After seeing this thread from the Community Council, I am actually now curious with the Classic community on where to go after WotLK Classic, whether we continue on with the next expansion or whether to restart Wrath or Vanilla.
I know that Cataclysm was the beginning of the downfall with WoW, and it was when subs originally started declining. But everyone does have different opinions about Cata. What we hated, what we liked, etc.
I’m of the mindset that re-re-releasing a Classic+ version of the game would result in significant diminishing returns. The ‘classic’ versions aren’t that long ago, and I don’t see that many players returning to play those for a 3rd time. I’m not saying these aren’t good versions of the game, but at the end of the day they won’t hold the nostalgia that they do now if they’re only 6 years old, and a lot of players can’t be bothered to do it all again.
I also have no issues with them continuing the current releases of classic and moving along up to a certain point. I think that the end of MoP would be a good place to stop though, as I don’t imagine too many would be interested in WoD.
That said, a lot also depends on whether they just replicate Cata-MoP or if they take things on board to make them more desirable. The biggest legitimate complaint about Cata was the length of time between patches, and DS went on for 6+ months too long. That’s easily fixed if they want to do it. Similarly, MoP’s biggest issues were the initial dailies and SoO going on for way too long. Again, easy fixes if people want them.
Option 3, if they were so inclined, would be to do shorter versions of Cata and MoP and start work on the skipped content for WoD. WoD had a lot of potential, and the raids were generally good but the massive lack of content, pathfinder, plus too much garrison focus killed it. If however they were to actually give us capital cities, take a lot of stuff out of garrisons, give us the Shatt raid, faralon, proper tanaan etc then people might be interested…
Now, that I am sort of free for the time being. Here is my take.
So, the things I found was the game went majorly went downhill with and after WoD, though all for different reasons. That doesn’t mean that Cata and MoP didn’t have its downsides as well, but not as bad as what it was from WoD.
Cataclysm
Honestly, I actually did enjoy Cataclysm, but to some extent. The main problem I hated was that the world was completely overhaul to be designed to be used with flying, but if you’re levelling an alt or a new player, you’re not going to have any flying below level 60, and once you hit level 60, you’re going to be off to the Outlands and Northrend, and won’t return to either the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor until 80. The other thing which I hated the most in Cata was the introduction of Looking For Raid with Dragon Soul raid. Introduction to LFR made it lazy way to get some gear, since you can basically be AFK while others does the fights.
And from the original thread that I linked in the opening post:
I while I agree with this comment from one of the Community Council members, I also disagree. One thing I found was the best transmog appearances seem to actually dropped from raids or rated PVP, though this is only my opinion. But the addition and introduction of transmogrification opened the game further to customize our characters more, considering it wasn’t until Shadowlands that we were originally limited with the character customizations.
Mist of Pandaria
Yes, one of my favourite expansions, it isn’t also without its downsides too. First of all, the removal of having to visit a class trainer to learn new abilities, this was one thing that was quite disappointing in my opinion. Although it was Cata that we saw the removal of class spell ranks, MoP made class trainers only useful for dual speculation, and took away a bit of a character progression.
Plus, Mist of Pandaria was also the introduction of the level boost from the WoW shop, (Although added in patch 5.4.8). Even now with Classic, with TBC and Wrath, there is the level boost, the level boost is what is killing the game levelling system the most. It is taking away the meaning of progression, and just allowing people to skip everything.
Then also, Battle Pets. Though there is some that does like it, me personally, I hated it. If I wanted to play Pokemon, I would’ve gone and played Pokemon. And it isn’t that I hate pokemon, but it seems like the idea to add it into WoW was just lazy, and provided really nothing.
Warlords of Draenor
The expansion that truly began WoW’s downfall. Firstly, it was the expansion that was abandoned before its first major patch, and the expansion really provided nothing to keep people interested outside of raiding or PVP.
Also, the level squish that was done in WoD also the introduction of 1-shot levelling, as it was overdone and tested poorly, made levelling pretty much useless and dungeons solo’able at any level with every class. WoD did have the potential to be a good expansion, but it didn’t because of the level squish and it being abandoned.
I would continue further with Legion, BfA and SL, but the stuff with those 3 expansions would take more than just a couple of paragraphs per each expansion. There is more stuff about Cata, MoP and WoD, but I listed my own reasons to why I disliked the most from the 3 expansions. Others may have different opinions.
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