It almost always goes down this route, the people that dislike Cata comes out, says their piece then those that are tired of seeing it respond and then it just spirals from there.
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If you’re used to WotLK heroics then you may be surprised by the difficulty spike in Cata, but it might not be as rough as it was 15 years ago because a lot of players will already know the mechanics.
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I love that people assume Classic was strictly in reference to Vanilla style when it was meant as Classic to that era
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Thank you, the only player out of the 10 bickering to actually answer my question!
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I’d love it if we could skip straight to MoP honestly. MoP was peak! Very much looking forward to Cata to get MoP 
In OG Cata each trash pack would have like 6-7 things and you had to sap,sheep,shackel undead or fear two of them or the group would steam roll you. (note: in Cata warlocks get a glyff that makes feared people stand in place trembling instead of running crazy pulling everything. However at the end of cata they nerfed it so you can just group the 7 up and AOE them. we don’t know which version we will yet.
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Heroic dungeons at launch are definitely a step up, and a lot of fun. The increase in difficulty comes from the fact the mobs in trash packs have dangerous abilities that need to be dealt with, the dungeon bosses are a lot more complex than the dungeon bosses in Wrath, and, at launch you cannot over-gear the content and brute force your way past the skill checks.
If you can find a dedicated team of players to farm these with during pre-raid, you’ll have a great time. RDF at launch will be interesting. I think the player base for Cata Classic will be much better as original Cataclysm was populated by many neophytes, whereas this time around it’s veterans of the franchise/genre that have been playing for over a decade, almost two in some cases.
The two dungeons that come to mind when I think of people having fits over launch difficulty are Grim Batol and Stone Core. No surprise to anyone that was there before. Those two dungeons are outliers in that the trash pulls and bosses form start to finish are challenging at launch all the way up to the point you start acucmulating 359 gear from normal Tier 11 raids.
While those two are the standouts, many dungeons have challenging fights/achievements that stand out as well. The escape sequence from Heroic DM, “Headed South” in Lost City, the first and last boss of Vortex Pinnacle, the second boss in Black Rock Descent are the fights that come to mind without doing any research.
You will need all five players paying attention and able to handle the mechanics or things get rough. Even losing a lowly damage dealer on a boss fight can mean your doom because you will fail a DPS check via a mechanic, enrage timer, or you won’t be able to kill the boss before your healer runs out of mana. Healer mana and healing in Cata… that’s a topic that could/should be discussed in it’s own thread. That change alone makes dungeons at launch a lot more difficult that anything people were used to save for some of the harder heroic dungeons during TBC luanch.
Raid difficulty is also a step up in Cata. Tier 11 has some very difficult bosses. In many cases, the bosses are harder on 10 player difficulty compared to 25 because you have fewer people to deal with mechanics, and the loss of one player on 10 is very hard to recover from. Fights that come to mind are Halfus (easiest boss in tier 11 but tight window on mechanics), Ascendant Council, Cho’Gall, Nefarian and Al’Akir. Even on normal those fights will be more challenging than most of what was seen prior, save for the hardest of bosses in Wrath. On heroic, you could almost count the fights in all of the previous raids (pre-nerf Vashj & KT, Muru, Kil’Jaeden, Yogg one/zero, Firefighter, Arthas) on one hand that are as difficult as six bosses from the first tier on heroic (Ascendant Council, Cho’Gall, Sinestra, Al’Akir, Omnotron, and Nefarian).
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I think the difficulty will be much more a mentality of the community adjusting to how the game plays in Cata over the content before.
Right now, for example, its fairly common to just stand in the fire. Ignore mechanics. Just DPS burn it to the ground so you only have to do the “dance” once instead of two or three times.
These things are a lot more punishing in Cata. Healers will run out of mana due to reckless abandonment and ignoring mechanics if the abilities themselves just don’t outright kill you for doing so. So a lot of DPS players are going to probably learn the hard way that “one more gcd for my parse” is a death. Tanks also have to learn to be more proactive in keeping themselves alive. Just putting on insanely bad tanking gear to do more damage probably gets you kicked over along with that mechanical issue. Healers will have to adjust to mana being a resource you have to mind, someone being at 95% doesn’t mean snap instant cast to snipe while also minding all those mechanical things too.
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It is my understanding, they stated they were dropping a patch that contains nerf’d dungeons.
Well not really. If you are talking about when Cataclysm first came out, that was also the time that Facebook came out and started the Social Media revolution. It wasn’t just WoW, Social Media ate the MMO’s lunch.
From that point on MMO was no longer the new incredible thing, it settled back into being a nitch industry for gammers.
Facebook launched in 2004, before vanilla.
I think a bigger change was smartphones. The iPhone launched in summer 2007, and in a few years smartphones went from rare to everyone having one.
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Ouch, yeah. Grim Batol pulls very much warrant CC, and the early Stonecore pulls are also rough if DPS don’t focus the mob that evolves.
I never played endgame cata, but I remember the leveling dungeons were no pushovers. Most pugs that I played we ended up wiping a few times. If you’re pugging while leveling, better prepare for that.
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Metagoblin did a good video called “i played 100 hours of Cataclysm” - I would recommend it.
Cata raiding is a step up from Wrath, as MoP is a step up from Cata, etc. I would say it’s harder than Wrath overall, but not as hard as mythic raiding on retail.
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It is for example most dungeons have actual dangerous mechanics that will wipe you if you do not do said Mechanics, the most deadly one are Ozruk Stomp, Foe Reaper 5000 Harvest golem Vehicle phase and General Umbriss Charge as far as I remember those can wipe a group with ease, There isn’t anything like that in WOTLK.
And the raids are also on a whole new level, but I only raided from Fireland in OG Cata so no idea how hard the raid before that were.
Cata has much more in common with Wrath than it does retail. of course if you actually played either retail or classic you would know that.
during Cata you still go through Outland and Northrend while leveling. the only thing that is “gone” is the old versions of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, but they still live on in Classic Era and SoD so go play one of those versions if you ever just have to visit the old zones (but you never did go visit them after TBC launched did you?)
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Cata is king of the personal responsibility mechanics. Not as many screw up and wipe the raid mechanics, but a ton of screw up and you die and everyone knows you screwed up mechanics.
I doubt they will release actual pre nerf dungeons, but even they had 1 shot mechanics for every single boss.
Zzzz schizo does not = schizophrenia. Schizo is actually the term for schizoid a completely different mental illness. As a schizoid myself and reading your responses I would like to say welcome to the group
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We shall see. They did release pre-nerf Vashj in TBC Classic and she was quite a DPS check compared to any of the fights before that. Naxx in Wrath Classic was also supposedly buffed (didn’t feel like it) because the original version was laughably easy from what I heard (I missed the first year of OG Wrath).
Thank you, that was the perfect video to watch.
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