BTW… Excellent write up of Cata. I’m always impressed when folks know their subject so well.
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Huh, that is a highly interesting and informative response. Thanks for taking the time to write that, I feel for the first time I actually understand what Cata changed about WoW (other than the landscape).
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Cata was a good expansion, the problem was that the expansion didnt have a lot of stuff to do
Oh, in one of my previous guilds, we had a saying: If it’s red, it’s dead. If it’s bloodelf, it’s camped.
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The problem was that it was a bad expansion. It completely trashed Azeroth and gave the Alliance Worgen.
in terms of gameplay the expansion was amazing, it made the leveling experience more interesting and you could level like 5 levels in 1 zone but i see that as something positive, not negative and the worgens were amazing! if you didnt cata it means you didnt play it
It had decent dungeons in what would be called phase 1.
Come phase 2 they indirectly nerfed the content with massive gear inflation because the Wrath babies cries were drowning the forums in tiers over the fact that no instanced content could be zerged.
The idea of Cata heroics was a throwback to early TBC heroics in their pre-nerf state.
Lots of us loved it, but the wimpy kids don’t want hard modes.
Regarding classes, it was the first major pruning of the game, Wrath was the first actual pruning, but Cata used Daisy Cutter to prune the classes.
Also the world revamp looked ok, but the static state of the wrecked world went on way too long and looked like crap to be blunt.
Your post sums it up perfectly.
Cataclysm was a solid expansion with an unfortunately bad ending, but let’s be real here, people still get too hung up over the old-Azeroth change (something I was unhappy with too, but it’s a non-issue now that we have Classic).
One thing Cataclysm does not get nearly enough credit for is how it fleshed out specs. Wrath was the expansion that gave specs a base identity (Warlocks don’t just shadowbolt, Mages get more than 1 spell to cast, etc), but Cata polished them and enhanced them further. This is combined with positive system changes to mechanics like all DoTs scaling from haste and critting innately.
I’d even go so far to argue that classes were better in Cata than they were in MoP, but that’s a pretty controversial opinion.
Nope. Without meaningful changes, I’m done mid way through Wrath.
Exactly this.
That’s not true though. Cataclysm briefly dipped below 10m but it did finish at 10m subs. Wrath had peaked at 12m but only in its final quarter, which is what Cata started at, so 2 mil lost from 12 mil.
If we’re going by subs, MoP started below 10m and lost more subs per quarter, briefly dipped to 7 mil and finished at barely 7.5 mil, which was a full quarter of the playerbase and the biggest sub loss for any expansion, until WoD doubled that in its first and second quarter. Yet MoP continues to get the rose-colored glasses treatment en masse.
So people give it that, MOP was so bad and boring i quit, came back for ToT still bored, the raid was boring, and the isle of thunder just annoying, so i quit again, came back and SoO was just damn annoying also, dungeons still sucked, dailies still sucked, MoP was the begining of if you want to compete in WoW you need 18hours a day to do every daily to farm rep or your a bad.
The changes to ret made me want to quit my paladin. Linear questing is incredibly boring. They also got rid of many of the most interesting quests.
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ret was incredibly good at the end of the expansion and even during firelands, and if you quit because they removed the “interesting quests” then i dont know what to tell you
I quit for a number of reasons. I returned late on, and still hated all the changes to Azeroth. Leveling through Cata content once was okay, at best. I dunno, it was a pivotal time for WoW. For the worse. I’m really glad to have Classic and now TNC. I suspect my time in Classic WoW may end if Cata comes back.
At least give cata a proper shot 
At least give cata a proper shot:)
i’d atleast level up and do the heroics, those were hard at launch, it was a fun time for me. The phase terrain of each zone really blew me away at the time as well. I definitely wouldn’t play through it though, i’d probs check out 2-3 months after launch and come back for MoP. MoP is one of my favourites.
Those are both good things.
This looms heavy for a ton of people, and honestly I get it but at the same time I don’t. So many people clamored for change, for things to look like we’ve been through those regions, for places we saved to no longer be under perpetual siege, etc. Then we got it and… well… change became irksome and bad and wrong.
/shrug
That’s a tough one. MoP classes were fantastic as well, and I enjoyed Tanking in both, but MoP gave us the first iteration of “Active Mitigation” that was… well… eh. It didn’t do well because it was poorly balanced and Monks were just freaks (and better) so it was all over the place.
Both expansion get a lot of unnecessary hate despite both having some fantastic positives.
I get some people like the new Azeroth. I can’t think of a single change to the world that I liked. The idea of quests getting stale after leveling through the content a few times makes sense. I just wish they made less “catastrophic” changes.
I suppose I may have liked Worgen if they came out when I was 15. But, the expansion landed on my 32nd birthday, which was a bad surprise. And I was at least twice as old as I should have been to think they were cool.