What do you think about Callings in Shadowlands?

World of Warcraft is always trying to come up with new ways to do the same things. After my first real week of doing Callings, I think I can finally say that they are interesting, and in some ways an advancement over Emissaries. They aren’t just “Do X World Quests,” as there are a variety of Callings from killing rares and opening chests to defending a zone by doing various things — including WQs, dailies and even dungeons — and I think that’s an advancement over Emissaries.

But I also think in some ways Callings are a step backwards. They’re awkward at times, with some of the means to fulfill their requirements being opaque. There’s a real feeling of okay, does this count for the Calling that you often can only find out by just sticking your face into the situation and that’s not really a great time. And also, having to go to your Sanctum and manually pick up the quest for a Calling after two expansions of Emissaries just being autocomplete, well, it feels retrograde. We’d already solved this, why did we deliberately make it worse?

In a field absolutely crowded with things to do like Torghast, dungeons, Mythic dungeons, raiding, etc., it feels like making Callings be so deliberately convoluted and difficult to suss out wasn’t the best move, instead of just letting them be something you could find out on a map and just do. There’s already a lot of things that you have to work out like your current Renown level and the unfolding of quests, how that interacts with your quest rewards and so on, without also having to run around collecting Callings quests. That’s time I could be using to die like a chicken to the Terragrue, guys.

But maybe you feel differently and you enjoy the randomness, having to puzzle out how to complete the Calling, and going back to your Sanctum to pick them up instead of just heading out and working on it. So here’s your chance to discuss Callings, what you like, what you don’t, and what you think would be good to see in the future.