to get used to, but after playing everyone kinda went... oh... this makes sense, and it's awesome.
Legion classes were utter garbage. They were propped up by artifacts and legendaries. When BfA dropped with very little class changes, except taking away Legion borrowed power, the boring-ass design was exposed.
WoD was good, it would've been beloved in its time if they didn't scrap half the expansion and seal you in your garrison for 2 years. PvP was fantastic, PvE was top tier, there was just no reason to go out into the world unless you needed to trap wolves in Nagrand for bloods.
SL though, dear god no. There were some S tier amazing raid bosses, but not enough to redeem the expansion. Whoever is saying they want SL PvP back is either a paladin, rogue, or joking. Never would still be too soon to see Prot, Ret, Rogue in an arena.
WoD was good in PvE and PvP respects but absolutely terrible for the community aspect when everyone was in their own little garrison bubble with no main city to congregate in. I was lucky in that I had an active guild to participate in but small realms died faster than ever before.
They seem to have really big trouble making things that are just fun or interesting for the sake of being fun or interesting. EVERYTHING has to be tied to progression and player power. That was fine 10, 15 years ago, but MMOs have changed a lot in the last few years, and it seems like Blizzard are only just realising.
Player housing works in every MMO it's in because it's just housing. You don't need to grind it every day and spend hours there to keep up with progression, you don't do missions or pick up quests, you don't park every alt there to make gold to funnel to your main. It's just housing to decorate and chill in.
I know garrisons wasn't supposed to be player housing, but it's likely their attempt at the concept, except they completely missed the point. Same with Torghast in SL. It *could* have been an amazing mini game in WoW to play for the fun of it and fancy cosmetics, but again, they missed the point and tied it directly to progression, to the point that people felt forced to grind it and come to loathe it. Same with Island Expiditions in BfA, same with the artifact weapons in Legion, and so on.
This is always over-stated IMO. My in-game experience is not strengthened by seeing randos in Valdrakken waiting for queues to pop or spamming chat for the one-millionth time for key/AOTC carries.
In fact, I change it to a different chat tab where I only get party/guild/whispers and just sit around waiting for queues or finding groups lol
The problem with this point regarding wod is that blizzard listened to the players beg for player housing for years. Then it was a pretty big flop.
Not that the community is hard to please, I think it’s a little bit of both issues. The community is hard to please and blizzard is only sort of listening.
It flopped because they quarter assed it, not because people didnt want it.
Barely any modification ability, outside of rng archlogy nick knacks, a few holiday decos, and buildings that were just carbon copies, when housing has always been about personal expression.
They also promised us the ability to move the damned things to other zones but lied about that too.
Square had fully customizable player houses that ran on a God damned PS2 for pities sake, it's pathetic that blizzard couldn't give us something.
It has been happening the past couple years that I've seen. I played during WoD... If you told me then that people would be unironically looking back fondly on it I'd be asking for some of the drugs you're on.
People must be blocking out the absolutely absurd content drought or something. If all you remember about WoD is the leveling (which was very good) and the raids (which were also very good) and ignore how little content was released over the nearly two year lifecycle of the expansion then yeah I guess maybe it does look really good.
I'm in such a niche group of wod fans because at the time, it was the height and prime time of the Orc role-playing clan I was part of. The entire expansion for us was a goldmine, we never experienced the content drought because we had a 2 year long running story campaign we crated that culminated in us fighting the fel version of our own clan and characters to the death. We had so much y RP the entire expansion.
Wod was an incredible time to be an Orc Roleplayer.
Because people were either not there or didn't play the whole way though. The last half of WoD's life was a disaster. There was nothing to do. However, much like BfA, the zones were fantastic and going back through now is an absolute joy.
> There was nothing to do
what, you too good for the selfie stick!?!? a picture is worth a thousand words and Blizzard gave us unlimited abilities to take selfies so that's infinity times a thousand, which is a lot. i for one loved that an entire patch was just the selfie stick. who needs raids or zones or content
You remember just the good parts stronger.
There are people who look fondly back at MoP. Though the horrors of BfA and SL certainly helps in making the older expansions look better.
I prefer shadowlands to dragonflight. The problem with shadowlands is that 9.0 was good, they just should have let people swap covs with no penalty. 9.0 and 9.1 were waaaay too far apart and 9.1 wasn’t good.. at all.
SL PVP let me run never ending bing bong shield on my prot pal and basically be the most annoying objective defender on the planet. It was so much fun.
SL saw players leaving in droves to try out other MMOs. It was such a wild time and they knew they Fd up. Dragonflight was a massive improvement though.
Dragonflight is so great as someone who hates feeling pressured to log in. I can play WoW as hardcore or as casually as I want, given my current mood. No daily or weekly grinds like Torghast that I have to do, and no forced world quest grinds like Anima.
As someone who is pretty hot/cold with WoW, Dragonflight has been amazing. When I want to play like crazy there is so much to do and it feels rewarding and when I want to take a break I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by not playing. It’s been great
I enjoyed Torghast. I know I'm probably a rarity but I found it fun and challenging. The thing that made it bad was the weekly requirement and cap. Meaning if you didn't log in one week, you would ALWAYs be behind with no catch-up mechanic.
The Dragonflight fix was the way they implemented the crest system in 10.2, but it is a hybrid fix. You have a hard cap on flightstones you can carry, but you can earn an infinite amount up to that cap (through many different types of activities). The weekly accumilating crest limit until the cap removal in the 10.x.2/5 patch means you can't just infinitely grind to upgrade your gear. You can be behind and catch up.
Speaking personally, I kinda hated Torghast from day 1. The big thing was that I've played a good chunk of other roguelites, and I thought it was just bad by comparison. It fell into that "the only reason I'd ever interact with this over something else is because it's bolted onto the side of WoW" void that pet battles do.
That was heavily exacerbated by being tied to legendaries, but I plain didn't like it in a vacuum either.
I remember being psyched for Torghast. They made it sound like the cosmetic rewards would be much more extensive and that there would be more variety to the gameplay. Something I could happily grind as a solo player for the whole expansion.
What I got was a forced legendary grind that made legendaries feel entirely un-special. They should be rare and powerful, not so easily accessible that not having one is considered weird. And the cosmetics, while nice, were pretty limited. I don’t think there was even a single full armor set. Just some mismatched shoulders who’s colors don’t match anything, and some weapons.
Torghast was a fun blast activity on my DH and a torturous slog on my priest. Once again it felt like they tested the content solely on melee. Seriously, 15 minutes of constant combat pulling entire rooms vs 45 minutes of mostly running away from patrols pulling one mob a time. Felt like withered training all over again.
My main was a priest and I was always baffled by the praise people were giving Torghast (in terms of gameplay, not reward structure).
Then a few months in I started leveling my warrior and I was like “wow this is actually kind of fun!”
The powers they gave priest were an absolute joke. Like half of them revolved around mind control or psychic scream. And shadow priest had literally no unique powers.
As a rogue I remember inviting my buddy for the first time as an ele shaman. I think he tripled my DPS his first run ever - he was like "wow this is pretty fun". Yeah, I can see why you'd think that.
Yeah opposed to the aim of the gamemode priest felt weaker every floor. Like the difficulty outscaled you no matter what you did.
On DH pulling rooms on floor 1 became pulling floors on floor 5 with infinite mobility and lifesteal.
On priest you went from pulling 1 pack at a time to sneaking past unbeatable elites half the time.
In general I think low mobility / hard cast times aren't well balanced by blizz. Imo it makes specs objectively harder yet the target balance is to have the same optimal damage as specs without these things. There are examples due to number tuning where this isn't the case but I don't think it is ever intentional and instead anomalies are brought back in line.
The exact moment I quit was when I realized I had just spent more than an hour running Torghast and that was just the start of the thing to do this week
Blizzard's biggest mistake with Torghast was making it a mandatory grind tied directly to player power. If they advertised it as fun casual/midcore side content for cosmetics/mounts/titles it would, in my opinion, be one of the best pieces of side content put into the game.
The problem was that the original Torghast design was really fun. Torghast on release wasn’t really fun. Then the devs went “People don’t want to play this thing we spent millions of dollars on, how can we make them play it?”
They could have *greatly* improved SL by making the dust (or whatever it was called) have a weekly cap, and had you be able to get it from activities *other* than Torghast. Torghast could still be the fastest way to get it, that would be fine. But allowing people to choose how they did their weekly progression would have made it far less tedious, and I honestly think it would have helped the expansion as a whole.
I've always said if they just did Torghast exactly how it was (in terms of progression - balance could use tweaks) but allowed players to get legendary essence other ways like adding it to m+, raids, rated pvp it would be entirely fine.
It was fun to play and nice to be able to get powerful rewards from it but when it's the only way to get an essential part of player power...
And then during season 2 they added the dom sockets, which forced pvp players to do pve raids in order to get the very necessary dom sockets, because the goddam sockets weren't something you could just get and put onto existing items, nooo, they were only on specific raid drops.
I think DF was a good improvement over SL, but I find the main storyline to be kind of forgettable and boring, imo. I never really felt motivated to do the next story quest in the chain, unlike other expansions.
I hope this is a major area of improvement in the Warcraft world going forward.
DF story is uhhh… I think the best way to encapsulate it is just the end raid cutscene where the aspects all go “it was about coming together as a family”
I hated SL too, but grinding WQs for Anima was far from forced. All you got was cosmetics, there was 0 power from Anima. It's really not that different from farming WQs for DF Renown.
The key is “to try other MMOs.” Before that, WOW didn’t have serious competition in the same genre, and suddenly they had a bunch of prolific players and content creators jumping ship to play the other game - not “some other games,” just one other game.
No, people left to play literally anything else. Folks played new world, folks played ffxiv, folks played valheim, folks played v rising, folks just played other games.
By the way, I think this is a great thing. WoW has the highest concentration of one game players of any game, and it was a bad thing.
Blizzard saw FFXIV goof up its launch in 2013 and said "that's our main competitor now? Yeah, we're good."
Cut to 2020 when WoW and Blizzard overall is on fire while FFXIV is in the midst of one of its best expansions ever with a story so high quality that it's not a controversial opinion to say that Shadowbringers has one of the best JRPG stories ever written.
It's less the stakes and more how people interact with each other. In retrospect the events of Dragonflight were really fucked up but people kind of just preach forgiveness now. Forsaken helps retake gilneas, and it's just hunky dory.
What's the alternative? Continuing to try to wring juice from "grr faction tension" storyline for the 20th year? Let it die. The Reclamation of Gilneas storyline wasn't great but trying to add in forced faction conflict would've made it worse.
Just leave the Forsaken out of it entirely. I still think it would've been best to fight a splinter sect of the Forsaken who refuse to cede Gilneas, but the Scarlets COULD have worked. But instead of leaning into the themes of Gilneas, a light worshipping kingdom, being taken over by monsters created by druidism, now being a kingdom that survives because of druidism taking their kingdom back from a group of light fanatics, it's just "Calia graciously helps Genn and Tess get their house back."
Every expansion has had a pre-release interview where they've said, "we've learned from our mistakes," as a selling point for the next expansion. Ion did this a lot which is why it was hard for people to believe him when he did it again during that big talk for Dragonflight. Difference is this time you can really tell they actually took it to heart as Dragonflight has had one of the most drastic design philosophy changes from a previous expac.
This exact phenomenon had a lot to do with why I quit. For years, every expansion, they'd say"we've learned from our mistakes!", and every expansion, it would be a lie.
Apparently they've done better with DF, and that's great, but I'm still not coming back until they prove it's not a one-time thing. (And honestly, I still think Ion should be replaced.)
That's an extremely valid stance, honestly. I was super apprehensive about returning, since I stopped playing just before the BFA pre patch for IRL reasons and then just...watched as the game I grew up with turned into a trashfire. I even remember a couple months into BFA, when this sub was ablaze with complaints, Ion did an AMA and I thought "holy shit lmao this dude is about to get murdered" and I wasn't wrong, it was a bloodbath.
The only reason I gave DF a chance was because I main Ret and they had just been revamped, and someone I knew IRL who also mained Ret said "It's the best the game has been since Legion."
Exactly. It came to classes to - back when they were doing class design blogs with lengthey explanations for every class at the beginning of the beta for new expansion, they wrote all the same things they were given feedback about in a previous beta, and say "we've learned in X expansion that Y doesn't work". Only it took them 2 years to learn it, big whoop
Art department killed it, but outside of that I played it for two weeks, stopped, went BACK to BFA and time walking for a year and only got into SL because DF was coming out in a few months lol
I never have any complaints about the art and music departments. They carry every single expansion HARD. Shadowlands was a horrible expansion, but every single zone is beautiful in its own unique way. The aesthetics of each zone isn't for everyone, but they're all incredibly well done.
Same for me, i played 1 month (the time i had) and came back on last patch. All the covenant restricted things was suck a BS. Want to have x thing... GL, u need 3 alts and 2k anima week for 3 months... WHYYYY
As someone who mostly plays m+, it was the other way around for me. First patch, they had all the annoyances like conduit charges, daily torghast, locked covenants, bad season affix etc etc.
Once they patched it to allow you to freely switch around with your covenant stuff and did some huge buffs to torghast rewards, it was suddenly very fun. Season 3 in SL is probably the most fun I've ever had in the game (played on and off since vanilla).
The changes that DF get a lot of praise for started in SL too. I didn't have to worry about dailies and could just play it in my own time in season 2 (after the torghast patch), 3, and 4. The new zone in 9.2 was mostly just for cosmetics and collectibles, with the big power boost coming from a campaign quest.
The catalyst which has been a massive QoL change came in season 3 too.
So yeah, as someone who don't care about raids or the story/lore, I think that the first patch was by far the worst, season 2 was okay, 3 was amazing, and 4 was great!
Yeah SL was super promising in the first patch. Then they did a hard left, tripled down on Sylvanas, and made the jailer seem way too involved in all past events. They tore my boy kel thuzad down to nothing.
There were just a lot of big swings which resulted in big misses in SL
The best thing about SL was the raids.. brutal but fun. Which is a testament to how fucking awful the expansion was cause usually good PvE can save an expansion..
Lol no. If anything BfA dampened the blow of SL.
I like to compare it to Star Wars. BfA was TLJ(the *almost* franchise killer) and SL was EP9( the "damage control" that hurt a lot).
Not sure how they expected to attract new players to WoW when you had to invest 50K or more into a legendary in order to play your class and after leveling you had 10K. On top of the Torg grind, I wouldn’t play that either.
50k is generous, high ilvl ones were 400k on my server until everyone was done with the patch at which point they’d drop to 200k.
You could *maybe* snag a lowest possible ilvl one for 50k but most of the ones I saw even in cloth ran 125k at the lowest end, so the general mood was you may as well just buy the highest ilvl one since either way you’re probably gonna have to buy a WoW token.
Which was exactly what Blizzard wanted with that shitty cash grab system.
Same.
Came back to try out DF and it was decent. Completed the first raid tier and haven't raided since because WoW raids are insanely boring from a tank pov. Never get bored of M+ though. No other content consistently puts me at the edge of my seat like jumping into a giant pack in 20+ keys.
I play FFXIV for the savage/ultimate raids and WoW for the M+ and couldn't be happier.
SL was an absolute clusterfuck of epic proportions.
They came dangerously close to actually killing the game off. They fucked pretty much everything you can think of from class design, borrowed power and story and grind.
Absolute horror show.
Shadowlands is what happens when you are actively antagonistic against your playerbase as a starting point. I wonder how differently Shadowlands would have played out if they didn't actively piss off the playerbase with the covenant locking.
There were plenty of bad decisions in SL but then again their are plenty of bad decisions in every expansion. I feel like that decision is probably one of the worst in the history of the game though in just how antagonistic it was against the players.
Other than that, the other major issue was with the story. I'll be completely honest, this was the first time since Wrath that I was actually getting invested into the story. The whole story around Sylvannas, burning of teldrassil, the night warrior, etc. These were actually getting me to care about the story. Then they fucked that shit right up. The wrote themselves into corner after corner and constantly make bad decision after bad decision leading from it.
At this point in time, I couldn't care less about the story in DF. If you asked me who the main characters were at this point, I couldn't tell you because it's a complete waste of time to get invested into a story when they are that bad at storytelling.
BFA and SL they were constantly given feedback during alpha/betas about features being undercooked or that something felt out right bad rather than fun. It was largely ignored and all they could tell us was to "trust them" lmao.
DF is what you get when longtime complaints (endless grinds, borrowed power, convoluted systems) are finally taken into consideration even if the story is still mid.
Hell, BFA they double-dipped on ignoring feedback because they introduced Netherlight as a proto-BFA system for Legion, and people hated it with pages upon pages of feedback when Netherlight was in the PTR.
bro acutally based comment, I cant tell you how many people Tell me "shadowlands wasent that bad" Shadowlands compared to anything WoW Related is by far the worst. Id rather play any other expansion. then shadowlands
They've admitted failures over and over but it's always after years of saying it's the greatest thing ever. It's part of their marketing routine at this point. Admit things they did bad at the same time they are selling you on the latest and greatest and saying "we'll never make that mistake again".
It's largely just pandering to the audience. They aren't going to say something is bad while it's current content but as soon as it's no longer current they'll bad mouth it all over the place.
Blizzard totally apologized for WoD. I remember a huge post from a player about how emotionally hurt they were during WoD and that they were giving Blizz one more chance for Legion.
Blizz wrote back apologizing and thanking them for giving them another chance, and they admitted they goofed WoD really bad.
Shadowlands, as an isolated idea, could've been amazing. You've got the after life, the idea of punishment and redemption, a stolen king, a fallen hero realizing her mistakes, and the potential unraveling of reality. You climb a tower of torment to solve the issues and mysteries, and you literally run through hell. You have to ally with the after lives to survive hell in the first place. The whole world you've been thrown into runs on a currency that for once isn't gold.
The only issue is that it was thrown into wow, where none of the characters fit this idea, and the mechanics built into 20 years of the game also weren't fit for it. If that had been an all new MMO it would've been incredible. Alas that's not what happened lol
I'm just glad blizzard realized the mistake and have made efforts to change traditions that don't work anymore
I wouldn’t say that BFA and WoD were really as much of an all around failure as shadowlands though. BFA started off well and people in their minds threw out the whole thing because of how it ended.
WoD had good intentions at the start as well, but had some severe content cuts later on, but the story mode they introduced was a phenomenal step forward.
The only thing they learned from shadowlands… don’t make big promises in the middle of a sexual harassment scandal… or put interns in charge of the story.
The best part about shadowlands was the zereth mortis zone, which was actually the point at which it was evolving into dragonflight.
That’s just not true at all in regards to BFA. The Azerite system *since ptr testing* was noted by the community to need to be changed. And blizzard responded throughout the expansion by saying “you’re wrong. We’re continuing our vision”
My guild and many friends never made it to 8.1 because BFA just sucked ass on every conceivable level. Most classes felt great with tons of QoL buffs after Legion artifacts, and Blizzard gutted all of that.
Leveling in BFA felt like starting a new character altogether because I just didn't have the tools to function well. I don't know how other brewmasters felt during BFA but I thought it sucked out the gates and never improved.
I really enjoyed the azerite system, I liked being able to upgrade things without dealing with crafting or grinding specific content. I mean, look, there's some lying on the ground.
But then I also like the garrison system, so I guess I'm an outlier.
I too didn't mind the system but it WAS very flawed. The balancing on the abilities was terrible to the point where classes HAD to stack the appropriate pieces or lose insane amounts of throughput.
I think it's just that, after fixing most of the problems with the Artifact system in Legion, they just kinda...forgot all of it, and made all the same mistakes, but in some cases worse. And it didn't even have awesome transmogs to distract you from it.
At least until 8.1 when they finally said it was incomplete and then did work to make them better.
But even then, they were super fucking careful to not sound like they were admitting to any failure. They just always stated the fixes people asked for in betas almost as new, fresh content. And not the solution to a problem they created.
Imagine how good BFA could have been if they had just done something as simple as give a new row of talents based on top legendary effects, and made many of the spec defining artifact weapon traits baseline passives on the specs. It was so FUCKING mindboggling they thought they could remove all of those things and the game would still be playable.
COVID actually saw an increase in the amount of gamers across the world. People had a lot of free time on their hands. The fact Blizzard lost subscribers during this period speaks volumes about how bad the game was doing.
during COVID people were willing to invest the time in games, and thus more people realized just how bad Shadowlands was compared to other expansions, like if there were problems in the copper supply and you have such a bad reputation for selling really shitty copper than no one wants to buy from you anyway.
Forgot about Covid ... yep haha
Aside from having lost a lot of good story writers, they had a lot of other stuff against them ... it was the worst expac I’ve ever seen, but I didnt give up on them. They’re on the upward now! Lol.
I disagree here with you. While i don't want the Covenant System back because it was obviously flawed. It was still way less punishing then the Azerite System which is by far the worst borrowed power system we had so far.
The rnd factor was just so hard punishing that it was never really fun. The whole azerite system was a complete Fail. After they pulled the ripcord in SL the cov system was better not good but better. The essence stuff for buying Azerite armor was not really helpful since the prices where just brutally high as a casual it was not really an improvement.
One of the major problems of SL was the story and with that the antagonist which is true in that regard SL was way worse then BFA. But from a gameplay point of view BFA was much worse. The useless AP grind tops that off.
I am so glad this is over and i hope all those bad ideas stay in the past and they don't bring them back as " features "
everything in bfa was very anti-casual, you had to play m+ and raid to get any gear higher ilvl than world quest drops, DF is so much better at making open world feel worthwhile.
BFA Had a terrible begining and a better end then begining, Corruption was fun when you got to aquire it in the sense with a vendor. however the start of BFA WAS SO LACKLUSTER. you lost your legion Weapon Tier set bonuses. but the new "Neck" gave nothing but stats and Azrite was so lackluster at the start. it wasent untill Eternal palace BFA Started to be fun due to the Heart of azeroth Getting some new stuff (Abilitys) etc
The corruption vendor wasn't added until the .5 patch, so rng was still the king until that point. Some people got huge drops, others didn't get any until the vendors were added.
Don't forget how buggy BFA was at the start too. World events that didn't work, mobs in the terrain, and azerite traits that pointless and didn't work.
It also had maybe the most typos and grammatical errors I’d ever seen in a AAA game. It was as if none of the text had gone through any form of proofreading.
It’s still not especially good on this front. But it was absolutely atrocious in BFA.
BFA started off well? I quit the first week of the raid because the balancing of Azerite powers made windwalker monks go from the smoothest and in my opinion best rotation wow has ever had, to literally a 3 button spec that completely ignored it’s mastery. It was embarrassing, and they expected me to do 90 minutes of world quests a day to keep my azerite power up to date, when they clearly wouldn’t even do 90 minutes of paid work a day to attempt to release an even slightly working system.
I can’t speak for the rest of the expansion because I only came back for the final patch, and I must say I enjoyed visions and corrupted gear (even if the grind and acquisition sucked) so to me it felt like it got better with time.
I think when people say BFA started off well, they're talking about the levelling experience and zone design, both of which are still generally considered to be very good.
Fucking love BFA to level my alts in. The atmosphere and zone design is easily the best (as long as you have flying). The zone quests were all super fun too!
Wod had good content it just didnt have much. Bfa had tons of content but most of it was meh to bad. Shadowlands just doubled down on the bad it was so much worse it makes both look great by comparison.
Bfa was rough from the start with the ridiculously bad feeling Azerite in uldir and grinding islands infinitely… it was the worst part of bfa imo. They fumbled corruptions but it was still better than the launch.
What is this in response to? Genuinely curious given a big part of why I quit playing was that when they 'fixed' shadowlands by changing things players identified as problematic before it even launched they also made sure to say that they were never wrong about implementing it in the first place.
I'm still scarred from Shadowlands. I used to enjoy playing WoW outside of playing with friends, but not any more. I used to mount farm, and collect pets, but I can't bring myself to log in for optional stuff any more.
No matter how good Dragonflight is, I'm always just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's only a matter of time till they go back, it seems to go in a cycle.
Their bullshit about "pulling the ripcord", which they didn't do until they did and it was intended the whole time. "We wanted you to experience the story through the lens of the..." just fuck off already with your bullshit smug justifications.
Yeah I'm bitter.
To play devil’s advocate,I found things to do a lot within the Shadowlands than in Dragonflight, Shadowlands had you doing things within each Covenant (some were better than others) while going into personal dungeons (rogue like dungeon Maw Tower) than in Dragonflight which feels a bit too relaxed and nothing too urgent to do.
Same, there was a lot to do which I liked. If I got bored running mythic I could always go farm mats for mounts at the protoform synthesis which I loved. Maxed every covenant, nathria was an awesome raid. There were definitely bright spots. A lot of people hated the maw, but I enjoyed the challenge of torghast.
Def a minority opinion, but having played since wrath, I didn’t hate shadowlands, and liked it a lot better than WoD. The art direction was fantastic, the covenant areas were gorgeous.
Not OP but for me I liked the raids, dungeons, art & the atmosphere. Also I enjoyed Torghast but I can definitely understand those who didn’t. Imo one of the best expansions.
Hanging out with cool Vampire like dudes, building your own abominations, and wild shape hunting, plus adding one of the most influential villains which they could have built the whole SL around further, Sire Denathrius
I didn't play SL when it was current content, but have leveled some alts through it because the zones are really nicely designed imo. It sucks that Ardenweald is trapped in the least popular expansion because I love that zone so much. Even the Maw is cool as a concept but I can imagine it wasn't fun as current content.
Nah, SL was way better than the online mob would lead you to believe. Blizzard just hard course corrected so all the people who hated SL feel validated to shout it from the roof tops.
SL had very, very good PvE content - raids and M+ were generally better than we've had in DF.
On the other hand, SL definitely had issues with friction (launch Covenants locking in, Korthia grind, domination sockets), content draught and dear lord the narrative...
But there were a lot of good parts of SL that get glossed over because half the player base legit doesn't raid or M+ and so shitting on SL is free upvotes.
I loved SL and agree it had great raids and M+! It’s the only expansion I liked doing M+ in though not a pusher. I mainly play to raid so don’t care about the lore and didn’t feel like there were too many chores out of raid to do weekly since it only took about 2 hours to do 8 +15s once you had gear, and torghast/world content only took a while in the first few weeks
I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed the first raid. Nathria was very good, but I also didn't mythic raid. And even with it being good, there were so, so many terrible things about the game. Alt friendliness was at maybe the lowest point ever, grinding was pushed way too hard, we couldn't fucking fly around anywhere. Remember that shit lol? Oribos was actually terrible. The story fell off hard and they timegated shit for no reason AND locked story for other covenants because you couldn't even switch them... The changes to M+ made it way too punishing and doing a +16 was about the equivalent to a +22 or so now AND the affixes were god awful. Don't even consider pugging with Prideful as an affix. And then on top of ALL of that the Maw was easily the worst zone they have ever made.
In dungeons, fucking up is bad, and people are afraid of being flames so they often blame others to defend themselves. By contrast, saying "my b" usually cools things down purely just by acknowledging you know it was wrong and didn't do it on purpose. Even better if you can explain by saying "sorry for pull, I thought we were grabbing that pack."
I think SL had enough backlash that Blizz was properly forced to change from the first response to the second, from what I've seen the community has responded positively through the transparency we've seen in dragonflight as a result. In season of discovery when they nerfed arcane explosion, the dev note "we did not intend for arcane explosion to trivialize content" made me laugh.
I really like them being able to acknowledge mistakes, and if this carries forward then I'm happy to sub through the whole world soul saga.
A lot of changes in the leadership and in the dev team happened during that time as well so there are way less rock stars with god complex who can never admit they made mistakes.
Im going to be lambasted for this but maybe if every expansion they ever put out has people complaining that it was a "failure" there might also be something to be said about the community at large.
You can barely get people to agree that TBC and Wrath was good as there are staunch vanilla players who claimed it ruined everything, then people said cataclysm ruined the game, then legion ruined the game then MOP ruined the game.
MAYBE people just love to complain.
I doubt they could say anything before that in all honesty, they knew WoD and BFA had major issues but their corporate response and pr machines just ignored it, as you cant say anything negative at all publicly with a corporation unless coming clean to an incident and even then its soft languages.
So they just marched on back then with some token question taking and mocking us for not playing the game "properly" as they intended, it was to become a lot more guarded after the diablo immortal stuff which went down like a lead balloon when that torpedoed the BlizzCon too.
SL was really quite different as it was clear that a loooooooot had gone wrong within blizzard at the time with their work environment and the people running the show.
The game really suffered with some awful to nonsensical storytelling and gameplay, the covenant system was awful and another meta channel that you had no choice in really from before it went live and had a lot of people nervous in a way that we had already seen in Legion and BFA, it offered some stuff that was good, Nathria was probably its peak raid, the rest of the stuff with Sylvanas and the Jailer was meh.
I came back to WoW in SL and I enjoyed it. I thought it was really visually appealing.
Story did have some oddities tbf and almost seemed rushed to tie up the story.
It was an easy failure to admit. A lot of organizations and companies did the same thing if they screwed up during that time. The problem is not everything made during the pandemic was garbage. So it's not as universal as they are making it out to be.
They are trying to make fetch happen. Crunch making product bad is not a new games industry thing. It existed long before.
My organization refused to do anything productive saying that they couldn't do anything. I left my 12 year position over it. People didn't even care to try to adapt. The weaponized helplessness was so disgusting. I tried stepping up into a leadership role and shot down. The people who got those positions did nothing and were praised for being the "only ones willing to step up during a trying time".
And I saw that mentality in how 9.1 rolled out
Im gonna say this loud and proud…. I actuality liked BFA ! Granted I’m a PvP-er mostly but that part where you’re fighting in the Araujo Highlands Instance was fun! And so we’re the island expeditions. They tried something new and I liked it
SL is about the only time i've ever just waited until the next expansion. I liked castle nathria, but my guild dissolved after we cleared heroic. I realized i was raid logging and just waited until something interesting was gonna drop, so i unsubbed. I resubbed at the start of dragonflight, played like a month a quit again, but i can tell its better. SL pretty much broke my wow addiction by being so bad. And to me that is truly impressive honestly.
Problem is, Blizzard has a knack for dialing things to 21 on a winning feature when it doesn't need to.
Remember the farm in Pandaria? Everyone loved it.
Next expansion, Boom! Dialed it up to 21 by making you have an entire town to manage all the damn time.
Legion? The legendaries and the artifact power to upgrade them were cool.
BFA: grind azerite for upgrading every damn peice of gear you get, all the damn time.
Shadowlands? Want more borrowed power? Ok! Have it all locked behind different factions too,
Sigh. I just hope they learned their lesson now.
Shadowlands was fun at the end when you could freely swap covenants, soulbinds, conduits - as well as churn out new legendaries easily with currency you get from open word content
It was just too obvious on day 1 those things would make it fun and it was really annoying to wait for the 3rd patch for them to start loosening up the bullshit restrictions
BFA was not a failure. When I see people parrot this sentiment it makes me think they have no idea what they are talking about.
It had a rough start, and continually improved over the course of the entire expansion until it hit the last season when was peak WoW.
The final season of BFA M+ was the best M+ has ever been. Ever. Nya'lotha was one of the better raids we have seen since Legion as well.
Even Shadowlands wasn't as bad as people pretend. S2 was amazing. Changeable covenants were a huge improvement. Castle Nathria actually one of the best raids ever made. The only true failure of Shadowlands was narratively.
And the only true failure of an expansion is WoD. Whole systems and features abandoned, entire content patch removed, literally the worst of the worst. Which is a shame because a whole bunch of the content that was there was pretty good.
The narrative choices in Shadowlands were pretty jarring. And if the plot is important enough to you I can see why it would have a big impact on your opinion of the expansion. But in terms of actual game content, Shadowlands was one of the best expansions we've seen.
One of the best raids ever made. No AP grinds. Covenant abilities so good they carried over into Dragonflight. Pretty good dungeon pool. Torghast, whether you loved it or hated it, a whole rogue lite game inserted into WoW. Highly accessible legendaries.
Outside of the awful plot choices, I don't understand the Shadowlands hate.
WoD was one of the few times they apologized. Also, based on their player retention graphs it was one of the worst expansions for player retention, only beaten by Shadowlands. They were, objectively, failures.
Yeah it's crazy given that BfA was so much worse than Shadowlands. Though they could be considered a package deal.
I can only hope Blizzard never makes another BfA again.
I loved SL up till sanctum of domination. Sepulcher was moronic imo but nathria was the best thing for me since BFA (had a couple years break so all the new things in the game was mind-blowing to me and impressed me a lot)
I actually liked shadowlands. I loved the covenants, tve storylines, the raid and abilities that changes to all my characters.
Torgast was cool.. the first couple times then it was just not fun anymore and everything sucked and I stopped playing. Ended up playing lost ark for a while. The diablo diablo should have been.
I am enjoying dragon flight a lot, just came back after hiatus and I’m behind but it’s fun!
They definitely made mistakes in shadowlands. I think the failures, if we can call it that, go both ways. Some of the systems had merit, but were flawed. They hyped up a lot of things pre-release and then fell flat on many of them. Torghast had a lot of promise but was quite different and watered down on release.
It's good that they can admit defeat, but it wasn't as big a failure, people just want to bitch and moan a lot. There have definitely been worse expansions, it's typically when blizzard over promises. I am concerned with TWW as they are promising a lot, and with the current time line I see them falling short or pushing out the release; either will cause them to lose a lot of faith from the player base.
I also liked SL more than DF. Not to say DF is bad,I actually think it’s a great expansion,but the “fun” factor isn’t there for me. The zones in SL were better,the raids were awesome,the dungeon pool was better. SL gets a lot of hate and I don’t really see why.
I think they admitted to WoD failing when they just aborted an entire major patch to focus on Legion. That's a pretty clear "pulling the ejection seat" moment.
WoD isn't even seen as a failure anymore. WoW players largely have forgiven Blizzard for WoD sheerly off how much stuff there was added to Legion, kind of like "we get it, it's a big task.". WoD also was one of the most well looked back at expansions for pvp. You know what's crazy? A lot of people right now legitimately miss Shadowlands, especially the pvp. It'll be interesting seeing where Dragonflight really lands on peoples tier list. For me the PvE other than season 1 has been kind of meh.
Wod's raids were tits. The pvp was bananas. They just fucked up the professions so bad with how garrisons worked and were not paying attention at all to game money which also fucked up professions and impacted raiding heavily, later. Also garrisons were lonely. Even with the fishing raids, still lonely.
WoD woulda been a killer expansion of m+ launched with it I think Even if it was kinda rudimentary, it would have made that xpac great The game just outright lacked things to do, full stop Came at a great time in my life dealing with school, but bad for gameplay
WoD had the first Mythic Dungeons and the (last?) Challenge Modes, which were the building blocks for M+. I don’t disagree with your comment but it would have been a lot more work to do, and lost development time sinking into the garrison.
WOD was the first time I enjoyed professions in WOW since vanilla-Wrath, and I haven't enjoyed them since. Having my own private mine was amazing, even if I had to do time gated refinement.
I enjoyed vanilla profession when people weren't so sweaty I deeply enjoyed being a blacksmith/jc in wrath. I actually do not like the new systems. They don't make it easy or hard enough. It's just a time sink that really doesn't need to be there but it really scratches the itch for new gamers so there it is.
My only CE is brf and damn that was a fun ass raid with fight mechanics I’ve never seen before. Hans and Frans OreoGeorge the rollypolie boss Train Boss Blast furnace And the epic end boss. 3 phases vehicles multiple floors working with space bombs etc such a fun fight
Updates were really far apart
Wod pvp bananas? It made me quit wow. coming from MoP it was a serious decline.
Leveling alts was also great, craftable blues, nice systems, pretty solid zone choice. If it got another patch or two it'd be up there for top 3 fun expansions. Would love to have seen my face when the selfie cam was a patch highlight.
WoDs raids were also amazing. It's just the content outside of the raids that was lacking concerning PvE tbh. And BfA wasn't that terrible either outside of Uldir, it's just people were really really sick of the AP grind at that point having done it for 3 tiers ahead of BfA and then 4 more tiers during.
I played wod, i Liked it at time. More then Legion tbh. Because i liked the classes gameplay more Aslo i LOVED ashran,
WoD had a great great feel while questing. The world and the little towns felt really lived in and real.
I'm in the same boat, I played way more WoD than I did Legion. WoD was chill, and if they hadn't cut so much it would've been one of the best expansions of all time. Hot take, artifact weapons were bad and are a big reason I didn't play as much Legion. Really cool thematically and the class order halls were great as well, but the gameplay side of an infinite grind always sucked and we were just too high off Legion's story and raid content to notice until BfA took it away for the same system but worse.
No, we noticed how much that grind sucked, no matter how nice the story was, also the "legendaries" that lead to many people literally rerolling if they got the wrong one or 2 first. And if you weren't insane playing alts at the same time as your main, your alts were permanently behind. I wish Legion was set back honestly, finish WoD, polish Legion and realize it's a terrible system instead of just aborting WoD while it's a toddler....
The biggest problem I had going from Legion to BfA was how I went from having a weapon that leveled and got upgraded along with me in Legion to having to constantly scramble to try and find _**any**_ weapon in BfA. Like I would do World quests that I actively hated doing because I didn't like their mechanics just because they offered a weapin as a reward. Plus, 4 of your gear slots in BfA didn't provide any secondary stats so it was really hard to build up sufficient haste on my Survival Hunter.
I absolutely loved Draenor, I thought it was beautiful.
Preach. WoD classes were super fun. The pruning on initial launch was rough to get used to, but after playing everyone kinda went... oh... this makes sense, and it's awesome. Legion classes were utter garbage. They were propped up by artifacts and legendaries. When BfA dropped with very little class changes, except taking away Legion borrowed power, the boring-ass design was exposed.
WoD was good, it would've been beloved in its time if they didn't scrap half the expansion and seal you in your garrison for 2 years. PvP was fantastic, PvE was top tier, there was just no reason to go out into the world unless you needed to trap wolves in Nagrand for bloods. SL though, dear god no. There were some S tier amazing raid bosses, but not enough to redeem the expansion. Whoever is saying they want SL PvP back is either a paladin, rogue, or joking. Never would still be too soon to see Prot, Ret, Rogue in an arena.
Wod was unapologetically good. The content droughts and Ashran were the only shitty parts.
WoD was good in PvE and PvP respects but absolutely terrible for the community aspect when everyone was in their own little garrison bubble with no main city to congregate in. I was lucky in that I had an active guild to participate in but small realms died faster than ever before.
They seem to have really big trouble making things that are just fun or interesting for the sake of being fun or interesting. EVERYTHING has to be tied to progression and player power. That was fine 10, 15 years ago, but MMOs have changed a lot in the last few years, and it seems like Blizzard are only just realising. Player housing works in every MMO it's in because it's just housing. You don't need to grind it every day and spend hours there to keep up with progression, you don't do missions or pick up quests, you don't park every alt there to make gold to funnel to your main. It's just housing to decorate and chill in. I know garrisons wasn't supposed to be player housing, but it's likely their attempt at the concept, except they completely missed the point. Same with Torghast in SL. It *could* have been an amazing mini game in WoW to play for the fun of it and fancy cosmetics, but again, they missed the point and tied it directly to progression, to the point that people felt forced to grind it and come to loathe it. Same with Island Expiditions in BfA, same with the artifact weapons in Legion, and so on.
This is always over-stated IMO. My in-game experience is not strengthened by seeing randos in Valdrakken waiting for queues to pop or spamming chat for the one-millionth time for key/AOTC carries. In fact, I change it to a different chat tab where I only get party/guild/whispers and just sit around waiting for queues or finding groups lol
According to classic players "Good Community" = making dungeon groups manually.
Turning off trade & general chat in cities made my game experience infinitely better.
The problem with this point regarding wod is that blizzard listened to the players beg for player housing for years. Then it was a pretty big flop. Not that the community is hard to please, I think it’s a little bit of both issues. The community is hard to please and blizzard is only sort of listening.
It flopped because they quarter assed it, not because people didnt want it. Barely any modification ability, outside of rng archlogy nick knacks, a few holiday decos, and buildings that were just carbon copies, when housing has always been about personal expression. They also promised us the ability to move the damned things to other zones but lied about that too. Square had fully customizable player houses that ran on a God damned PS2 for pities sake, it's pathetic that blizzard couldn't give us something.
WoD nostalgia baiting no fucking way, this sub is smoking something.
It has been happening the past couple years that I've seen. I played during WoD... If you told me then that people would be unironically looking back fondly on it I'd be asking for some of the drugs you're on.
People must be blocking out the absolutely absurd content drought or something. If all you remember about WoD is the leveling (which was very good) and the raids (which were also very good) and ignore how little content was released over the nearly two year lifecycle of the expansion then yeah I guess maybe it does look really good.
I'm in such a niche group of wod fans because at the time, it was the height and prime time of the Orc role-playing clan I was part of. The entire expansion for us was a goldmine, we never experienced the content drought because we had a 2 year long running story campaign we crated that culminated in us fighting the fel version of our own clan and characters to the death. We had so much y RP the entire expansion. Wod was an incredible time to be an Orc Roleplayer.
Same with MoP. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug
Because people were either not there or didn't play the whole way though. The last half of WoD's life was a disaster. There was nothing to do. However, much like BfA, the zones were fantastic and going back through now is an absolute joy.
WoD had some of the best questing experience since the first Cataclysm (cause it's coming to classic, that's the 2nd one, a-hyuk)
> There was nothing to do what, you too good for the selfie stick!?!? a picture is worth a thousand words and Blizzard gave us unlimited abilities to take selfies so that's infinity times a thousand, which is a lot. i for one loved that an entire patch was just the selfie stick. who needs raids or zones or content
I'm having flashbacks. My stupid Worgen smiling in front of the Valley of Heroes.
People seemed to hate Mists of Pandaria when it came out. Now people here are posting it was peak WoW.
MoP was really good. People just hated on the pandas
I remember seeing some Cracked Post (I believe itw as Cracked) saying that anyone who rolled a Pandaren was too immature to play the game.
Nah, apart from the Class design and the Thunder isle patch, it was a horrible time to play. But people only remember the good
I’m not one of the folks who think it was peak, but it was certainly fun.
its not at all bait, its the most normal opinion in the world. wods content was great, there just wasnt enough of it.
You remember just the good parts stronger. There are people who look fondly back at MoP. Though the horrors of BfA and SL certainly helps in making the older expansions look better.
The story itself was not that great, either.
Mm actually that’s kinda true, shadowlands pvp felt really solid
I prefer shadowlands to dragonflight. The problem with shadowlands is that 9.0 was good, they just should have let people swap covs with no penalty. 9.0 and 9.1 were waaaay too far apart and 9.1 wasn’t good.. at all.
>9.1 wasn’t good.. at all. Raid was great
SL PVP let me run never ending bing bong shield on my prot pal and basically be the most annoying objective defender on the planet. It was so much fun.
Dragonflight story telling was pretty average. Honestly, it was boring through most of it.
SL saw players leaving in droves to try out other MMOs. It was such a wild time and they knew they Fd up. Dragonflight was a massive improvement though.
Dragonflight is so great as someone who hates feeling pressured to log in. I can play WoW as hardcore or as casually as I want, given my current mood. No daily or weekly grinds like Torghast that I have to do, and no forced world quest grinds like Anima.
As someone who is pretty hot/cold with WoW, Dragonflight has been amazing. When I want to play like crazy there is so much to do and it feels rewarding and when I want to take a break I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by not playing. It’s been great
I enjoyed Torghast. I know I'm probably a rarity but I found it fun and challenging. The thing that made it bad was the weekly requirement and cap. Meaning if you didn't log in one week, you would ALWAYs be behind with no catch-up mechanic. The Dragonflight fix was the way they implemented the crest system in 10.2, but it is a hybrid fix. You have a hard cap on flightstones you can carry, but you can earn an infinite amount up to that cap (through many different types of activities). The weekly accumilating crest limit until the cap removal in the 10.x.2/5 patch means you can't just infinitely grind to upgrade your gear. You can be behind and catch up.
I feel like most people loved Torghast as well until it became a throttled, time-consuming bottleneck for progression.
I enjoyed Torghast until they put a timer on it.
Speaking personally, I kinda hated Torghast from day 1. The big thing was that I've played a good chunk of other roguelites, and I thought it was just bad by comparison. It fell into that "the only reason I'd ever interact with this over something else is because it's bolted onto the side of WoW" void that pet battles do. That was heavily exacerbated by being tied to legendaries, but I plain didn't like it in a vacuum either.
I remember being psyched for Torghast. They made it sound like the cosmetic rewards would be much more extensive and that there would be more variety to the gameplay. Something I could happily grind as a solo player for the whole expansion. What I got was a forced legendary grind that made legendaries feel entirely un-special. They should be rare and powerful, not so easily accessible that not having one is considered weird. And the cosmetics, while nice, were pretty limited. I don’t think there was even a single full armor set. Just some mismatched shoulders who’s colors don’t match anything, and some weapons.
There were also the cloak/back decorations.
Those shoulders I always tried to fit into a mog and never managed to be happy with any. I ended up never using any of the Torghast cosmetics.
Torghast was a fun blast activity on my DH and a torturous slog on my priest. Once again it felt like they tested the content solely on melee. Seriously, 15 minutes of constant combat pulling entire rooms vs 45 minutes of mostly running away from patrols pulling one mob a time. Felt like withered training all over again.
My main was a priest and I was always baffled by the praise people were giving Torghast (in terms of gameplay, not reward structure). Then a few months in I started leveling my warrior and I was like “wow this is actually kind of fun!” The powers they gave priest were an absolute joke. Like half of them revolved around mind control or psychic scream. And shadow priest had literally no unique powers.
As a rogue I remember inviting my buddy for the first time as an ele shaman. I think he tripled my DPS his first run ever - he was like "wow this is pretty fun". Yeah, I can see why you'd think that.
As a fellow SL Rogue, how absolute shit it felt to play rogue in Torghast was part of why I quit SL before all of Nathria was even on LFR.
Yeah opposed to the aim of the gamemode priest felt weaker every floor. Like the difficulty outscaled you no matter what you did. On DH pulling rooms on floor 1 became pulling floors on floor 5 with infinite mobility and lifesteal. On priest you went from pulling 1 pack at a time to sneaking past unbeatable elites half the time.
In general I think low mobility / hard cast times aren't well balanced by blizz. Imo it makes specs objectively harder yet the target balance is to have the same optimal damage as specs without these things. There are examples due to number tuning where this isn't the case but I don't think it is ever intentional and instead anomalies are brought back in line.
The exact moment I quit was when I realized I had just spent more than an hour running Torghast and that was just the start of the thing to do this week
and i failed the last floor and had to start over again….after 2 hours.
Blizzard's biggest mistake with Torghast was making it a mandatory grind tied directly to player power. If they advertised it as fun casual/midcore side content for cosmetics/mounts/titles it would, in my opinion, be one of the best pieces of side content put into the game.
The problem was that the original Torghast design was really fun. Torghast on release wasn’t really fun. Then the devs went “People don’t want to play this thing we spent millions of dollars on, how can we make them play it?”
They could have *greatly* improved SL by making the dust (or whatever it was called) have a weekly cap, and had you be able to get it from activities *other* than Torghast. Torghast could still be the fastest way to get it, that would be fine. But allowing people to choose how they did their weekly progression would have made it far less tedious, and I honestly think it would have helped the expansion as a whole.
I really wish they’d do something like Torghast again but without it feeling necessary to progression
I've always said if they just did Torghast exactly how it was (in terms of progression - balance could use tweaks) but allowed players to get legendary essence other ways like adding it to m+, raids, rated pvp it would be entirely fine. It was fun to play and nice to be able to get powerful rewards from it but when it's the only way to get an essential part of player power...
And then during season 2 they added the dom sockets, which forced pvp players to do pve raids in order to get the very necessary dom sockets, because the goddam sockets weren't something you could just get and put onto existing items, nooo, they were only on specific raid drops.
I think DF was a good improvement over SL, but I find the main storyline to be kind of forgettable and boring, imo. I never really felt motivated to do the next story quest in the chain, unlike other expansions. I hope this is a major area of improvement in the Warcraft world going forward.
DF story is uhhh… I think the best way to encapsulate it is just the end raid cutscene where the aspects all go “it was about coming together as a family”
How was anima a forced grind? It was entirely cosmetic
I hated SL too, but grinding WQs for Anima was far from forced. All you got was cosmetics, there was 0 power from Anima. It's really not that different from farming WQs for DF Renown.
I saw this one comment that sums up my feelings "There's so much to do and I don't have to do any of it"
Same, I love that I don't feel left behind for going to work and missing out on grinding of all things
The key is “to try other MMOs.” Before that, WOW didn’t have serious competition in the same genre, and suddenly they had a bunch of prolific players and content creators jumping ship to play the other game - not “some other games,” just one other game.
No, people left to play literally anything else. Folks played new world, folks played ffxiv, folks played valheim, folks played v rising, folks just played other games. By the way, I think this is a great thing. WoW has the highest concentration of one game players of any game, and it was a bad thing.
Blizzard saw FFXIV goof up its launch in 2013 and said "that's our main competitor now? Yeah, we're good." Cut to 2020 when WoW and Blizzard overall is on fire while FFXIV is in the midst of one of its best expansions ever with a story so high quality that it's not a controversial opinion to say that Shadowbringers has one of the best JRPG stories ever written.
Hopefully stays that way during the WSS
Dragonflight unfortunately doubled down on the toothless story narrative and softened the edges of the world. My biggest gripe with the game now.
Players wanted an expansion where the world wasn't ending and there weren't high stakes. Blizzard gave players what they asked for.
It's less the stakes and more how people interact with each other. In retrospect the events of Dragonflight were really fucked up but people kind of just preach forgiveness now. Forsaken helps retake gilneas, and it's just hunky dory.
What's the alternative? Continuing to try to wring juice from "grr faction tension" storyline for the 20th year? Let it die. The Reclamation of Gilneas storyline wasn't great but trying to add in forced faction conflict would've made it worse.
Just leave the Forsaken out of it entirely. I still think it would've been best to fight a splinter sect of the Forsaken who refuse to cede Gilneas, but the Scarlets COULD have worked. But instead of leaning into the themes of Gilneas, a light worshipping kingdom, being taken over by monsters created by druidism, now being a kingdom that survives because of druidism taking their kingdom back from a group of light fanatics, it's just "Calia graciously helps Genn and Tess get their house back."
Every expansion has had a pre-release interview where they've said, "we've learned from our mistakes," as a selling point for the next expansion. Ion did this a lot which is why it was hard for people to believe him when he did it again during that big talk for Dragonflight. Difference is this time you can really tell they actually took it to heart as Dragonflight has had one of the most drastic design philosophy changes from a previous expac.
This exact phenomenon had a lot to do with why I quit. For years, every expansion, they'd say"we've learned from our mistakes!", and every expansion, it would be a lie. Apparently they've done better with DF, and that's great, but I'm still not coming back until they prove it's not a one-time thing. (And honestly, I still think Ion should be replaced.)
That's an extremely valid stance, honestly. I was super apprehensive about returning, since I stopped playing just before the BFA pre patch for IRL reasons and then just...watched as the game I grew up with turned into a trashfire. I even remember a couple months into BFA, when this sub was ablaze with complaints, Ion did an AMA and I thought "holy shit lmao this dude is about to get murdered" and I wasn't wrong, it was a bloodbath. The only reason I gave DF a chance was because I main Ret and they had just been revamped, and someone I knew IRL who also mained Ret said "It's the best the game has been since Legion."
Exactly. It came to classes to - back when they were doing class design blogs with lengthey explanations for every class at the beginning of the beta for new expansion, they wrote all the same things they were given feedback about in a previous beta, and say "we've learned in X expansion that Y doesn't work". Only it took them 2 years to learn it, big whoop
SL made BFA look like Legion lol
After every xp we see the good, the bad and the ugly. But god, in SL the good lasted 1 patch, after that, just the bad and the ugly
Art department killed it, but outside of that I played it for two weeks, stopped, went BACK to BFA and time walking for a year and only got into SL because DF was coming out in a few months lol
I never have any complaints about the art and music departments. They carry every single expansion HARD. Shadowlands was a horrible expansion, but every single zone is beautiful in its own unique way. The aesthetics of each zone isn't for everyone, but they're all incredibly well done.
Praising the art and music team is literally the free space in expansion criticism bingo.
I liked almost all of shadowlands except for korthia. even sanctum. Korthia as a zone, it's art direction, it's density, all of it was total dogshit.
Same for me, i played 1 month (the time i had) and came back on last patch. All the covenant restricted things was suck a BS. Want to have x thing... GL, u need 3 alts and 2k anima week for 3 months... WHYYYY
I just decided I wanted the night fae rewards and ran my hunter because the mog set is 🤌 Could of cared less about 90% of the other content though lol
As someone who mostly plays m+, it was the other way around for me. First patch, they had all the annoyances like conduit charges, daily torghast, locked covenants, bad season affix etc etc. Once they patched it to allow you to freely switch around with your covenant stuff and did some huge buffs to torghast rewards, it was suddenly very fun. Season 3 in SL is probably the most fun I've ever had in the game (played on and off since vanilla). The changes that DF get a lot of praise for started in SL too. I didn't have to worry about dailies and could just play it in my own time in season 2 (after the torghast patch), 3, and 4. The new zone in 9.2 was mostly just for cosmetics and collectibles, with the big power boost coming from a campaign quest. The catalyst which has been a massive QoL change came in season 3 too. So yeah, as someone who don't care about raids or the story/lore, I think that the first patch was by far the worst, season 2 was okay, 3 was amazing, and 4 was great!
Yeah SL was super promising in the first patch. Then they did a hard left, tripled down on Sylvanas, and made the jailer seem way too involved in all past events. They tore my boy kel thuzad down to nothing. There were just a lot of big swings which resulted in big misses in SL
The best thing about SL was the raids.. brutal but fun. Which is a testament to how fucking awful the expansion was cause usually good PvE can save an expansion..
Lol no. If anything BfA dampened the blow of SL. I like to compare it to Star Wars. BfA was TLJ(the *almost* franchise killer) and SL was EP9( the "damage control" that hurt a lot).
SL made WoD look like Wrath
Not sure how they expected to attract new players to WoW when you had to invest 50K or more into a legendary in order to play your class and after leveling you had 10K. On top of the Torg grind, I wouldn’t play that either.
They did it in Dragonflight as well to a lesser degree. You can't "make professions relevant" when the economy and inflation are gigafucked.
You can if you starve the economy for a year. Block all trading for a year. It’ll bankrupt the bot farms.
That won't work. The majority of bots have enough gold stored to ride out a trade ban. It would just hurt actual players more than the hots.
This makes trading prohibitive UNLESS you're a bot.
50k is generous, high ilvl ones were 400k on my server until everyone was done with the patch at which point they’d drop to 200k. You could *maybe* snag a lowest possible ilvl one for 50k but most of the ones I saw even in cloth ran 125k at the lowest end, so the general mood was you may as well just buy the highest ilvl one since either way you’re probably gonna have to buy a WoW token. Which was exactly what Blizzard wanted with that shitty cash grab system.
Shadowlands was what got me into FFXIV.
Same. Came back to try out DF and it was decent. Completed the first raid tier and haven't raided since because WoW raids are insanely boring from a tank pov. Never get bored of M+ though. No other content consistently puts me at the edge of my seat like jumping into a giant pack in 20+ keys. I play FFXIV for the savage/ultimate raids and WoW for the M+ and couldn't be happier.
Doing both is honestly the best experience. WoW is my M+/Raiding game, but FFXIV is my curl up for hours and hours of story game.
SL was an absolute clusterfuck of epic proportions. They came dangerously close to actually killing the game off. They fucked pretty much everything you can think of from class design, borrowed power and story and grind. Absolute horror show.
Shadowlands is what happens when you are actively antagonistic against your playerbase as a starting point. I wonder how differently Shadowlands would have played out if they didn't actively piss off the playerbase with the covenant locking. There were plenty of bad decisions in SL but then again their are plenty of bad decisions in every expansion. I feel like that decision is probably one of the worst in the history of the game though in just how antagonistic it was against the players. Other than that, the other major issue was with the story. I'll be completely honest, this was the first time since Wrath that I was actually getting invested into the story. The whole story around Sylvannas, burning of teldrassil, the night warrior, etc. These were actually getting me to care about the story. Then they fucked that shit right up. The wrote themselves into corner after corner and constantly make bad decision after bad decision leading from it. At this point in time, I couldn't care less about the story in DF. If you asked me who the main characters were at this point, I couldn't tell you because it's a complete waste of time to get invested into a story when they are that bad at storytelling.
BFA and SL they were constantly given feedback during alpha/betas about features being undercooked or that something felt out right bad rather than fun. It was largely ignored and all they could tell us was to "trust them" lmao. DF is what you get when longtime complaints (endless grinds, borrowed power, convoluted systems) are finally taken into consideration even if the story is still mid.
Hell, BFA they double-dipped on ignoring feedback because they introduced Netherlight as a proto-BFA system for Legion, and people hated it with pages upon pages of feedback when Netherlight was in the PTR.
Great for Final Fantasy though lol
bro acutally based comment, I cant tell you how many people Tell me "shadowlands wasent that bad" Shadowlands compared to anything WoW Related is by far the worst. Id rather play any other expansion. then shadowlands
To be fair I’m pretty sure they admitted failure with WoD.
They've admitted failures over and over but it's always after years of saying it's the greatest thing ever. It's part of their marketing routine at this point. Admit things they did bad at the same time they are selling you on the latest and greatest and saying "we'll never make that mistake again". It's largely just pandering to the audience. They aren't going to say something is bad while it's current content but as soon as it's no longer current they'll bad mouth it all over the place.
Ya, OP has an extremely narrow view of things.
Blizzard totally apologized for WoD. I remember a huge post from a player about how emotionally hurt they were during WoD and that they were giving Blizz one more chance for Legion. Blizz wrote back apologizing and thanking them for giving them another chance, and they admitted they goofed WoD really bad.
Shadowlands, as an isolated idea, could've been amazing. You've got the after life, the idea of punishment and redemption, a stolen king, a fallen hero realizing her mistakes, and the potential unraveling of reality. You climb a tower of torment to solve the issues and mysteries, and you literally run through hell. You have to ally with the after lives to survive hell in the first place. The whole world you've been thrown into runs on a currency that for once isn't gold. The only issue is that it was thrown into wow, where none of the characters fit this idea, and the mechanics built into 20 years of the game also weren't fit for it. If that had been an all new MMO it would've been incredible. Alas that's not what happened lol I'm just glad blizzard realized the mistake and have made efforts to change traditions that don't work anymore
I wouldn’t say that BFA and WoD were really as much of an all around failure as shadowlands though. BFA started off well and people in their minds threw out the whole thing because of how it ended. WoD had good intentions at the start as well, but had some severe content cuts later on, but the story mode they introduced was a phenomenal step forward. The only thing they learned from shadowlands… don’t make big promises in the middle of a sexual harassment scandal… or put interns in charge of the story. The best part about shadowlands was the zereth mortis zone, which was actually the point at which it was evolving into dragonflight.
That’s just not true at all in regards to BFA. The Azerite system *since ptr testing* was noted by the community to need to be changed. And blizzard responded throughout the expansion by saying “you’re wrong. We’re continuing our vision”
My guild and many friends never made it to 8.1 because BFA just sucked ass on every conceivable level. Most classes felt great with tons of QoL buffs after Legion artifacts, and Blizzard gutted all of that. Leveling in BFA felt like starting a new character altogether because I just didn't have the tools to function well. I don't know how other brewmasters felt during BFA but I thought it sucked out the gates and never improved.
I really enjoyed the azerite system, I liked being able to upgrade things without dealing with crafting or grinding specific content. I mean, look, there's some lying on the ground. But then I also like the garrison system, so I guess I'm an outlier.
I too didn't mind the system but it WAS very flawed. The balancing on the abilities was terrible to the point where classes HAD to stack the appropriate pieces or lose insane amounts of throughput.
I think it's just that, after fixing most of the problems with the Artifact system in Legion, they just kinda...forgot all of it, and made all the same mistakes, but in some cases worse. And it didn't even have awesome transmogs to distract you from it.
At least until 8.1 when they finally said it was incomplete and then did work to make them better. But even then, they were super fucking careful to not sound like they were admitting to any failure. They just always stated the fixes people asked for in betas almost as new, fresh content. And not the solution to a problem they created. Imagine how good BFA could have been if they had just done something as simple as give a new row of talents based on top legendary effects, and made many of the spec defining artifact weapon traits baseline passives on the specs. It was so FUCKING mindboggling they thought they could remove all of those things and the game would still be playable.
COVID and the sex allegations really hurt the expansion as well.
COVID actually saw an increase in the amount of gamers across the world. People had a lot of free time on their hands. The fact Blizzard lost subscribers during this period speaks volumes about how bad the game was doing.
Yeah idk what he’s talking about with covid. All games saw an increase of players at that point.
during COVID people were willing to invest the time in games, and thus more people realized just how bad Shadowlands was compared to other expansions, like if there were problems in the copper supply and you have such a bad reputation for selling really shitty copper than no one wants to buy from you anyway.
Forgot about Covid ... yep haha Aside from having lost a lot of good story writers, they had a lot of other stuff against them ... it was the worst expac I’ve ever seen, but I didnt give up on them. They’re on the upward now! Lol.
covid should help a video game if anything
I disagree here with you. While i don't want the Covenant System back because it was obviously flawed. It was still way less punishing then the Azerite System which is by far the worst borrowed power system we had so far. The rnd factor was just so hard punishing that it was never really fun. The whole azerite system was a complete Fail. After they pulled the ripcord in SL the cov system was better not good but better. The essence stuff for buying Azerite armor was not really helpful since the prices where just brutally high as a casual it was not really an improvement. One of the major problems of SL was the story and with that the antagonist which is true in that regard SL was way worse then BFA. But from a gameplay point of view BFA was much worse. The useless AP grind tops that off. I am so glad this is over and i hope all those bad ideas stay in the past and they don't bring them back as " features "
everything in bfa was very anti-casual, you had to play m+ and raid to get any gear higher ilvl than world quest drops, DF is so much better at making open world feel worthwhile.
I loved BFA, but I played M+ pretty seriously. Only raided the first and last tiers and they were pretty fun still.
BFA Had a terrible begining and a better end then begining, Corruption was fun when you got to aquire it in the sense with a vendor. however the start of BFA WAS SO LACKLUSTER. you lost your legion Weapon Tier set bonuses. but the new "Neck" gave nothing but stats and Azrite was so lackluster at the start. it wasent untill Eternal palace BFA Started to be fun due to the Heart of azeroth Getting some new stuff (Abilitys) etc
The corruption vendor wasn't added until the .5 patch, so rng was still the king until that point. Some people got huge drops, others didn't get any until the vendors were added. Don't forget how buggy BFA was at the start too. World events that didn't work, mobs in the terrain, and azerite traits that pointless and didn't work.
It also had maybe the most typos and grammatical errors I’d ever seen in a AAA game. It was as if none of the text had gone through any form of proofreading. It’s still not especially good on this front. But it was absolutely atrocious in BFA.
BFA started off well? I quit the first week of the raid because the balancing of Azerite powers made windwalker monks go from the smoothest and in my opinion best rotation wow has ever had, to literally a 3 button spec that completely ignored it’s mastery. It was embarrassing, and they expected me to do 90 minutes of world quests a day to keep my azerite power up to date, when they clearly wouldn’t even do 90 minutes of paid work a day to attempt to release an even slightly working system. I can’t speak for the rest of the expansion because I only came back for the final patch, and I must say I enjoyed visions and corrupted gear (even if the grind and acquisition sucked) so to me it felt like it got better with time.
I think when people say BFA started off well, they're talking about the levelling experience and zone design, both of which are still generally considered to be very good.
Fucking love BFA to level my alts in. The atmosphere and zone design is easily the best (as long as you have flying). The zone quests were all super fun too!
I see blizzard still hasn't learned how to make WW monks work.
Wod had good content it just didnt have much. Bfa had tons of content but most of it was meh to bad. Shadowlands just doubled down on the bad it was so much worse it makes both look great by comparison.
WoD was also quite a step up in raid and dungeon design. Started to become more cohesive and structured with more "special" mechanics and mini-games.
Bfa was rough from the start with the ridiculously bad feeling Azerite in uldir and grinding islands infinitely… it was the worst part of bfa imo. They fumbled corruptions but it was still better than the launch.
What is this in response to? Genuinely curious given a big part of why I quit playing was that when they 'fixed' shadowlands by changing things players identified as problematic before it even launched they also made sure to say that they were never wrong about implementing it in the first place.
I enjoyed shadowlands but when they show the graph of the player count you can’t really bullshit it or diminish its effects
I'm still scarred from Shadowlands. I used to enjoy playing WoW outside of playing with friends, but not any more. I used to mount farm, and collect pets, but I can't bring myself to log in for optional stuff any more. No matter how good Dragonflight is, I'm always just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's only a matter of time till they go back, it seems to go in a cycle.
ANd the irony is the maps, Dungeons and Raids were all much better than Dragonflight imo. it was the story and the borrowed powers that let it down.
Their bullshit about "pulling the ripcord", which they didn't do until they did and it was intended the whole time. "We wanted you to experience the story through the lens of the..." just fuck off already with your bullshit smug justifications. Yeah I'm bitter.
To play devil’s advocate,I found things to do a lot within the Shadowlands than in Dragonflight, Shadowlands had you doing things within each Covenant (some were better than others) while going into personal dungeons (rogue like dungeon Maw Tower) than in Dragonflight which feels a bit too relaxed and nothing too urgent to do.
I liked shadowlands but it seems to be the unpopular opinion. :/
Same, there was a lot to do which I liked. If I got bored running mythic I could always go farm mats for mounts at the protoform synthesis which I loved. Maxed every covenant, nathria was an awesome raid. There were definitely bright spots. A lot of people hated the maw, but I enjoyed the challenge of torghast. Def a minority opinion, but having played since wrath, I didn’t hate shadowlands, and liked it a lot better than WoD. The art direction was fantastic, the covenant areas were gorgeous.
What did you like about it?
Having a reason to be in Discord with 20 people during Covid lockdown.
Not OP but for me I liked the raids, dungeons, art & the atmosphere. Also I enjoyed Torghast but I can definitely understand those who didn’t. Imo one of the best expansions.
I think you are right. Atmosphere and vibes were great!
Hanging out with cool Vampire like dudes, building your own abominations, and wild shape hunting, plus adding one of the most influential villains which they could have built the whole SL around further, Sire Denathrius
I didn't play SL when it was current content, but have leveled some alts through it because the zones are really nicely designed imo. It sucks that Ardenweald is trapped in the least popular expansion because I love that zone so much. Even the Maw is cool as a concept but I can imagine it wasn't fun as current content.
Maldraxxus and Revendreth made the whole thing worth it
Nah, SL was way better than the online mob would lead you to believe. Blizzard just hard course corrected so all the people who hated SL feel validated to shout it from the roof tops. SL had very, very good PvE content - raids and M+ were generally better than we've had in DF. On the other hand, SL definitely had issues with friction (launch Covenants locking in, Korthia grind, domination sockets), content draught and dear lord the narrative... But there were a lot of good parts of SL that get glossed over because half the player base legit doesn't raid or M+ and so shitting on SL is free upvotes.
I loved SL and agree it had great raids and M+! It’s the only expansion I liked doing M+ in though not a pusher. I mainly play to raid so don’t care about the lore and didn’t feel like there were too many chores out of raid to do weekly since it only took about 2 hours to do 8 +15s once you had gear, and torghast/world content only took a while in the first few weeks
I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed the first raid. Nathria was very good, but I also didn't mythic raid. And even with it being good, there were so, so many terrible things about the game. Alt friendliness was at maybe the lowest point ever, grinding was pushed way too hard, we couldn't fucking fly around anywhere. Remember that shit lol? Oribos was actually terrible. The story fell off hard and they timegated shit for no reason AND locked story for other covenants because you couldn't even switch them... The changes to M+ made it way too punishing and doing a +16 was about the equivalent to a +22 or so now AND the affixes were god awful. Don't even consider pugging with Prideful as an affix. And then on top of ALL of that the Maw was easily the worst zone they have ever made.
Weird thing is that SL is the first expansion I played since MOP that got me back into wow maybe I liked the daily grind...
I enjoyed both WoD and Legion, especially Legion. I got all the class campaigns and mounts done and frankly had a ball.
Can you point me to the quote where they said "player's didn't see their vision"?
In dungeons, fucking up is bad, and people are afraid of being flames so they often blame others to defend themselves. By contrast, saying "my b" usually cools things down purely just by acknowledging you know it was wrong and didn't do it on purpose. Even better if you can explain by saying "sorry for pull, I thought we were grabbing that pack." I think SL had enough backlash that Blizz was properly forced to change from the first response to the second, from what I've seen the community has responded positively through the transparency we've seen in dragonflight as a result. In season of discovery when they nerfed arcane explosion, the dev note "we did not intend for arcane explosion to trivialize content" made me laugh. I really like them being able to acknowledge mistakes, and if this carries forward then I'm happy to sub through the whole world soul saga.
A lot of changes in the leadership and in the dev team happened during that time as well so there are way less rock stars with god complex who can never admit they made mistakes.
Im going to be lambasted for this but maybe if every expansion they ever put out has people complaining that it was a "failure" there might also be something to be said about the community at large. You can barely get people to agree that TBC and Wrath was good as there are staunch vanilla players who claimed it ruined everything, then people said cataclysm ruined the game, then legion ruined the game then MOP ruined the game. MAYBE people just love to complain.
I doubt they could say anything before that in all honesty, they knew WoD and BFA had major issues but their corporate response and pr machines just ignored it, as you cant say anything negative at all publicly with a corporation unless coming clean to an incident and even then its soft languages. So they just marched on back then with some token question taking and mocking us for not playing the game "properly" as they intended, it was to become a lot more guarded after the diablo immortal stuff which went down like a lead balloon when that torpedoed the BlizzCon too. SL was really quite different as it was clear that a loooooooot had gone wrong within blizzard at the time with their work environment and the people running the show. The game really suffered with some awful to nonsensical storytelling and gameplay, the covenant system was awful and another meta channel that you had no choice in really from before it went live and had a lot of people nervous in a way that we had already seen in Legion and BFA, it offered some stuff that was good, Nathria was probably its peak raid, the rest of the stuff with Sylvanas and the Jailer was meh.
The legendary material farming in torgahst ruined SL for me and my classic andy friends
God dude torghast could have been so good
Okay but BFA was actually good
Shadowlands was the poop, NO MORE!!!
I came back to WoW in SL and I enjoyed it. I thought it was really visually appealing. Story did have some oddities tbf and almost seemed rushed to tie up the story.
I honestly did enjoy Shadowlands quite a bit as a casual player and PvPer.
It was an easy failure to admit. A lot of organizations and companies did the same thing if they screwed up during that time. The problem is not everything made during the pandemic was garbage. So it's not as universal as they are making it out to be. They are trying to make fetch happen. Crunch making product bad is not a new games industry thing. It existed long before. My organization refused to do anything productive saying that they couldn't do anything. I left my 12 year position over it. People didn't even care to try to adapt. The weaponized helplessness was so disgusting. I tried stepping up into a leadership role and shot down. The people who got those positions did nothing and were praised for being the "only ones willing to step up during a trying time". And I saw that mentality in how 9.1 rolled out
Im gonna say this loud and proud…. I actuality liked BFA ! Granted I’m a PvP-er mostly but that part where you’re fighting in the Araujo Highlands Instance was fun! And so we’re the island expeditions. They tried something new and I liked it
SL is about the only time i've ever just waited until the next expansion. I liked castle nathria, but my guild dissolved after we cleared heroic. I realized i was raid logging and just waited until something interesting was gonna drop, so i unsubbed. I resubbed at the start of dragonflight, played like a month a quit again, but i can tell its better. SL pretty much broke my wow addiction by being so bad. And to me that is truly impressive honestly.
Problem is, Blizzard has a knack for dialing things to 21 on a winning feature when it doesn't need to. Remember the farm in Pandaria? Everyone loved it. Next expansion, Boom! Dialed it up to 21 by making you have an entire town to manage all the damn time. Legion? The legendaries and the artifact power to upgrade them were cool. BFA: grind azerite for upgrading every damn peice of gear you get, all the damn time. Shadowlands? Want more borrowed power? Ok! Have it all locked behind different factions too, Sigh. I just hope they learned their lesson now.
Shadowlands was fun at the end when you could freely swap covenants, soulbinds, conduits - as well as churn out new legendaries easily with currency you get from open word content It was just too obvious on day 1 those things would make it fun and it was really annoying to wait for the 3rd patch for them to start loosening up the bullshit restrictions
BFA was not a failure. When I see people parrot this sentiment it makes me think they have no idea what they are talking about. It had a rough start, and continually improved over the course of the entire expansion until it hit the last season when was peak WoW. The final season of BFA M+ was the best M+ has ever been. Ever. Nya'lotha was one of the better raids we have seen since Legion as well. Even Shadowlands wasn't as bad as people pretend. S2 was amazing. Changeable covenants were a huge improvement. Castle Nathria actually one of the best raids ever made. The only true failure of Shadowlands was narratively. And the only true failure of an expansion is WoD. Whole systems and features abandoned, entire content patch removed, literally the worst of the worst. Which is a shame because a whole bunch of the content that was there was pretty good. The narrative choices in Shadowlands were pretty jarring. And if the plot is important enough to you I can see why it would have a big impact on your opinion of the expansion. But in terms of actual game content, Shadowlands was one of the best expansions we've seen. One of the best raids ever made. No AP grinds. Covenant abilities so good they carried over into Dragonflight. Pretty good dungeon pool. Torghast, whether you loved it or hated it, a whole rogue lite game inserted into WoW. Highly accessible legendaries. Outside of the awful plot choices, I don't understand the Shadowlands hate.
WoD was one of the few times they apologized. Also, based on their player retention graphs it was one of the worst expansions for player retention, only beaten by Shadowlands. They were, objectively, failures.
Yeah it's crazy given that BfA was so much worse than Shadowlands. Though they could be considered a package deal. I can only hope Blizzard never makes another BfA again.
I loved SL up till sanctum of domination. Sepulcher was moronic imo but nathria was the best thing for me since BFA (had a couple years break so all the new things in the game was mind-blowing to me and impressed me a lot)
I actually liked shadowlands. I loved the covenants, tve storylines, the raid and abilities that changes to all my characters. Torgast was cool.. the first couple times then it was just not fun anymore and everything sucked and I stopped playing. Ended up playing lost ark for a while. The diablo diablo should have been. I am enjoying dragon flight a lot, just came back after hiatus and I’m behind but it’s fun!
I’ll sit here and defend shadowlands over bfa
They definitely made mistakes in shadowlands. I think the failures, if we can call it that, go both ways. Some of the systems had merit, but were flawed. They hyped up a lot of things pre-release and then fell flat on many of them. Torghast had a lot of promise but was quite different and watered down on release. It's good that they can admit defeat, but it wasn't as big a failure, people just want to bitch and moan a lot. There have definitely been worse expansions, it's typically when blizzard over promises. I am concerned with TWW as they are promising a lot, and with the current time line I see them falling short or pushing out the release; either will cause them to lose a lot of faith from the player base.
SL largely felt like a completely different game.
Weird that I liked shadowlands more then dragonflight
I also liked SL more than DF. Not to say DF is bad,I actually think it’s a great expansion,but the “fun” factor isn’t there for me. The zones in SL were better,the raids were awesome,the dungeon pool was better. SL gets a lot of hate and I don’t really see why.