I hear the dungeons in that time were hard, and that the community cried enough to get them nerfed. Is this true?
If so, wouldn’t that go against a lot of what I see here from the casuals that hate m+ and ask for difficult non timed content?
If difficult regular content got so much pushback that they got nerfed, it sounds like people don’t really want that.
It’s not so much that they were hard, it’s that Wrath was very easy. Cata dungeons, especially at the start of the Xpac, required co-ordinated CC’ing and that wasn’t something a lot of people were used to because many of them were “wrath babies”
Paen is pretty much on the money. People were wiping in Stonecore trash and it was amazing.
The dungeons were tuned very differently from the ones in Wrath.
People had gotten used to running through and AoE’ing down everything on the way to bosses that had fairly easy mechanics.
Cata dungeons were much more difficult by comparison, and I think folks were unpleasantly surprised that the strategies that worked in Wrath no longer applied.
Harder than WotLK dungeons? Yes. Were they nerfed? Yes. WotLK dungeons were really easy while they were current. Gear really outpaced the dungeons and classes were in a lot better place than they had been prior.
Article mentioning the nerfing:
https://www.eurogamer.net/blizzard-nerfs-cataclysm-dungeonsThey required more coordination on the Heroic level. If you weren’t careful there were mechanics that could kill the party. This was different than the AOE Gofest that was popular in Wrath Dungeons.
No… Different groups of people. There isn’t a single definition of casual. I don’t think that being casual means that you don’t want to tackle difficult content. It means that WOW is not your identity and you have other things to do as well.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind more difficult and more randomized World Content that can be achieved by solo players. People that want to make it easier should be able to team up. Now keep in mind that a solo player can be different than a casual player.
I also remember healer mana management returned and was a bigger part of healing than it had been in WotLK.
It was more that they were of an appropriate difficulty, which at the time was just much harder than the easy difficulties we were all used to at the time.
Cata dungeon difficulty is not the reason I strongly disagree with any kind of Cata classic, however…
No, they weren’t hard, it’s just the end of Wrath was a AOE fest (besides maybe Icecrown Dungeons with poop geared group) so people were used to that and then Cata came and stomped groups that didn’t CC.
CC and the dungeons were easy.
This is true 
You can read Ghostcrawler, the Riot Dev in charge of League of Legends MMO, response to it here when he worked for Blizz
Is it possible for some players to want something while others want something else?
Of course there are people that don’t and people that do.
Heroics were considered hard by a few yes. They were nerfed, but they definitely weren’t that difficult. People went from overgearing WOTLK heroics to undergearing Cata heroics. People like to say WOTLK heroics were a joke, but they weren’t a joke on launch. Sure they weren’t as punishing as TBC heroics, but people boycotted The Oculus for a long time because the vehicle fight took a coordinated group until the nerf. What caused them to be a joke was the way ilvl jumped up 13 per raid difficulty. In TBC you had the highest ilvl 2h axe being 146 ilvl with heroic dungeon axes being 115. Meanwhile in WOTLK a 2h axe in heroics would be 200 and in 25 man ICC was 264. 31 ilvl increase vs 64 ilvl increase.
The dungeons are still hard by todays standards. Next toon you level run Vortex Pinnacle and see just how many people end up leaving the party lol
The dungeons in Cata were extremely difficult on launch. Proper CC was needed due to how hard everything hit during that time! Messing up a good number of mechanics was also typically a one shot.
I enjoyed the difficulty myself, but they were nerfed after the next big content patch, I believe. Same patch that removed Deathwing breathing fire on a zone, too, which I also thought was neat…
Yes.
“You think you want it, but you don’t”
They don’t want M+ timer removal to give non timed difficult content.
They want to be able to just fail as many times as they want in the keys and still get rewards.
It’s the illusion of wanting hard content, when it’s actually a way to give out prizes to last place.
WoW devs have a habit of going from one extreme to another, and that’s exactly what happened in Cata. They went from relatively easy dungeons in Wrath, designed to cater to the millions of casual gamers flooding the servers when WoW was a pop culture juggernaut, to much harder dungeons in Cata that the more hardcore players from early days had been asking for.
How it was done:
How it should have been done:
Unfortunately, as what happens in many corporate environments, you get two factions with widely differing views of how projects should be implemented. When one’s idea isn’t working, a switch is made to the other, and you get wild swings like this instead of careful adjustment.
I don’t recall the dungeons being hard back in Cata. The biggest complaint I will remember was that you had to discover the entrance first before you could even que for that dungeon.
Wrath created the Dungeon zerging as CC was non-existed, those who thought the dungeons were hard in Cata had that Zerg mentality. Most packs at first at the start of the expansion had to be pulled safely, there was no skipping most packs or it will either, pull onto you when fighting a group of 4 or 5 (Meaning your now fighting maybe 9 mobs at the same time) or you just wipe.
The skill level was just lower back then
They weren’t after a month or two.
Being a healer going OOM after a handful of heals wasn’t fun.
BREAK YOURSELVES UPON MY BODY
Feel the strength of THE EARF
Yea wrath dungeons were easy pz compared to cata heroics. Save for maybe the ICC 5 mans and they were not that bad. It is just a lot of wrath players sucked.
I remember the first dungeons in WotLK, we had to stop between every pull and drink and bandage; sometimes if you showed up without bandages: you’d get kicked from the group. Clearly, with gear, we eventually blew through the dungeons with speed runs.
Cata was mostly a shock, more than anything else. We had to freeze trap certain mobs and, eventually, we learned how and which and would get feisty when someone didn’t know what to do.
In my opinion, Cata made us what we are today. It forced us to up our skill level. An interrupt is expected and not unusual, we all know how to lock down a mob, we are more aware of our whole toolkit than ever before.