Wow 8.3 "shadowlands pre-patch" impressions - Not a rant at all.

Oooh boi. Where to begin...

So I dipped back in, gotta take a peek now and then.
To unlock/update all the new stuff you have to do hours of pointless quests ofc.
Fun times if you have many alts, most of this shit is unskippable.

When you're done you have to do invasions, world events.
In some new cool zones? Nope. "Hey u memba this zone?
Or how about this zone??" lvl 80-90 uldum and pandaria zones phased into lvl 120 zones, because they were dead as fuck I guess. So now you get to grind those ten hours every day. Without a direct portal to panda, nor instant flight path from the azeroth heart home station thingy whatever the fuck you call it in silithus. Just spamming portals and hearthstones all day. 'Cos that's quality gaming.

So these invasion dailies give you "Forced Meta Currency #1" coalescing visions, which up untill a few days ago was capped at 25k. Limit removed, here's why:

Then you have to go to silithus to a npc-whocares to buy FMC2: a vessel key.
This key costs 10k coals and is capped at 5 that you can hold at once. Smooth.
This caused enough frustrated feedback that they removed the coal limit.
So like, one problem less I guess.

You use these keys to open horrific visions, a corrupted version of stormwind or orgrimmar. These instances have a time limit, your sanity bar that is drained. At least in poe you have 6 portal shots. Enjoy grinding 10k coals for a key and then getting a DC and getting busy irl with something else. Can't go afk or idle for one second or a ton of your grinded time is wasted trying to farm... drum roll please... FMC3: corrupted mementos
You get a few hundred mentos per section that you manage to clear before killing the "map boss" which always ends the event, and some for any trash mobs too afaik.

These mentos freshmakers are somewhat like old resources, used to upgrade a "passive perk tree station", basically Niko, darkness resistance etc., to help you push further and further inside the maps and clear more wing sections of it, to loot more mentos, to get more resistances, to push further, to get more mentos, you get the picture.

To upgrade the mentos tree fully you need about 50-100k, idk, a fuckload.
Another 100k if you want the new bug mount. So good luck with this hoop jumping on a loop.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Now the main reason why you wanna do these horror maps is that you get FMC4: pages. What? You thought that was it? Naah son.

You now have a legendary cloak in addition to your heart of ass-rat.
Each page (or later book) gives your cloak +5 ilvl.
So you must do the thing, to get the thing, to get those things, to get this thing. So. Much. Fucking. Fun. The enjoyment is literally manifesting itself in a physical form by oozing out of my pores.

With the amulet at least you were (and still are [forced to]) upgrade it by doing a lot things; pve, pvp, quests, dungeons, raids, dailies, weeklies, in a huge sub variety, each yielding the needed azerite powers.

Also, there is no LFD tool for these visions. Everything has to be searched manually, make groups, get into the lingo and all. Have fun as a noob or having been gone a while with the new abbreviations and key words:
horrific visions, basic visions, daily visions, world visions, wing tiers, levels, mentos stages, cloak lvl, sanity resistances, perk tiers, perk types, sanity orbs, side quests, secret bonus mount mail box thingy behind second wing and if you don't know what I'm talking about and you're not even in ilvl 999 gear with all achievements GETTA FUCK OUTTA MY FACE NOOB SCUM!!


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The other fun part, if you're coming back, is the insane gear gap.
You get forced into the same random BG as everyone who has been grinding this shit for weeks before you.
Your "I'm doing ok" casual "epic" i410 gear char with 250k hp gets totally shat on and deleted by these no lives in their mythic i470 with 500k hp-800k hp. Just hit 120 on my tank, TANK... instantly got all the acc bound gear and world quest boost I could find, still only at i400 and 300k hp,
getting raped by dps classes who have 600k hp, unbuffed. And blizz don't seem to have any intentions whatsoever to EVER fix this gap issue.

Wanna do pvp? No match making. Just go get raped and suffer for weeks.
Get lucky leeching off the big bois and hope you get a lucky RNG reward for the right slot. This personally is pissing me off so fucking much since I am one of the smartest, best pvpers ever, and I can't do ANYTHING simply because of the insane stat scaling and gear gap, boosting all my enemies hp and dmg to ten times what I am able to do. I would fucking fire everyone at blizz for this shit instantly if I could and fix it in so many ways.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Short:

Blizzard tried maps and breach.
Nothing to see or do here.
0/10 would not recommend.

Overall fixes?

- The visions would be bearable if the sanity bar was drained based on mistakes you make; standing in chaos/fire, with diminishing returns to mitigate or recover, resulting in more rewards based on your performance without the stupid time limit.

- One solid, more accessible currency. Too much moot shit atm.

- Ability to use LFD to queue into any/all visions.

Wouldn't have been half that bad... for a patch.

WoW died for me a long time ago.
Shame really as I made a # of good friends while there.
The shit you posted above makes me remember why I won't go back.

I had a blast playing Classic WoW for the last 3+ months, then kinda left after people started to go zoom-zoom on every single dungeon.

The current player base is just not what I grew up liking about WoW. It's way too try hard for my liking.

feels very very weird to have a wow thread in this swamp..

I'm expecting the d2 peons and wow classic frogs to dismiss any liking for retail.

as for the patch itself not a fan of corruption system and the RNG on top of RNG.. which clearly tencentggg is copying from activision lately.