20th Anniversary Celebration: Cataclysm Memories Edition

Wyrmrest Accord
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This is a weekly series! Here are the threads so far…

:point_up: Keep sharing! A new expansion thread will drop each week.

Cataclysm Memories

Now it’s time for Cataclysm. An expansion had to follow after the iconic and loved Wrath of the Lich King, and Blizzard chose Deathwing as the antagonistic lead. Swooping over Azeroth not only in the trailer but throughout the entire expansion as a herald of fire and death, the world was remade in the literal upending of the earth by the movement of fallen Earth Warden himself.

To get everyone into the mood, here is the iconic login music/screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgjnru0h1zE.

Incoming Memories…

What were your impressions of the trailer when Deathwing destroyed parts of Stormwind? How would you rate it against Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Wrath’s trailers?

The login screen carried on the continuity of Stormwind’s destruction with Deathwing looming over its melting towers, along with new music. How would you rank it among other login screens? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgjnru0h1zE

Deathwing would occasionally fly over random zones of Azeroth throughout this expansion, incinerating anyone caught under his wings to death. This also gave players a cheeky achievement called Stood in the Fire. If you played in Cata, when did you get this achievement? Was it intentional or unintentional?

Cataclysm gave Azeroth a much-needed world makeover. What parts did you like or dislike? Has your view changed through the years?

Cataclysm was the first expansion to introduce Looking for Raid, AKA LFR. How did it change your gameplay, if at all?

Cataclysm’s first season of dungeons were notoriously long and difficult compared to its Wrath predecessor. This made them a bit controversial with fans. What was your impression?

The long-isolated kingdom of Gilneas and playable worgen were finally introduced in Cataclysm. Did you roll a worgen? How did this change the game for you, if at all?

After years in the background as a neutral faction, playable goblins finally joined the Horde. Did you roll a goblin? How did this change the game for you, if at all?

What would Today You say to Cataclysm You?

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I think I got it pretty early. I was clueless, and just flying around the Barrens and he snuck up behind me. I didn’t know what was happening. The screen turned colors as I recall and I dropped like a rock and the achievement notification popped up.

Earthspear lore (it was just a little bit before I joined) was that they were having a funeral in Winterspring and Deathy showed up the griefed the event. lol

aaaaand… I have to clock out from work. I’ll add more later.

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Alas, I cannot answer this one. I only played the prepatch and then un-subbed because I was super unhappy with the changes to my healadin. And then SWTOR came out so that was my new focus.

Do I regret not sticking around? Sometimes. But it just wasn’t for me for that time period.

ETA: I actually do have that achievement, so it would have had to be during prepatch that I got it. xD

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No way man. Goblins are the worst…

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The most interesting thing about Cataclysm is how its design choices sent subscription numbers into a tailspin that never fully recovered.

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To this day, nothing will ever top Arthas’ raising of Sindragosa. Deathwing was a random NPC from Beyond the Dark Portal. I’d read the War of the Ancients trilogy, but I wasn’t as excited. He was a dragon. We’d already fought dragons.

It was fine. I never lingered long enough on a log in screen to be attached to any of them.

I think I have that cheev. I honestly can’t recall and I have no strong memories of it. It wasn’t like the Fel Reaver when the screen started shaking that the god awful horn sent your pants into brown mode.

Loved the new rewards and the look of the new arms and armor. The Plaguelands got a fun quest chain…but the bulk of the Cata revamp has aged like Milk. Westfall being a gigantic CSI: Miami meme is especially fresh in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

I stopped bothering with guilds entirely.

Personally speaking I really enjoyed being relevant again with my Freezing Trap. I liked the fact you couldn’t just face pull an entire dungeon and honestly had no qualms with the difficulty. What I had was qualms with the production quality (The Uldum dungeons especially were odious with HORRIBLE voice acting).

Played a few Worgen, none of them stuck.

Played a few Goblins, none of them stuck. Discovered I’ve got a thing for short stacks though, because the Goblin Gals dances trigger a neuron response. It’s led to quite a humorous RP quirk of Vanndrel’s that never gets addressed because I decided that he also has an attraction of Goblin females - not that you’d ever get him to admit it. (But you will get him to blush furiously)

Poor Bastard. You think you’re out. You’re finally done. Never going to play this waste of a time game again.

You’ll be back. You always come back.

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Loving these so far. Up until BfA and Shadowlands especially, Cata was maligned as the “worst” expansion… aaand I’ve been in the minority opinion for over a decade now that Cata wasn’t that bad. I actually had fun.

What were your impressions of the trailer when Deathwing destroyed parts of Stormwind? How would you rate it against Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Wrath’s trailers?

Since I was still on my old server at the time and canonically, the old Stormwind Park was an IC hive of scum and villainy that literally had bomb threats happening on a nightly basis, my reaction was “good riddance.”

That said, we as a server assembled in the Park one last time the night before launch and danced till the servers shut down.

The login screen carried on the continuity of Stormwind’s destruction with Deathwing looming over its melting towers, along with new music. How would you rank it among other login screens? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgjnru0h1zE

I didn’t expect the login screen to have Deathwing literally LOOMING OVER STORMWIND GATE, just chilling. I appreciated the extra urgency of the strings in the piece and I get a lot of nostalgia listening to it.

Deathwing would occasionally fly over random zones of Azeroth throughout this expansion, incinerating anyone caught under his wings to death. This also gave players a cheeky achievement called Stood in the Fire . If you played in Cata, when did you get this achievement? Was it intentional or unintentional?

Looking at my main at the time, I got the achievement 08/13/2011. Considering the game released December of the previous year, I did good up till then. What ultimately got me was an RP event in Winterspring where I was briefly AFK. Everyone else vacated except me.

I also fondly recall every time [Stood in the Fire]! guild achievement went off in chat because inevitably, the guildie would reappear in chat two minutes later with a “…sonuab*tch, I was AFK.”

Cataclysm gave Azeroth a much-needed world makeover. What parts did you like or dislike? Has your view changed through the years?

OG Duskwood was better. Elite Stitches no longer roaming the roads was a very, very sad change for me.

As for what I liked, other than the Plaguelands healing, Brill’s new graveyard being absolutely amazing, and the “I’m gunna punch Death in th’ FACE!” quest, I don’t have too many lingering memories of the revamp anymore, positive or negative.

Cataclysm was the first expansion to introduce Looking for Raid, AKA LFR. How did it change your gameplay, if at all?

I hosted a major server event around LFR’s introduction. A month of roleplay in Dragonblight lead up to 2 RP-LFR raids simultaneously run on Allianceside and a Hordeside run the next day. I loved that LFR made raiding accessible to roleplayers who otherwise would have to join a raiding guild to see the endgame content.

That said, randomly pugged LFRs quickly turned into a nightmare.

Cataclysm’s first season of dungeons were notoriously long and difficult compared to its Wrath predecessor. This made them a bit controversial with fans. What was your impression?

I loved it. The assembly line ease of Wrath dungeons was a huge disappointment to me after coming up in Vanilla and Burning Crusade, so it felt like a return to form. Unfortunately for me and my guildies, our first capped characters were 4 plate wearers and one hunter, so our idea of CC was 1) a Frost Trap, 2) hunter kiting a guy, and 3) our second warrior off-tanking. It made for some hilarious fights we reminiscence about to this day.

The long-isolated kingdom of Gilneas and playable worgen were finally introduced in Cataclysm. Did you roll a worgen? How did this change the game for you, if at all?

At the time, the worgen starting zone was one of the most story-driven zones I’d experienced other than death knight. Today, it’s rather tedious to get through and I’ve heard grumbles of people wishing it were shorter, but it blew my socks off at the time.

Also, since my paladin was canonically from the kingdom of Gilneas since 2005, I was pretty stoked to finally see it beyond concept art and vague mentions in the RTS games.

After years in the background as a neutral faction, playable goblins finally joined the Horde. Did you roll a goblin? How did this change the game for you, if at all?

Because I was primarily Alliance and cross-faction roleplay was less common back then (or at least on my server; the lack of Elixir of Tongues reallly made it hard), I didn’t see too much goblins. I did the starting area out of curiosity and it didn’t nab me, but parts of it (the golf resort, etc.) made me smirk.

What would Today You say to Cataclysm You?

Yeah, so this recession sucks. This is why you should have went for another degree. That said, you can’t go back now so keep chugging. You’ll make it.

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Cataclysm was an immediate disappointment. Didn’t care about Deathwing. The achievement was kind of whatever.

They introduced guild levels. Smoke and Mirrors was going to get server first level 25 guild on WrA. Then Blizz reset something and knocked us and several other guilds back several levels. No amount of tickets got them to restore the levels because they said we’d get there eventually. Way to miss the point, Blizz. The excitement that my guild had going into the expac immediately deflated.

No one I know liked Vash’jir. Deepholm bugged out for me and after turning in a quest, the chain simply stopped. Three tickets got closed by Blizz - one told me to look for posts on fan sites online (what?), one told me there was a quest I was missing (there was not) and one finally told me it was a known bug and they weren’t fixing it. So I got to raid without a shoulder enchant. Overall, this was when we noticed customer service becoming unresponsive.

A lot of the questlines made me wince. SFK was ok but some of our healers couldn’t deal with the first fight. I hated the new Deadmines. New race/class combos were ok.

When players saw the difference in difficulty between end of LK and beginning of Cata, WrA began to bleed players. I could only field 2 raid teams due to lack of raid leaders and geared players and the vast majority of the guild was upset that they couldn’t get back into raiding right away.

It was depressing and a lot of stress. I just simply stopped raiding (and I was 3rd ranked HPally on the server at the time).

Tol Barad was simply not Wintergrasp. It was really hard to turn over to the other faction and I remember hard core PvPers doing so very late night because it wasn’t happening often during peak times.

I played both Worgen and Goblin starter zones. I did not keep either character. Zone changes were interesting at first, but overall I didn’t like a lot of them and they got stale very quickly for me. I liked reforging but disliked the talent trees.

Oh, and this was the expac where they blindsided us with Thrall’s wedding.

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I legitimately forgot that zone existed until just now. I feel like I need to go revisit it just to refresh it in my mind.

Good ol’ Aggra, just manifested out of whole cloth and making it a point to fit “Go’el” into every line.

She sank the entire Thrall-Jania armada of ships.

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Oof, I remember Vash’jir got skewered in player feedback and quite a bit of it was deserved. The most irredeemable part of its design was the lack of clarity when it came to depth of quest items and turn ins — back then, Blizzard didn’t a map indicator whether objectives were up or down, which made an effectively 3D zone like Vash’jir a nightmare to complete. If you got to read Vash’jir General or the forums at the time, the amount of salt would have made players float.

I was initially lucky because I happened to not choose Vash’jir as my first zone and word-of-mouth spread quickly. I did my best to avoid it until I no longer could in hopes Blizzard would make QoL adjustments. Unfortunately, they did not so I got to do the OG version along with everyone else. I was thankful the story was compelling enough, as we finally got some decent Naga Lore after years of waiting, but there was one quest turn in in particular that was so hard to find, I was hopelessly swimming in circles along 5 other equally lost levelers till one of us found it on accident and lead the others into the hidden cave.

As for Tol Barad, it was the last dedicated server PvP hurrah of my old server and between spotting Horde friends and coining the endearing term of “axe hugs” to say hello, it was something we looked forward to. Though it was the pre-Elixir of Tongues era, we had close friends on Hordeside and focus killing them in TB was a glimmer of Vanilla’s old server-based PvP system. By then, battlegrounds were mainly fought with strangers to killing friends and building silly rivalries with fellow server members was already a relic of the past. And likewise, our Horde friends did everything they could to gang up on us. It wasn’t unusual for us to have a T match then join Mumble and have a laugh about it.

A note, my computer in Wrath was too potato to manage Wintergrasp without lagging out so I had no other basis for comparison. My first WG experience was years later when it was added as an Epic Battleground. That said, the chaotic merry-go-round nature of TB definitely wasn’t Blizzard’s best invention but the nostalgia of slaying friends on the battlefield has overshadowed that criticism over the years for me.

Cata… didn’t have great voice acting. It was still leagues better than it was in Vanilla when every character was voiced by Chris Metzen to the point of memery, but instead of continuing upwards from Wrath, it got a little silly again. (Thankfully, that changed completely come MoP but that’s next week.)

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If Vash’jir had been either half as big or turned into two zones, I would have loved it.

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My memories of Cata aren’t great. On the one hand I had some good RP and transitioned to Zalinara as my RP main. On the other, there was a LOT of discontent with the world revamp, new zones, and far too many meme quests. My Alliance side RP guild pretty much said “F this” and mostly left the game and the slow decline of my original server (Shadow Council) accelerated as most of the active RPers bailed for WrA and MG and/or went elsewhere.

Most of my RP contacts wound up in GW2 so I ended up there and started a pattern of coming back to WoW for a few months with each expansion before bouncing to another game.

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At the time, it thought it was great. I loved that their were actually changes in the world. I was a little ticked that my beloved Barrens were really jacked up. But I assumed, for some unknown reason, that all of that would get worked out. Little did I realize how poorly it would age.

By the end of the expansion, I loathed all of it. I hate it more with it each expansion, because they just left it. The Barrens is still jacked up, and not in a way that makes sense. Just in that “whelp, that’s over now. moving on…” sense. Is it so freakin’ hard to build a bridge and reconnect the Gold Road? Garrosh’s shamans are gone, fix the Barrens!

I did roll a worgen, several worgen to be exact. Not one of them stuck. I did enjoy the worgen starting zone though. I loved the old school horror movie vibe. I just can’t stick with an alliance character, and I don’t know why.

I did roll a goblin, and just like with the worgen, they didn’t stick in the long run. Though one lasted until fairly recently. A mage whose back story back story changed a bit over time. She started as a prophet of sorts. She emerged from a brief coma after an “industrial accident”. A “vision” led her start a cult, which was basically a pyramid scheme based around selling skin care products. Think Mary Kay meets Scientology. Never really got to play her that much because I just did not have the time to devote her. Eventually she became an art and antiquities dealer, i.e. a fence.

My main take aways from Cataclysm was that the potential of it sounded better than the reality turned out to be. Grandiose idea, but execution and delivery did not live up to the hype. It’s also when I realized that Blizz had no issue with trashing lore and wasn’t that great with writing. RIP CAIRN!

I also remember that Cataclysm felt like the expansion that would never end in terms of the content drought. I know it was just two years between the drop of Cata and the drop of Pandaland, but I remember it felt sooooooo much longer. We had trouble with keeping engagement in the guild because people just got so bored with the game.

I went from being really excited about Cata to absolutely despising it in less than a year.

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I legit do not remember when I finally left the game.

I remember I was doing dailies on Tol Barad and just thinking “I’m so over this end game content design.” and just…leaving. I don’t even remember if I legit did any of the Cata raids when they were fresh content.

That’s Cataclysm’s biggest legacy for me. It was so utterly forgettable that I can’t even remember what the onus for me leaving was, or even when it happened. Hell, I legit have forgotten about Vash’jir and Deepholm exist until this thread, and I’m the guy who makes it a point to just trawl old zones and content for laughs and transmogs.

EDIT: Update - I revisited Vash’jir and Deepholm both. God, I hate Cataclysm Zone design. Vash’jir alone is almost 2/3rd the size of the entire new real estate of The War Within. Deepholm has some creativity to it, but there’s a whole lot of vast emptiness.

You know what Deepholm was not designed for? Dynamic Flying. It’s a nightmare of weird aerial hit boxes that will arrest all your speed and the zone itself actually isn’t high enough to maintain speed to keep replenishment. I also find it hilarious I can actually fly over the bulk of Vash’jir, though there’s very much nothing to see if you do that.

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I joined WoW during the Rage of the Firelands patch playing a free trial account. I leveled one of each race to 20 and geared them out in blues and then went on to try exploring areas that were out of my level range. I was doing fine, and managed to explore most of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor on my blood elf hunter until I reached Uldum and was chased down by several fast mobs from a range. The GM kindly dropped me back in Tanaris where I could get by w/o being corpse camped by scarabs.

Now that I’ve given classic a go, I can confidently say that they can have it. I’m glad quest density was fixed and content was updated. I liked Deathwing’s drive-by breathings. I’m cool with the Grimtotem doing an Eddie Murphy from the Golden Child impression.

What we need is ANOTHER CATACLYSM. Let’s update the s**t out of these areas. It’s time to change the Silvermoon assets already. I want to fly in the spacegoat starting area. I want quest text to reflect the fact that there’s a a black hole in the sky and a ginormous freaking sword sticking out of the world that people can see several areas away.

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Someone else liked Cata? There are dozens of us. Dozens. :smiling_face_with_tear: