Maldraxxus Impressions

 With the fix to the Beta, I was able to finish the primary quest line in Maldraxxus.

Much like Bastion, you arrive to find that the ordinary way things are supposed to go has broken down. The bad guys in this zone are obvious from the beginning.

The order of the zones (at least for your first go) are very clearly designed to alternate between light and dark. While Bastion is a (mostly) pristine garden of a zone - with buildings and roads reminiscent of the Halls of Valor and Mac'aree - Maldraxxus is one of the grossest places we've ever been. The very earth itself seems to be made of rotten flesh (disgustingly, Skinners can actually harvest from nodes on the ground here... don't think about that too much.)

Yet the realm's purpose suggests that all this grossness actually serves a purpose. When invaders come to the Shadowlands - something that does seem to have happened from time to time, such as denizens of the Void - it is the forces of Maldraxxus that fight them off. All the plagues, constructs, and liches are actually there to serve as the Shadowlands' army.

Naturally, with the Jailer securing agents within the various realms we go to, things have gone sideways, and a civil war has erupted within the realm.

You fight for the House of the Chosen - one of five Houses that make up Maldraxxus' military services (the others, though two have been destroyed in the war, are the House of Plagues, the House of Eyes, the House of Rituals, and the House of Constructs.)

Meanwhile, the throughline of the zone's quests has you working to empower a runeblade left for you to find by the Primus - the original (but vanished) ruler of the realm.

I'll say that the zone actually feels markedly different from Bastion - where Bastion has rather discrete areas in which there is danger, and a lot where the things you fight are summoned in various cleansing rituals, Maldraxxus is dense with foes. You're going to be carving your way through literally armies of the undead here.

I don't know that the story is quite as thought-provoking as the one in Bastion - I can totally understand the standpoint of people who join the Forsworn - but if you want to fight Scourge-like foes, this is the place to be.

Notably, toward the end of the quests here, you return to the Maw (which unfortunately had a rather bugged quests that I had to kind of get lucky to finish) before a last chapter in Maldraxxus. While there aren't quite as many breaks from leveling zones in the questing in Shadowlands (at least so far,) as there were in Legion and BFA, it's cool to really make the Maw simultaneously feel like a real part of the expansion while also feeling decidedly more deadly (while you might find it annoying, and check in with me after a few months of this, the fact that you can't mount in the Maw actually makes the zone feel much more menacing and disorienting.)