As opposed to people who spend all day blindly defending Blizzard at every turn? Don’t worry, everyone else will leave soon enough.
The OP is correct. Cataclysim is the beginning of retail.
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go ahead, leave, the door is that way →
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I agree with him that wrath was amazing. Maybe not the best, as I really liked legion, but certainly up there.
However, that being said, if they kept wrath servers up, I wouldn’t continue to play them. Amazing as it was, its had its time. I played through naxx, ulduar, togc, icc… only raid I didnt do was ruby sanctum cause I was kinda done at that point. My point is even the most amazing expansions have their time to end and cata is the next logical step.
I did however on the final day of wrath do the dk starting zone one more time because I love their intro. I also logged a character off in thousand needles inside the centaur cave to see what would happen. My final farewell to wrath… now im ready for cata 
Ps if youre curious, logging back into thousand needles just ports you to the nearest graveyard
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Love everything Blizzard does or leave. This is the level on this forum now, you’re either a sychophant or get out.
You’ll get your wish in the end.
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I was excited for cata classic. I loved the raids and end game quite a bit (the firelands dailies not so much).
I never really leveled 1-60 in cataclysm however, so I’m excited to level through it all fresh before they nerf XP or do the talent change in mop.
I do think people like to use “retail” as some kind of pejorative which is fairly disingenuous. Retail has lots of pros and many cons, just like era, wrath and any other point in wow. Retail might not be what some people want, which is fine, but I’ve played DF more than any other expansion. I do think that part of why wrath was so loved is because it made everything quite easy and accessible. Much like Dragonflight. 
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The only slap in the face was not keeping at least one era server for every version they rerelease. No problem that they’re releasing Cata or other versions otherwise.
Also, you people obsessed with Wrath don’t like admitting how close to Cata Wrath actually was.
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This is the problem. They over-designed rotations and auto-spec your talents for you effectively by removing most of the depth and hybrid possibility, took a bunch of stuff off GCD (birth of the Swifty oneshot macro) which meant you needed to be on adderall to perform at top levels, made excessively difficult raid content (I’m not against that but it needs to be more of a niche sport for it’s own sake rather than have the game revolve around it), homogenized interrupts and dispels, started adding more self-healing.
Many of the problems which sucked the soul out of the modern game and made it indigestible to the massive MMO crowd which WoW originally attracted (they lost nearly half their playerbase with Cata, they just so happened to replace another 25% or so of that lost amount with new players by overhauling the new player experience).
There were hints of this in TBC and Wrath, but Cataclysm is definitely when the MMO truly began to die in WoW. Server identity lost to cross-realm, raid-finder etc.
Cataclysm is cool for a lot of other reasons, I have nostalgia for it too. It’s when I actually played my best (cross section between me having enough experience to play at R1 levels and also being lower skillcap than wrath arenas because arms warrior complexity was reduced even though the APM required to play it increased quite a bit - see my adderall comment)… this was not a great turn in the direction of WoW though, and the careful design of the old world was sucked away to be replaced by flashy mostly thoughtless over the top Deathwing-oriented everything by overworked designers who had a log of like 10,000 quests they were made to rework.
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They’re absolutely annoying as retail players are but please listen to everyone droning about:
“just play Cata or leave wahhh”
Or
“Classic players are the minority, kek”
They’re right because most classic players have already uninstalled and are playing private servers or quitting all together.
Don’t give Blizz your money if they don’t deliver. That’s how capitalism works (Blizz doesn’t make decisions, the stakeholders do) and it’s up to us to suck it up and show their money hungry stakeholders that they were old, unintelligent, greedy, and wrong.
Cheers
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For me, cata is not the beginning of “retail”, but the conclusion of classic. Considering we’re getting a revamped MoP, it’ll be interesting to see where they take it at the end of cata. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy cata.
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Personally I consider the opening of the dark portal to be the end of classic.
For me it’s Wrath but mainly from a narrative point of View, since it concludes the Warcraft 3 storyline also the RPG systems are closer to vanilla so I enjoy it more
Cata is good but I would love if we kept era realms for both TBC and Wrath
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Tbh, even if they stuck with the “magic formula” that pole vaulted them into a super success story, tbh, that was Vanilla and TBC. It never would have had much staying power. and it actually has nothing to do with the game itself.
The gaming landscaped changed over night. Gaming was no longer niche and frowned upon. It was main stream. Blizzard had to cater to the casuals and QoL. They had to add the quick dopamine hits. Everything had to make 100% sense. Not to stereo type, but in order to have played WoW in the old days you had to have had a screw loose - basement dwelling nerd or not. Now that gaming was main stream, you had to cater to the kids who had other activities. Who only had X minutes a day to play.
As much as I despise anything after TBC, I think Blizzard made the right moving in making Retail more and more streamlined, more accessible, more mini gamish, more single player, more whatever.
The game had to change with the landscape. And for a game that was created with the “old” mentality, it’s awfully hard to play catchup. It’s why there are so many phrases that are used over and over again. “bad game design”. “waste of time”. Like, why is there a room with no npc in it? bad game design. lol.
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numbers don’t agree with you
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While i think you could’ve made the comment more compact and understandable (don’t take offense pls) I agree with the point you’re trying to make.
Blizzard made WoW a good game for its time, better than the rest of the MMORPG genre that was new and extremely revolutionary for the 2000s gaming world. But instead of polishing and expanding on what made WoW good, to keep it good and relevant as time went by, they thought every single release is magically going to be a hit independent on the previous xpacs. Even worse, they left every xpac prior to go waste by becoming obsolete but still taking disk space and resources. If they were smart they would draw the line at Cata and completely revamp not only the graphics and the combat, but the entire game system and philosophy. Cata should have been a WoW 2, so to speak and not an addition. In fact they needed to stop with 2 year expansion model at that point all together and make it seasonal event type of content. The result would be a cleaner, less convoluted, more intuitive gameplay where all content is available and relevant enough and would pave the way to modern style gaming. No one would complain back then that the game is evolving since player count was at peak and players were new and young. GL changing the game for 37 year olds now who are extremely attached and averse to any major change bcs the reason they play WoW is it reminds them of when they were teenagers, little less stressed and little bit happier
Masterfully put
That was pretty much my experience of Wrath. It was disappointing, because I’d really looked forward to Wrath Classic. I just couldn’t play it, after having experienced TBC Classic. I just dabbled a bit with Hardcore and SoD. And the same will probably be true of Cata Classic. I will probably dabble. I think the only thing that would have me playing more regularly would be a permanent or seasonal TBC-era server. But I have no great expectation that this will happen.
Which is funny considering many of us that had been playing MMO’s prior to WoW saw it as the easy mode casual MMO in Vanilla 
It needed some things cleaned up but by making it more streamlined all they did was swap one player base for another. Most everyone I knew prior to Cata was gone before the end of Cata. There were a few, and obviously I was an exception as well, but even I started trying to find something else. I just always ended up back here because the rest were just copycats, they offered nothing different.
I actually thought the had a chance to make Cata what it could have been by fixing its issues like they talked about doing at Blizzcon. Instead Blizzard sunk its time and money into SoD and what we are going to get is the old version of Cata. I expect we will see the exact same pattern we saw back then. Oddly enough I think that is why the time line for Cata appears to quick, that is their back up plan in hoping the don’t lose too many.
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Arms warrior rotation is the same
Rogue rotation is the same
Mage rotation, same
Warlock rotation same.
What are you talking about
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Thats entirely subjective homie
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It’s not a revamped mop. It’s a leveling event for a limited time.
Mop classic will still come out
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