Cataclysm is commonly regarded to be among the worst expansions by a fair amount of the playerbase. However, this notion is mostly made based on misconception and the overall last impression of the expansion.
In many ways, Cataclysm is a lot like WotLK. However, Cataclysm makes it way less likely for one to raid log or quit. Through systems such as transmogrification, players are incentivized to group up with others in order to complete old raids (you couldn’t solo these raids in Cata) for transmog gear. Now, some may say that Cata’s raid list is way less than WotLK’s and other expansions, and you’d be right. However, beyond face value, Wrath’s raid pool consists of two recycled raids from Vanilla and three one-boss raids (five one-room raids counting Ruby Sanctum and ToC), so really only three out of the nine raids (ICC, Ulduar, ToC (maybe?)) are substantial. On the other hand, Cataclysm only contains two questionable raids: Throne of the 4 Winds and Dragon Soul, the latter of which is tainted by the Spine of Deathwing and LFR (which will definitely not be in Cata Classic!!!)
The new talent system may be more restrictive in customization, however really only the “increases the critical strike change of X by Y%” talents were cut, however they are still in the game as the Mastery stat. I feel as if Cata’s character endgame customization is better than Wrath’s, through the expanded glyph system and item reforging.
While Cata did remove RPG-aspects such as Weapon Skill, it’s an often misconception that Cata removed the need for class trainers and the talent trees, both of which were done in Mists of Pandaria.
Will some major changes need to be made before Cata Classic comes out? Yes. For one, leveling is simply too easy and is also very confusing for new players between levels 58 and 80. However, I hope you all realise that Cataclysm has the potential to be great.
i didnt think it was that bad. But i was playing with good freinds and we enjoyed the challenge the original dungeon difficulty gave us. was refreshing from the zomg zerg wolk dungeons. The leveling was fine, the zones were cool and the raiding was good.
I think the biggest issue people had was how much everything changed. Poeple liked old azeroth and saw Cata as the begining of major change that people bucked back on. But the expansion itself i thought was fine minus 18 months of dragon soul. i think that played a big part in giving it such a bad rep too
You left out the whole part of “you must have 41 points in a single tree before you can move onto another tree” part of the Cataclysm revamp.
Combine that with class changes and classes just felt bland.
Combine that with Blizzard trying to tell players what they should enjoy through longer and “harder” dungeons, through harder raids etc.
Combine that with, and they admitted as much, wasting too much time on revamping a word you only saw temporarily.
Combine that with lore that was bland as hell.
Combine that with a brand spanking new profession that … served no purpose other than a blatant time spender.
And so on and so forth.
The most important thing that changed in Cataclysm is that Blizzard decided that they knew better than 12 million subs how the 12 million subs liked their game.
Ghostcrawlers whiny tweet about how “they hoped players would rise to the occasion of new 5 mans” is peak Cataclysm. They had completely lost touch with their playerbase.
That’s why Cataclysm was bad.
And it’s why WotLK was so good.
And it’s why it’s an effing mystery they’re adding H+ to WotLKC and removing RDF cause it’s the exact same philosophy that made Cataclysm a bad expansion.
Blizzard clearly has no feeling with their playerbase and the proper response to this is going the Runescape route of actually communicating with their playerbase.
Instead they’re forcing their own vision. They’re literally repeating mistakes of the past and people are out here screeching “we don’t want RDF cause it leads to retail”. The direction Blizzard is taking the game is that, but on crack.
It’s not just the number of different raid instances. Just compare the total number of raid bosses between cata and WotLK. Cata is missing enough bosses to account for an entire raid tier.
A lot of that was due to the times and the complaints of those times. WOTLK-MoP was a slow retailization. Wrath started it with 10 man easy mode content, RDF, and heirlooms. Cata doubled down on people complaining about raid times. My first MC rag kill in 2004/05 took like 6 and a half hours on a Saturday with everybody off school/work ready to basically waste the entire day downing rag.
People complained raids were too long from vanilla through Wrath and in cata they addressed it by making their big raids like Blackwing/Twilight bastion only having 5-6 bosses instead of previous raids that had 10+
A lot of people mindlessly hate retail, but retail exists because of Blizzard listening to the common player (it just so happens the average common player wasnt a top 10%er pushing HMs every lock out)
I used to think this was true, but since I’ve been frequenting the forums, I suspect that it’s just a very vocal small fraction of disgruntled people who like to dip in and out of WoW and solely level alt after alt, complaining that the game is unfair, unbalanced, etc. etc.
Catering to that crowd leads to all the things we dislike about Retail. I feel like it’s time to start drawing the line, and declaring no RDF for Wrath Classic was a great start. In like fashion, I hope for no RDF and its equivalent LFR.
Cataclysm was one of my favorite (possibly favorite) expansions. I loved the first tier of raids and the instances with some mechanics were a ton of fun!
To be fair, I had to quit playing due to RL getting very busy when Firelands was the current raid.
I was never a big fan of the leveling process. I think Cataclysm made it much more linear, which in turn made it quite obvious. I could not have cared less about the changes to the old world, as I wasn’t spending any significant time playing through older zones or trying to relive older experiences.
The dungeons were quite fun! They required more than simply tank and spank strategies, which often meant having to point out mechanics to people.
There were also interesting first tier raids that likewise required some mechanics to be followed and communication/coordination.
If anything, the worst part of Cata for me was that a lot of people took a break to go play Skyrim, which I personally never got into.
If you left during Firelands that was a good time to get out as that was one of the better raids in WoW in general and the previous tier was also pretty decent. Dragonsoul was one of the worst, like ToC levels of bad but for different reasons.
The dungeons were meh, they went to a super CC focused design I found boring, I preferred the ICC dungeons where they had challenging mechanics but weren’t bring the class not the player.
What was harsh about Cata was the change in raids with merging 10 mans and 25 mans which was just bad across a lot of levels of play from casual to hardcore. Things like guild perks which devastated smaller guilds. Or things like how the VP system actively enforced raid logging.
I wouldn’t base interest in cata off of p servers. Ik a lot of vanilla folks interested in coming back for cata specifically because it’s PvP scene is considered one of the best in WoW history
This is a bad business strategy. Gearing the game towards casual players only alienates the hardcore players, and actually does nothing to keep casual players subbed longer. The goal is to tempt casual players into becoming hardcore players. The goal should not be to allow casual players to achieve all that they desire in the game whilst remaining casual. That’s why the WoW player base became a revolving door during WotLK and Cata. You could resub for one month after each new content patch, then unsub and take a break until the next one and not even feel like you missed out on anything.
When you stop gearing the game towards diehard players, the overall quality of the game suffers.
And neither will I or my acct sub will be. I’m glad you are wanting to classic Andy up an expansion that was very much the real beginning of retail without regard to those that may have wanted it that way.
