Cata was pretty decent, I think Alakir and the Bastion raid and Firelands were pretty on point. They whiffed with Deathwing though absolutley did not put any development effort into that raid, systems were in a good spot imo, you could choose talents still where you wanted , but they were more impactful…people get so hung up and seem to hate having some things baked in to your core passives…Idk why.
It seemed more fun to get a couple core abilities once you chose the first point in a talent tree (like getting Bloodthirst at level 10). It wasn’t game breaking and things went from needing to spend 5 points over 5 levels to gain 5% of a stat (like Crit) to only needing 2 points to do it. It filtered out junk, but the classic and TBC crowd really, really like ‘junk’ stuff because it is true sandbox.
I have nothing against the sandbox style lovers, but I personally enjoyed having less talent points and just picking stuff that you could feel once you chose it.
Zones were not awful, though to this day, I cannot remember one pixel of Twilight Highlands, so they weren’t great either…no epciness of Storm Peaks or Grizzly Hills.
Difficulty of launch heroics made you wish you were wiping in Blood furnace again, so the brutality of the tuning was fun to try to work through for awhile
A solid 6.5/10
The novelty of the revamped 1-60 content faded fast even though people really hyped it in the buildup to Cata.
The 5man and raid content were enjoyable in T11 and 12 but there wasn’t much really going on otherwise and if you weren’t playing with a consistent group of players the experience could be pretty bad.
DS lasting as long as it did was the real disaster though. I quite liked the Firelands patch.
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and it was at that moment right there where you lost your argument
Imagine going in on the rose tinted glasses trope and immediately following with this:
Filed under absurd.
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Cata wrecked the old world, and was a difficulty shock for the player base coming off of one of the easiest eras of WoW (minus Ulduar and LK). It was frustrating because no one knew how to get out of stuff or interrupt anymore.
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Destroying the old world was already enough to cement it as a terrible expansion, but it was also the expac where LFR came in, and the story got REEEEALLY stretched.
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No. It wasn’t. It was actually pretty good.
What most players hated about cataclysm is that’s when blizzard started to make heroics/raids harder and the casual audience was upset they couldn’t just kill anything they wanted too while being bad at the game.
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I become a Worgan… but the rest is bad
Cataclysm was pretty good. I enjoyed 4.0 raiding quite a lot and the heroics were good before the nerfs.
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The early 10H vs 25H difficulty and realm firsts drama resulting in it.
Heroic Dungeon overnerfing at the start of the xpac.
Sinestra world first drama.
Dragon Soul items being so overpowered in PvP that some player hosted Arena Tournaments completely banned them. (cunning of the cruel stacking locks in rbgs)
Some classes’ 4p being so good that you had to go into LFR to try and complete tier sets.
Tol Barad bridge afkers.
Cata was around the time gaming really started to get picked up by the youtube algorithm to the point where they essentially stopped it from being picked up in the algorithm for years. But that’s why Cata has some good coverage on it over on youtube, if you wanna go rewatch a lot of the overall good and bad from it def go watch TotalBiscuit’s videos from that time.
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The short answer is yes. Cataclysm was that bad.
That was when they eliminated all differences between classes. Instead of doing the activity of design and balance, they just took a short cut and gave everyone everything.
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It’s really not, but it’s a different target audience and flavor than the people enjoying classic at the moment.
Can’t please everyone, and the changes they made displease this group.
Looking back, Cataclysm started a tonal shift in the game. While WoW never took itself too seriously, I think the original world was brilliantly designed. It felt very immersive. The cataclysm world revamp did streamline questing, but all the quests hubs really magnified the theme park aspect of the game. A lot of the quests also became a little silly. And I feel like the silliness persisted for several expansions.
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Jokes upon jokes became the norm once we hit TBC if we’re being honest, it just isn’t something that is so obvious when the humor of the quest is just in the quest text 95% of us don’t read anymore. Quests in TBC have a lot more pun-oriented names, non-serious references, or are outright ridiculous. With Cata and future expansions, we got NPCs that actually RP’d and spoke to us, full voice acting and everything, and it was such a departure from the muppet mouth movements of a stationary NPC as we got 3-4 paragraphs of sob story before accepting a “Kill 10 Gnolls” quest.
I think people definitely were off put by it to be sure, as you note the tonal shift, but it was already there in many respects.
Ah yes… I remember playing my Druid exactly the same as my Warrior, Paladin, and Death Knight…
/facepalm
Dragon Soul was just… ugh… such a letdown for the end of the expansion. Itemization went into ridiculous extremes, more so than ICC or Sunwell ever did, and the trinkets and set bonuses were just beyond ridiculous. The LFR situation was stupid too, and I was glad when they finally made LFR sets not the same thing as the Tier sets.
If you took out the Deathwing fights, Dragon Soul was a good raid. I really liked the airship fight with Blackhorn (sp?). Deathwing himself? BAH!
BAH!!!
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The thing is about catachlism Is a lot of people have nostalgia with the old world See I’m the odd person out one of the very few things I do like about cata Is the changes to the world the thing I hated about cata was Classes.
Cataclysm was the point where you really had to really start having Adams to play your class It was the point where it really started becoming add on of warcraft.
You see at the end of wrath Our classes were complete There’s at the point where they just didn’t really need anything.
So It was at the point where imagination really started To take hold There was sum in wath But there was still uniqueness there was enough imagination where nobody felt like they didn’t have anything but not too much work everybody felt the same.
As far as the changes to the world See I’m with a few people that loved it It’s depending on the zone desolis was amazing after the revamp and so is the barons.
But for a lot of people those zones contained a lot of the memories they had and when those were gone The game Justin feel the same anymore.
those tank 4 pieces were disgusting tbh. I dont think there’s been a 4p since that has been just so overwhelmingly OP.
This is not true, classes still had their own niches until WoD. When WoD happened is when the homogenization took a huge hit on all classes. I enjoyed ele in MoP because I still had the ability to provide utility to the raid. In WoD that wasn’t a thing anymore.
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TBC is still my favorite WoW expansion. And yes, Cata really was what finally killed it for me. I just unsubbed, but only because of the way Blizzard isn’t handling server populations. I would literally play for years otherwise. And I’ll resub if they fix things, though I’m not holding my breath.
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It wasn’t THAT bad in the same way that say WoD was pretty much over all just an awful expansion. But it did have a handful of very poor design decisions that were really negative.
The three that really come to mind are,
The 5 man heroics at launch, they simply had no place in a random group finder and blizzard refused to correct the situation in any kind of a timely manner.
Joining the 10/25 man lockouts/loot/achieves. That over night killed a big pug raiding scene that had popped up in Wrath.
And guild perks, one of those good ideas that just back fired horribly in practice.