Shadowlands

Shadowlands is the one that actually got me to quit, and after nineteen years of playing, that's not a sentence I write lightly. Warlords nearly lost me to boredom, a year of sitting in a garrison with nothing to do, but I white-knuckled through it and stayed subscribed. Shadowlands I didn't. Shadowlands frustrated me so thoroughly that I unsubscribed, walked away, and stayed gone for about a year. Boredom just means the game left. Frustration means the game is right there, asking for your time every single day and making you resent it, until one day you stop giving it.

The setup had me. The afterlife, the realms of Death, an undead warlock finally getting to see where all of this actually goes. I'm the guy who plays a class built around dark magic and a race that's already dead, so an expansion about the machinery of the beyond should have been catnip. And the zones delivered. Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, Revendreth, each a distinct take on death, all of them gorgeous. Maldraxxus especially, the undead-army realm, felt built for exactly my kind of character.

Then the systems closed in. Shadowlands is where Blizzard's love affair with borrowed power hit its absolute peak, and it buried a genuinely interesting expansion under a pile of grind. You picked a covenant, and it came with an ability so tied to your performance that picking wrong could hobble your character, and switching was painful enough that people agonized over it like a mortgage. The thing that should have been a fun roleplay choice, which faction of the afterlife do I want to run with, got turned into a math problem with a penalty for guessing wrong.

Then there was the Maw, and Torghast, and anima. The Maw was designed to be unpleasant and it succeeded a little too well. Torghast started as a genuinely cool idea, a tower you climb with weird temporary powers, and then they wrapped requirements around it until it became one more weekly chore with a timer. Anima was the grind under the grind, the currency you fed into everything, and there was never enough of it and always another thing that wanted it. The whole expansion had this feeling of a checklist that got longer every time you cleared it.

And the story, the thing I'd actually shown up for, fell apart at the end. Years of buildup around Sylvanas and the villain behind the curtain, and the payoff was essentially "it was all part of the plan," which retroactively made a lot of things I cared about feel cheap. When the lore is the reason you play your character and it lets you down that hard, it takes something out of you.

It didn't help that this all landed in 2020, when the game was one of the few social things a lot of us had left, and it asked us to spend that time on chores in a gray prison realm. I logged in out of obligation, did my anima laps, and felt the thing I never want to feel about this hobby. That it had become work I wasn't getting paid for.

So I stopped. I leveled maybe two alts into the expansion, sat with how little I actually wanted to log in, and decided I hated it and canceled the sub. I left. For real, for the better part of a year, and I spent most of that stretch playing Final Fantasy XIV instead. WoW carried on without me and I didn't miss it, and that scared me a little, because I'd never once been able to say that before.

I came back near the tail end of Shadowlands and caught up on what I'd skipped. Dragonflight was on the horizon by then, ready to remind me why I'd given this game so many years, and that's a story for another day soon. But Shadowlands is the one that broke the streak. Not the expansion that gave me nothing. The one that gave me too much of the wrong thing, and for the first time made walking away feel like the healthy call.

And the pause had taken its toll.  Instead of 43 max level alts at the end of the expansion, I went into Dragonflight with only 8.

Joar