The Shadowlands Endgame Loop (ranked)

So after almost a week of the "real" Shadowlands, I got a better grasp about what ended up being fun and what didn't. While I was going to guesstimate something for the whole expansion before it launched, it ended up being just a few notes. That had ranks. So here's my ranking of stuff the expansion has to do, from best to worst.

1: Mythic plus

Big shocker here. Could have screenshotted the 2 chested +7 Mists key or the first 10 which was Necrotic Wake (deplete) instead, but here we are. Dungeons are more on the "ok" scale this time around, from fairly good (Halls of Atonement) to fairly bad (Plaguefall and Necrotic Wake), and with just 8 dungeons too it feels like a big loss from BFA. Lack of drops and making the mistake of being okay to push things more than I enjoy are other issues. But its still by far the best WoW content at the moment.

2: Raid

The new raid kinda lived up to expectations, with some interesting "basic" mechanics that didn't get too gimmicky. And starting undergeared. However... Loot from raid is based on having very little drop, and it was bugged first week giving too much. And the vault is the same ilevel as the raid you do, so if you do any m+ it's almost bound to be better. Add to the fact we had about twice as many as the small more intimate 10-15 people raids we had for 3 seasons and that I somehow picked an incredibly bad spec to play detracted a fair amount from the experience. So doing anything more than getting curve seems pointless.

3: Renown

Was a bit lukewarm to the whole weekly renown thing, especially the souls in the maw stuff. But they fixed the souls to have enough respawns and have several people be able to click for the Maw soul collecting making it a breeze. Same thing for anima collection; just do world boss, the weekly dungeon(s) and forget it exists until you complete it from random mission table thingies and dungeon drops. Making the world quests fully optional otherwise. Unless you'd want to speed up reputation gains I suppose. Anyway, this is not intrusive at all. And I feel I can skip the Maw and covenant upgrades for when the interesting stuff has a lull.

4: Professions

Doing professions is fine enough, herb/alch plus cooking/fishing seeming like the real obligatory stuff to have unless you want to have your gold funds drained real fast. Some of the armor crafting stuff is just legendary crafting professions with a somewhat annoying skill up system detracting somewhat from the fun.

5: Gearing

Gearing in WoW has never been this dull. It went from having over the top loot rng with different things than normal, to just having things with the same 4 stats on them and there being little of it. It felt a bit meaningful to get a weapon upgrade, but otherwise its mostly relief when getting something. The fact that its based on pure luck and not some kind of tokens just make it more aggrevating. You can have the same 5 people spam dungeons and some nights its the same 2-3 people that get everything. And it feeds into my issue with progress stuff, it's not fun to end up trailing behind buying BoEs either feeding into how they have made the most central part of WoW be so frustrating on top of the gear being dull.

6: Torghast

They took content that was whacky fun and had a great progress idea, to making an incredibly tedious time consuming uninspired heap of junk that got boring 2 weeks in for me. The fact that is integral to the legendaries that makes your character pop makes me want to skip alts, just get a rank 1 on a couple of alts and a rank 4 for all specs for main. And then skip doing it for the rest of the patch. Since I assume they will just push in more upgrade tiers every patch and make you spend hours of takes-way-too-long-without-depth content to keep up to date. I had high hopes, but even warfronts was better than this.

Not appearing on this list: PvP.

All I hear about is oneshots in bgs. Not really my kind of pvp... So haven't bothered to try. And see no reason to give it a chance either since nothing I want from it either.