After a year and six months, I can finally mark Shadowlands as complete!

Shadowlands is a bold step into unfamiliar territory for Blizzard. Well-established aesthetics that the company has cultivated for years aren't wholly present here. Bastion and Revendreth look unlike anything in the series thus far, and although Maldraxxus and Ardenweald boast familiar returns to plaguelands and elven iconography, the little shifts make them feel really distinct.

The introduction of Chromie Time and the level squish is the most proactive change the series has seen. You no longer have to go through 120 levels and jump between content from every expansion to catch up to the new stuff. Players can just go through a starting zone and get to the latest expansion with a single expansion of their choice. If it wasn’t for this change, I would have never come back to WoW. It gave me the opportunity to make a new character and play entirely through Legion (a beloved expansion I completely missed) before beginning Shadowlands, without having to trudge through all of the old content again. I’m still utilizing this feature today, jumping through Battle for Azeroth’s Horde and Alliance campaigns separately with new characters and tackling what I missed from Warlords of Draenor.

Additionally, Shadowlands does a great job making this expansion feel like a venture into a whole different plane. Blizzard's artists and environment designers knocked it out of the park here. Shadowlands is fuckin' gorgeous and if we were judging based on aesthetic alone, this expansion would be S-tier. More so than any other expansion, many corners of Shadowlands could be mistaken for a painting, sometimes hard to believe you’re even playing a video game. World of Warcraft has always been at the pinnacle of inspiration in art direction IMO (it’s what made me obsessed with environment and world design), and this whole experience reaffirms that.

Unfortunately, what Shadowlands gets wrong is obnoxious. Much of it exists as an unnecessary grind, making it clear that Blizzard hasn’t learned much after what happened with Battle for Azeroth. Renown, Anima, and Korthia’s Research all contribute towards a bland endgame grind that encourages progression through forcing the player to engage with daily and weekly quest rotations.

Similar to WoD, this is an expansion that suffered from long-periods of no content. Blizzard Entertainment offset this with some heavy grinds to create the illusion of progress, but most of the community was not fooled. Eight months of no new content and the main way a player could engage with content or improve themself was through world quests in one of the four zones tackling the daily/weekly systems and upgrading their armor with Anima. And when 9.1 came out, that gear was made redundant with a similar system, except they just replaced “Anima” with “Research” in the new zone, Korthia.

Korthia is a tiny little subset of The Maw where the players were meant to spend months grinding Research for upgraded equipment. The zone looks fine, it’s just massively disappointing after waiting so many months for something new, and then what we get is just a small but new portion of an already established area. What I do like about Korthia is the treasure hunting. It’s deemed “the city of secrets” and it lives up to that name, as my friend and I spent a lot of time digging through its corners and solving a few puzzles to find hidden items. Love that sort of stuff.

But then this Korthia gear was made redundant when 9.2 came out, which seems to suggest Blizzard realized these systems suck. No more Research-esque currency, although, once again, the new gear throughout Zereth Mortis completely makes the previous patches' stuff useless. Zereth Mortis is a good looking zone, though, and although I don’t like it more than any of the base areas, it’s still a compelling addition.

I’m not bothered by the awful grind when it’s limited to getting gear with higher item level. I already experienced the bulk of Shadowlands’ content, so that’s not going to sour my experience. But Shadowlands locked campaign content behind Renown, a reputation based currency that needed to be acquired by grinding weekly quests (and sometimes killing world bosses/beating raids/dungeons). Players cannot access the Covenant campaign and 9.1’s Chains of Domination campaign without having a certain amount of Renown. I refused to do Chains of Domination because I did not want to continue the Renown grind; I did it the first time (for the covenant campaign) and did not enjoy having to wait a week to begin the next story quest. Why the hell am I even paying $15 a month? This system is reminiscent of free-to-play energy mechanics that prevent you from playing too much at once. Heck that.

Blizzard can be as egregious as it wants with locking gear behind a dumb grind, but taking away my campaign and main questlines away from me? That’s like… the reason I play this game! To be fair, the Covenant campaign isn’t particularly compelling, although I actually liked Chains of Domination quite a bit. Once again, 9.2 solved this by awarding Renown at an alarming rate and allowed me to get to 80 Renown (the max) by finishing the Sepulcher of the First Ones campaign. I hope Blizzard has actually learned its lesson and reflects this appropriately in Dragonflight.

Shadowlands’ mainline narrative is largely underwhelming. Anduin’s big arc is barely given the spotlight, so many characters say NOTHING during key moments, and the Jailer is an underwhelming villain. I’m intrigued by the final twist but ultimately, he kinda just feels like a less menacing Sargeras. What did he want to accomplish by remaking reality again? Honestly not sure, maybe someone could explain it to me lol. Also don’t like the implications of Shadowlands’ lore. Feels like Zereth Mortis should’ve been more important, and the gravitas of what is coupled with all this crazy shit feels like it wasn’t given the weight it deserved. It’s such a monumental moment for Azeroth and its characters but it feels like Blizzard just wanted to rush through the story and then pretend it never happened. That’s not to say all elements of the story are bad: Uther’s arc is solid, and I like all the individual arcs of the zones. Seeing Ysera made me sob, and Tyrande got some cool moments, although I wish they did more with her. Wish the Night Warrior arc got more attention, still cool though! Sylvanas’ redemption is a total asspull, but they don’t do a terrible job towards the end wrapping it up. Pretty mixed feelings towards this.

Shadowlands’ dungeons are really solid, not much else to say otherwise. Had a lot of fun running through them and enjoyed how they utilized the separate aesthetics of each zone. Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination are both solid raids, but Sepulcher of the First Ones is only just OK. I expected a lot more from the dialogue, and wanted Jailer’s fight to be more elaborate, and also expected for Anduin’s battle to have more complexity? Honestly, it felt a bit easy overall. Planning to try this raid on Normal and see if it’s more complex. Big issue here is that the gear the player gets from Zereth Mortis is far stronger than the minimum ilevel for Sepulcher’s easiest difficulty (LFR) but significantly weaker than the minimum ilevel for Normal difficulty. Doesn’t seem properly balanced, and if I wanna do the normal version, I now have to do a lot of mythic dungeons to upgrade my armor. Actually don’t mind this though, Mythic dungeons are fun as hell. Just wish my initial LFR run was more challenging.

The highlight of Shadowlands as far as endgame content is Tazavesh, the game’s eight-boss mega-dungeon. That marketplace is ripe with creativity, and takes the player through so many unique and challenging ideas. Purchasing gizmos from shady merchants, playing in a jazz band for a group of outlaws, battling a massive loot dragon, and fighting a metal mailman delivering ticking bombs leads to non-stop wildness and I loved it; spent five hours trudging through this hard-as-nails Mythic dungeon with a really kind group and was the most fun I’ve had in Shadowlands.

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Overall, I absolutely adore Shadowlands’ base content, including its main questing zones, initial raid and all of its dungeons. They’re fantastic aesthetically and have interesting area-storylines. But the expansion is bogged down by an overly grindy endgame and some underwhelming patched content (Tazavesh is amazing, Sanctum of Domination is good, and Zereth Mortis is a solid zone tho), especially considering the less-than-ideal rate new stuff was released. The mainline narrative does not feel put together, and ultimately Blizzard failed to handle the scale of its implications properly.

Shadowlands is a good expansion IMO but Blizzard could learn a lot from the mistakes it made. Really looking forward to Dragonflight and hope the team learned some valuable lessons here.

This was not a good expansion.
Raids were not very fun (except the first one, which was ok), dungeons were not the best. Torghast, the new "roguelike" mode was turned into a grind to obtain currency for legendaries, which made the mode forced and boring, especially if you were playing alts.

And the story was...bad to say at least.

At least zones were good looking.

Unfortunately, you can't just give a snapshot of someone's story, and complain about that one segment. You need a full recap, or else it just won't make sense. So go watch 2018's show because I don't have fucking time.

Gutting Sylvanas' character, taking out the soul, and sending her to hell could just be called method acting, given her backstory. Blizzard is just retreading old ground with the last few years of... whatever they're trying to do.

Somehow they've taken a previously-beloved character, and changed everything about who she is about a half a dozen times in only a few years. First she's thankful for the Horde, then she's committing war crimes behind their back. Then she's proudly leading the faction, before literally betraying them for Satan himself. Now guess what? She's good again! This was all part of her master plan that she's been conspiring for 20 years, without any hint whatsoever, and definitely wasn't made up to cause shock value. And now, like every Gen Z white girl on Twitter, she wasn't evil this whole time, it was just a bad case of Dissociative Soul Disorder.

Look, I won't dwell on this for too long this time. We know how much of a dumpster fire Blizzard is. A few weeks ago, even the devs started shifting the blame on her, trying to claim the entire last decade of her character being thrown out the window is the result of Afrasiabi. Even they don't want to be associated with her. The fucking writers at Blizzard are ashamed. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Oh shadowlands. It started out really good, launch was a blast, leveling was (mostly) fun, wasnt a fan of ardenweald, maldraxxus, or the maw least of all. Nathria was such a fun raid, and covenants I mostly liked. I also REALLY enjoyed torghast which is quite an unpopular opinion, though I still think it could have been left out entirely as well as the legendary system altogether. Then the burnout hit, the dungeons got boring quick, the zones got kinda bland, and the story, oh boy lets not go there. 9.1 was fun, came back for it and honestly enjoyed Korthia a lot more than I expected to, the maw still sucked however Sanctum was an excellent raid. Overall not a bad patch but then burnout hit big time and I took almost half a year off. Came back for 9.2 well into the patch, did the story for zereth mortis, annnnd realized im still burned out as fuck. Zero motivation to do sepulcher whatsoever, or even gear at all. Solo shuffle was the best thing to come out of that patch, I LOVE IT. But I stopped playing 9.2 after only 3 maybe 4 weeks and havent touched SL since.

Overall it was still better than BFA but this has to be the highest burnout expansion of all time for me.

This was the last expansion i played, as such this rating is based on my total time playing the game from about the middle of cataclysm to the final patch of Shadowlands.
Middle of the road is about right for the overall experience.
Really enjoyed Mists of Pandaria and Legion.
At it's best the narrative was great, there was lots of fun things you could with friends and it was just generally a good experience.
At it's worst it's a slog that feels more like a chore than a fun experience. When i was younger and didn't have a job I could tolerate the hours, but now my free time is less abundant, it is not something i'd put anymore time into.

Also this expansion had some of the worst storytelling from all of the Warcraft mythos.

it's like blizzard tried to do Legion again but completely forgot what made it so enjoyable.

content-wise, at least from a casual dude's perspective, it's pretty much Legion but just "okay". torghast is pretty fun and the zones themselves are pretty cool even if they're just basically hell, basically heaven, basically purgatory with vampires, bootleg emerald dream, and "look, the scourge had to get their aesthetic from somewhere". covenants are pretty neat even if they lack the appeal that legion's class halls had. also venthyr best covenant.

as for the story, hoo boy. it's like they looked at infinity war, was like "we can do that too", and tried making wow's story seem more "epic" by (once again) overcomplicating the cosmology and making it seem like every single event in wow's history was, for the most part, orchestrated by the jailer (warcraft thanus) in a grand scheme to i guess take over the universe and possibly character assassinate sylvanas moreso than after WOTLK. or something. good earthmother herself, fucking blow me.

make fun of the vulpera all you want, they're arguably the best race to play for this xpak because it completely takes the piss out of wowcraft's writing like it rightfully should.

and uh. considering what's been happening at blizz lately, i really wonder how they're gonna save face in later patches.

hoo boy

9.2 EDIT: wow that sure was a conclusion that ultimately means fucking nothing because WOW THERE'S A BIGGER BAD GUY THE JAILER WAS TRYING TO SAVE US FROM I GUESS?

pretty ballsy of blizzard to retcon several millenia worth of lore in their own universe in an attempt to orchestrate this game of cosmic chess with a payoff that ultimately means nothing and feels like a slap in the face to anyone who was genuinely invested in the story, god damn

danuser, it's on sight

Without having played more than an hour of Dragonflight, as a player since beta of WoW I can confidently say Shadowlands was the absolute worst expansion pack and version of the game to date. Every single thing is gated. Overlapping, interwoven systems of gating/grinding that make the slightest bit of power gain an insane chore whether it was Korthia dailies, Zereth Mortis dailies, mythics, etc. On top of that, the dungeons and lore were mostly boring and ridiculous and Sylvanas was already irredeemable trash before WoW even started, but the story once again takes a poop on the only remaining decent characters in the franchise and the Jailer is a boring villain.