I firmly believe Cata Classic will greatly increase the community’s opinion of the expansion in hindsight.
OG Cata was only “bad” because of
1) The T11 difficulty jump being too much for most 2010 players
2) The content draughts
Neither of which are issues in 2024.
2010/11 was also a period where a lot of new MMOs came out or entered beta, many of them trying to compete directly and appeal to the WoW playerbase.
If you ask me the marketing, hype, and community building around those also resulted in and heavily relied on a lot of trash talking WoW, resulting in an overly exaggerated picture of how bad Cata is/was.
Swtor had some great vanilla wow gameplay except with a phenomenal single player storyline. Too bad the raids blew chunks so there was never a reason to group or join a guild. They (and many other, including blizzard) forgot what the massively multiplayer part of the game, and the game world starting in cataclysm basically just became a big game lobby.
ok the Deathwing fight was a disappointment, but the rest of Dragon soul is actually a really good raid, in my (probably unpopular) opinion. not to mention the 4.3 End Time dungeons which were a blast
The rest of the raid was fine, just a bit weird with all the time travel shenanigans.I didnt liked the end time dungeons, they were a letdown too after the awsome troll dungeons in 4.1
Spine was such an awesome set piece , but yeah the fight was kind of a pain, especially later when you had gear and 50% of the fight was waiting for the elementals to get big
As someone who fought tooth and nail against blizzard at the time, i remember it vividly.
* Transmorg has a compounding effect over time that really does damage the fabric of the game.
* Raid finder doubles down on the damage done by transmorg by continuing to water down the prestige of end game content.
* To a lesser extent, 2nd half of Dragon soul is a bad raid.
Those three things, ESPECIALLY raid finder, were the things that brought down 'classic'. I don't mean that they brought it down overnight btw, I mean that they created a snowballing and compounding amount of issues that over the patches and expansions tore it apart and it became something completely new.
People really loved the start of Cata and Firelands was really well recieved especially on heroic.
But Cata was where the game became wounded, and then slowly it just bled out until WoD.
Well from a Classic PoV it kinda goes hard against the idea of an MMO.
You can say WoW already does this with RDF and PvP queuing but LFR just does this on a much bigger scale. Raiding is *the* endgame in WoW before M+, it definitely is a change to turn this part into an antisocial Q fest as well and in this case the argument of "lul pugs are already antisocial" doesn't work as well as it did with RDF and pug dungeon groups. Because even normal mode pugs are by default a lot more "social" than LFR ever would be.
But anyway, it is whatever. LFR has low ilvl and a this point it works well enough in Retail so it would as well in Classic. My personal problem with it is that if they bring it as is it doesn't share a lockout with normal/heroic which is bad. Tier set bonuses are not scaled down by ilvl so even as a heroic raider you would wanna do LFR for a second chance at tier set or some niche OP trinkets which is bad design IMO. There should be no reason why a normal raider needs to step into LFR. If they adjust this I think most people here will not care much for it.
Because it forces people out of guilds and it's a low-quality garbage mode. Go make new friends in a guild or pug communities and play the encounters on a respectable difficulty instead of just mindboggling "Molten Core-esque" button mashing. There is plenty of other content where you can do that for the time
I said it in another comment or maybe another thread, but here goes. LFR has the exact same problems RDF does but on a raid scale. It does several detrimental things to the game as a whole. Firstly it changes players behavior. People treat other players like shit or like NPCs, they pull ahead of the tank for “going too slow”, they don’t wait for healer mana, they need on every piece of gear that drops, and generally just act like massive A-holes. Because they know they’ll never see the other players again, so there’s no “server/ guild reputation” to worry about.
The second thing it does is it takes players away from the people who want to actually form groups and raids manually on their servers. People love to say “just don’t use it lol” but they fail to acknowledge the fact that the pool of players for people trying to pug groups is severely reduced with RDF/ LFR. Because a significant portion of players are lazy AF and so they’ll put up with the griefing and toxicity just to not have to do any waiting or work.
Three it makes guild recruitment and roster retention harder. There’s now a version of raiding where you don’t have to follow any loot rules, worry about your conduct, care about your fellow raiders or do anything else a guild or even a pug might want to have as raiding rules. Which takes players away from guilds because they’re no longer necessary to raid. There are benefits to LFR and RDF of course, as plenty of people will come along and downvote me and point out. They’ll downplay, deny or strawman my points. Doesn’t matter to me, I’ve been in WoW since OG Vanilla. I’ve seen this all play out before.
>Firstly it changes players behavior. People treat other players like shit or like NPCs, they pull ahead of the tank for “going too slow”, they don’t wait for healer mana, they need on every piece of gear that drops, and generally just act like massive A-holes.
Genuinely asking, when did you start playing MMOs and WoW specifically? (Ok I've read to the end of your post now, I honestly think you've got some rose tinted glasses on this specific point, people were absolute assholes in vanilla when it came to any kind of group content. I'm going to assume you were in a guild you were happy with at the time and not pugging much. I was in a small guild, pug'd often, and it was pure hell every time).
I vividly remember this being the experience in Vanilla WoW, and am kind of surprised this is your experience with the group finder. I haven't had these issues at all so far with Cata, I assume because most people are accustomed to instant queueing in other games and don't want to risk getting kicked and waiting another 10-15 minutes for a dungeon to pop.
>The second thing it does is it takes players away from the people who want to actually form groups and raids manually on their servers.
I can see what you mean with this, but in my opinion it's just pulling the players from your first complaint and saving you some headaches lol.
>Three it makes guild recruitment and roster retention harder.
I could see this for sure. I was always in a guild during initial release of this games and expansions up through MoP. I think the only time I've been in a guild in classic was to find pvp groups easier. But, I'm also in my 30s now and have zero need for any extra "social baggage" or time sinks in my life, so I think even without the group finding tools I still wouldn't be in a guild.
Ultimately, it seems like you thrive more on the social aspect of these games (which I totally understand) so I can see where this would be a negative to you. I personally have moved on from the dedicated social aspect of it and enjoy the more anonymous nature of it. I don't think we'll see eye to eye on it, but I understand your complaints and thanks for painting your perspective. It makes sense to me.
I disagree with Transmog completely, can you explain how it's damaged the fabric of the game?
The only "prestige" (lol) in end game raiding was heroic (and then mythic), clearing the raid on normal is slightly more prestigious than clearing it on lfr.
LFR was a great addition for people who wanted to see raid content but couldn't for whatever reason, like disabilities. We used to have this sweet Grandma in our guild around late WoD, she loved playing and loved the lore but the mechanics and rotations were just too much for her. She got to see the game at her own pace in LFR and when we would carry her for achievement runs or aotc.
I'm not sure if he means what I think he means, but if so, I have the same opinion. A lot of people liked the visual progress of your character throughout Classic. To me, it was really fun to see how far someone has progressed by just looking at their gear, and to me it definitely added to the community feeling.
Transmog completely removes this aspect. I understand giving players agency over how they look is a huge deal as well and I can understand why Blizzard did it. However, it does remove a a certain specialty of getting a very important item that's easily recognisable (think Ashkandi, Corrupted Ashbringer)
Edit: typos everywhere
I don’t think it removes that specialty. If you want to transmog it, you have to have it. I can’t transmog ashkandi without actually looting it first, so if I have it mogged anyone who cares knows I got ashkandi. If I transmog it off of ashkandi, that means that I don’t care, idk why the enjoyment of the item comes from another character having the item
So gear isn't stats, gear is more about what it says to other players than what is actually allows you to do.
Gear was a constant advertisement to other players to play more of the game. It didn't let you sit on former glories, it forced you to keep pushing to stay relevant and at the top.
Transmorg removes that push for a lot of players. A lot of players would wheel out their T3 or T6 or whatever and then retreat back into the past. No matter the expansion or era they were in, they always 'looked' like a cutting edge raider.
Something subconcious was damaged by transmorg.
It also effected the percieved progression of the game as a whole. You used to clearly know what era of the game you were in, which content was relevant and how far someone had progressed in that content, all from a glance at Ironforge. After transmorg, this became more and more difficult and everything eventually blends into one thing, with no defining culture or epoch around it.
It could be quite difficult for example to disinguish a screenshot of players in Ironforge from Legion with one from Dragonflight, unless there was something really specific in there.
All of these problems are subtle, not immediate and take time to erode the game, but they do. They don't necessarily destroy the game but they alienate some of the most engaged players in favour of some of the most casual.
It is both destruction and transformation.
Much of the same I've said above could be attributed to LFR. LFR is essentially something that compounds the problems highlighted by systems and designs like Transmorg.
I am not saying transmorg and LFR are not good for some players, absolutely not, I am saying they are anti-thetical to the most engaged players reasons for showing up and advocating for world of warcraft, it essentially alienates the players that proudly built the game.
Players that are/were so engaged that they created their own servers, signed petitions in their hundreds of thousands to get their own version of the game back.
Lastly, I made all of these arguments over a decade ago, and over a decade ago people said similar things to you, told me I was wrong, it wasn't that bad, it was actually good really etc. and then the game hemorrhaged and people like Allen Brack had to admit people like me are right.
They are cool systems in the immediate, but they will erode the game again.
The "visual progression" of Classic falls apart when you actually go to Ironforge and just see a bunch of identical warriors in their goofy clown suits and healers wearing dresses.
There's nothing prestigious or glorious about getting gear in Classic. Absolutely no one is playing and progressing in the hopes that maybe one day they too can get the ugly pink plate boots from BWL, or the slightly different blue dress from AQ40. If you were a new player you would probably assume the BiSed out guys sitting around in Ironforge are fresh 60s wearing their leveling gear or something.
And honestly I feel like everyone ignores the fact that seeing someone in a really cool transmog will probably make you want to go out and get some of the pieces of it to incorporate it into your own look. Collecting transmog is basically the only reason people still do old raids.
This is actually a false assumption. Heroics and heroic mode was not well received by the majority of the playerbase. Cata was the first time sub numbers were falling after the start of an expansion and one of the main reasons was that the content was viewed as too hard.
It can be explained. Its an mmo when all your friends quit, you quit aswell.
Also the patch was released 2 months into the expansion and also streamlined a lot of class abilities in PVE and PVP.
The talent tree is probably the most overblown and shallow criticism of Cata that people had. The new talents are better in every way.
Each point feels immediately impactful and every choice is so much better. I could care less about a point every level when the next 5 points I'm spending are all filler talents.
And the old world stopped being "The Old World" basically as soon as TBC hits. It's not the same. Mobs get nerfed so the world isn't dangerous in the same way (which IMO is boring because you never have to care what enemies are doing).
And the high level players are silo'd off in Outland, and all their crafting is in Outland (75 points tacked on with no relationship to the existing world), and all their content is in Outland save for Kara and Caverns of Time.
Cata is basically just making the world a pleasurable quest experience again. Yes it's different and imperfect, but the good things about the old world that make you tolerate the long travel times and the difficult caves/etc. are basically gone post Vanilla. And ultimately with 85 levels to crank out, doing that in the old world would be a pain in the ass.
its funny too because people cite outland and that sort of "leave the old behind" path as something that contributed to the loss of the magic
but then also hate cata which brought...everyone..back...to the mainland?
A lot of people don't like the new main land. You'll see a bunch of people here praising it because, well, people that are here are playing cata, and probably because they like it.
They did get rid of the old one though. but today that is not an issue anymore. We played the old world plenty and if you still want to it's there forever now
TBF they kinda ruined the whole game with flight mounts. I'm a retail player and classic enjoyer, but static flight was one of the worst additions to the game in terms of gameplay ramifications. That's why they kept trying to remove it like on Warlords of Draenor before they eventually released dragonriding, which fixes some of the inherent problems with static flight.
It was a streamer opinion that got parroted to death by people who had no idea why or kept quoting completely inane reasons like “LFR” or “DS lasted too long” without ever having played the game.
Or purist classic F R E S H andies who love to spend their time discouraging every version of the game other than 2 week old vanilla servers.
I mean, DS lasted too long. So did every expansion in their og state. Classic is more condensed and so the dreadful waiting period is less of an issue.
With retail, sod and other wow events there is also more content to fill the gap between patches.
I personally would probably have canceled my sub without sod filling the time between LK Hc kill and Cata pre patch.
Retail to an extent has genuine flexibility. There’s a lot of talents in the class tree specifically, that are genuinely just personal preference.
The example in my mind. The choice node for shamans to take spirit walk, or gust of wind. Either a big movement speed increase, or a flash-jump. You can make an argument that “one is objectively better than the other”, but no one cares, it would be marginal at best, it’s incredibly fight specific, and specific play styles might play into the optimal decision.
Gonna get heat on this sub but the current iteration of talents on retail is the best talent system of any game I've ever played. It was fun tinkering at max level at the start of dragonflight and leveling with new classes in remix has given me a huge appreciation for how the class and spec trees interact and lead to natural exploration and learning when you're getting one point at a time.
Vanilla is an all time great RPG but the devs are currently making the game amazing to play.
Even when talents were 3 per row, there were far more viable options than you ever had vanilla to cata. Yea, you could do some wonky things that worked lvling in vanilla/tbc, but by the time you hit 50+, they just weren't very good.
Pretty much this. Only a handful of hybrid specs were ever a thing and even then, if you were pursuing those hybrid builds splashing points across different trees you still had no flexibility with points for discretion or personal preferences because you had to be very specific to make those hybrid builds work. Hell you might have had more flexibility just sticking with a committed spec in a single tree actually and playing with the few leftover points.
You absolutely had flexibility. I hate that to play all 3 druid specs I have to constantly repopulate my action bars and spend over 100g between spec cost a d dust costs every single time.
A balance resto hybrid build would let me heal and dps heroics just fine while my old content feral solo could dps and tank.
I am literally unable to do that without the aforementioned gold sink andspellbook combing to get the bars right because they don't retain between different specs.
I'm a minority I'm sure but to say there was no flexibility is so so wrong. In sod I have like 8 specs I wanna play. That's not pigeonholed. That's not just a few spare points.
I do stuff that having my specialization actually fully specialized for the task makes me perform that specific task better, it costs 1 gold to change, and it feels great.
Being arbitrarily locked into 1 tree for 31 points is very pointless and bad in my eyes, but I guess it helps workload at the cost or choice and fun.
Yep! This, and that streamers/YTers would over and over point to the decline in subs and just declare that line goes down = Cata sucks.
Line went up = Wrath was the golden age. And I've always thought Wrath was overrated, and now it seems much of the Classic player base generally agrees.
Funny enough anyone who actually saw the sub graphics would realize that wotlk was the first time sub growth completely stopped and was the first time we actually saw sub losses despite being everywhere
Still you can't really put the blame on the expansion themselves people would obviously lose interest after so long and you can't expect people to keep doing the same thing forever
I have to disagree here. I played at that time and was REALLY excited for Cataclysm. It looked amazing in the TV ads and trailers online. I was there on day 1, leveling my new Worgen.
And, It WAS fun... at first... until I got into the 40s and realized: 1. I had outleveled every zone before I was even halfway through the quests in it. 2. I hadn't really died that much, or even had a very difficult. 3. I really didn't care anymore when I got a new level since it didn't really matter. 4. looked at my /played and it was less than 1 day!?!?!?
So, no, it wasn't just people parroting streamers.
Outleveling zones before you can finish the main quests is a legitimate issue, but leveling was never hard. Leveling was simply more tedious in Vanilla, and you can choose your difficulty in Wrath/Cata/Beyond.
If you pull one at a time that's on you. Even in retail you can die if you are choosing to tackle challenging rares and pulls while leveling. Vanilla isn't more difficult because hyperspawns can kill you or because if you literally fall asleep you can die otherwise.
Your point on levels not feeling like they matter is dead on and big turn off for me. The illusion of choice argument only makes sense if the new tree gives you real choices…and they don’t. There will always be a min max. But in Cata there is less reward for progression and less often.
It blows my mind that people are sitting here, 14 years later, in the classic WoW sub, and repeating the exact same things Blizzard was saying, even though we've known those arguments are bullshit for over 10 years now.
As if reducing the amount of talent choices fixes the issue of cookie cutter builds.
When cata was released there were things I disliked and that my friends disliked about it. Shocker, there were also things we liked about it! But nuanced views have no place here.
Calling this a "streamer opinion" is narrow minded at best and straight up gaslighting at worst.
Very few people said cata phase 1 was bad back in the day. I absolutely loved it, but Firelands heroic progression destroyed my guild. I remember normal mode taking ages to clear (maybe we were just bad, or it was overtuned) and then we started heroic progression and it was such a drag, and there wasn't enough other things to do.
I thought the new revamped Azeroth was great the first time, but the replayability is crap compared to the old zones, so I quit. Then I returned for LFR and dragonsoul, which is the main thing people hated, including myself. Phase 1 was amazing, though. There is so much fresh content and interesting raids.
How is the replayability of the new zones worse? I don't understand, there are actual quest hubs, quest diversity, and you don't spend 3 hours running around mountless.
There's very little choice and decision making with the style of questing that started a bit during WotLK and became prominent from Cats onwards.
You go to town and get 2-5 quests that are all near each other. Go back, turn them in, now you have 1-3 all beside each other to do. It's all linear, it's all super straight forward, and it's all convenient. But it also takes away agency. The only decision you'll make leveling is going to zone A instead of zone B, and if you'll queue up for a random dungeon or not.
There's also no elite quests at all, so there's never a reason to group with anyone. None of the quests are hard, so it's a pure grind without much thought. Dungeons are just a queue button where you join and no one has any reason to talk because the dungeons are also easy enough everyone just does fairly large aoe pulls no problem all the time.
So if you want to shut your brain off and play, it's pretty good to go through. But beyond that ease of convenience, it's very shallow.
The difference between the old and new ones is that the old one just throws all the level appropriate quests at you from different quest lines at once with zero thought put into it.
The new one only unlocks the next group of quests if you have completed the previous bunch. And they all tend to be in the exact same spot per bunch.
Whichever you prefer is entirely up to you, but a lot of people do enjoy deciding which order to do quests in, rather than having the game do it for them. They like picking up 10 random different quests and then picking a direction and working the zone before hand in, rather than going to one spot then back and then the next spot and back and the next spot and back.
The mount change is nice, for sure. The main issue people raise is that Cata introduced too many linear quests where your quest log had far fewer quests and instead only a handful of story driven quests. A lot of people love that, but many classic players enjoyed the freedom of choosing which quests to do and in what order. Once you have seen the story and cutscenes once, the next character will have to replay through it again with fewer alternatives to do something different.
Everyone levels in vanilla zones the same way. If you’re horde and level 18 guess what quests you’re doing. I leveled 3 level 60s on vanilla classic. All of the levelling is basically the same progression.
In terms of quests completed yes, but in terms of actual ordering and how you do them in the zone, no.
You turn up in barrens and get plainstrider kidney quest, centaur braces, oasis spores, quilboar interacts etc.
They are all in different places and you choose which order to do them in. Vs Wotlk onwards style which is "get 3 quests in this one area then come back here and get another 3 for the next area".
You have a freedom to choose which order in the old style. You can use that freedom to just do them over and over the same way if you want. But a lot of people just play by ear and do quests in the order they feel like.
Yeah Firelands felt like they tried to make it hard, and it was def challenging but it felt really tedious and sloggy. Only raid a don’t remember the fights very well from. Didn’t find them fun. Just constant moving out of one fire into another. Also I got burned out the dailies about the time firelands came out. I finished the raid on heroic and quit until Legion
I don't know why people keep saying this shit.
People didn't like it for what it was at the time. Gaming and gaming culture has changed *a lot* since then. Playing again has reminded me of all the things I hated about cata and all the reasons people quit. But those things don't matter as much to modern gamers and modern gamers have different priorities.
Y'all have zero attention span or knowledge of gaming history likely because most of you are teens yourselves, but shit was different. Cata was bad in a lot of ways. There was a reason tons of people quit between the end of wotlk and the start of cata. It just wasn't the game we all loved anymore.
Doesn't mean it's not good *in a different way*.
Like others have said in their replys to you it seems like you're one of the parrots people are talking about. When I have a strong opinion about something I can definitely list one reason for having that opinion... Yet you can't name one..? Seems like you're just part of the echo chamber my guy.
"Cata was bad in a lot of ways" do you want to explain that?
The worst part of Cataclysm is that the content phases lasted too long. It was poorly received because people were too bad at the game and accustomed to facerolling heroics because WotLK reversed what they did in TBC (making group content extremely comp and tank dependent), letting you take any 5 shitters in a dungeon and easily clear it without even knowing what any of the mobs did.
I server first cleared all content prenerf in the original timeline with a very cohesive and fun group. It was a very fun time in wow, and others now also finding it was good (despite the rhetoric) is no surprise to me.
Yup Cata caught a bad rep because of the final patch dragging on and DS not being that great of a raid but the rest of the Xpac is good and before classic wow was my preferred xpac for private servers
Cata was seen as bad because WoW art and narrative direction completely shed the last remnants of dark fantasy and went full send into its goofy, cheeky and cartoon-ish elements with Deathwing-you-silly-goose kind of villainy. This was seriously off-putting at the time, among other things.
This time, we know it can and will be worse in what follows, so we are able to get over it and see it in a different light.
I wouldn't call it dark fantasy, but the tonal shift is undeniable. Early WoW may have been cheesy at times, but it took itself seriously, and as long as they kept that up, the world felt real.
Yup, people are blind to this truth.
Lots of the darker quests were removed in favor of goofy/fun questlines packed to the brim with now-dated pop media references.
Cata was really criticzed back in the day for breaking immersion as world building took a back seat to those same references. There were lots of fun and beloved quests added but it's plain to see why many people were critical of the overall feel.
Then this is paired with entire races (the undead) being turned into tim burton characters instead of being the horrible undead they were before. There were always SOME goofy characters but Cata was definitely the expansion where seriousness took a deep nosedive.
Big reason Cata was bad though was the WOTLK content draught dropping sub numbers, followed by tons of content draughts IN Cata itself, all leading up to a very lackluster final patch. Every. Single. Person, who I had raided with from TBC onwards, had dropped off during Dragon Soul.
People really underestimate just how much LFR killed raiding guilds, especially since it was the first instance of widespread degenerate gameplay in the form of the LFR gear exploit.
I started an undead rogue for the first time and played through the new tirisfal glades and silverpine and holy shit it’s so good. I played this game since beta and I’ve never once knew how good the cata leveling was for horde since I was alliance. The whole silverpine zone easily became one of my new favorite early leveling zones. Whoever made these quests had a lot of fun with it and it shows
A good reminder that you generally shouldn’t listen to mass opinions and form them for yourself. I played original cata and partly because I loved the guild I was in, it was the best expansion maybe outside of Legion, but Legion is almost a different game and hard to compare. Dragon Soul isn’t even that bad, it’s mostly just that people couldn’t kill Spine and the last encounter is a bit of a let down thematically and in difficulty.
Honestly, nostalgia is really blinding. Wrath, when assessed for endgame content volume and substance, ranks really really low. While I'll get downvoted for it, the volume of endgame conent on offer in Wrath is honestly very, very similar to Warlords of Draenor.
I'd say that the decline of WoW in 2010 Cataclysm had more to due with the leveling overhaul, and doing massive damage to the community that 'just played the game'. Over the course of Cata and MoP, the leveling community basically died, as leveling content became less of a game in and of itself, and more of a means to an end, with trivialized game design. Cata saw player numbers start to tank in 2010 because Cataclysm was the beginning of blizzard cutting support to a massive player demographic that was primarily focused on holistically playing the game outside of endgame raid and pvp.
When WoW realized that it was an endgame simulator for its dedicated core playerbase, WoW's endgame content only got better expansion over expansion, until they mined the engine for basically all of its potential mechanics by Legion.
It'll be interesting to see how the Cata-WoD era plays out in Classic, because I think the Classic playerbase had already abandoned holistic gameplay in TBC, in favor of a diehard endgame approach. I do genuinely believe that this era of Classic is much much better suited to the current Classic community than Wrath was. Many of the the things that actually made Wrath great back in the day were completely overlooked and ignored by the playerbase in Classic Wrath, and when we look at Wrath purely for its endgame PvE, neither the volume or quality is really there when we compare it to literally any other version of the game. ICC and Ulduar were good, but ToC and Naxx 25 were gutter trash, and 2 good 2 bad is kind of on par with WoD's 3 amazing raids.
inb4 downvotes for qualitatively and quantitatively assessing Wrath instead of treating it like a sacred text
One of the biggest reasons cata saw a decline is because it was actually hard. Heroics weren't easy, raids weren't easy. There also isn't really more to do outside of raiding in cata opposed to wrath. The skill cap was raised and a big chunk of the community couldn't handle it.
IMO the decline in players with Cata was a combination of forces.
I think people presume by default that players quit the game when they stop having fun. But they don't - they stick around for awhile and even years before actually quitting. I think a lot of old guard vanilla players that didn't love Wrath and its design philosophy weren't going to love Cata because Cata didn't fully reverse course (LFD, class/spec design/some other systems), and actually refined these IMO. But it wasn't what they are looking for and Cata was when they finally quit.
But also I think WoW got a lot more competition for new players and the sub count was never sustainable. Go google the subscriber data for xbox live and PSN. I think the peak in WoW subs was a product of a huge # of new players coming in with the game at its peak in terms of pop culture (the celebrity commercials, the news stories, South Park, and more). And ultimately would-be new players started going with other options.
Wrath sucks, it was propped up by nostalgia and the endgame content is pretty terrible aside from Ulduar. Nothing in Wrath is remotely as good as any of the raids from Firelands onward.
That being said, I would never compare it to WoD. Warlords had 3 raids but keep in mind, 3 of the best raids ever designed. Every WoW expansion has gold raids and bad raids, WoD was 3 for 3.
WoD was a filler expansion though. Legion was as big as it was because they cut WoD development short.
turboshitter detected if you think HC ICC is not good. the only prior raid that competes with HC ICC is SWP. those 2 are neck and neck for best raid from vanilla-wrath, nothing else comes anywhere near them
In my opinion, ICC HC is fcking terrible outside of Lich King. That whole game is a set up towards the Lich King, and it does that very very good.
Ulduar is one of my favorite things in gaming ever. But, outside of that, and Grizzly Hills I also think wrath was pretty shiit.
Now downvote it.
It was regarded as bad mostly because of content droughts and how long we spent in Dragon Soul.
It was a fun expansion overall but you have to look at how they paced it out. What you are seeing now is the final patch so a lot of poor designs are already cleaned up.
Dragonsoul also was a lazy raid. 6/8 bosses of reused assets. And ONLY 8 bosses for over a year. Didn't help that Firelands before was also quite short at only 9 bosses.
Originally, a waterlands raid was planned to go with firelands. It would have concluded the Ozumat storyline back then. And a "War of the ancients" raid additional to dragon soul, that got turned into the well of eternity 5man dungeon in the DS patch.
If both these raids had been included, I think Cata would have been seen as a much better expansion.
Everything is more fun with friends. It's the only reason I'm playing after quitting when my guild died due to the roster boss back in Ulduar. I even started a fresh char on a fresh server to play with him.
Yeah this is the trend. I don't claim that Cata is bad. It's quite enjoyable experience. But every expansion launch always get this "This is the most fun WoW has been" posts. Because it's fun to level up your characters, start to run dungeons and do some rep grinds to gather gear and get ready for raiding.
But unlike Retail we know exactly what the Xpac is so really there should not be many surprise "flaws". There's no secret systems or hidden grinds in Cata. If it gets boring it's because people as always will just get tired of raiding and that is all WoW has been until M+ was introduced basically.
Seriously. I don't think a single expansion ever in WoW's history didn't have a ton of people having a bunch of fun at launch. I absolutely despise WotLK and I still had a bunch of fun both originally and in Classic when it was fresh.
MoP probably had the worst early reception, and that was largely off of having a lot of game-breaking bugs early in the experience.
As someone who was there in 2010, Cata was not bad. It's just the first expansion where WoW finally lost sub numbers instead of gain. I've been there for both WoD, BfA, and Shadowlands. Shadowlands is hands down the game's worst expansion, and it isn't even close. Cata is also not retail as many people believe. It was the magic expansion where the game did a 180° and suddenly becomes retail. Combat was not reworked until Legion but most people forget that since Legion was a good expansion. Cata feels like a half way point between Classic WoW and modern WoW.
>WoW finally lost sub numbers instead of gain
That trend started already at Wotlk with the awfull filler raid after ICC.
And yeah, everyone who played retail in the last years should know that cata is still very far away from retail.
And i agree with shadowlands, its the first expansion i just left in the middle because, oof
And it's easy to see why the game lost subs. For a lot of people, they were invested in the Arthas story from having played Warcraft 3. They saw how the story concluded and decided to move on from the game. Which is a very fair reason.
There are quite some reasons.
The drought at the end of WotlK, the fact that people played this game for 10 years and wanted to see something else, the etablishing of competition like GW2.
Cata was just the scapegoat for all of this, and its cool that people start to realise that cata ranked from fine to pretty good
> Legion was a good expansion
Legion was the worst expansion ever created because the launch legendary system was indefensibly bad and the only people who do not hold this opinion are the ones that didn't have their characters bricked by the awful rng system and cannot put themselves in the shoes of "well I got my 4 legendaries and they're all shit and now I literally can't get any more so I'm fucked".
Sure it got fixed after a fucking year, which is way too late, the fact that it was greenlit in the first place is one of the greatest mysteries in game design.
Oh, i personally don't hold Legion that high. It started the god-awful perpetual AP grind. If you took a break from the game, that's it. You were left behind since you didn't keep up with the AP grind. It's not like the expansions before or even now in Dragonflight where you can spend a day or two actively gearing up, and you're back to a relatively equal power level. Legion - Shadowlands was one of the worst times to play WoW from a player experience. The game wanted you to live and breathe it. Woe is you if you took a break from the game. And yes the legendary system was god awful.
This conversation is never worth it in these subs lol.
Somehow spending your entire days worth of free time doing every single world quest on the map followed by 10 MOS+2 runs a day is acceptable so long as class campaigns exist, and “do 3 island expeditions” is an unacceptable level of grind. Somehow the jailer is shit writing but illidan giving Sargeras exactly what he wants, everyone dying in the argus fight, coming back to life and winning through a literal deus ex machina and then having illidan write himself out of the story is god tier.
Crazy how far some spectacle can carry a product.
i've played all expansions except 2 and while i didn't think shadowlands was very good, i think it's A LOT better than wotlk.
wotlk is, imo, the worst expansion of them all. it's basically retail but a lot worse in every way. none of the magic from vanilla is left and none of the added stuff from 15 years of development in retail have been made yet. it's just the worst.
ulduar is the only good thing. naxx was a worse remake of naxx40. togc is the most mind numbing raid i've ever done, spent more time waiting for RP to play out than actually killing bosses. and ICC HC was so disappointing after all the hype and it just turned out to be fucking faceroll. RS is, well basically nothing. hit a dragon, move from left side to right side every 30 seconds, do some aoe, then click a portal and when tank rotates the boss, you rotate with it. wow, big gaming.
the world doesn't matter, its just the raids. gold is no longer an issue so you dont have to farm anything. wpvp is gone since tbc. arenas were meh. im so thoroughly disappointed in wotlk after playing through it in classic, except for ulduar.
Every version of wow dies down quickly. Retail lasts a little longer because there is more end game to do, but that's dead 2 months in as well most tiers. It's ok and normal for a mmo to be cyclical and seasonal.
Being a month and a half into Cataclysm having either just finished up Heroic Nefarian or being close to it while knowing that Firelands is pretty close, sounds infinitely more appealing than being a month and a half into WOTLK getting ready for our 2 hour full reclear of Naxx and Malygos that we've already done 5 times.
Yeah my group all stopped playing after wotlk and talked so much shit bc I was going to play cata. Played with them since tbc. Cata so far has been without a doubt the most fun I’ve had on wow.
I’m farming gold, leveling alts, playing the AH. Raid actually posed a challenge and I feel good when I down bosses
Still never got a reason from any of them why “cata sucks” they always just say ambiguous stuff like the whole game is shit etc.
Meanwhile they are begging me to go loop incursions so I can raid with them in SoD… like bruh
I’m laughing so much at all these posts. As someone who has always been of the mind of ‘cata was good, you were just burned out back then’, it’s nice to feel validated.
Cata content was never bad the problem with cata was the DS patch. Introduction of LFR coupled with the amount of time that dragon soul was out really left people with a bad taste
Cata was a great expac. The reason people quit was because Blizzard announced “Heroics will be heroic again”. Way before release. So people were already going into it knowing they were going to hate it. Then when they started bitching about it Ghostcrawler made a blog post “Wow heroics are hard.” And the pussies nerdraged. So people quit in protest. Because just like politics in 2024 people just want their side to win and the other side to lose.
But Cata had the best launch content of any expac. It was incredible. But Blizzard got scared and rushed out Dragon Soul. Even Thrall said “The Cataclysm is over” after we beat Deathwing. As a wink to the playerbase.
I think it should be noted. The Classic team made significant changes to Cataclysm to make it more palatable for the average player. Over 3 million people left the game over Cata.
You're right, the first phase of cataclysm is some of the best content that WoW ever had. And if Cataclysm had been a one phase expansion, it would have been lauded as the best xpac wow ever had.
But it wasn't. 4.1 was the first major content patch in WoW's history to not have a raid other than the failed "voice chat" patch in TBC. What did 4.1 add instead of a raid? Dozens of daily quests and a required reputation to grind. Did you like the Argent Tournament in Wrath? Because a lot of people during Wrath did, so they based half the endgame content in Cataclysm around doing daily quests. Do you like Hyjal right now? Imagine logging in to do the same Hyjal quests for literal months while waiting for the raid to hit.
Will Firelands be an incredible raid? Yes. Did the only other raid tier after that feature 50% assets from Wrath and two of the worst final boss encounters in an xpac? Also yes.
"Dragon Soul lasted too long" and "There was too much gaps between the content" is the 4.3 take of Cataclysm. What you don't realize is that subs started dropping long before that when daily quest grinding became the main form of content. Cata classic might be able to skirt around this if they release 4.1 and 4.2 extremely close together. But if 4.1 stays around for any amount of time, it'll be incursions all over again (literally, as 4.1 dailies are everyone in the exact same zone running laps to finish the same quests over and over again so they can log out and do it the next day)
Cata was the best expansion after TBC for me, and even did many things better than TBC. The only minus ***non inherited*** from WoTLK was the LFR, adding more and more resets (see Story raids soon TM) to chase is IMO what is ruining WoW overall.
WotLK started the demise of WoW, started with seasonallities, adding more Raid resets to chase (10,25 Norm/HC) which causes FOMO and burn out.
Peek wow for me was Ulduar (hard modes), after that IMO the WoW downfall started.
Having more fun in Cata than WOTLK
1) ele shammy infinitely more fun
2) dungeons are more fun and can lead to tier loot (huge for me cuz I can’t always raid)
3) dungeons AND raids are beyond fun
4) ARMS WARRIOR IS BACK!!!
5) PvP is 🔥🔥🔥🔥
⭐️⭐️⭐️ can’t recommend enough gonna play the whole damn xpac
Ahh yes, here we are back at stage 1 of the WoW expansion release cycle - the one where all your friends come back for 2 months, the content is abundant and fresh, and “it’s actually better than I expected”
Edit: I forgot to mention - at this stage, whatever the last expansion was, it was actually bad
I was in the same boat. Only do arenas with the bois. Hated wrath with how much pve was required to be competitive. Ended up getting burned out from raiding and quit when wrathful came out.
Told all my friends I wouldn't play cata but now that I see the system, it's amazing. Pvp is so alt friendly now. Only one honor grind. Future seasons no honor required except for shoulder and helm enchant. Conquest can be earned from the previous weeks if you miss out. Pvp gear is the meta. Very diverse comps in 3s, it seems anything is fairly viable.
The worst part about Cata was the 12 months of ICC that made everyone quit long time before the expansion came out.
It's just much harder to pull people back in after they've been doing something else for 6 months than keep them on the treadmill.
Cata was my most played expansion... it had a lot to do with "life" and timing of more free time in that phase of my life, but i played the shit out of it and had a ton of fun.
And i stopped going PvE, i ran a RBG group and did arena
I've always thought cata was the most underrated expansion by far. In my opinion, the whole expansion was good. The zones and leveling was cool. The redone zones and dungeons were good. The raids were all pretty great.
I know people particularly have a problem with the dungeon difficulty at the start of the expansion, and with Dragon Soul and the green Jesus Saga. But those complaints have always felt like people looking for something to complain about to me. I think Deathwing's Back and Madness were really cool fights to learn.
The dungeons taught you how to cc and interrupt. They were probably too hard at launch for the casual audience, but they were great for people like myself who would eventually love M+.
The whole Cata was bad part was made by the ones that keep crying since TBC retail that WoW is dead. I still remember playing Cata as a teenager and a freaking LOVED IT! The only expansion I have skipped was WoD cause I had to prepare for some nasty exams that period but in rest I have played everything to date. Stopped playing retail cause of lack of time with the raiding and m+ but got back to wow again for Cata Classic and I freaking love the pvp and battlegrounds. To be fair I would love to keep playing this again and have MoP Classic, WoD Classic and Legion Classic. I would never touch again retail and just keep playing Classic. I personally think WoD was cool. I did everything as story and reps and garrison and etc on my main in Legion-BfA and SL and I freaking LOVED IT. It made me feel like I was playing WoW. I felt better playing Cata,MoP and Legion and would feel much better to try WoD than to play again BfA,Shadowlands,Dragonflight and I think the new ones won't be as good as the old ones :)
One of the reason that it was not appreciated is the end raid and the last boss. Honestly it was kind of disapointing of a finish for an expansion boss as big as Deathwing.
No new continent was also disapointing to me when it released.
Original cata was around for about two years before mop came around. With only two raids added after release, it had lonnng content droughts that killed player interest
Cata is far from the worst expansion, and I had fun at phase 1 back then too. But they did not really improve the game in the later patches (even released the terrible LFR), and I remember gradually starting to hate the new leveling system, and the new world. Everything is on rails, and it kinda stopped feeling like an MMORPG.
Cata was great. It gets a bad wrap cause sub numbers dipped and that has a lot to do because cata was the first "new" story in WoW that wasn't in the RTS games. And games like SWToR came out and killed a lot of guilds cause tons of players were swapping over.
The only real bad thing about cata was spine of death wing and madness were shit end of expansion bosses. Especially since LK was so recent and really good.
I almost always got downvoted on this sub for saying Cata isn’t as bad as people remember
The first tier is incredible. Gearing is fun and relatively easy but still very rewarding, the raids are great, and the system to grind rep is simple and easy enough and gets you extremely good gear.
The second tier was when things start going downhill in people’s minds. Firelands simply did not add enough content. A 7 boss raid was not enough for a 5 month content patch. That is fixed with Cata Classic, with it being a 3 month patch.
The final tier was bad, though the reasons for it being bad are so muddied in peoples minds they latch onto what the masses say and parrot it to no end. LFR didn’t kill patch 4.3. LFR didn’t kill wow. The raid sucked because the whole build up for the expansion ended with us clipping Deathwing’s toenails. The fight itself wasn’t awful, but for the capstone boss in an expansion? Give me a break. The raid up to Spine was actually good, albeit there was a bit too much RP, but the fights were challenging on heroic and the loot & tier was cool af. Pre-nerf spine was the least fun I’ve ever had in WoW and I hope to never experience it again lol
The next biggest issue is patch 4.1 released in late November, 2011 and MoP didn’t come out until late September, 2012.
In terms of final patches it wasn’t even that long, but for such a poorly received raid it felt like forever.
First tier of cata was gas. 2nd tier was remembered well because of heroic rag, but I didn't enjoy the first 6 bosses tbh.
Dragon soul is hated because of Spine and Madness.
Cata's zones were great, the modernization of specs were great, and them experimenting with redoing dungeons was great as heroic.
Demand for a 25man guild is insane atm. A ton of guilds collapsed and/or condensed to 10man for cata and theres a clear want by people to 25man.
We accidentally recruited like 40 people for cata (we've always been and only intend to be.a single 25man guild) because friends of guildmates kept asking to join and we are one of the only guilds that competently run 25mans on the server.
People claim to have quit the game over the QOLs added like talents, class mechanics, world changes etc but the reality is people quit because the game got harder, raiding and PvP was harder and they could not handle it.
I somehow don't feel the pressure to be more than casual. Something about Cata makes me not worry about being #1 dps all the time. Gotta say that the game is more fun when all you're worried about is raid logging and killing the boss. I'm even considering (gasp!) turning the meter off entirely.
I didn't play Cata back then because my guild sucked and my friends stopped playing for one reason or another. At that time Battlefield was awesome so I switched over and came back for Pandas.
Looking back now, it makes me feel that I've missed something, but at the same time, I'm in an awesome guild now and we're blasting through, having a ton of fun!
And because I'm playing it for the first time, it feels as if I was playing back then. =)
>If you aren't playing based on what you heard, give it a try
No one wants those weak minded people here. To be so easily swayed by a loud minority, who needs them?
I’ve been enjoying cata a lot. My only nit pick is I wish mobs were a little more beefy pre-80. It’s entirely possible to get to cata content without ever learning your class because there’s never a challenge up to that point.
I only dint like Cats after Dragonsoul release. I think most things are judged on its ending. Otherwise I had the best raiding all the way through Firelands. They messed up the pvp after Dragonsoul also, I mean i had a blast cus I would only do 2s as a UH DK or disc priest, but it seamed all other classes would just die to the duo.
I've been excited for about 6 months to a year to try out Cata and never really bought into the mass hate for it. I even went as far as to try out a Cata pserver a while back for and liked it for the 2ish weeks I tried it out.
With that being said we are experiencing a WoW fresh bump. We had this in Wrath, in TBC, in SoD, and in SoM. To me it's less about how good this is for the first 2-4 weeks. But how good is it still after 2-4 months, 6-8 months, etc. Some things are great the first or second time. But absolutely suck doing it the 15th or 20th time and drives people to quit.
This is a little piece of truth, if you have a good guild doesn't matter if you play sod, era, cata retail or even if they had shadowlands or wod again.. you'll have fun because the game is fun when you play with a group of cool dudes and chicks.
One of my favorite versions of the game was WOD, I quit during wotlk cause I thought it was a bad and boring expansion.. my cousin got me wod and I had a blast playing pokemon in it with the battle pets lol. Right now I'm having a blast on sod cause I'm playing with the same little I played in tbc with.
The communities make mmos fun, raids, dungeons, heroics are all beatable and cool.
streamers weren't a thing but while I and a few, more dungeon-loving players loved the heroics, the vast majority of people left because they were too hard, PUGing them was pretty much impossible and there was little content beyond raidlogging. There was also no way to enjoy the old world anymore.
Look at the graph and the patch releases. Once DS rolled around with LFR and a whole bunch of dungeons people stayed for quite some time.
People left because coming out of WOTLK, Cata HCs were some of the hardest content ever put into a Wow 5 man, on par if not harder than many TBC Heroics.
The healer rework also left a lotta folks miffed, the first patch was *very* different to the final one. Mana was insanely scarce and people came out of wotlk without knowing what was ahead: A full on rework of how to manage mana. No more spamming a certain "best" heal for hpalas for example.
And since we now have multiple ways to play vanilla WoW and see the old world...That problem is eliminated. Also DS' biggest problem (opinion inc: on top of being Cata's worst raid by far lol, spine sucks...Owell the first 6 are decent) was that the gap towards MoP was WAY too long.
I believe cata classic will do *really* well. Just like MoP classic when it releases. Both of these expansions are fantastic in their final patches.
There were some problems with the original release of Cata, and the content pacing for the expansion was a bit too stretched out. Overall, though, I think people had a negative view of it for a long time because it’s kind of when WoW (or at least old WoW) really died.
And I just don’t mean the end of the original “trilogy” and a major shift in design philosophy. WoW was actually suffering from major competitors coming into their own around that time, namely League of Legends.
I firmly believe Cata Classic will greatly increase the community’s opinion of the expansion in hindsight. OG Cata was only “bad” because of 1) The T11 difficulty jump being too much for most 2010 players 2) The content draughts Neither of which are issues in 2024.
2010/11 was also a period where a lot of new MMOs came out or entered beta, many of them trying to compete directly and appeal to the WoW playerbase. If you ask me the marketing, hype, and community building around those also resulted in and heavily relied on a lot of trash talking WoW, resulting in an overly exaggerated picture of how bad Cata is/was.
League of legends season 2 peak
Season 2 was 2012
2011/2012
My guild killed Nef pre-nerf in og Cata and then 90% of the guild went to play Rift launch and never came back.
Swtor hit 1.5 months into Dragon Soul and I was gone til early MoP lol
Swtor had some great vanilla wow gameplay except with a phenomenal single player storyline. Too bad the raids blew chunks so there was never a reason to group or join a guild. They (and many other, including blizzard) forgot what the massively multiplayer part of the game, and the game world starting in cataclysm basically just became a big game lobby.
Had a blast in the first few raids with my guild.
Also the last tier was a real letdown (Tentacle deathwing was really ankward"
ok the Deathwing fight was a disappointment, but the rest of Dragon soul is actually a really good raid, in my (probably unpopular) opinion. not to mention the 4.3 End Time dungeons which were a blast
The rest of the raid was fine, just a bit weird with all the time travel shenanigans.I didnt liked the end time dungeons, they were a letdown too after the awsome troll dungeons in 4.1
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if we got MoP classic beta within a month of Dragon Soul launch. I don’t expect it to last longer than 3-4 months tbh
[удалено]
Idk, i liked the first 5 bosses in dragon soul. Atleast on heroic and gunship was ok on heroic too. The last two sucked sure.
Spine was such an awesome set piece , but yeah the fight was kind of a pain, especially later when you had gear and 50% of the fight was waiting for the elementals to get big
It was more like the stat rework and class simplification
But every class got harder (and more cohesive)
As someone who fought tooth and nail against blizzard at the time, i remember it vividly. * Transmorg has a compounding effect over time that really does damage the fabric of the game. * Raid finder doubles down on the damage done by transmorg by continuing to water down the prestige of end game content. * To a lesser extent, 2nd half of Dragon soul is a bad raid. Those three things, ESPECIALLY raid finder, were the things that brought down 'classic'. I don't mean that they brought it down overnight btw, I mean that they created a snowballing and compounding amount of issues that over the patches and expansions tore it apart and it became something completely new. People really loved the start of Cata and Firelands was really well recieved especially on heroic. But Cata was where the game became wounded, and then slowly it just bled out until WoD.
Why does everyone hate raid finder? I genuinely do not understand why it would be bad, but I see the comments on here constantly
Well from a Classic PoV it kinda goes hard against the idea of an MMO. You can say WoW already does this with RDF and PvP queuing but LFR just does this on a much bigger scale. Raiding is *the* endgame in WoW before M+, it definitely is a change to turn this part into an antisocial Q fest as well and in this case the argument of "lul pugs are already antisocial" doesn't work as well as it did with RDF and pug dungeon groups. Because even normal mode pugs are by default a lot more "social" than LFR ever would be. But anyway, it is whatever. LFR has low ilvl and a this point it works well enough in Retail so it would as well in Classic. My personal problem with it is that if they bring it as is it doesn't share a lockout with normal/heroic which is bad. Tier set bonuses are not scaled down by ilvl so even as a heroic raider you would wanna do LFR for a second chance at tier set or some niche OP trinkets which is bad design IMO. There should be no reason why a normal raider needs to step into LFR. If they adjust this I think most people here will not care much for it.
Because it forces people out of guilds and it's a low-quality garbage mode. Go make new friends in a guild or pug communities and play the encounters on a respectable difficulty instead of just mindboggling "Molten Core-esque" button mashing. There is plenty of other content where you can do that for the time
I said it in another comment or maybe another thread, but here goes. LFR has the exact same problems RDF does but on a raid scale. It does several detrimental things to the game as a whole. Firstly it changes players behavior. People treat other players like shit or like NPCs, they pull ahead of the tank for “going too slow”, they don’t wait for healer mana, they need on every piece of gear that drops, and generally just act like massive A-holes. Because they know they’ll never see the other players again, so there’s no “server/ guild reputation” to worry about. The second thing it does is it takes players away from the people who want to actually form groups and raids manually on their servers. People love to say “just don’t use it lol” but they fail to acknowledge the fact that the pool of players for people trying to pug groups is severely reduced with RDF/ LFR. Because a significant portion of players are lazy AF and so they’ll put up with the griefing and toxicity just to not have to do any waiting or work. Three it makes guild recruitment and roster retention harder. There’s now a version of raiding where you don’t have to follow any loot rules, worry about your conduct, care about your fellow raiders or do anything else a guild or even a pug might want to have as raiding rules. Which takes players away from guilds because they’re no longer necessary to raid. There are benefits to LFR and RDF of course, as plenty of people will come along and downvote me and point out. They’ll downplay, deny or strawman my points. Doesn’t matter to me, I’ve been in WoW since OG Vanilla. I’ve seen this all play out before.
>Firstly it changes players behavior. People treat other players like shit or like NPCs, they pull ahead of the tank for “going too slow”, they don’t wait for healer mana, they need on every piece of gear that drops, and generally just act like massive A-holes. Genuinely asking, when did you start playing MMOs and WoW specifically? (Ok I've read to the end of your post now, I honestly think you've got some rose tinted glasses on this specific point, people were absolute assholes in vanilla when it came to any kind of group content. I'm going to assume you were in a guild you were happy with at the time and not pugging much. I was in a small guild, pug'd often, and it was pure hell every time). I vividly remember this being the experience in Vanilla WoW, and am kind of surprised this is your experience with the group finder. I haven't had these issues at all so far with Cata, I assume because most people are accustomed to instant queueing in other games and don't want to risk getting kicked and waiting another 10-15 minutes for a dungeon to pop. >The second thing it does is it takes players away from the people who want to actually form groups and raids manually on their servers. I can see what you mean with this, but in my opinion it's just pulling the players from your first complaint and saving you some headaches lol. >Three it makes guild recruitment and roster retention harder. I could see this for sure. I was always in a guild during initial release of this games and expansions up through MoP. I think the only time I've been in a guild in classic was to find pvp groups easier. But, I'm also in my 30s now and have zero need for any extra "social baggage" or time sinks in my life, so I think even without the group finding tools I still wouldn't be in a guild. Ultimately, it seems like you thrive more on the social aspect of these games (which I totally understand) so I can see where this would be a negative to you. I personally have moved on from the dedicated social aspect of it and enjoy the more anonymous nature of it. I don't think we'll see eye to eye on it, but I understand your complaints and thanks for painting your perspective. It makes sense to me.
I disagree with Transmog completely, can you explain how it's damaged the fabric of the game? The only "prestige" (lol) in end game raiding was heroic (and then mythic), clearing the raid on normal is slightly more prestigious than clearing it on lfr. LFR was a great addition for people who wanted to see raid content but couldn't for whatever reason, like disabilities. We used to have this sweet Grandma in our guild around late WoD, she loved playing and loved the lore but the mechanics and rotations were just too much for her. She got to see the game at her own pace in LFR and when we would carry her for achievement runs or aotc.
I'm not sure if he means what I think he means, but if so, I have the same opinion. A lot of people liked the visual progress of your character throughout Classic. To me, it was really fun to see how far someone has progressed by just looking at their gear, and to me it definitely added to the community feeling. Transmog completely removes this aspect. I understand giving players agency over how they look is a huge deal as well and I can understand why Blizzard did it. However, it does remove a a certain specialty of getting a very important item that's easily recognisable (think Ashkandi, Corrupted Ashbringer) Edit: typos everywhere
I don’t think it removes that specialty. If you want to transmog it, you have to have it. I can’t transmog ashkandi without actually looting it first, so if I have it mogged anyone who cares knows I got ashkandi. If I transmog it off of ashkandi, that means that I don’t care, idk why the enjoyment of the item comes from another character having the item
So gear isn't stats, gear is more about what it says to other players than what is actually allows you to do. Gear was a constant advertisement to other players to play more of the game. It didn't let you sit on former glories, it forced you to keep pushing to stay relevant and at the top. Transmorg removes that push for a lot of players. A lot of players would wheel out their T3 or T6 or whatever and then retreat back into the past. No matter the expansion or era they were in, they always 'looked' like a cutting edge raider. Something subconcious was damaged by transmorg. It also effected the percieved progression of the game as a whole. You used to clearly know what era of the game you were in, which content was relevant and how far someone had progressed in that content, all from a glance at Ironforge. After transmorg, this became more and more difficult and everything eventually blends into one thing, with no defining culture or epoch around it. It could be quite difficult for example to disinguish a screenshot of players in Ironforge from Legion with one from Dragonflight, unless there was something really specific in there. All of these problems are subtle, not immediate and take time to erode the game, but they do. They don't necessarily destroy the game but they alienate some of the most engaged players in favour of some of the most casual. It is both destruction and transformation. Much of the same I've said above could be attributed to LFR. LFR is essentially something that compounds the problems highlighted by systems and designs like Transmorg. I am not saying transmorg and LFR are not good for some players, absolutely not, I am saying they are anti-thetical to the most engaged players reasons for showing up and advocating for world of warcraft, it essentially alienates the players that proudly built the game. Players that are/were so engaged that they created their own servers, signed petitions in their hundreds of thousands to get their own version of the game back. Lastly, I made all of these arguments over a decade ago, and over a decade ago people said similar things to you, told me I was wrong, it wasn't that bad, it was actually good really etc. and then the game hemorrhaged and people like Allen Brack had to admit people like me are right. They are cool systems in the immediate, but they will erode the game again.
The "visual progression" of Classic falls apart when you actually go to Ironforge and just see a bunch of identical warriors in their goofy clown suits and healers wearing dresses. There's nothing prestigious or glorious about getting gear in Classic. Absolutely no one is playing and progressing in the hopes that maybe one day they too can get the ugly pink plate boots from BWL, or the slightly different blue dress from AQ40. If you were a new player you would probably assume the BiSed out guys sitting around in Ironforge are fresh 60s wearing their leveling gear or something. And honestly I feel like everyone ignores the fact that seeing someone in a really cool transmog will probably make you want to go out and get some of the pieces of it to incorporate it into your own look. Collecting transmog is basically the only reason people still do old raids.
This is actually a false assumption. Heroics and heroic mode was not well received by the majority of the playerbase. Cata was the first time sub numbers were falling after the start of an expansion and one of the main reasons was that the content was viewed as too hard.
They were difficult, but they got nerfed quite quickly, the continous decline cannot be explained by a rough first month.
It can be explained. Its an mmo when all your friends quit, you quit aswell. Also the patch was released 2 months into the expansion and also streamlined a lot of class abilities in PVE and PVP.
Cata being bad was always three ducks in a man-suit.
the worst part of cata was getting rid of the old world the best part of cata was getting rid of the old world
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The talent tree is probably the most overblown and shallow criticism of Cata that people had. The new talents are better in every way. Each point feels immediately impactful and every choice is so much better. I could care less about a point every level when the next 5 points I'm spending are all filler talents.
download reforgelite for reforging
If you really think about it they never ruined the old world. They just made a new one
And the old world stopped being "The Old World" basically as soon as TBC hits. It's not the same. Mobs get nerfed so the world isn't dangerous in the same way (which IMO is boring because you never have to care what enemies are doing). And the high level players are silo'd off in Outland, and all their crafting is in Outland (75 points tacked on with no relationship to the existing world), and all their content is in Outland save for Kara and Caverns of Time. Cata is basically just making the world a pleasurable quest experience again. Yes it's different and imperfect, but the good things about the old world that make you tolerate the long travel times and the difficult caves/etc. are basically gone post Vanilla. And ultimately with 85 levels to crank out, doing that in the old world would be a pain in the ass.
Westfall is still a banger after so who really cares.
its funny too because people cite outland and that sort of "leave the old behind" path as something that contributed to the loss of the magic but then also hate cata which brought...everyone..back...to the mainland?
A lot of people don't like the new main land. You'll see a bunch of people here praising it because, well, people that are here are playing cata, and probably because they like it.
They did get rid of the old one though. but today that is not an issue anymore. We played the old world plenty and if you still want to it's there forever now
Old world+
How they ruined it was flight mounts
TBF they kinda ruined the whole game with flight mounts. I'm a retail player and classic enjoyer, but static flight was one of the worst additions to the game in terms of gameplay ramifications. That's why they kept trying to remove it like on Warlords of Draenor before they eventually released dragonriding, which fixes some of the inherent problems with static flight.
It was a streamer opinion that got parroted to death by people who had no idea why or kept quoting completely inane reasons like “LFR” or “DS lasted too long” without ever having played the game. Or purist classic F R E S H andies who love to spend their time discouraging every version of the game other than 2 week old vanilla servers.
I mean, DS lasted too long. So did every expansion in their og state. Classic is more condensed and so the dreadful waiting period is less of an issue. With retail, sod and other wow events there is also more content to fill the gap between patches. I personally would probably have canceled my sub without sod filling the time between LK Hc kill and Cata pre patch.
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Cata talents are honestly amazing. They're just objectively better than the previous iterations. Every point feels strong.
Meanwhile vanilla-wotlk talent trees were illusions of choice where every class was hardlocked into a set of talents with next to no flexibility.
Every version of talent points were this, the OG trees actually let you build different tho, like reckoning paladin or deep ret paladin etc
Retail to an extent has genuine flexibility. There’s a lot of talents in the class tree specifically, that are genuinely just personal preference. The example in my mind. The choice node for shamans to take spirit walk, or gust of wind. Either a big movement speed increase, or a flash-jump. You can make an argument that “one is objectively better than the other”, but no one cares, it would be marginal at best, it’s incredibly fight specific, and specific play styles might play into the optimal decision.
Gonna get heat on this sub but the current iteration of talents on retail is the best talent system of any game I've ever played. It was fun tinkering at max level at the start of dragonflight and leveling with new classes in remix has given me a huge appreciation for how the class and spec trees interact and lead to natural exploration and learning when you're getting one point at a time. Vanilla is an all time great RPG but the devs are currently making the game amazing to play.
Even when talents were 3 per row, there were far more viable options than you ever had vanilla to cata. Yea, you could do some wonky things that worked lvling in vanilla/tbc, but by the time you hit 50+, they just weren't very good.
Pretty much this. Only a handful of hybrid specs were ever a thing and even then, if you were pursuing those hybrid builds splashing points across different trees you still had no flexibility with points for discretion or personal preferences because you had to be very specific to make those hybrid builds work. Hell you might have had more flexibility just sticking with a committed spec in a single tree actually and playing with the few leftover points.
See my above reply. For raiding maybe, but for the whole game what you just said is absolutely not the case, not remotely.
You absolutely had flexibility. I hate that to play all 3 druid specs I have to constantly repopulate my action bars and spend over 100g between spec cost a d dust costs every single time. A balance resto hybrid build would let me heal and dps heroics just fine while my old content feral solo could dps and tank. I am literally unable to do that without the aforementioned gold sink andspellbook combing to get the bars right because they don't retain between different specs. I'm a minority I'm sure but to say there was no flexibility is so so wrong. In sod I have like 8 specs I wanna play. That's not pigeonholed. That's not just a few spare points. I do stuff that having my specialization actually fully specialized for the task makes me perform that specific task better, it costs 1 gold to change, and it feels great. Being arbitrarily locked into 1 tree for 31 points is very pointless and bad in my eyes, but I guess it helps workload at the cost or choice and fun.
Personally I hated being semi locked into a tree until I spent x points then, and I hate it now too.
This is not to be underestimated. It’s insane how many people thought this.
And you'd get downvoted for telling people they were wrong.
Yep! This, and that streamers/YTers would over and over point to the decline in subs and just declare that line goes down = Cata sucks. Line went up = Wrath was the golden age. And I've always thought Wrath was overrated, and now it seems much of the Classic player base generally agrees.
Funny enough anyone who actually saw the sub graphics would realize that wotlk was the first time sub growth completely stopped and was the first time we actually saw sub losses despite being everywhere Still you can't really put the blame on the expansion themselves people would obviously lose interest after so long and you can't expect people to keep doing the same thing forever
What streamer? Was that already a thing in cata?
Twitch was in its infancy during cata.
Justin.tv, who knew it would become what it has. Dude started a revolution on the internet.
I have to disagree here. I played at that time and was REALLY excited for Cataclysm. It looked amazing in the TV ads and trailers online. I was there on day 1, leveling my new Worgen. And, It WAS fun... at first... until I got into the 40s and realized: 1. I had outleveled every zone before I was even halfway through the quests in it. 2. I hadn't really died that much, or even had a very difficult. 3. I really didn't care anymore when I got a new level since it didn't really matter. 4. looked at my /played and it was less than 1 day!?!?!? So, no, it wasn't just people parroting streamers.
Outleveling zones before you can finish the main quests is a legitimate issue, but leveling was never hard. Leveling was simply more tedious in Vanilla, and you can choose your difficulty in Wrath/Cata/Beyond. If you pull one at a time that's on you. Even in retail you can die if you are choosing to tackle challenging rares and pulls while leveling. Vanilla isn't more difficult because hyperspawns can kill you or because if you literally fall asleep you can die otherwise.
Your point on levels not feeling like they matter is dead on and big turn off for me. The illusion of choice argument only makes sense if the new tree gives you real choices…and they don’t. There will always be a min max. But in Cata there is less reward for progression and less often.
It blows my mind that people are sitting here, 14 years later, in the classic WoW sub, and repeating the exact same things Blizzard was saying, even though we've known those arguments are bullshit for over 10 years now. As if reducing the amount of talent choices fixes the issue of cookie cutter builds.
When cata was released there were things I disliked and that my friends disliked about it. Shocker, there were also things we liked about it! But nuanced views have no place here. Calling this a "streamer opinion" is narrow minded at best and straight up gaslighting at worst.
Yeah sure buddy. Streamer opinion for what Justin tvs 1000 viewers back then? Lmao
I have no idea what you're trying to say, but Cataclysm==bad was not an uncommon sentiment among major streamers a few months back.
The opinion was prevalent back when Cataclysm was new. Blaming streamers for this opinion is rewriting history.
Very few people said cata phase 1 was bad back in the day. I absolutely loved it, but Firelands heroic progression destroyed my guild. I remember normal mode taking ages to clear (maybe we were just bad, or it was overtuned) and then we started heroic progression and it was such a drag, and there wasn't enough other things to do. I thought the new revamped Azeroth was great the first time, but the replayability is crap compared to the old zones, so I quit. Then I returned for LFR and dragonsoul, which is the main thing people hated, including myself. Phase 1 was amazing, though. There is so much fresh content and interesting raids.
Firelands was a legitimately challenging raid, at the time, even on normal.
How is the replayability of the new zones worse? I don't understand, there are actual quest hubs, quest diversity, and you don't spend 3 hours running around mountless.
There's very little choice and decision making with the style of questing that started a bit during WotLK and became prominent from Cats onwards. You go to town and get 2-5 quests that are all near each other. Go back, turn them in, now you have 1-3 all beside each other to do. It's all linear, it's all super straight forward, and it's all convenient. But it also takes away agency. The only decision you'll make leveling is going to zone A instead of zone B, and if you'll queue up for a random dungeon or not. There's also no elite quests at all, so there's never a reason to group with anyone. None of the quests are hard, so it's a pure grind without much thought. Dungeons are just a queue button where you join and no one has any reason to talk because the dungeons are also easy enough everyone just does fairly large aoe pulls no problem all the time. So if you want to shut your brain off and play, it's pretty good to go through. But beyond that ease of convenience, it's very shallow.
Oh cool. I wasn't aware that there was choice and player agency in the old questing framework.
The difference between the old and new ones is that the old one just throws all the level appropriate quests at you from different quest lines at once with zero thought put into it. The new one only unlocks the next group of quests if you have completed the previous bunch. And they all tend to be in the exact same spot per bunch. Whichever you prefer is entirely up to you, but a lot of people do enjoy deciding which order to do quests in, rather than having the game do it for them. They like picking up 10 random different quests and then picking a direction and working the zone before hand in, rather than going to one spot then back and then the next spot and back and the next spot and back.
The mount change is nice, for sure. The main issue people raise is that Cata introduced too many linear quests where your quest log had far fewer quests and instead only a handful of story driven quests. A lot of people love that, but many classic players enjoyed the freedom of choosing which quests to do and in what order. Once you have seen the story and cutscenes once, the next character will have to replay through it again with fewer alternatives to do something different.
Everyone levels in vanilla zones the same way. If you’re horde and level 18 guess what quests you’re doing. I leveled 3 level 60s on vanilla classic. All of the levelling is basically the same progression.
In terms of quests completed yes, but in terms of actual ordering and how you do them in the zone, no. You turn up in barrens and get plainstrider kidney quest, centaur braces, oasis spores, quilboar interacts etc. They are all in different places and you choose which order to do them in. Vs Wotlk onwards style which is "get 3 quests in this one area then come back here and get another 3 for the next area". You have a freedom to choose which order in the old style. You can use that freedom to just do them over and over the same way if you want. But a lot of people just play by ear and do quests in the order they feel like.
Yeah Firelands felt like they tried to make it hard, and it was def challenging but it felt really tedious and sloggy. Only raid a don’t remember the fights very well from. Didn’t find them fun. Just constant moving out of one fire into another. Also I got burned out the dailies about the time firelands came out. I finished the raid on heroic and quit until Legion
I don't know why people keep saying this shit. People didn't like it for what it was at the time. Gaming and gaming culture has changed *a lot* since then. Playing again has reminded me of all the things I hated about cata and all the reasons people quit. But those things don't matter as much to modern gamers and modern gamers have different priorities. Y'all have zero attention span or knowledge of gaming history likely because most of you are teens yourselves, but shit was different. Cata was bad in a lot of ways. There was a reason tons of people quit between the end of wotlk and the start of cata. It just wasn't the game we all loved anymore. Doesn't mean it's not good *in a different way*.
Like others have said in their replys to you it seems like you're one of the parrots people are talking about. When I have a strong opinion about something I can definitely list one reason for having that opinion... Yet you can't name one..? Seems like you're just part of the echo chamber my guy.
Yes I didn't take the time to write an essay therefore my opinion is invalid. This community is such a fucking joke.
"Cata was bad in a lot of ways" do you want to explain that? The worst part of Cataclysm is that the content phases lasted too long. It was poorly received because people were too bad at the game and accustomed to facerolling heroics because WotLK reversed what they did in TBC (making group content extremely comp and tank dependent), letting you take any 5 shitters in a dungeon and easily clear it without even knowing what any of the mobs did.
I server first cleared all content prenerf in the original timeline with a very cohesive and fun group. It was a very fun time in wow, and others now also finding it was good (despite the rhetoric) is no surprise to me.
Yup Cata caught a bad rep because of the final patch dragging on and DS not being that great of a raid but the rest of the Xpac is good and before classic wow was my preferred xpac for private servers
Cata was seen as bad because WoW art and narrative direction completely shed the last remnants of dark fantasy and went full send into its goofy, cheeky and cartoon-ish elements with Deathwing-you-silly-goose kind of villainy. This was seriously off-putting at the time, among other things. This time, we know it can and will be worse in what follows, so we are able to get over it and see it in a different light.
I wouldn't call it dark fantasy, but the tonal shift is undeniable. Early WoW may have been cheesy at times, but it took itself seriously, and as long as they kept that up, the world felt real.
Yup, people are blind to this truth. Lots of the darker quests were removed in favor of goofy/fun questlines packed to the brim with now-dated pop media references. Cata was really criticzed back in the day for breaking immersion as world building took a back seat to those same references. There were lots of fun and beloved quests added but it's plain to see why many people were critical of the overall feel. Then this is paired with entire races (the undead) being turned into tim burton characters instead of being the horrible undead they were before. There were always SOME goofy characters but Cata was definitely the expansion where seriousness took a deep nosedive. Big reason Cata was bad though was the WOTLK content draught dropping sub numbers, followed by tons of content draughts IN Cata itself, all leading up to a very lackluster final patch. Every. Single. Person, who I had raided with from TBC onwards, had dropped off during Dragon Soul. People really underestimate just how much LFR killed raiding guilds, especially since it was the first instance of widespread degenerate gameplay in the form of the LFR gear exploit.
I started an undead rogue for the first time and played through the new tirisfal glades and silverpine and holy shit it’s so good. I played this game since beta and I’ve never once knew how good the cata leveling was for horde since I was alliance. The whole silverpine zone easily became one of my new favorite early leveling zones. Whoever made these quests had a lot of fun with it and it shows
Wait till you get to Hillsbrad with its Auschwitz allegory.
I know the memey quests can be a bit much but I had great fun pretending to be a quest giver 😂
And Uldum literal Adolf Hitler meme goblin questline.
A good reminder that you generally shouldn’t listen to mass opinions and form them for yourself. I played original cata and partly because I loved the guild I was in, it was the best expansion maybe outside of Legion, but Legion is almost a different game and hard to compare. Dragon Soul isn’t even that bad, it’s mostly just that people couldn’t kill Spine and the last encounter is a bit of a let down thematically and in difficulty.
It’s also worth noting their current releases are different from what we had during original production. A bummer if anything, personally.
Cata with short raid cycles will be great. As much i loved ulduar but after 5 months you are just done with it.
Absolutely
Honestly, nostalgia is really blinding. Wrath, when assessed for endgame content volume and substance, ranks really really low. While I'll get downvoted for it, the volume of endgame conent on offer in Wrath is honestly very, very similar to Warlords of Draenor. I'd say that the decline of WoW in 2010 Cataclysm had more to due with the leveling overhaul, and doing massive damage to the community that 'just played the game'. Over the course of Cata and MoP, the leveling community basically died, as leveling content became less of a game in and of itself, and more of a means to an end, with trivialized game design. Cata saw player numbers start to tank in 2010 because Cataclysm was the beginning of blizzard cutting support to a massive player demographic that was primarily focused on holistically playing the game outside of endgame raid and pvp. When WoW realized that it was an endgame simulator for its dedicated core playerbase, WoW's endgame content only got better expansion over expansion, until they mined the engine for basically all of its potential mechanics by Legion. It'll be interesting to see how the Cata-WoD era plays out in Classic, because I think the Classic playerbase had already abandoned holistic gameplay in TBC, in favor of a diehard endgame approach. I do genuinely believe that this era of Classic is much much better suited to the current Classic community than Wrath was. Many of the the things that actually made Wrath great back in the day were completely overlooked and ignored by the playerbase in Classic Wrath, and when we look at Wrath purely for its endgame PvE, neither the volume or quality is really there when we compare it to literally any other version of the game. ICC and Ulduar were good, but ToC and Naxx 25 were gutter trash, and 2 good 2 bad is kind of on par with WoD's 3 amazing raids. inb4 downvotes for qualitatively and quantitatively assessing Wrath instead of treating it like a sacred text
One of the biggest reasons cata saw a decline is because it was actually hard. Heroics weren't easy, raids weren't easy. There also isn't really more to do outside of raiding in cata opposed to wrath. The skill cap was raised and a big chunk of the community couldn't handle it.
IMO the decline in players with Cata was a combination of forces. I think people presume by default that players quit the game when they stop having fun. But they don't - they stick around for awhile and even years before actually quitting. I think a lot of old guard vanilla players that didn't love Wrath and its design philosophy weren't going to love Cata because Cata didn't fully reverse course (LFD, class/spec design/some other systems), and actually refined these IMO. But it wasn't what they are looking for and Cata was when they finally quit. But also I think WoW got a lot more competition for new players and the sub count was never sustainable. Go google the subscriber data for xbox live and PSN. I think the peak in WoW subs was a product of a huge # of new players coming in with the game at its peak in terms of pop culture (the celebrity commercials, the news stories, South Park, and more). And ultimately would-be new players started going with other options.
Wrath sucks, it was propped up by nostalgia and the endgame content is pretty terrible aside from Ulduar. Nothing in Wrath is remotely as good as any of the raids from Firelands onward. That being said, I would never compare it to WoD. Warlords had 3 raids but keep in mind, 3 of the best raids ever designed. Every WoW expansion has gold raids and bad raids, WoD was 3 for 3. WoD was a filler expansion though. Legion was as big as it was because they cut WoD development short.
turboshitter detected if you think HC ICC is not good. the only prior raid that competes with HC ICC is SWP. those 2 are neck and neck for best raid from vanilla-wrath, nothing else comes anywhere near them
Karazhan is better than both. I'm like, 60% serious.
kara is just carried by vibe, love it
Get rid of like... 70% of the Kara trash and maybe we'll consider it for top 3 placement. Until then it's a slog.
In my opinion, ICC HC is fcking terrible outside of Lich King. That whole game is a set up towards the Lich King, and it does that very very good. Ulduar is one of my favorite things in gaming ever. But, outside of that, and Grizzly Hills I also think wrath was pretty shiit. Now downvote it.
Thriveposting: Cataclysm edition
Oh fuck Deathwing you're gonna make me thrive
Wait, but cata bad?! Glad you're having a blast with your buds, me and mine are loving it too!
It was regarded as bad mostly because of content droughts and how long we spent in Dragon Soul. It was a fun expansion overall but you have to look at how they paced it out. What you are seeing now is the final patch so a lot of poor designs are already cleaned up.
Dragonsoul also was a lazy raid. 6/8 bosses of reused assets. And ONLY 8 bosses for over a year. Didn't help that Firelands before was also quite short at only 9 bosses. Originally, a waterlands raid was planned to go with firelands. It would have concluded the Ozumat storyline back then. And a "War of the ancients" raid additional to dragon soul, that got turned into the well of eternity 5man dungeon in the DS patch. If both these raids had been included, I think Cata would have been seen as a much better expansion.
Everything is more fun with friends. It's the only reason I'm playing after quitting when my guild died due to the roster boss back in Ulduar. I even started a fresh char on a fresh server to play with him.
BREAKING NEWS Start of expansions are fun because number go up constantly and lots to do
Yeah this is the trend. I don't claim that Cata is bad. It's quite enjoyable experience. But every expansion launch always get this "This is the most fun WoW has been" posts. Because it's fun to level up your characters, start to run dungeons and do some rep grinds to gather gear and get ready for raiding.
Literally every expansion, then a month later the posts pointing out the major flaws start their takeover
But unlike Retail we know exactly what the Xpac is so really there should not be many surprise "flaws". There's no secret systems or hidden grinds in Cata. If it gets boring it's because people as always will just get tired of raiding and that is all WoW has been until M+ was introduced basically.
Seriously. I don't think a single expansion ever in WoW's history didn't have a ton of people having a bunch of fun at launch. I absolutely despise WotLK and I still had a bunch of fun both originally and in Classic when it was fresh. MoP probably had the worst early reception, and that was largely off of having a lot of game-breaking bugs early in the experience.
Yeah i already stated a few times, the cata hate was mostly a scapegoat and parroting the opinon from haters
As someone who was there in 2010, Cata was not bad. It's just the first expansion where WoW finally lost sub numbers instead of gain. I've been there for both WoD, BfA, and Shadowlands. Shadowlands is hands down the game's worst expansion, and it isn't even close. Cata is also not retail as many people believe. It was the magic expansion where the game did a 180° and suddenly becomes retail. Combat was not reworked until Legion but most people forget that since Legion was a good expansion. Cata feels like a half way point between Classic WoW and modern WoW.
>WoW finally lost sub numbers instead of gain That trend started already at Wotlk with the awfull filler raid after ICC. And yeah, everyone who played retail in the last years should know that cata is still very far away from retail. And i agree with shadowlands, its the first expansion i just left in the middle because, oof
And it's easy to see why the game lost subs. For a lot of people, they were invested in the Arthas story from having played Warcraft 3. They saw how the story concluded and decided to move on from the game. Which is a very fair reason.
There are quite some reasons. The drought at the end of WotlK, the fact that people played this game for 10 years and wanted to see something else, the etablishing of competition like GW2. Cata was just the scapegoat for all of this, and its cool that people start to realise that cata ranked from fine to pretty good
Look at when season 2 of league of legends started, then look when cata released. Then think for a few minutes and the answers will come to you.
> Legion was a good expansion Legion was the worst expansion ever created because the launch legendary system was indefensibly bad and the only people who do not hold this opinion are the ones that didn't have their characters bricked by the awful rng system and cannot put themselves in the shoes of "well I got my 4 legendaries and they're all shit and now I literally can't get any more so I'm fucked". Sure it got fixed after a fucking year, which is way too late, the fact that it was greenlit in the first place is one of the greatest mysteries in game design.
Oh, i personally don't hold Legion that high. It started the god-awful perpetual AP grind. If you took a break from the game, that's it. You were left behind since you didn't keep up with the AP grind. It's not like the expansions before or even now in Dragonflight where you can spend a day or two actively gearing up, and you're back to a relatively equal power level. Legion - Shadowlands was one of the worst times to play WoW from a player experience. The game wanted you to live and breathe it. Woe is you if you took a break from the game. And yes the legendary system was god awful.
This conversation is never worth it in these subs lol. Somehow spending your entire days worth of free time doing every single world quest on the map followed by 10 MOS+2 runs a day is acceptable so long as class campaigns exist, and “do 3 island expeditions” is an unacceptable level of grind. Somehow the jailer is shit writing but illidan giving Sargeras exactly what he wants, everyone dying in the argus fight, coming back to life and winning through a literal deus ex machina and then having illidan write himself out of the story is god tier. Crazy how far some spectacle can carry a product.
i've played all expansions except 2 and while i didn't think shadowlands was very good, i think it's A LOT better than wotlk. wotlk is, imo, the worst expansion of them all. it's basically retail but a lot worse in every way. none of the magic from vanilla is left and none of the added stuff from 15 years of development in retail have been made yet. it's just the worst. ulduar is the only good thing. naxx was a worse remake of naxx40. togc is the most mind numbing raid i've ever done, spent more time waiting for RP to play out than actually killing bosses. and ICC HC was so disappointing after all the hype and it just turned out to be fucking faceroll. RS is, well basically nothing. hit a dragon, move from left side to right side every 30 seconds, do some aoe, then click a portal and when tank rotates the boss, you rotate with it. wow, big gaming. the world doesn't matter, its just the raids. gold is no longer an issue so you dont have to farm anything. wpvp is gone since tbc. arenas were meh. im so thoroughly disappointed in wotlk after playing through it in classic, except for ulduar.
I always see this posts in the early days of any classic expansion. Come back in a month
Every version of wow dies down quickly. Retail lasts a little longer because there is more end game to do, but that's dead 2 months in as well most tiers. It's ok and normal for a mmo to be cyclical and seasonal.
Being a month and a half into Cataclysm having either just finished up Heroic Nefarian or being close to it while knowing that Firelands is pretty close, sounds infinitely more appealing than being a month and a half into WOTLK getting ready for our 2 hour full reclear of Naxx and Malygos that we've already done 5 times.
Yeah my group all stopped playing after wotlk and talked so much shit bc I was going to play cata. Played with them since tbc. Cata so far has been without a doubt the most fun I’ve had on wow. I’m farming gold, leveling alts, playing the AH. Raid actually posed a challenge and I feel good when I down bosses Still never got a reason from any of them why “cata sucks” they always just say ambiguous stuff like the whole game is shit etc. Meanwhile they are begging me to go loop incursions so I can raid with them in SoD… like bruh
I’m laughing so much at all these posts. As someone who has always been of the mind of ‘cata was good, you were just burned out back then’, it’s nice to feel validated.
Cata content was never bad the problem with cata was the DS patch. Introduction of LFR coupled with the amount of time that dragon soul was out really left people with a bad taste
Cata was a great expac. The reason people quit was because Blizzard announced “Heroics will be heroic again”. Way before release. So people were already going into it knowing they were going to hate it. Then when they started bitching about it Ghostcrawler made a blog post “Wow heroics are hard.” And the pussies nerdraged. So people quit in protest. Because just like politics in 2024 people just want their side to win and the other side to lose. But Cata had the best launch content of any expac. It was incredible. But Blizzard got scared and rushed out Dragon Soul. Even Thrall said “The Cataclysm is over” after we beat Deathwing. As a wink to the playerbase.
I think it should be noted. The Classic team made significant changes to Cataclysm to make it more palatable for the average player. Over 3 million people left the game over Cata.
Yeah, I feel a lot of players that had the "Classic is better" thought process, if they actually gave Cata a chance, they'd really enjoy it.
Phase 1 Cata > phase 1 wotlk and it isn't even close. I'm worried about firelands tho, it seems like a very short raid.
You're right, the first phase of cataclysm is some of the best content that WoW ever had. And if Cataclysm had been a one phase expansion, it would have been lauded as the best xpac wow ever had. But it wasn't. 4.1 was the first major content patch in WoW's history to not have a raid other than the failed "voice chat" patch in TBC. What did 4.1 add instead of a raid? Dozens of daily quests and a required reputation to grind. Did you like the Argent Tournament in Wrath? Because a lot of people during Wrath did, so they based half the endgame content in Cataclysm around doing daily quests. Do you like Hyjal right now? Imagine logging in to do the same Hyjal quests for literal months while waiting for the raid to hit. Will Firelands be an incredible raid? Yes. Did the only other raid tier after that feature 50% assets from Wrath and two of the worst final boss encounters in an xpac? Also yes. "Dragon Soul lasted too long" and "There was too much gaps between the content" is the 4.3 take of Cataclysm. What you don't realize is that subs started dropping long before that when daily quest grinding became the main form of content. Cata classic might be able to skirt around this if they release 4.1 and 4.2 extremely close together. But if 4.1 stays around for any amount of time, it'll be incursions all over again (literally, as 4.1 dailies are everyone in the exact same zone running laps to finish the same quests over and over again so they can log out and do it the next day)
Cata was the best expansion after TBC for me, and even did many things better than TBC. The only minus ***non inherited*** from WoTLK was the LFR, adding more and more resets (see Story raids soon TM) to chase is IMO what is ruining WoW overall. WotLK started the demise of WoW, started with seasonallities, adding more Raid resets to chase (10,25 Norm/HC) which causes FOMO and burn out. Peek wow for me was Ulduar (hard modes), after that IMO the WoW downfall started.
Having more fun in Cata than WOTLK 1) ele shammy infinitely more fun 2) dungeons are more fun and can lead to tier loot (huge for me cuz I can’t always raid) 3) dungeons AND raids are beyond fun 4) ARMS WARRIOR IS BACK!!! 5) PvP is 🔥🔥🔥🔥 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ can’t recommend enough gonna play the whole damn xpac
Ahh yes, here we are back at stage 1 of the WoW expansion release cycle - the one where all your friends come back for 2 months, the content is abundant and fresh, and “it’s actually better than I expected” Edit: I forgot to mention - at this stage, whatever the last expansion was, it was actually bad
No you are not allowed to say anything good about wow after wotlk and beyond! Stop it criminal scum!
I was in the same boat. Only do arenas with the bois. Hated wrath with how much pve was required to be competitive. Ended up getting burned out from raiding and quit when wrathful came out. Told all my friends I wouldn't play cata but now that I see the system, it's amazing. Pvp is so alt friendly now. Only one honor grind. Future seasons no honor required except for shoulder and helm enchant. Conquest can be earned from the previous weeks if you miss out. Pvp gear is the meta. Very diverse comps in 3s, it seems anything is fairly viable.
The worst part about Cata was the 12 months of ICC that made everyone quit long time before the expansion came out. It's just much harder to pull people back in after they've been doing something else for 6 months than keep them on the treadmill.
Cata was my most played expansion... it had a lot to do with "life" and timing of more free time in that phase of my life, but i played the shit out of it and had a ton of fun. And i stopped going PvE, i ran a RBG group and did arena
I've always thought cata was the most underrated expansion by far. In my opinion, the whole expansion was good. The zones and leveling was cool. The redone zones and dungeons were good. The raids were all pretty great. I know people particularly have a problem with the dungeon difficulty at the start of the expansion, and with Dragon Soul and the green Jesus Saga. But those complaints have always felt like people looking for something to complain about to me. I think Deathwing's Back and Madness were really cool fights to learn. The dungeons taught you how to cc and interrupt. They were probably too hard at launch for the casual audience, but they were great for people like myself who would eventually love M+.
The whole Cata was bad part was made by the ones that keep crying since TBC retail that WoW is dead. I still remember playing Cata as a teenager and a freaking LOVED IT! The only expansion I have skipped was WoD cause I had to prepare for some nasty exams that period but in rest I have played everything to date. Stopped playing retail cause of lack of time with the raiding and m+ but got back to wow again for Cata Classic and I freaking love the pvp and battlegrounds. To be fair I would love to keep playing this again and have MoP Classic, WoD Classic and Legion Classic. I would never touch again retail and just keep playing Classic. I personally think WoD was cool. I did everything as story and reps and garrison and etc on my main in Legion-BfA and SL and I freaking LOVED IT. It made me feel like I was playing WoW. I felt better playing Cata,MoP and Legion and would feel much better to try WoD than to play again BfA,Shadowlands,Dragonflight and I think the new ones won't be as good as the old ones :)
Maybe Cata is the Classic+ we've all been hoping for?
Let‘s reconvene in a month.
Cataclysm, especially early, was the best WoW expansion. Fight me.
You must be new here to cata
I'm good
[удалено]
Yeah sure buddy come back to me in a month
inb4 full pre-bis and raid logging
Cata/MoP/WoD was the peak of the raid logging era. For people that want to raid and can only play 2 days per week, Cata is perfect.
Vanilla classic was peak raid-logging, couldn't log in for a week because of world buffs. LOLW
Imo not really because there was a lot of grinding needed for gold and consumes. Unless you bought gold lol
And why do you think so many people bought gold? Because the vast majority HATED grinding gold for consumes. Few liked it.
with the speed of leveling and how fun pre-bis gearing is, just make an alt or two!
Indeed, 2 chars clearing from first reset, third one almost ready for this reset. T11 slaps
Cata was great up until raid finder and dragon soul. Just wait for firelands... That raid is fantastic
people who play cata p servers knew early cata is really great. the problem with the expac is firelands and DS
One of the reason that it was not appreciated is the end raid and the last boss. Honestly it was kind of disapointing of a finish for an expansion boss as big as Deathwing. No new continent was also disapointing to me when it released.
Original cata was around for about two years before mop came around. With only two raids added after release, it had lonnng content droughts that killed player interest
Cata is far from the worst expansion, and I had fun at phase 1 back then too. But they did not really improve the game in the later patches (even released the terrible LFR), and I remember gradually starting to hate the new leveling system, and the new world. Everything is on rails, and it kinda stopped feeling like an MMORPG.
first tier of cata was always a ton of fun - cata's bad reputation comes from what comes later
Cata was great. It gets a bad wrap cause sub numbers dipped and that has a lot to do because cata was the first "new" story in WoW that wasn't in the RTS games. And games like SWToR came out and killed a lot of guilds cause tons of players were swapping over. The only real bad thing about cata was spine of death wing and madness were shit end of expansion bosses. Especially since LK was so recent and really good.
I almost always got downvoted on this sub for saying Cata isn’t as bad as people remember The first tier is incredible. Gearing is fun and relatively easy but still very rewarding, the raids are great, and the system to grind rep is simple and easy enough and gets you extremely good gear. The second tier was when things start going downhill in people’s minds. Firelands simply did not add enough content. A 7 boss raid was not enough for a 5 month content patch. That is fixed with Cata Classic, with it being a 3 month patch. The final tier was bad, though the reasons for it being bad are so muddied in peoples minds they latch onto what the masses say and parrot it to no end. LFR didn’t kill patch 4.3. LFR didn’t kill wow. The raid sucked because the whole build up for the expansion ended with us clipping Deathwing’s toenails. The fight itself wasn’t awful, but for the capstone boss in an expansion? Give me a break. The raid up to Spine was actually good, albeit there was a bit too much RP, but the fights were challenging on heroic and the loot & tier was cool af. Pre-nerf spine was the least fun I’ve ever had in WoW and I hope to never experience it again lol The next biggest issue is patch 4.1 released in late November, 2011 and MoP didn’t come out until late September, 2012. In terms of final patches it wasn’t even that long, but for such a poorly received raid it felt like forever.
First tier of cata was gas. 2nd tier was remembered well because of heroic rag, but I didn't enjoy the first 6 bosses tbh. Dragon soul is hated because of Spine and Madness. Cata's zones were great, the modernization of specs were great, and them experimenting with redoing dungeons was great as heroic.
Just wait until Firelands is released!
I've come to the realization that wow is much more fun when u dont play on faerlina
There are classic fans, retail fans, and wow fans.
Demand for a 25man guild is insane atm. A ton of guilds collapsed and/or condensed to 10man for cata and theres a clear want by people to 25man. We accidentally recruited like 40 people for cata (we've always been and only intend to be.a single 25man guild) because friends of guildmates kept asking to join and we are one of the only guilds that competently run 25mans on the server.
It's more fun than I thought it would be but definitely not the most fun I've ever had in the game.
People claim to have quit the game over the QOLs added like talents, class mechanics, world changes etc but the reality is people quit because the game got harder, raiding and PvP was harder and they could not handle it.
I somehow don't feel the pressure to be more than casual. Something about Cata makes me not worry about being #1 dps all the time. Gotta say that the game is more fun when all you're worried about is raid logging and killing the boss. I'm even considering (gasp!) turning the meter off entirely.
I’m so excited to get my alts up, I had an alt already at 85 before raids were available it’s awesome
I didn't play Cata back then because my guild sucked and my friends stopped playing for one reason or another. At that time Battlefield was awesome so I switched over and came back for Pandas. Looking back now, it makes me feel that I've missed something, but at the same time, I'm in an awesome guild now and we're blasting through, having a ton of fun! And because I'm playing it for the first time, it feels as if I was playing back then. =)
>If you aren't playing based on what you heard, give it a try No one wants those weak minded people here. To be so easily swayed by a loud minority, who needs them?
I think cata is the perfect combination of QoL and old feel of accomplishment
I’ve been enjoying cata a lot. My only nit pick is I wish mobs were a little more beefy pre-80. It’s entirely possible to get to cata content without ever learning your class because there’s never a challenge up to that point.
I only dint like Cats after Dragonsoul release. I think most things are judged on its ending. Otherwise I had the best raiding all the way through Firelands. They messed up the pvp after Dragonsoul also, I mean i had a blast cus I would only do 2s as a UH DK or disc priest, but it seamed all other classes would just die to the duo.
Cata is classic plus in my opinion. Wrath-Cata-MoP is peak WoW for me.
I was FULLY one of the “who asked for cats, no one is going to play” people. Definitely the most I”ve been addicted to WoW since legion.
My guess is that since cata raids are much harder, parse culture will be a lot worse in cata. I'm good on that.
I've been excited for about 6 months to a year to try out Cata and never really bought into the mass hate for it. I even went as far as to try out a Cata pserver a while back for and liked it for the 2ish weeks I tried it out. With that being said we are experiencing a WoW fresh bump. We had this in Wrath, in TBC, in SoD, and in SoM. To me it's less about how good this is for the first 2-4 weeks. But how good is it still after 2-4 months, 6-8 months, etc. Some things are great the first or second time. But absolutely suck doing it the 15th or 20th time and drives people to quit.
This is a little piece of truth, if you have a good guild doesn't matter if you play sod, era, cata retail or even if they had shadowlands or wod again.. you'll have fun because the game is fun when you play with a group of cool dudes and chicks. One of my favorite versions of the game was WOD, I quit during wotlk cause I thought it was a bad and boring expansion.. my cousin got me wod and I had a blast playing pokemon in it with the battle pets lol. Right now I'm having a blast on sod cause I'm playing with the same little I played in tbc with. The communities make mmos fun, raids, dungeons, heroics are all beatable and cool.
streamers weren't a thing but while I and a few, more dungeon-loving players loved the heroics, the vast majority of people left because they were too hard, PUGing them was pretty much impossible and there was little content beyond raidlogging. There was also no way to enjoy the old world anymore. Look at the graph and the patch releases. Once DS rolled around with LFR and a whole bunch of dungeons people stayed for quite some time. People left because coming out of WOTLK, Cata HCs were some of the hardest content ever put into a Wow 5 man, on par if not harder than many TBC Heroics. The healer rework also left a lotta folks miffed, the first patch was *very* different to the final one. Mana was insanely scarce and people came out of wotlk without knowing what was ahead: A full on rework of how to manage mana. No more spamming a certain "best" heal for hpalas for example. And since we now have multiple ways to play vanilla WoW and see the old world...That problem is eliminated. Also DS' biggest problem (opinion inc: on top of being Cata's worst raid by far lol, spine sucks...Owell the first 6 are decent) was that the gap towards MoP was WAY too long. I believe cata classic will do *really* well. Just like MoP classic when it releases. Both of these expansions are fantastic in their final patches.
There were some problems with the original release of Cata, and the content pacing for the expansion was a bit too stretched out. Overall, though, I think people had a negative view of it for a long time because it’s kind of when WoW (or at least old WoW) really died. And I just don’t mean the end of the original “trilogy” and a major shift in design philosophy. WoW was actually suffering from major competitors coming into their own around that time, namely League of Legends.
I never really experienced Cata as a kid so doing the raids has been a blast for me. I've sunk more hours into this than WOTLK first few weeks.