I feel a lot of this came down to the world revamp causing them to need to redo so many old story line while also coming up with new content. The Harrison Jones quests really got played out by the time you finished them.
LFR and Dragon Soul just not being the follow up to Firelands to end the expansion are my biggest negatives for Cata. The number of dropped story lines was also disappointing for how strong the expansion started overall. For how ambitious the project was, it felt like they needed 3-6 more months to really polish the quests.
Survival Hunter and Fire Mage were extremely fun to play.
The dungeons were SUPER fun especially pre-nerf and the end time dungeons were my favorites.
Leveling through the new revamp zones was really amazing and fun especially after so many years of questings in the older zones it was a breath of fresh air even if later on people started to hate them which is normal, they should do another revamp of the old worlds zones.
The Talent tree felt better in general in my opinion.
Deathwing randomly killing you while you were questing was also fun, you never knew when your time would come and suddenly sky turn red… And you knew its over for you.
Fireland is my favorite raid.
I didn’t truly hated anything about it really beside maybe the underwater zone bad place to quest.
There have already been over a hundred posts since this, so please forgive me if someone else has already raised the points that I am about to.
Cataclysm heroics weren’t just a lot harder and that’s it. They were more difficult (more mechanics, requiring more crowd control efforts) while simultaneously giving worse loot (compared to wrath heroics) and at a time when Blizzard intentionally made healing more difficult. All of these at once - combined with other changes to talents, skills, and class designs turned a LOT of people off right when they would be raring to go.
Blizzard has a tendency to make three massive changes to fix a problem that only needed one minor adjustment.
I really wish they’d implement these classic servers differently. Like have a cluster for each expansion and charge a fee to upgrade (move to the next cluster.)
The game is just so different from expansion to expansion. I enjoy the old classic and I’m bummed it force moved all my characters into tbc then Wrath.
Cata was where the Devs tried to force us into specs and how we play the game with Talent tree design. Hybrids really died and creative builds.
It’s the Devs job to design something and get out of the way of the players and let them innovate and create fun ways to play the game. Cata became more rigid where it was the Devs who wanted us to play their way. Which is bad.
The best part of an MMO is when players theorycraft fun new ways to use Gear or Builds and that died in Cata. Not to mention the content in Cata wasn’t great along with design.
the addition of LFR, and the new talent system that was dumbed down. Also the classes felt weird. Paladins getting holy power among other specs getting weird additions. Also the final raid of the expansion was considered a flop, especially the last 2 bosses. which was really just one boss.
a lot of people consider cata to be one of the best expansions for pvp balance in arena. The secret heroic only bosses were a nice touch as well. The raids actually were pretty fun. The instances were good as well.
Wrath heroics were considered loot pinatas so when cata came and the heroics were quite a bit harder, at least at the start, and bosses only dropped blues, a lot of people ended up just quitting the game. I remember I quit a few months in i did a few bosses in BWD, did some pvp on holy paladin and that was it quit for 2 or 3 years and did private server stuff until close to the end of mop.
holy paladin was probably the spec that changed the most as you had mana to worry about as well as the stupid combo point system, called holy power.
I quit during cata, mainly for irl reasons. It was a busy time in my life. I didnt care for the zones (except uldum) and the new talent trees, but i didnt think they were game breaking. I just didnt like them. If the do rerelease it, the talents are one of the things theyre talking about changing, so Ill probably give it a shot.
Yeah I know that lmao. It was released in ICC patch. My point is the precedent it laid and the code behind the system made it extremely easy to slap LFR onto the game.
Nobody would have accepted LFR in the game if RDF didn’t provide the foundation.
I believe people didn’t dislike cata because it was bad, as the dungeons and some raids were fun and challenging. But it did replace wrath, and the idea it might replace wrath classic is bad.
I played a warrior from vanilla to cata, the changes to war in cata killed the class for me. (I didnt mind putting heroic strike or cleave on the mousewheel.)
For me, Cata is when every class got ruined. That’s when they really lost their way. Most classes had a stupid gimmick that made them less fun to play. I had been a holy priest up to then, but the new “fun” gimmick of the “big toolbox” healer only being able to use some of their abilities at a time was a deal breaker. Druid had stupid and pointless eclipse. Talent trees became a silly and pointless mess.
Other than classes (and the community killing RDF) there actually was some good content in Cata. The storytelling of the leveling experience was well done.
lackluster in comparison to the previous expac I think. the raid mechanics were interesting, but you could just do the content easier and faster through lfr. i didnt even need a guild to see all the content, and generally any move that disassociates the player from other groups (like WoD’s bases) has the inadvertent effect of crippling the major social aspect that keeps the game interesting. also warrior pvp was depressing.
I remember thinking MoP was going to be a big stinker, but honestly MoP really did everything I wanted in an expac to follow Wrath. They’d have to get pretty out of the box with cata classic for me to consider doing that content again.
*except the story. The writing has always been debatable but I liked a lot of it up to this point. I think it went into free fall after the Garrosh arc and any time I try to see what’s going on now I end up disappointed. It lacks any real substance, and every event feels forced.