World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has brought several new zones to the ever-expanding world of Azeroth. With large open-world areas taking center stage in the game’s latest expansion, Blizzard has put an emphasis on exploration and immersion in the game’s newest landscapes. 

From the massive barren wastes of Maldraxxus to the breathtaking forests of Ardenweald, each zone is unique in its own right. But when it comes to quality, some simply stand out more than others.

Here are the five open world zones of WoW: Shadowlands ranked from worst to best.

5) The Maw

There’s a lot wrong with the Maw in its current state, making it easily fall to the bottom of this list. The introductory questline that players experience here is nice enough to serve as an appetizer for the Shadowlands campaign. But once you return here at max level, the time spent feels like a chore more than anything else.

In other zones, the urge to min-max is definitely present. When it comes to places like Revendreth and Ardenweald, it’s hard to argue against spending more time in those particular zones to farm reputation or finish up more World Quests. But in the Maw, maxing out your daily Eye of the Jailer mechanic while completing all of the available quests that Ve’nari has to offer just feels like a second job within the game. Scouring the zones for rare enemies is bad enough and the minimal rewards of reputation and Stygia don’t entice players to want to stick around in the zone. 

Plus, it’s not like you can stick around in the zone, anyway. Once you kill enough enemies and gain enough reputation in the Maw throughout the course of one day, mobs will begin tracking you down while the zone passively depletes your health one second at a time. There’s better ways to gate content than situations when the game is actively throwing you out of a certain area after you’ve spent too much time there. Regardless, players wanting to leave a place early when they know they’re going to eventually get kicked out isn’t a good look for the Maw.

4) Maldraxxus

The players’ first introduction to Maldraxxus is incredibly memorable. The experience of being thrown headfirst into an arena with several hundred combatants is sure to be a wild time. And from there, the campaign only grows stronger. Throughout the course of the Maldraxxus leveling storyline, players are reintroduced to several main characters, such as Draka, Alexandros Mograine, and Lady Vashj, tying up several loose ends from past expansions. 

But although the leveling experience in Maldraxxus is particularly strong, the zone falls off heavily once players reach Shadowlands’ endgame. The zone’s incredibly large size, which was definitely a welcome sight during the leveling process, plays a negative role at max level—especially when players are trying to navigate the zone in a timely manner.

Additionally, the zone falls extremely flat in the landscape department. The art direction of Maldraxxus feels entirely too uniform, making the zone ultimately unappealing to go back to and spend time in. For a zone as massive as Maldraxxus—the indisputably biggest zone in the expansion—one would expect at least a few varying directions in terms of art. But for the most part, the zone relies on dark grays and slimy greens throughout its entirety. While jumping from World Quest to World Quest at max level, it’s hard for the experience not to feel repetitive and similar, despite sometimes being halfway across the zone doing an entirely different activity.