Legit question, I’ve never played Cataclysm. Quit WoW right after ICC released and didn’t come back until WoD.
It’s just hard to believe that Cata would go down as one of the worse right after WoW has peaked in sub numbers during WotLK. After Classic, TBC felt like a huge upgrade, and then WotLK arguably felt like a huge upgrade to TBC, but then all of a sudden Cata was a huge downgrade to the point where sub numbers never recovered.
to many raid start game for tryhard end game for regaler good pepole wanna play to do relax for fun crz
IIRC a lot of healers hated cata
People say the raids were decent, though Firelands was kinda small.
Beyond that, Blizz spent a lot of time revamping the old world, and it came off feeling like a more disheveled, unpolished expansion. Gotta remember, this was magnified by it immediately following Wrath.
That, plus it introduced LFR, which still sticks in peoples’ craws for some reason.
Think it was the first use of extremely linear leveling zones. The water zone…
To be fair, pugging dungeons early in Cata was what killed off all my healers for good.
Nah, the 10/25 attempted balance was the problem, not the amount of raids. It wasn’t many bosses.
The end game content outside of raiding was rather boring.
From what I remember, there wasn’t really a whole lot to do in endgame. A lot of resources went into revamping the vanilla zones and the end zones felt some of that lost effect. Revamps like that are also pretty polarizing.
I don’t think Cata was ever universally hated though. It’s always usually been regarded as a middle range expansion. Not super great, but not terrible either. Pretty decent. Dragon Soul was the only real iffy part of it.
It also introduced transmog! The best thing ever.
Biggest thing i hate is how it changed the old world.
I don’t think cataclysm was bad at all.
I think people didn’t like it because it didn’t age well.
The gap between vanilla and Cataclysm is shorter than the difference between Cataclysm and Shadowlands.
The cata zones are showing their age. It’s time for another world update, but for heavens sake. Update the zone without throwing a volcano smack dab in the middle of it.
Can you blame them for doing it though? They tried to breathe new life into the old content, even if it failed.
Also, Thrall.
Everywhere.
I can’t say it is bad . I came in right at the end of BC just before Wrath so Wrath was my first full expansion .
Wrath I was still kind of learning things . Cata is where I started to get the hang of it and to be honest is one of my top 3 expansions along with Mists and WoD .
I liked some of the stuff from Wrath and the little BC stuff I did ( That is why I am doing TBCC to see what I missed ) . To me even though there have been some things I have enjoyed , there is actually more in the last 3 expansions I think are bad .
I just hope 9.1 helps to turn SL around.
I liked it although I miss the original Barrens.
WoTLK raid had massive raid damage that spiked health pools so healers basically had to spam heals without missing GCDs. This was super fun especially on a Shaman spamming Chain Heal. Cata changed from the spike damage to slower damage and at the same time massively increased the mana costs for healers heals so that they would have to triage heal. The intention was to leave people at not full health and only heal them if they actually needed it. Problem was that the mana issues were so bad you could barely keep up with the tank damage on boss fights without even healing a DPS a single time. Obviously the community turned toxic towards the healers not constantly having everyone’s health at 100% at all times. This led to content nerfs after the outcry.
I liked Cata. Had a blast with my DK back then. I thought the new zones were cool and had a good time in Tol Barad. Darkmoon Fair was a fun addition. Professions were still meaningful and I did pretty well with inscription. I didn’t really like how Arenas became pretty much mandatory for pvp.
PS: I actually liked Vash’jir. It actually felt like an adventure being underwater (even more so during the search for Derek Proudmoore in BFA where you dive so deep it’s pitch black 
Blowing up the whole old world and shoving a bunch of craters, tornados, and silly pop culture references into it will tend to do that.
In the name of improving many original dungeons, they totally ruined them. They would be nerfed or rewritten entirely. ZF, SM (we basically lost all 4 and got two new ones), and Sunken Temple was totally eviscerated. STV was split up and many of the best quests were removed. Almost every elite mob in the outside world (and some dungeons) was reduced to the level that made it seem as though it was barely able to escape from The Valley of Trials. Last but not least, we could no longer kill Hoggar in large groups of super low toons since the Alliance always managed to show up in time and take him away.
Johnny Awesome and that one undead farmer guy were hands down the best part of the expansion.
OK!! TARREN MILL!!! IS THAT IN THE BARRENS!!!
I have no idea why people didn’t like it. I hearted Cataclysm. I had SO MUCH fun pvping. I even did heroic raiding. It was my last expansion for both.