Done For Now

Good Morning Friends. This is a post that I have found myself avoiding for a month now, but I think it is probably time to make it. If my screenshot archive is correct, I have not logged into World of Warcraft since December 10th. That means I have had over a month to try and summon the desire to return to the game and it just hasn’t arrived. Shadowlands represents the expansion that I made the least amount of progress in before ultimately leaving. Generally speaking when a new MMO expansion launches I get two to three characters to the level cap and then ultimately bounce. This time I made it through one character and just could not bring myself to repeat the content again for a second character. I attempted to level a third character with Threads of Fate since that is a permanent choice and locks you out of the story content, but found it equally unenjoyable.

The Leveling Process

The disappointing thing is that I was greatly enjoying the leveling process prior to the launch of the expansion and managed to push up a full roster of horde characters to the new squished level cap of 50, along with six alliance characters as well. I am not exactly sure what is wrong, but I didn’t enjoy the overall leveling experience in Shadowlands. There were some zones like Bastion were just pure hell for me to make it through, and other zones like my favorite Maldraxxus were nowhere near as enjoyable to go through a second time once the story beats were known. On my second character I stalled out a little bit into Maldraxxus, and on my Threads of Fate character I didn’t complete a single zone worth of content. My favorite leveling experience was probably Legion, and I am not entirely certain what differs so much between the two expansions. It might simply be that I was in a different frame of mind this time around and as a result I had a vastly different experience.

Torghast

The feature that I was looking forward to the most in Shadowlands was Torghast, and the end result did not match up to my expectations. In Final Fantasy XIV there is a system called the Palace of the Dead which is this amazing endless dungeon leveling experience that has a chance of dropping some really cool items along the way, and also serves as a way to unlock once powerful and now at least cool looking weapons. Mentally I was expecting that sort of system to make its way to World of Warcraft and not a largely pointless mini game. Sure you get Artifact Power… I mean Soul Ash… but the end result is just a long grind for a benefit that feels like it does not match up to the amount of time that the activity just took. It feels sorta like you are being asked to solo a Heroic dungeon with no gear payout. Were I to fix it I would make it so that mythic+ dungeon loot could drop in there or something worth chasing.

Legendary Gear

I loved the Legendary armor from Legion, and as a result I was super excited to see a system like that returning. In Legion, knowing there was a chance of getting a Legendary drop pretty much elevated every single activity in the game for me. The problem was there was no way of chasing a specific legendary item, but past that the system was perfection as far as I was concerned. With shadowlands instead we got a system where you collect the patterns for Legendary items, grind Torghast to get soul ash and then combine that with exceptionally expensive crafting materials in order to craft a piece of gear that is going to fall behind the curve unless you pour a constant supply of money and materials into making it better. I essentially bankrupted myself crafting a single Legendary, and the piece that I liked about Legion was having multiple allowed me to rapidly swap up my play style to fit a specific encounter. Sure I got one that was useful immediately, but knowing it is likely the only one I will have kinda kills the Diablo 3 build creation joy of the earlier system.

Then there are the Legendary patterns which were extremely poorly implemented. They drop from specific encounters, some of which are the first boss of a dungeon… or can be engineered in such a way as to force them to be the first boss of the dungeon. Players are going to take the path of least resistance every single time and what ended up happening as a result is that folks would queue for a dungeon, steamroll the first boss… not get the drop they wanted and then bail out accepting the deserter buff. Most of my runs of Mists of Tirna Scithe saw us loosing either a Tank or a Healer after the first boss… and in some cases the entire party. De Other Side is a great dungeon, but Tanks would join… make a beeline for a specific one of the three starting encounters and then bail immediately following. Sure in some cases people were chasing gear, but more often than not they were chasing whatever happened to be their best in slot Legendary pattern.

The Maw

The Maw is all stick and no carrot. The attempt was to create something Soulsbournian in World of Warcraft with this purposefully obtuse experience that you have to struggle with to slowly improve and unlock new things. The problem here however is that essentially The Maw, Torghast and Legendary Crafting are supposed to be this self perpetuating cycle. You run Torghast to get the material gate for crafting Legendary items and you run Maw to improve your experience running Torghast. The problem is that if any of that cycle is broken then the entire cycle of reward is broken. For me since I did not enjoy Torghast and ran out of money to craft Legendary items… The Maw quickly became something that I was doing each day to complete the daily quests but wondering why the fuck I was putting myself through the hassle. I logged in a few minutes ago to snag a screenshot… and apparently had just bailed in the middle of the maw the last time I played.

This could have been really cool, but again the reward systems are the problem. Just like Torghast you need to have some sort of reward other than more systems in order to interest me in coming back. I am super loot motivated and without loot as the reward waiting on me at the end… I am not sure I want to go through your obstacle course. Even if they had put a rare chance of something interesting dropping from the boss encounters, I probably would have farmed them every single day dealing with the constantly escalating series of bullshit in the form of the eye of the jailer. Instead I knew that going to the maw was going to yield absolutely nothing useful and little things like the inability to use a mount just pissed me off to no end.

Covenant Faction Systems

Now this is the one that I probably understand the least. I loved the Class Order Hall in Legion. It grounded me in the expansion and played into the whole class fantasy narrative in a way that has never been in the game prior to that point. It was amazing and each of them was filled with so many neat easter eggs linking back to past content. On paper the Covenant system seems like it should be fairly similar but in practice it just did not feel good to experience. I realize that the gates are there to keep players from finishing the Covenant system in a single week, but the gates also served as a disincentive for me to keep playing given that I knew I could only do so much in a given weekly reset period. It felt like everything I wanted to do required something that I could not get until the next reset and there were no slow and grindy systems that allowed me to make up that difference.

Additionally there were too many different systems going on at once and creating a dissonant experience. I’ve never loved the War Table style systems in World of Warcraft, but in the past you could always automate this experience with an addon. The Covenant table system looked like it might be different and more interactive, but in reality it is just complicated enough that you can’t easily automate it but requires no more interaction. As a result it sorta ends up being the worst possible version of the War Table because now you can’t even employ an addon (or couldn’t last I checked) to just sorta take care of it for you and it is still just a series of dice rolls. The soul bind system was kinda cool but the acquisition of these felt bad especially given that there were slightly better versions that you needed to somehow track down.

Loot Drought

The dungeons felt really good, and I give them credit for making a cycle of really enjoyable experiences. Unfortunately it also felt like I was not really making much in the way of progress. I ground my face against Heroic dungeons with a reckless abandon in an attempt to “gear up” and so often I walked away with nothing but an expenditure of time and a repair bill for my trouble. Blizzard shifted the way gear dropped in an attempt to make obtaining loot feel more important, which is probably a double edged sword. Sure when I finally got the thing I had been chasing it felt amazing… but similarly the thirty two times I attempted to get it before and got nothing felt soul crushingly awful. I have no clue how this applies to raiding but I feel like more than likely the loot distribution feels equally bad there. I didn’t survive long enough to actually attend a raid.

Healer Drought

I think the thing that probably contributed the most to my bouncing is the fact that I could not find a reliable source of healing to make groups happen. I have a lot of friends and almost all of them seem to be playing DPS these days. My usual partner in crime Grace, did not even make it through the leveling experience for some of the reasons outlined above. My guild seemed to have two active healers, both of which were available during times that were generally too late for me to commit to running anything. This ended up with me abandoning my goal of being a Paladin Tank, and instead spending most of my time pugging as a Retribution DPS. There are a lot of things I am willing to do… but tanking for pugs is not really one of them. I tried tanking a Mythic plus from the group finder and it went just as frustratingly as you might expect.

I think I probably would have stuck around a little longer were I able to reliably run all of the Mythic plus dungeons each week, but the struggle to make a single one happen just didn’t make the possible rewards worth the effort. Had I been enjoying any of the above items… I could have shifted my play style up and just melted back into the background leveling alts. Unfortunately the only part of the game that I did enjoy was the Dungeon game… and that required a constant flow of healers that simply did not materialize in order to make it happen. I am not sure what is up with healing this expansion, but it seems like folks that have been constant healers previously have abandoned it for the way of the DPS.

Unintended Path of Post

So here we are at the end of a post that I did not mean to turn out the way it ultimately has. I’ve said before that I often times have no clue what I am going to say until I sit down and the keyboard and start typing. Originally I meant this to be a post just stating that I was largely giving up on World of Warcraft Shadowlands after a month of not playing it and having no desire to return. What ended up happening instead is a long rant about the things that frustrated me. I guess maybe I needed to get it out of my system and since this is my blog and everything is me editorializing… rant happened. I have friends who are still enjoying the expansion and I am happy to see that. The last thing I want to do is burn down the building on the way out. I am just not sure if this specific combination of systems was what I wanted out of World of Warcraft.

I was hoping for another expansion to rival Legion, which now sits atop the list of my favorite expansions. Instead I got something that is more down towards the Battle for Azeroth end of the list. Truth is I probably found more joy in BFA than I have so far in Shadowlands, but I feel like I am certain to give it another shot after a few patches to see if that impression changes.

10 thoughts on “Done For Now”

  1. Your reaction is close to mine. I also stopped playing mid December, even though the sub doesn’t run out until near the end of February.

    I have — let’s not call it a concern, but rather a feeling — that WoW may not recover from this expansion, or may finally transition to F2P. The end game annoyances make some sense as a precursor to a F2P transition where you are expected to buy your way around them.

  2. All valid and common points that a lot of folks have voiced. Quite a few of them have relatively simple fixes to address. Why torghast is not a ln RNG comestic fest is beyond me. Why badges are not around is astounding. Why they don’t move all lengendaries to end bosses is bananas. Charge 10k anima and give 35 at a time?

    Thats the frustration. That theres just a logical gap in design. When you make 70% of the game optional, make that optional stuff fun.

  3. The odd thing here is — I agree with every single one of your points; and yet… This is still the most engaged with WoW I’ve been in a very long time.

    Will it last? Nah – probably not for very long. This is me after all. I’ve even got a second character to max level and while not super geared out, is at least OK — for me alts (if I do them at all) is very much an end of expansion thing, after I’ve skipped the x.1 and x.2 patches and returned for the final haul right before the next expansion. 😉

    It’s hard to say why the dramatically different responses to the same set of inputs here. I suppose the big one for me is that if I wasn’t raiding with guild I’d probably have been over it all already, so maybe it’s nothing more than that.

    • I think to be honest, had I not latched so hard onto Cyberpunk I would still be kicking around trying to make this work. However it took me out of the habit of logging in and a month and some change later I realized that desire to log in never returned even though I am several games past the one that originally knocked me out of that orbit. It is super hard to understand how one sequence of actions causes someone to engage and another sequence to detach. Had I gotten into the flow of raiding, I probably would have kept limping along. Had I found reliable healing partners, I probably would have engaged more with the mythic+ scene. Now I am far enough out that it is probably going to take quite a bit to get me to reengage.

  4. For me I ended up choosing vampire land. Some of the colors in Bastion were so bright blue that it was all I could do to get out of the area. Ardenweald? No, just no. Emo elves had me cringing in the first 5 minutes. Maldraxis was a strong second, but felt more PvP centric to me. So I’m stuck in the land of elevator bosses, constantly trying to figure out if I need to be up or down.

    • The one thing I’ve noticed since I got benched last night in my own guild. Running around solo, even in fairly decent 190 gear, is not enjoyable as a Priest. I’ve gotten so use to teaming up with my wife that after it taking way to long to just fight off a random creature so I could fish, had me logging out to go watch tv

  5. I think my mistake, is that I hadn’t run Legion when I joined back up. So I went through BFA and enjoyed it, because Warlords was my last expansion. Then I went and played Legion until Shadowlands dropped. Moving directly from Legion to Shadowlands was…. boring as heck. I liked the look of the zones and the story was interesting enough…(I even teared up a lot in the forest story), but the systems and point-to-point play was… not good.

  6. Eh, I lost any passion for WoW back in the Legion days. I’m glad people are having fun, and I’m sorry you didn’t. But nothing about BFA or Shadowlands ever appealed. My question is why they haven’t done an expansion based on the Emerald Dream. I vaguely remember a single dungeon or raid in one of the recent expansions was set there, but fans had been clamoring for an entire land of Azeroth, unpeopled. I don’t know, maybe it would have disappointed, as well. Here’s where I plug the game I’ve called home or several years now it seems.

    Ever since leaving Legion, Scooter and I have been playing GW2, not too long after Path of Fire dropped. I just like the gameplay better, and there always seems to be stuff to do, even though I don’t think the world of Tyria quite as big as Azeroth, et al. One nice thing that counters a complaint Syp had about WoW, mounts are valid transportation everywhere. It seemed to take a while at the time, but in retrospect, we managed to get all the mounts in short order (except the PvP warbeast).

    I know some of your Aggrochat buddies have been playing GW1; or were, at least, 6 or 7 months ago. Almost inspired me to check it out.

    • I wish I liked Guild Wars 2. There is a group that often times runs fractals after we finish the podcast on Saturday nights. Whatever GW2 is doing it just doesn’t really work for me and I have never been able to figure it out. I think it has some cool things going for it, but something never quite clicks for me.

  7. For me, the zones were not as fun as I expected. Given the material, I had hoped they would all be more fantastical than they were. Plus, there is too much reliance on story (which I have never loved in WoW).

    I was happy the second time to skip the plot and go straight to world quests. I thought it would give me a leg up on all the endgame resource grinds. It did not. Worse yet, World Quest design has only gone downhill. Many of these were too long and there are too few/too little variance. That and it takes me too long to get from zone to zone.

    The endgame grinds also weren’t fun. I miss badges. I only felt in control of my gear destiny via Torghast, but that was heavily gated and honestly pretty tedious once the new shine wore off. The Covenant stuff was neat in theory, but the gating killed any motivation I had. This is a case where I would prefer you hide the seems better.

    All in all, I thought it was a worse leveling experience than BFA with an endgame that instantly turned me off. I am no longer the WoW mark I once was, but I have played the last four expansions at launch for the two weeks of fun I can squeeze out of them. For me, WoW is no longer a MMO, and is more of a nostalgia fix with a shitty RPG attached.

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