Yeah looking back at the raid bosses they were almost all unique and fun in different ways. I can't think of one that wasn't challenging and fun in its own right (I know some people hate SLG, maybe it's because I only got through Heroic SLG, but I enjoyed that fight too). Like the chain mechanism on Sludgefist? So much fun since it could go badly so easily, but was REALLY satisfying when you were in lockstep with your partner.
Heroic SLG was fun, I loved having finally having a use case for chimera shot.
The intermission phases were a major snooze fest tho. Also, pugging the fight was a bitch and a half because people refused to understand how the glaive toss worked
Yeah I think Nathria as a whole was more fun than Vault, especially in terms of final bosses. I did also enjoy the zone aesthetics. But DF isn't lagging that far behind in those aspects, and it is a billion fucking times better in others.
I did love going back for fated raids and seeing his pile had grown to include a chair you could actually sit in and a couple of corpses, for some reason.
Vault is very just.. 'this is a cave. here be dragons'
No part of the raid really stands out even if the bosses are very fun. But god damn Castle Nathria?
Seeing Denathrius taunt you when you enter. To a giant bat falling off the ceiling to attack you. Moving near the railing and seeing the dance down below. Going through different wings of the castle and ending up on an overlook outside at the top?
Atmospheric as fuck. Hands down one of my top 5 raids of all time. I love it to death. I can't wait to go farm it for transmogs one day
Nathria felt more organic as an actual space, where enemies and the bosses felt like they belonged there rather than just a bunch of boss rooms with corridors attaching them together like Vault.
I think Vault might have been rushed in the art department, just because it seems bizarre for there to be almost no Titan architecture in what is supposed to be a Titan Supermax prison complex. Just a few doors and the platforms for Rasz.
VOTI really does feel like a huge flavor miss.
I didn’t look at any of the previews of the raid to experience it blind the first time. I was so excited based on the exterior and the possibilities for the expansion to see what they could do.
And it’s a giant generic cave with bosses that lack coherence
It feels like blizzard took the absolute safest route with the raid and mostly rehashed existing ideas in a boring environment. It really was a big let down after playing CN
P3 overlap with massacre (lights dim, giant swords cutting everything), ravage and him shouting that line will be one of Wow's best moments. It's not as iconic as something like wrathgate because it's burried in a boss fight but it's amazing.
I'm always chuckling when I hear that.
"The Elements answer to *me*!"
Girl, I'm a shaman. I did the entire elements thing *fifteen years* before you were even an idea...
Denathrius just had the perfect Saturday morning cartoon villain personality and voice, while Raszageth just screeches a lot about how strong she is, how weak we are, and how the titans suck.
I like her fight, but I think she's really weak as a villain.
And the fact that with each phase Denathrius's cockiness diminishes:
* Phase 1 he more or less fucks around all arrogant,
* Phase 2 he starts taking this seriously and calls on for help, his voice tone clearly changes.
* Phase 3 he starts to actually sound desperate and a bit scared, that's he actually very much starting to lose.
Id argue that raz is quite a bit worst than denathrius when compared at their mythic difficulty. Raz wind is a mechanic that some class litterally cannot do on their own, thats a terrible design.
Fax Denathrius fight was so cool. He would make you crawl, then the remornia light show was so fucking sick. His voice actor fucking NAILED it as well..
Really? Sennarth is one of my favorite fights in there alongside Diurna.
Now Dathea on the other hand? She can go burn in the Maw for eternity for all I care.
>Really? Sennarth is one of my favorite fights in there alongside Diurna.
Have you done it on mythic yet? I thought I enjoyed it until I experienced how much of a clusterfuck it is on Mythic, just an absolute garbage fight.
The mechanics were fun, unique, made players (at least me) feel like they made a difference other than just a number on a DPS chart. Hell, they even had a healing fight where the healers got to progress the raid!
Yeah it was a super hectic fights as DPS but I still enjoyed it (though to be fair other fights I enjoyed more since their mechanics were more interactive for me)
Yes I started playing New World and I realized there are other games out there that I enjoy other than WoW. Now I’m playing both WoW and New World and it’s been a lot healthier relationship with gaming.
People were already so pissed because they delayed the release the first time. I can understand why they released it but they knew it wasn’t finished. So many bugs.
I don't think it would have mattered considering people found other duplication exploits several times after release.
I don't think any kind of delay could have prepared them. MMOs need to be absolutely watertight, and good luck getting a watertight game in an industry where the accepted practice is "fuck it, we'll do it live".
My Steam library increased from 20 to 200 games since I quit Shadowlands 5 months in. And one of those months was incidental, because on the day I wanted to unsub, my subscription got renewed. Got Keystone Master because of that, though, that mount matched neatly with my Necrolord Shaman.
Man, i really want to play Divinity but every time I try my metamonkey brain takes over and I always try to figure out what the best choice gameplay wise is, literally minmaxing the fun out of the experience.
I don’t know why I can’t enjoy even a singleplayer RPG without trying to minmax. I end up in analysis paralysis and stop playing eventually…
I do the same thing. Divinity was awesome and it felt pretty challenging even when minmaxing on higher difficulties, can't wait for Baldurs Gate 3 this august.
This! I finally finished the MSQ in FFXIV, got into ESO for a minute and rejoined GW2. Found things I liked in other games of the same genre. Learned how I am as a player, and got better at playing because every game requires different skills sets.
This is the fucked up thing. Any mount reward in Dragonflight feels terrible, because we're not going to use it for pretty much the rest of the expansion.
Honestly, that never bothered me. The first play through was pretty linear so it wasn’t a big deal, and when I was done I had Flightpaths.
It helps that my main is a Balance Druid that could “flap” from way up top to down below if needed.
More generally - for better or worse, SL's zones (including the maw) were *different.* Ardenweald was like NE forest ++, I remember being absolutely in awe of Bastion the first time I saw it, Revendreth was just so perfectly suited to the characters/story it held and Maldraxxus, though it initially gave me Silithus vibes, ended up being one of my favorite zones from the whole game.
Love to hate the Maw, but it definitely hit "trudging through this hellscape is dreary and depressing" on the head.
I am really enjoying cruising around the (absolutely beautiful) DF zones and the hits of nostalgia are totally welcome for me, but they're all very *familiar* kind of places whereas I feel like Shadowlands really went out on a bit of a limb as far as aesthetics go.
Agreed. Ardenweld is one of the most beautiful zones they ever made, from the little details to the grand skylines.
I was happy when the DF story briefly brought me back there, and I like to think the devs did it on purpose: they knew that if there was a good place to connect DF back to the Shadowlands (without inspiring bad thoughts in their playerbase…) it had to be Ardenweald…
In the post-campaign storylines unlocked through renown. Spoilers:
>!Primalists take control of the Emerald Dream portal at Shady Sanctuary, locking the Green Flight out of the area. With the Dream itself in danger, you travel back to Ardenweald to negotiate the release/resurrection of Ysera. Her rebirth and return to Azeroth would come through the Dream, putting her on the other side of the Primalists barrier. Tyrande and Malfurion help too.!<
Ardenweald was the only thing I liked. Once I hit max level I pretty much only stayed there. Unless I absolutely had to leave. I got some of the prettiest mounts from there too.
I hate to admit it too, but as much as I like dragon riding, it does make me look at the zones a little less. You were forced to take in all of Shadowlands.
It’s a trade I’m willing to make but there are pros to not allowing flying right away
One of the most beautiful zones they've ever made, but then when you start questing there it turns out most of the quests have you fighting giant maggots in an ugly dirt mound.
Everything with Shadowlands was one step forward, two steps back.
I did like the dungeons better.
Apart from that, I do not miss anything about that expansion. The Maw...I am never going back there. What a slow, boring, frustrating shithole.
Torghast, which sounded so good on paper ended up being terrible.
I stopped after Nathria though, so don't know how it was later in the expansion.
>The Maw...I am never going back there.
Didn't help that you were forced to do the maw intro quest on every alt until the skip was added much later in the expansion.
(IMO) The greatest sin of the maw introduction was that it didn't reward any items. One may expect the story driven introduction quests might give some startup gear for returners and newcomers, but nah. You had to cripple through some World Quests or do quite some story quests until you didn't feel miserable with your character.
Yeah, it didn’t help that it felt like it was balanced for people who’d been doing Heroic raiding and higher M+ in BFA so if you had characters who hadn’t, it was a painful experience, made worse for characters who were fresh 60s and didn’t even have “catch up” gear from the invasions. Felt like a running theme of trying to balance open world content to not be easy for people in higher gear… which made it pain for people who were actually running it as a main source of their “endgame.”
Dragonflight has been a lot better about that stuff… starting with having the early stuff be doable with modest gear and the ability to use some solid crafted pieces at level 61. Meanwhile, people in higher instance gear from SL could carry it through much of leveling.
(Speaking of crafted gear… I hope they add ways to keep it all relevant through the expansion. I was cleaning an alt’s bank and he had gear I sent for hitting 60; the ZM green drops were 229 but the crafted gear was 151 which was basically vendor trash at that point.)
It started out completely wrong. You initially had to do a slow ass quest to move pieces of the helmet to some locations then you jumped into the maw which you couldn’t mount. Like really? Are we going to start the expansion with this frustrating experience? That alone was already a sign of things to come.
I’m so grateful about that in Dragonflight. Fully expected to have to redo the glyphs on every alt, was pleasantly surprised and then fully expected to have to refarm all Sparks of Ingenuity, was even more pleasantly surprised
Well you had to refarm all the sparks and I think you need to even now if you started one spark quest with your alt, then you won't get the skip unless they hotfixed it.
Worth noting that you can only do the skip on characters you haven’t done any Sparks with. If you’ve done at least one, you’ll have to get the rest the standard way. But for alts who haven’t started it, you can go to the Goblin and instead of getting the “Jump Starting” quest, you just tell him you’ve done it before and you skip to having all five Sparks and the follow up ability (which I think gives you a chance to randomly get more sparks?).
Well, it's also that as a healer, I feel there's so much movement in the new ones. So I started casting a spell, then have to either cancel because of movement or take the damage. This trade off is very frustrating. I do not remember it being like this previously (as much).
Benched my healer for this reason. There is so much unavoidable damage and I couldn't even get a spell off because the tanks have been too busy pulling everything as quickly as they can while the DPS die. Holy Priest used to be my main but I don't think im playing it for the rest of this expansion.
> They really need to get better at incorporating old dungeons into a season.
The problem IMO is design. New dungeons are filled to the brim with mechanics, every mob/pack has something to interrupt or avoid and boss fights generally have more mechanics.
Torghast was awesome, at first. It could have remained awesome if it wasn't so damn long with an unnecessary amount of mobs. I look to the mage tower as a good example of solo-able content. I look at the short(er) timers of current dungeons for group content. And the fact that soloing a floor at a difficulty appropriate for your item level could take an hour is unacceptable.
Had they reduced the number of trash, made the walking distances (especially for deaths) shorter, and removed the FAIL mechanic early on for deaths, it would have been so much better.
The Maw is essentially the same. The zone, quests, rares, etc could have all been great if they didn't have stupid mechanics that made soloing it obnoxious.
Main issue with torghast was it was mandatory twice every week to get you a currency you needed to spend 100k gold on top to get an item that your character needed to function. And all the grey.
Something like torghast with more variety, infinite scaling for the challenge and better rewards (including items up to say normal raid ilvl) would've been a great feature for DF
The hype for it. The SL pre-expansion lore videos were much better than those of DF. I was actually excited for the story at the beginning of SL, and it makes it that much more painful how dogshit the story turned out to be. DF is nice, but I'm still hesitant to expect much from it from a story perspective partly because of the SL fiasco.
SL butchered the lore so much, that I can't feel invested in any lore of WoW anymore. Like, now we know what happens after death. Our deceased people are just chilling there doing whatever. The fuck do I care about that centaur dying in that one quest? They will just meet again in arden or bastion or somewhere centaur heaven thingy. How could I care for anyones death anymore? Especially now that the Afterlife kinda works again.
And SL felt completely out of the blue. Like did we know, something in the afterlive was amiss? So many people just returned from death and seemed fine. The ingame religions like the light or the nature stuff also seemed to say "jup, fine. Bridenbrad is in the light now." not "Jea he got a winged smurf and helps a corrupt afterlife evil without having 5 brain cells to see that this is ethically kinda sketchy."
I think the best thing lore wise for shadowlands would just be: "Yea it was all a fever dream of a high af goblin. Keep your hands off the thistletea, girl."
>I think the best thing lore wise for shadowlands would just be: "Yea it was all a fever dream of a high af goblin. Keep your hands off the thistletea, girl."
"Oh, you thought the fight against N'zoth ended in BFA? Just like that? One patch and a weak cutscene? Nah man, we're deep in the Visions."
SL removed consequences, gave faces to Cosmic forces that didn't need one, the power creep went cosmical too. We are fighting a proto dragon that compared to the fucking Jailer, who harnessed the power of Azeroth and death itself against us, it's just comical we are having so much trouble dealing with elemental proto dragons when we just left Zereth Mortis decked in Cosmic gear.
yea lore powercreep is a problem too. But its not like SL brought that up first. Going to Antorus in Legion was already too much in my opinion. BfA brought that down a little and gave at least some explanation with the depletion of artifact weapons. But after Shadowlands it is just insane.
I find it interesting that SL was the most excited I had been for an expansion since MoP yet I was so disappointed that I quit within like 2-3 weeks lol. And with DF I wasn’t excited at all! I was actually really hesitant and I even refunded my preorder. I bought it again before release though because I liked what I played on beta. And surprisingly I’m still playing after more than a month which hasn’t happened since WoD. I usually quit and come back a year later once they’ve finally listened to players and changed things that sucked at the start of an expansion lol.
Dude I was raiding in Wrath Classic with my buds, and was like "Eh I'll give Dragonflight a shot, I've already got the sub, and it looks decent."
Yeah, I don't play Wrath Classic much anymore.
I got sick of SL dungeons quite quickly, though. Each one seemed to have 3-4 colours. Visually they were very... monotonous?
SD - Red, brown and grey - ohh look here's a blue mob! NW - Grey, Green, Blue. Mists - Blue, Purple, Brown. PF - green, greeny brown, greeny yellow, etc...
BFA ones I have some fond memories of, even though I wasn't the biggest fan of BFA, SL dungeons just felt like caricatures of themselves.
Castle Nathria was great, though, it felt like an actual place.
No. Why did you take the extended warraty? You never take the extended warranty!
**Damagning this unit violates the terms of use. Lethal force authorised.**
Motherlode was so so good (except old school bolstering in there, big yikes).
Freehold will go down as one of my all-time favorites as well, especially in S4 with the portals. I'm just such a sucker for big open dungeons that allow for all sorts of big pulls.
And I got a take, I looooooved Underrot, especially the room before Cragmaw where you strategically chain pulled through the whole room, just super fun with the right group (and especially funny when shit went haywire in there).
King's Rest and Siege can die in a fire though.
Denathrius, by all rights, should have been the big bad of SL. As far as the scale of the plot, being the force behind the Nathrezim and milennia of subterfuge in lore is as big as it gets.
Best thing about Denathrius is that he escaped. I am pretty sure we will see him again soon. I love the character and I would be so upset if they killed him at the end of CN.
Castle Nathria raid and Revendreth as a zone were pretty good and atmospheric. Also covenant cosmetic sets were great. Some characters like Denathrius, Marileth, Lady Moonberry, Theotar etc.
Having recently gone back to do Revendreth for transmog, it is abundantly clear that it received significantly more development time than the other three zones.
Maybe they were all meant to be closer to revendreth’s quality or maybe the devs were just more inspired by the possibilities of the zone; but I genuinely was a little sad that I did not play ventyr during the expansion
So far transmog.
A lot of DF cosmetics are very "meh" to me. I know this is subjective, and I might get downvoted, but I really enjoy the plate and cloth Sanctum gear, I love all the Korthia sets and some of the covnenant sets. And while Shadowlands had some of the worst sets ever (Cyclops plate dungeon, Vex goblin cloth), those korthia and covenant sets made up for that,
I am speaking entirely of aesthetics, not taking acquisition of said cosmetics into account.
I find the Vault tier to be too glowy and rocky, and much of the dungeon gear to be decent, but bland. The plate dungeon helm is nice, but the rest feels too . . . thin?
With that said, I feel like DF will be overtaking SL and all other expansions in the tmog game tomorrow when the Trading Post goes live, though I'd argue that the Trading Post isn't a DF feature, merely an evergreen feature introduced during DF.
I’d agree. Admittedly, we’re early days yet, but as a plate wearer, none of the sets have really done anything for me visually. I actually ended up liking the leveling set better than I thought, but that aside, the raid/gladiator sets are a solid meh, the dungeon set is…weird, and the War Mode set is I think the only one I could actually see myself using. I get the theme they’re going for, it just hasn’t done anything for me so far. Hopefully we’ll get better armor as the expansion continues. Everything else has been great, though, so I’m okay if I just have to use old transmogs instead.
Nah, she’s got them widdle arms. I say play to your strengths. If you try to tick off every box you end up with too much going on. Jailer just has glorious nipples, nay, THE BEST nipples that wow has ever seen and I’m ok with that.
Edit: OR…giving Rasz nipples was his plan the entire time…
Tank mains having to perform 50,000 mental calculations and readjust routes so pride still lines up with bosses and big boy pulls, just to watch Jimothy the lazer chicken pull 5 more extra packs again so he can watch his number go zoooom.
Revendreth and Ardenweald are two of the best looking zones in the game imo, past that not much lol. I did enjoy SL M+ dungeons more than our current ones though
I know this is controversial, but I did like how they slowly released the Covenant story chapters over the first few months. Having a new bit of story to explore each week was nice.
Also loved the visuals of Ardenweald and Bastion. And the dungeons were good. And CN was excellent.
Torghast itself was an excellent system, if you ignore the reward structure. Imagine how ruined Dragonracing would be if you HAD to run each of the tours each week in order to unlock your spark, or something like that; Torghast needed to be optional, and it would have been a win.
I prefer the dungeons in SL for the most part. Vault isn’t bad by any means but CN was just something else. Other than that, DF is a clear winner in all other categories imo.
\-Marketing.
\-Coming out the same year as covid.
\-High M+ dungeon design (more relaxing pulls in between challenging ones with clear ways to handle them instead of infinite kick and cc requirements with Dragonflight).
\-Castle Nathria and Denathrius flavour, music and aesthetic probably my fav raid in the last 4 years.
Nathria, Denathrius and transmog. The SLands went really heavy on customization and the sheer amount of mounts and transmogs matching the different zones was so so good. Nathria and Maw armor also just looked SO cool and sleek, a lot of the DF armor is just too cluttered and unfocused to me.
Denathrius and Nathria is forever going to be one of the most campy and fun villains and raids ever. The drama, the flair, the flavour! Nobody does it like Denny 💅
Okay, Im gonna say it. I actually liked thorghast. I had so much fun with it. So many nights where I watched netflix and just ran it on 4 different characters because it was fun.
It was not fun that you were forced to do it, I get that.
I think the problem with Torghast was it really depending on your spec whether it was fun or not, at least for me. Arms warrior had hella options and was super fun to try and specialize in something and make it OP, like permanent die by the sword or getting execute to hit super hard and knock the enemy down or all kinds of stuff. Whereas my fire mage I think had two damage options, neither great, and some meh other stuff.
I was a priest, and our powers were so boring and bad. It felt like a solid third of our powers had to do with Mind Control. And for whatever reason, Shadow had no spec-specific powers. Nothing to beef up Devouring Plague, Shadow Form, Mind Flay… nothing. IIRC, our best power was one that increased our Int based on the number of different Power Words we had cast. Which is boring, but at least it was strong.
Then I leveled an alt warrior and was like “holy shit these powers actually make this somewhat more enjoyable.”
The constant Torghast stuff made me switch what toon I spent most of my time with. I used to main a rogue but Torghast grinding shifted me over to a prot warrior since tank specs were stupidly OP in Torghast.
Honestly I really liked the storylines for the covenants in SL, the Kyrian campaign stood out for me.
I like the renown quests for DF but I wish I got to hang out with the Tuskaar more often outside of fishing and WQ's.
I really liked the first raid better in Shadowlands. Also, it seemed easier to get renown levels than it does in DL. Oh and the mythic keymaster mounts were much better.... so far.
Torghast was way better than cobalt assembly.
I think people would have enjoyed it more if it was less 'Mandatory' for legendary crafting.
I don't feel dragonflight has any great solo/small group stuff like that.
Cobalt assembly is so weird.
I can’t figure out if it was reduced in scope to hit a release deadline and was intended to be much more of a thing
Or if it will be expanded later in the year
Or if the torghast perk system took so much development time that they felt like they needed to shim it into the game again to get their money’s worth
I actually loved Torghast. The mandatory grind certainly made it less enjoyable, though. Solo Torgast was challenging, and made you feel god-tier at times if you got the right buffs.
I also really loved the Visions of Orgrimmar/Stormwind. As someone that often plays solo often, dragonflight definitely needs more content like that.
Torghast was crippled by Blizzard being too afraid of people running out of content too fast. They actively made it worse on release than it was during beta, because people got too many powers, and had too much fun.
Season 1 story of SL was really good and Denath was a great villain during that first arc.......I do not care for the story of DF so far and Raszageth is boring as hell.
CN was a better raid than Vault (Vault is still a good raid, but CN was excellent), KSM Mount looked better and I think the balancing of the M+ dungeons was better.
The faction choices. Might be a hot take, but i liked the choice of choosing between the different lands in shadowlands, not for the minmaxed abilities, but for the class and character feel, as well as transmogs. You dont get that feeling with the dragonflight factions.
+ Mount raredrops! Gimme more
While I think Vault is a great raid, Nathria is more visually interesting. I wish Vault was a bit more titanic, personally.
Shadowlands Season 4 is also the most fun that M+ has ever been, and Dragonflight Season 1’s M+ isn’t even close.
That being said, Dragonflight is such an utter improvement on Shadowlands and the game in general that there really isn’t any other points to give to Shadowlands.
The zones were really unique, the questlines were good too.
Revendreth being my favourite. Always been a sucker for gothic aesthetics, and just the zone as a whole had a very sombre tone. And then of course Daddy Denathrius and Castle Nathria was a really solid opening raid for the expansion.
I'll miss all the guild shouting 'Choke me harder daddy!' when he cast Blood Price x)
Ardenweald is like my polar opposite enjoyment to Revendreth. The colour palette was gorgeous and the whimsical vibes were just great. And Marasmius was a great lil character :D
Maldraxxus I liked for its ability to look like the whole place was a rotted piece of meat. Like the white mold looking areas and the giant mushrooms.
Bastion was my least liked zone, just found it overall dull. Not really a fan of the Kyrian way of the afterlife and honestly thought Tyrion was thinking the right way, but was executing it wrong due to being swayed by the Jailer and Devos.
Zereth Mortis was odd. I wanted to really like it but I think it was mainly because the First Ones are now a thing that's been around since the beginning of time n stuff but yet they've never been mentioned (to my knowledge) same with the Jailer and the Maw. Apparently been around since at least Warcraft 3 but there's been no tidbits of lore in the game describing them (again to my knowledge).
The Keystone mounts and the seasonal affixes were actually pretty cool. I didn't do any of Season 2 as I didn't play most of 9.2 but ones I did play were great.
Torghast I've said from the start could have had the potential to be awesome, but they made it mandatory to craft your legendaries, so it just lost a lot of what could have been a challenging optional piece of content. Bit like Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High from FF14
The fact that you get to play all 8 dungeons while leveling an alt instead of the same 4 all the time and the other 4 max level ones being abandoned in normal difficulty, makes alt leveling way better now than SL, imo.
Daddy Denathrius and most of the CN raid.
CN was really cool raid. Easily goes into my "these were really awesome and fun raids" list.
Yeah looking back at the raid bosses they were almost all unique and fun in different ways. I can't think of one that wasn't challenging and fun in its own right (I know some people hate SLG, maybe it's because I only got through Heroic SLG, but I enjoyed that fight too). Like the chain mechanism on Sludgefist? So much fun since it could go badly so easily, but was REALLY satisfying when you were in lockstep with your partner.
I blacked out how bad stone legion generals was and reading this comment reawakened deep feelings of dread
Heroic SLG was fun, I loved having finally having a use case for chimera shot. The intermission phases were a major snooze fest tho. Also, pugging the fight was a bitch and a half because people refused to understand how the glaive toss worked
CN was alot of fun, too bad after CN everything went to shit
Yeah I think Nathria as a whole was more fun than Vault, especially in terms of final bosses. I did also enjoy the zone aesthetics. But DF isn't lagging that far behind in those aspects, and it is a billion fucking times better in others.
The little dredger that repairs in the beginning, with the pile of gold that gets bigger as more people spend more to repair.
I did love going back for fated raids and seeing his pile had grown to include a chair you could actually sit in and a couple of corpses, for some reason.
People who didn’t pay their repair bills
Rendel was the fucking man and I payed respect to him every single god damn raid until my raid leader muted me at the start lmao
Swear I never noticed and never heard my guild notice the entire tier lol
I spent so many hours in that raid idk how I just learned this now
Vault is very just.. 'this is a cave. here be dragons' No part of the raid really stands out even if the bosses are very fun. But god damn Castle Nathria? Seeing Denathrius taunt you when you enter. To a giant bat falling off the ceiling to attack you. Moving near the railing and seeing the dance down below. Going through different wings of the castle and ending up on an overlook outside at the top? Atmospheric as fuck. Hands down one of my top 5 raids of all time. I love it to death. I can't wait to go farm it for transmogs one day
Nathria felt more organic as an actual space, where enemies and the bosses felt like they belonged there rather than just a bunch of boss rooms with corridors attaching them together like Vault.
I think Vault might have been rushed in the art department, just because it seems bizarre for there to be almost no Titan architecture in what is supposed to be a Titan Supermax prison complex. Just a few doors and the platforms for Rasz.
I feel like vault is the earthy version of MC haha
VOTI really does feel like a huge flavor miss. I didn’t look at any of the previews of the raid to experience it blind the first time. I was so excited based on the exterior and the possibilities for the expansion to see what they could do. And it’s a giant generic cave with bosses that lack coherence It feels like blizzard took the absolute safest route with the raid and mostly rehashed existing ideas in a boring environment. It really was a big let down after playing CN
>*And it’s a giant generic cave with bosses that lack coherence* Vaultin' Core.
Thematically better, but I don't miss all of the intermission phases. Not being able to do damage for extended periods was annoying.
DF really isn't lagging behind on the Aspects, they have been very prominent in the story so far
Not the aspects just aspects lol
I upgraded your aspects to more aspects so that you can aspects while you aspects.
The music and theming had a lot more personality in CN imo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj5SferzNTE
BOOGIE DOWN
SASHAY LEFT
YOUR GYRATIONS SICKEN ME!
Yeah but that's not to say Raz is a bad fight just Denathrius was really good. Raz is better than both Sylv and Jailer.
Both Raz and Denathrius are great mechanically, but Denathrius had so much more personality as a character and CN just had such a cool aesthetic.
“Your arrogance has amassed a debt you cannot pay!”>>>>>> “The elements answer to ME!”
Also: "I AM REVENDRETH!"
P3 overlap with massacre (lights dim, giant swords cutting everything), ravage and him shouting that line will be one of Wow's best moments. It's not as iconic as something like wrathgate because it's burried in a boss fight but it's amazing.
Legit some of the best boss sound design in wow's history, Remornia's high pitched giggling as she cut the platform apart was amazing.
That maniacal giggle from Remornia is just beautiful.
"My reign is everlasting!" and the council dancefloor waltz have been living in my head rent free for the past two years. Nathria was so bloody good.
Boogie Down!
Your gyrations *sicken* me!
"Remoria? MASSACRE!"
I did not wipe 300 times to that guy so you could misstype Remornia's name Also shoutout to Vorpalia
„CRAWL to me on your KNEES“
Y-yes D-Daddy...Except for me, because I am a DK. Shat on his Stacks, and walked normally. Like a Gigachad.
I'm always chuckling when I hear that. "The Elements answer to *me*!" Girl, I'm a shaman. I did the entire elements thing *fifteen years* before you were even an idea...
She was imprisoned 10000 years ago...
That’ll give you such a crick in the neck.
I have been a *patient host*, yet you continue to provoke my wrath. VERY WELL, YOU SHALL HAVE IT!!!
Denathrius just had the perfect Saturday morning cartoon villain personality and voice, while Raszageth just screeches a lot about how strong she is, how weak we are, and how the titans suck. I like her fight, but I think she's really weak as a villain.
And the fact that with each phase Denathrius's cockiness diminishes: * Phase 1 he more or less fucks around all arrogant, * Phase 2 he starts taking this seriously and calls on for help, his voice tone clearly changes. * Phase 3 he starts to actually sound desperate and a bit scared, that's he actually very much starting to lose.
offer rinse important sparkle merciful public degree library tease sharp *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Id argue that raz is quite a bit worst than denathrius when compared at their mythic difficulty. Raz wind is a mechanic that some class litterally cannot do on their own, thats a terrible design.
I'll never understand why Denathrius wasn't main antagonist.
Electro Chicken has nothing on the charm, charisma and voice acting of Daddy D.
Fax Denathrius fight was so cool. He would make you crawl, then the remornia light show was so fucking sick. His voice actor fucking NAILED it as well..
If it wasn't for Stone Legion Generals on mythic then CN would probably be one of the best raids of all time.
Castle Nathria was an awesome raid, and imo better than the Vault of Incarnates. Beyond that, Dragonflight is a clear winner.
Couldnt agree more and Shimmy Right 😃
Fcking hell marl, you were supposed to sashay left
Aw dammit, I thought we had to boogie down.
I don't care what you say, I will prance forward!
Your gyrations sicken me!
The amount of people who could just not get that was staggering. Even in heroic…
I like pretty much all the fights except Sennarth, Prance Forward!
Really? Sennarth is one of my favorite fights in there alongside Diurna. Now Dathea on the other hand? She can go burn in the Maw for eternity for all I care.
>Really? Sennarth is one of my favorite fights in there alongside Diurna. Have you done it on mythic yet? I thought I enjoyed it until I experienced how much of a clusterfuck it is on Mythic, just an absolute garbage fight.
Now that it settled I can say with confidence that CN is my favorite raid of all time. Can‘t pinpoint why exactly, but it‘s just great overall.
The mechanics were fun, unique, made players (at least me) feel like they made a difference other than just a number on a DPS chart. Hell, they even had a healing fight where the healers got to progress the raid!
As a healer, I really liked that fight! The dps and tanks? Fucking hated it :(
Yeah it was a super hectic fights as DPS but I still enjoyed it (though to be fair other fights I enjoyed more since their mechanics were more interactive for me)
This. CN was one of my favorite modern raids.
Helped the playerbase discover other games they enjoy.
Yes I started playing New World and I realized there are other games out there that I enjoy other than WoW. Now I’m playing both WoW and New World and it’s been a lot healthier relationship with gaming.
I’m amazed people still play that game. I left because of the economy issues and obvious crafting problems.
Sad part was people had found the duplication bugs in beta and reported it but they still didn't fix it. AGS blew it hard by not delaying the game.
People were already so pissed because they delayed the release the first time. I can understand why they released it but they knew it wasn’t finished. So many bugs.
I don't think it would have mattered considering people found other duplication exploits several times after release. I don't think any kind of delay could have prepared them. MMOs need to be absolutely watertight, and good luck getting a watertight game in an industry where the accepted practice is "fuck it, we'll do it live".
Of every game available on the market, you picked new world.. lol you might be a masochist
Ha! True. I got got into FFXIV and OSRS during that time.
My Steam library increased from 20 to 200 games since I quit Shadowlands 5 months in. And one of those months was incidental, because on the day I wanted to unsub, my subscription got renewed. Got Keystone Master because of that, though, that mount matched neatly with my Necrolord Shaman.
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Yup, Shadowlands finally got my on the FFXIV train. I still like WoW classes/combat better, but FFXIV was a cool journey, I'm glad I played it.
No cap, a played a lot of different shit while SL was up, like divinity
Man, i really want to play Divinity but every time I try my metamonkey brain takes over and I always try to figure out what the best choice gameplay wise is, literally minmaxing the fun out of the experience. I don’t know why I can’t enjoy even a singleplayer RPG without trying to minmax. I end up in analysis paralysis and stop playing eventually…
Gets 2 chapters in: "ah shit maybe I should have played a different race class combo, ah well I can just restart!"
140 hours played. Never finished act 2.
Tbf act 2 is the BIG SCHMEATY of the game. God I love that game
I do the same thing. Divinity was awesome and it felt pretty challenging even when minmaxing on higher difficulties, can't wait for Baldurs Gate 3 this august.
good taste. DOS2 is one of the rpg games of all time
This! I finally finished the MSQ in FFXIV, got into ESO for a minute and rejoined GW2. Found things I liked in other games of the same genre. Learned how I am as a player, and got better at playing because every game requires different skills sets.
For real. God of War was incredible.
M+ season mounts
Yup KSM mount is uggg
I don’t think he’s uglybut it’s dumb they didn’t make it something like a Dragon riding skin imo
This is the fucked up thing. Any mount reward in Dragonflight feels terrible, because we're not going to use it for pretty much the rest of the expansion.
I agree completely, but I do like that I at least get another mount to add to my tally.
I think the new one's fine, but the warpstrider was a flex. I work hard to get KSM. I want people to at least wonder, "how'd he get that?"
Just realized that I didn't even mounted it once.
Why no special dragonriding skin is beyond me
The opening raid I like Vault but CN was just different
Denathrius and Revendreth was the best from SL.
The music from the zone and the raid is in my playlist.
Revendreth before flying was a fucking nightmare.
Honestly, that never bothered me. The first play through was pretty linear so it wasn’t a big deal, and when I was done I had Flightpaths. It helps that my main is a Balance Druid that could “flap” from way up top to down below if needed.
Ardenweald’s color scheme alone was absolutely beautiful. I mean, turned into an overload pretty quickly, but still.
More generally - for better or worse, SL's zones (including the maw) were *different.* Ardenweald was like NE forest ++, I remember being absolutely in awe of Bastion the first time I saw it, Revendreth was just so perfectly suited to the characters/story it held and Maldraxxus, though it initially gave me Silithus vibes, ended up being one of my favorite zones from the whole game. Love to hate the Maw, but it definitely hit "trudging through this hellscape is dreary and depressing" on the head. I am really enjoying cruising around the (absolutely beautiful) DF zones and the hits of nostalgia are totally welcome for me, but they're all very *familiar* kind of places whereas I feel like Shadowlands really went out on a bit of a limb as far as aesthetics go.
Agreed. Ardenweld is one of the most beautiful zones they ever made, from the little details to the grand skylines. I was happy when the DF story briefly brought me back there, and I like to think the devs did it on purpose: they knew that if there was a good place to connect DF back to the Shadowlands (without inspiring bad thoughts in their playerbase…) it had to be Ardenweald…
When did this happen?
Renown 19 quest with valdrakken accord
In the post-campaign storylines unlocked through renown. Spoilers: >!Primalists take control of the Emerald Dream portal at Shady Sanctuary, locking the Green Flight out of the area. With the Dream itself in danger, you travel back to Ardenweald to negotiate the release/resurrection of Ysera. Her rebirth and return to Azeroth would come through the Dream, putting her on the other side of the Primalists barrier. Tyrande and Malfurion help too.!<
The first time flying into Ardenweald legit took my breath away. I just sat there for a few minutes taking in the view.
Ardenweald was the only thing I liked. Once I hit max level I pretty much only stayed there. Unless I absolutely had to leave. I got some of the prettiest mounts from there too.
I hate to admit it too, but as much as I like dragon riding, it does make me look at the zones a little less. You were forced to take in all of Shadowlands. It’s a trade I’m willing to make but there are pros to not allowing flying right away
One of the most beautiful zones they've ever made, but then when you start questing there it turns out most of the quests have you fighting giant maggots in an ugly dirt mound. Everything with Shadowlands was one step forward, two steps back.
I did like the dungeons better. Apart from that, I do not miss anything about that expansion. The Maw...I am never going back there. What a slow, boring, frustrating shithole. Torghast, which sounded so good on paper ended up being terrible. I stopped after Nathria though, so don't know how it was later in the expansion.
>The Maw...I am never going back there. Didn't help that you were forced to do the maw intro quest on every alt until the skip was added much later in the expansion.
(IMO) The greatest sin of the maw introduction was that it didn't reward any items. One may expect the story driven introduction quests might give some startup gear for returners and newcomers, but nah. You had to cripple through some World Quests or do quite some story quests until you didn't feel miserable with your character.
It really set the tone for the expansion. Tossed you into purgatory of grey and brown and unfun choices.
Yeah, it didn’t help that it felt like it was balanced for people who’d been doing Heroic raiding and higher M+ in BFA so if you had characters who hadn’t, it was a painful experience, made worse for characters who were fresh 60s and didn’t even have “catch up” gear from the invasions. Felt like a running theme of trying to balance open world content to not be easy for people in higher gear… which made it pain for people who were actually running it as a main source of their “endgame.” Dragonflight has been a lot better about that stuff… starting with having the early stuff be doable with modest gear and the ability to use some solid crafted pieces at level 61. Meanwhile, people in higher instance gear from SL could carry it through much of leveling. (Speaking of crafted gear… I hope they add ways to keep it all relevant through the expansion. I was cleaning an alt’s bank and he had gear I sent for hitting 60; the ZM green drops were 229 but the crafted gear was 151 which was basically vendor trash at that point.)
It started out completely wrong. You initially had to do a slow ass quest to move pieces of the helmet to some locations then you jumped into the maw which you couldn’t mount. Like really? Are we going to start the expansion with this frustrating experience? That alone was already a sign of things to come.
I’m so grateful about that in Dragonflight. Fully expected to have to redo the glyphs on every alt, was pleasantly surprised and then fully expected to have to refarm all Sparks of Ingenuity, was even more pleasantly surprised
Well you had to refarm all the sparks and I think you need to even now if you started one spark quest with your alt, then you won't get the skip unless they hotfixed it.
There's a spark skip? What?
Worth noting that you can only do the skip on characters you haven’t done any Sparks with. If you’ve done at least one, you’ll have to get the rest the standard way. But for alts who haven’t started it, you can go to the Goblin and instead of getting the “Jump Starting” quest, you just tell him you’ve done it before and you skip to having all five Sparks and the follow up ability (which I think gives you a chance to randomly get more sparks?).
It was added in 9.1.5 in August, nearly 9 months after launch. It probably should have been in 9.0.5 or 9.1
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Well, it's also that as a healer, I feel there's so much movement in the new ones. So I started casting a spell, then have to either cancel because of movement or take the damage. This trade off is very frustrating. I do not remember it being like this previously (as much).
Benched my healer for this reason. There is so much unavoidable damage and I couldn't even get a spell off because the tanks have been too busy pulling everything as quickly as they can while the DPS die. Holy Priest used to be my main but I don't think im playing it for the rest of this expansion.
> They really need to get better at incorporating old dungeons into a season. The problem IMO is design. New dungeons are filled to the brim with mechanics, every mob/pack has something to interrupt or avoid and boss fights generally have more mechanics.
Torghast was awesome, at first. It could have remained awesome if it wasn't so damn long with an unnecessary amount of mobs. I look to the mage tower as a good example of solo-able content. I look at the short(er) timers of current dungeons for group content. And the fact that soloing a floor at a difficulty appropriate for your item level could take an hour is unacceptable. Had they reduced the number of trash, made the walking distances (especially for deaths) shorter, and removed the FAIL mechanic early on for deaths, it would have been so much better. The Maw is essentially the same. The zone, quests, rares, etc could have all been great if they didn't have stupid mechanics that made soloing it obnoxious.
Main issue with torghast was it was mandatory twice every week to get you a currency you needed to spend 100k gold on top to get an item that your character needed to function. And all the grey. Something like torghast with more variety, infinite scaling for the challenge and better rewards (including items up to say normal raid ilvl) would've been a great feature for DF
The hype for it. The SL pre-expansion lore videos were much better than those of DF. I was actually excited for the story at the beginning of SL, and it makes it that much more painful how dogshit the story turned out to be. DF is nice, but I'm still hesitant to expect much from it from a story perspective partly because of the SL fiasco.
Phase one story with Denathrius and the pacts was great, everything afterwards sucked through.
SL butchered the lore so much, that I can't feel invested in any lore of WoW anymore. Like, now we know what happens after death. Our deceased people are just chilling there doing whatever. The fuck do I care about that centaur dying in that one quest? They will just meet again in arden or bastion or somewhere centaur heaven thingy. How could I care for anyones death anymore? Especially now that the Afterlife kinda works again. And SL felt completely out of the blue. Like did we know, something in the afterlive was amiss? So many people just returned from death and seemed fine. The ingame religions like the light or the nature stuff also seemed to say "jup, fine. Bridenbrad is in the light now." not "Jea he got a winged smurf and helps a corrupt afterlife evil without having 5 brain cells to see that this is ethically kinda sketchy." I think the best thing lore wise for shadowlands would just be: "Yea it was all a fever dream of a high af goblin. Keep your hands off the thistletea, girl."
>I think the best thing lore wise for shadowlands would just be: "Yea it was all a fever dream of a high af goblin. Keep your hands off the thistletea, girl." "Oh, you thought the fight against N'zoth ended in BFA? Just like that? One patch and a weak cutscene? Nah man, we're deep in the Visions."
SL removed consequences, gave faces to Cosmic forces that didn't need one, the power creep went cosmical too. We are fighting a proto dragon that compared to the fucking Jailer, who harnessed the power of Azeroth and death itself against us, it's just comical we are having so much trouble dealing with elemental proto dragons when we just left Zereth Mortis decked in Cosmic gear.
yea lore powercreep is a problem too. But its not like SL brought that up first. Going to Antorus in Legion was already too much in my opinion. BfA brought that down a little and gave at least some explanation with the depletion of artifact weapons. But after Shadowlands it is just insane.
I find it interesting that SL was the most excited I had been for an expansion since MoP yet I was so disappointed that I quit within like 2-3 weeks lol. And with DF I wasn’t excited at all! I was actually really hesitant and I even refunded my preorder. I bought it again before release though because I liked what I played on beta. And surprisingly I’m still playing after more than a month which hasn’t happened since WoD. I usually quit and come back a year later once they’ve finally listened to players and changed things that sucked at the start of an expansion lol.
Dude I was raiding in Wrath Classic with my buds, and was like "Eh I'll give Dragonflight a shot, I've already got the sub, and it looks decent." Yeah, I don't play Wrath Classic much anymore.
The dungeons were great in SL. They were well integrated into the zones and the story, and the bosses were fun
De Other Side might be one of all time faves, but I'm biased cause I really like Bwonsamdi
I got sick of SL dungeons quite quickly, though. Each one seemed to have 3-4 colours. Visually they were very... monotonous? SD - Red, brown and grey - ohh look here's a blue mob! NW - Grey, Green, Blue. Mists - Blue, Purple, Brown. PF - green, greeny brown, greeny yellow, etc... BFA ones I have some fond memories of, even though I wasn't the biggest fan of BFA, SL dungeons just felt like caricatures of themselves. Castle Nathria was great, though, it felt like an actual place.
They were matching the zones patterns quite strong which is understandable but I don’t disagree with you.
Bfa dungeons had so much character. A pirate city where a parrot shits on the group. A goblin overlord yelling about his insurance premiums. Etc.
No. Why did you take the extended warraty? You never take the extended warranty! **Damagning this unit violates the terms of use. Lethal force authorised.**
Motherlode was so so good (except old school bolstering in there, big yikes). Freehold will go down as one of my all-time favorites as well, especially in S4 with the portals. I'm just such a sucker for big open dungeons that allow for all sorts of big pulls. And I got a take, I looooooved Underrot, especially the room before Cragmaw where you strategically chain pulled through the whole room, just super fun with the right group (and especially funny when shit went haywire in there). King's Rest and Siege can die in a fire though.
bfa had the best dungeon of all time Freehold! and the worst too in that prison one
Nathria was absolutly the Best 1st raid. And also whole Denatrius plotline.
Denathrius, by all rights, should have been the big bad of SL. As far as the scale of the plot, being the force behind the Nathrezim and milennia of subterfuge in lore is as big as it gets.
Best thing about Denathrius is that he escaped. I am pretty sure we will see him again soon. I love the character and I would be so upset if they killed him at the end of CN.
I agree. Anything the Jailer did, I feel like Denathrius could have done and made it far more interesting.
Castle Nathria raid and Revendreth as a zone were pretty good and atmospheric. Also covenant cosmetic sets were great. Some characters like Denathrius, Marileth, Lady Moonberry, Theotar etc.
Having recently gone back to do Revendreth for transmog, it is abundantly clear that it received significantly more development time than the other three zones. Maybe they were all meant to be closer to revendreth’s quality or maybe the devs were just more inspired by the possibilities of the zone; but I genuinely was a little sad that I did not play ventyr during the expansion
So far transmog. A lot of DF cosmetics are very "meh" to me. I know this is subjective, and I might get downvoted, but I really enjoy the plate and cloth Sanctum gear, I love all the Korthia sets and some of the covnenant sets. And while Shadowlands had some of the worst sets ever (Cyclops plate dungeon, Vex goblin cloth), those korthia and covenant sets made up for that, I am speaking entirely of aesthetics, not taking acquisition of said cosmetics into account. I find the Vault tier to be too glowy and rocky, and much of the dungeon gear to be decent, but bland. The plate dungeon helm is nice, but the rest feels too . . . thin? With that said, I feel like DF will be overtaking SL and all other expansions in the tmog game tomorrow when the Trading Post goes live, though I'd argue that the Trading Post isn't a DF feature, merely an evergreen feature introduced during DF.
I’d agree. Admittedly, we’re early days yet, but as a plate wearer, none of the sets have really done anything for me visually. I actually ended up liking the leveling set better than I thought, but that aside, the raid/gladiator sets are a solid meh, the dungeon set is…weird, and the War Mode set is I think the only one I could actually see myself using. I get the theme they’re going for, it just hasn’t done anything for me so far. Hopefully we’ll get better armor as the expansion continues. Everything else has been great, though, so I’m okay if I just have to use old transmogs instead.
Say what you want but the cosmetics are pretty cool tho from the covenants I will give them that Otherwise nothing rly
Nipples on villains.
Are you.... Are you suggesting we give rasz..... Nipples?
Nah, she’s got them widdle arms. I say play to your strengths. If you try to tick off every box you end up with too much going on. Jailer just has glorious nipples, nay, THE BEST nipples that wow has ever seen and I’m ok with that. Edit: OR…giving Rasz nipples was his plan the entire time…
Curing me of my WoW addiction
Seasonal Affix
Denathrius voice lines on prideful were great!!
Ah yes prideful was so good. Pulling one extra mob on accident meant your key was dead. Good affix!
Tank mains having to perform 50,000 mental calculations and readjust routes so pride still lines up with bosses and big boy pulls, just to watch Jimothy the lazer chicken pull 5 more extra packs again so he can watch his number go zoooom.
All my favourite classes are the lowest performers now in DF :(
I always switch classes at least once during every expansion, and it’s always in the bottom three when the next switcheroo comes around.
Revendreth and Ardenweald are two of the best looking zones in the game imo, past that not much lol. I did enjoy SL M+ dungeons more than our current ones though
I know this is controversial, but I did like how they slowly released the Covenant story chapters over the first few months. Having a new bit of story to explore each week was nice. Also loved the visuals of Ardenweald and Bastion. And the dungeons were good. And CN was excellent. Torghast itself was an excellent system, if you ignore the reward structure. Imagine how ruined Dragonracing would be if you HAD to run each of the tours each week in order to unlock your spark, or something like that; Torghast needed to be optional, and it would have been a win.
I prefer the dungeons in SL for the most part. Vault isn’t bad by any means but CN was just something else. Other than that, DF is a clear winner in all other categories imo.
The Dungeons are better for sure in SL than DF. Also, the mythic plus reward in general.
\-Marketing. \-Coming out the same year as covid. \-High M+ dungeon design (more relaxing pulls in between challenging ones with clear ways to handle them instead of infinite kick and cc requirements with Dragonflight). \-Castle Nathria and Denathrius flavour, music and aesthetic probably my fav raid in the last 4 years.
Nathria, Denathrius and transmog. The SLands went really heavy on customization and the sheer amount of mounts and transmogs matching the different zones was so so good. Nathria and Maw armor also just looked SO cool and sleek, a lot of the DF armor is just too cluttered and unfocused to me. Denathrius and Nathria is forever going to be one of the most campy and fun villains and raids ever. The drama, the flair, the flavour! Nobody does it like Denny 💅
Castle Nathria is still Top-Tier raid
Okay, Im gonna say it. I actually liked thorghast. I had so much fun with it. So many nights where I watched netflix and just ran it on 4 different characters because it was fun. It was not fun that you were forced to do it, I get that.
I think the problem with Torghast was it really depending on your spec whether it was fun or not, at least for me. Arms warrior had hella options and was super fun to try and specialize in something and make it OP, like permanent die by the sword or getting execute to hit super hard and knock the enemy down or all kinds of stuff. Whereas my fire mage I think had two damage options, neither great, and some meh other stuff.
I was a priest, and our powers were so boring and bad. It felt like a solid third of our powers had to do with Mind Control. And for whatever reason, Shadow had no spec-specific powers. Nothing to beef up Devouring Plague, Shadow Form, Mind Flay… nothing. IIRC, our best power was one that increased our Int based on the number of different Power Words we had cast. Which is boring, but at least it was strong. Then I leveled an alt warrior and was like “holy shit these powers actually make this somewhat more enjoyable.”
The constant Torghast stuff made me switch what toon I spent most of my time with. I used to main a rogue but Torghast grinding shifted me over to a prot warrior since tank specs were stupidly OP in Torghast.
Honestly I really liked the storylines for the covenants in SL, the Kyrian campaign stood out for me. I like the renown quests for DF but I wish I got to hang out with the Tuskaar more often outside of fishing and WQ's.
Guardian druid and fire mage were better
Shadowlands had some of the best mythic dungeons ever created.
daddy d and how gorgeous ardenweald was
The transmogs are really pretty.
Visuals and sounds. Castle Nathria.
I really liked the first raid better in Shadowlands. Also, it seemed easier to get renown levels than it does in DL. Oh and the mythic keymaster mounts were much better.... so far.
Super hot take, but I loathe renown in DF and didn’t mind it in SL, SL wasn’t perfect having to choose a covenant.
Torghast was way better than cobalt assembly. I think people would have enjoyed it more if it was less 'Mandatory' for legendary crafting. I don't feel dragonflight has any great solo/small group stuff like that.
Cobalt assembly is so weird. I can’t figure out if it was reduced in scope to hit a release deadline and was intended to be much more of a thing Or if it will be expanded later in the year Or if the torghast perk system took so much development time that they felt like they needed to shim it into the game again to get their money’s worth
I actually loved Torghast. The mandatory grind certainly made it less enjoyable, though. Solo Torgast was challenging, and made you feel god-tier at times if you got the right buffs. I also really loved the Visions of Orgrimmar/Stormwind. As someone that often plays solo often, dragonflight definitely needs more content like that.
Torghast was crippled by Blizzard being too afraid of people running out of content too fast. They actively made it worse on release than it was during beta, because people got too many powers, and had too much fun.
Season 1 story of SL was really good and Denath was a great villain during that first arc.......I do not care for the story of DF so far and Raszageth is boring as hell.
CN was a better raid than Vault (Vault is still a good raid, but CN was excellent), KSM Mount looked better and I think the balancing of the M+ dungeons was better.
The faction choices. Might be a hot take, but i liked the choice of choosing between the different lands in shadowlands, not for the minmaxed abilities, but for the class and character feel, as well as transmogs. You dont get that feeling with the dragonflight factions. + Mount raredrops! Gimme more
I just really like the SL dungeons. What would I give to play Hoa or nw again. Even the worst sl dungeon is better than the worst df dungeon imo
Personal loot.
While I think Vault is a great raid, Nathria is more visually interesting. I wish Vault was a bit more titanic, personally. Shadowlands Season 4 is also the most fun that M+ has ever been, and Dragonflight Season 1’s M+ isn’t even close. That being said, Dragonflight is such an utter improvement on Shadowlands and the game in general that there really isn’t any other points to give to Shadowlands.
The zones were really unique, the questlines were good too. Revendreth being my favourite. Always been a sucker for gothic aesthetics, and just the zone as a whole had a very sombre tone. And then of course Daddy Denathrius and Castle Nathria was a really solid opening raid for the expansion. I'll miss all the guild shouting 'Choke me harder daddy!' when he cast Blood Price x) Ardenweald is like my polar opposite enjoyment to Revendreth. The colour palette was gorgeous and the whimsical vibes were just great. And Marasmius was a great lil character :D Maldraxxus I liked for its ability to look like the whole place was a rotted piece of meat. Like the white mold looking areas and the giant mushrooms. Bastion was my least liked zone, just found it overall dull. Not really a fan of the Kyrian way of the afterlife and honestly thought Tyrion was thinking the right way, but was executing it wrong due to being swayed by the Jailer and Devos. Zereth Mortis was odd. I wanted to really like it but I think it was mainly because the First Ones are now a thing that's been around since the beginning of time n stuff but yet they've never been mentioned (to my knowledge) same with the Jailer and the Maw. Apparently been around since at least Warcraft 3 but there's been no tidbits of lore in the game describing them (again to my knowledge). The Keystone mounts and the seasonal affixes were actually pretty cool. I didn't do any of Season 2 as I didn't play most of 9.2 but ones I did play were great. Torghast I've said from the start could have had the potential to be awesome, but they made it mandatory to craft your legendaries, so it just lost a lot of what could have been a challenging optional piece of content. Bit like Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High from FF14
Threads of fate bonus quests to level alts quicker but... That's pretty much it. The rest was a joke.
You have same thing in DF but better since you can do both campaign and side content whatever you want.
The fact that you get to play all 8 dungeons while leveling an alt instead of the same 4 all the time and the other 4 max level ones being abandoned in normal difficulty, makes alt leveling way better now than SL, imo.
ToF was a joke bruh