Being Saleh: He Who Spiritwalk behind The Maw (Shadowlands Early review)

I see dead people... everywhere, because I broke my promise and return to WOW

As the living and undead denizen pondering how many times they will be dying again in order to stop the Jailer from whatever deadly crusade he's planning in, I once again realize that undead death knights in WOW probably the most confused since they have two headstart death among them heroes.

Welcome to Shadowlands, Wow's artsy afterlife

The Story (and visual)

After acquiring heart of Azeroth and infusing millions of azerite shard in there just to down the last of the Old Gods plaguing azeroth we are forced to stow it away in our banks, because Sylvanas gone head to head with Bolvar a.k.a the Lich King, broke his helmet, shattered the veil between the world of the living and the afterlife, and unleash undead plague v 2.0 in Azeroth (fun pre patch, I killed much more people in this event compared to battlegrounds) and now we again venture into the unknown, saving souls, and killing zombie dogs

 

At least we can use that overgrown amulet for this

 

The first trip brought us to the Maw, a hellish landscape filled with killable iron skeleton knights, apparently all dead people soul are now sucked to this debuffing plane, after escaping it (by mysterious means) and dubbed the name Maw Walker we arrived in Oribos and learned that deadites soul should be divided into other four planes (Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, and Rivendreth) apparently this engine of the dead is somewhat broken and so we ventured to the remaining planes to learn of the cause and to fix it.

The visual of the planes are somewhat awesome, the bluish elysian design of Bastion, sickly greenish skeletal wasteland  of Maldraxxus, eternal purple night of Ardenweald, and the sanguinic bloody red hue of Rivendreth are the proof that the art team of WOW is finally found their mojo again since Mists of Pandaria, the visual upgrade (I played in ultra) is the most refreshing, and now there are more cutscenes than ever, as WOW tried to dub FFXIV's 'visual storylines'. They made the initial scenario a lenghty ones, designed to introduce you to Maw, Oribos, and the four planes plus the way of life in each zone. As you venture to the planes you're introduced to denizens and their leaders, sometimes you get a little cutscenes, some plot twist, some action sequence, and some big happening. But most often you're just treated to voiced dialogue of NPCs forming a 'skippable sequence' where you can sit around and listening to them or just move on to the next exclamation mark, and oh yeah it's LONG!!

Sing it!!!

The lengthy storyline's probably a shock to most of WOW players who expected some sequential kill ten rats quest in the area then move on, but most of the campaign storyline required you to sit and listen to NPCs, watch cutscenes, fetch little things, play some mini games, or participate in a series of action culminated on fighting a single or group of enemies, the kill ten rats quests are now relegated to the 'side quests' designed to add some xp to your belt and/or give you some equipment upgrades, but it's not like the main storyline free from these quests, I was rather perplexed that Maldraxxus storyline quests including these thing although Maldraxxus is where the big lore things are dumped to you (oh sorry, minor spoiler)

 

At the end of the campaign (well, to be continued more like) you are forced eligible to join a covenant, the Kyrian of Bastion, Necrolord of Maldraxxus, Night Faes of Ardenweald, and Venthyr of Rivendreth, each gave you uniques set of armor, class abilities, global abilities, and soulbinds which is an unique way to make your usual class abilities become more useful, visually appealed or just plain weird/complex (I don't see why do I want to teleport to a group of enemies as a warlock just to fear them, although there are several soulbind options that I haven't tried before), there are three NPC you can soulbind with although in the time I was writing this there's only two available and just two or three path unlocked (each NPCs have several) so yeah maybe some day I can meet my one true useful soulmate bind

Be my soulbind, coming valentine 2021

 

Because of the lengthy-ness of the storyline campaign Blizzard made a second alt-friendly leveling system called Threads of Fate where you can just jump into the action (after you completed the Maw scenario) and complete world and side quests to level up, it's fairly straightforward and gave you more freedom, is it faster? Depends, I complete the storyline campaign (up to choosing a covenant) in seven days on my Demon hunter, just 4 days on my warlock's threads of fate but it was me being lazy and just played for like one hour a day? Falling asleep while campaigning are just one of the factor, but it's not because the story of Shadowlands is boring, It's just a tiring month, well honestly it's been like that every month since Covid-19.

The System (bah, too long)

So there are several new currency right now, let me shout it out for you, ANIMA!!! PHANTASMA!!! STYGIA!!! SOUL ASH!!! SINSTONE!! GRATEFUL OFFERING!!! SOULS!! GRATEFUL OFFERINGS!!! did I just said it twice? well it's because i love GRATEFUL OFFERINGS!!!

Give me  an offering of 245.754.888 flies and I'll let you ride me

 

 - Sanctum

Okay, here's the thing, after you pick a covenant you'll start building your Sanctum by collecting Anima, it's used to make your journey more wonderful in your selected planes, also gold rewards, and mounts and stuffs like armor set, and the continuity of the story campaign, later on you can collect GRATEFUL OFFERINGS!!! which can be used to purchase shinier stuffs, there's also mission table here and you're familiar with what mission table does, it have some variation but the basic is the same: Send troops, collect loots. But as anima is used for ALL of these activities you'll want to manage it carefully or you might ran out your primary resources (world quests). You'll also gain renown from weekly quests, renown is used to advance storyline and to open more upgrade options. and soulbinds, don't forget soulbinds.

 

-The Maw/Ve'nari

You'll met Ve'nari, a mysterious cartel member currently residing in the maw, they got some pretty stuff and you'll get rep for them by killing some Maw's rare spawn and daily quests, the maw's currency called Stygia are dropped from everything in the maw and Venari will trade their shiny stuff (and secrets) for it

The maw itself is hell, as you continue to slay it's denizen the jailer's eye will be fixed upon you, at tier 1 he'll just sent his eye to come after you to apply a debuff, at tier 5 however he'll send bullet-sponge assassins, his tower will bombard you with high-damaging projectiles which also chained you for some damage over time effects, and then the maw itself will apply dots to you until you die, and when you die you drop off some your hard-earned stygia, feel free to respawn and collect it a la dark soul style if you have the chance to, oh also ve'nari will stop giving reps to you at jailer's eye tier 5, so when you're masochist enough to get into that tier there'll be no more things to do at the maw except dancing in front of Ve'nari, just get out and come back in 24 hrs and it'll all reset

 

Pictured: The Maw

-Torghast

Ahh... Torghast, the new source of dividing community, some hate it, some love it, others like me is just like 'eh there's no timer? Let's run it' and then come out an hour later after get two shotted by the last boss and get kicked out without receiving any rewards, after that I'll proceed to continue Trails of Cold Steel 2 in easiest difficulty just to blow off some steam

Torghast is the all-new, ever-changing roguelike solo/group dungeon in WOW, it's a tower with six wings, every weeks two wings are open, each wings have 9 layers/difficulties and every layers have six floor with a final boss in the sixth floor, as you traverse the tower you'll find powerups called anima power which sometimes gave you significant stat and ability boost (but only for that particular layer journey), soul to save, followers to collect, and phantasma to collect, you can spend them in brokers at floor 3 and 6 since nothing in the tower will be brought outside (except new followers), feel free to bring friends if you can handle the mob scaling

So what's the purpose to run Torghast anyway, well... legendaries of course, when you clear each layer you'll get Soul Ash for crafting your legendaries and also for adding stats to it, but only and only if you defeat the sixth floor boss on each layer which sometimes overtuned and have annoying difficulties, like healing, and healing  and healing themselves goddamit!! But on the brighter side if you think you're already strong enough to challenge previous layer don't worry the weekly soul ash reward will be brought to the next layer, so if you think you're strong enough to defeat layer 6 of each wings the weekly soul ash rewards from layer 1-5 will be brought to you when you finished layer 6, so yeah, there's still weekly caps, Bolvar also gave 200 ash per week just to clear a layer.

I'm also grateful that storyline campaign happened in their own Torghast instance because if Thrall is locked behind layer 6 Torghast with elites that have 10x HP and deal 35x damage with an affix that creates a  damaging puddle on mob's corpse (and revive them) I'll uninstall WOW (again)

 

More time for Giant Robots!!!

 

The World Quests and Misc

The newly revamped world quests are no more like 7 seconds kill mobs and done, instead you'll get some slow and steady  kill ten rats and collect their teeth quests with some follow up requests (kill big rat) and also they mostly reward anima in droplet quantities, which is really in-lore accurate, but still a grindfest. Treasure hunt is fun, some chests appeared on map on weekly basis, some required puzzle solving so get ready to read Wowhead a lot

Early Verdict

The story is an interesting one, the title of Maw Walker is similar to Warrior of Light/Darkness from FFXIV, in earliest moment it was showed that our past old-gods-vanquishing-world-eater-legion slaying effort was nothing compared to this new threat, we're so powerless in the Maw that even to escape it we're sort of winging it, the spotlight of this story is the player, how do we escaped the maw? Why the unnatural interest to us, not just from the jailer but also from another party? The story so far put the mystery on us the player, branded us, giving it a strong early standing because I really don't want to hear everyone cried SYLVANAS again. Yes, put spotlight on us, not those NPCs

The time gating and the amount of currencies of this expansion is also interesting, for the first time after mists I don't feel like WOW is one big experiments, (yes, Legion however great it was, it's still an experiment) the time gate is intentional, it's designed to keep player engaged in limited activity to collect resources and getting stronger, and it's also to keep player subbing because each week something new opens up and we can continue there. When you keep subbing you can feel your journey continues in a way that you progressing in storyline, sanctum, torghast, dungeon, world boss, even if it feels miniscule, but when you stop subbing and came back like 10 months later you will be attacked by a bunch of lore dump and currency catch up that your progress won't be as cohesive anymore.

Here's an example, my daily life on week 1 in shadowlands on Necrolord covenant

Week 1

1. Run sanctum daily callings/world quests, this will fill up some of my anima and chest weekly quests 

2. Run daily Theater of Pain for some anima

3. Run daily random dungeon, it probably a weekly cartel reps dungeon or some satchels, also might be a weapon/equipment upgrades

4. Run Maw dailies, killing rares until tier 5 jailer eyes, if I got lucky I might get a rep boost item

5. Run torghast for the week

6. Any leftover weeklies can be grinded in day 6 or 7

Week 2

1. New renown weeklies means new story progress

2. Rinse and repeat

Sounds Repetitive? Well I can do all that in two hours, three counting Torghast, so it's enough for me (more TOCS 2 YAY!!!). Blizzard will continue to remove gating in new patches, adding new ilvl weapon on WQ and dungeons, making the Maw more accessible, they'll probably remove some of renown gating for some campaign quests plus adding some side quests to your sanctum which formerly tied to a locked upgrades, uneven lore bomb like this can be confusing up to the level where I once thinks: wait, it's that the priest legion dagger? How it ended up on Nathanos? That's what you got after 12 months of hiatus, with such a strong story headstart to whet the appetite Blizz bets itself with content time gating, will they succeeded? Well time will tell, gating is a tricky matter, too long waiting and sub will drop because of boredom, too short and too little new things subs will also dropped due to 'not enough content'

I personally enjoyed Shadowlands to this moment, my casual a.k.a lazy playstyle was just right for this expansion, the beautiful art style, the voice over, the storyline progress, but one question still linger: up to this second I'm convinced Blizz won't answer all the mysteries building up with a casual three sentence, but will the story hold up until the end? Will everything will be wrapped up nicely? Is Torghast carry really necessary? As I said before only time will tell but one thing is sure: I never once glanced to my EXP bar when I first journeyed through Shadowlands, and I would like that feelings repeated on the future expansions.

 

Oh dear god, not again!!!