Why Cataclysm is more classic than WotLK

Community General Discussion
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WotLK was the first expansion whose new content did not include any new zones in the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor, the continents that were included in Vanilla WoW. Cataclysm, in contrast, is set almost entirely in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.

All raids from Vanilla and Cataclysm are on those continents (or at least have entrances there), and the same can be said for some TBC raids such as Karazhan, Battle for Mt. Hyjal, and Sunwell. NONE of the WotLK raids are in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor though. (Onyxia’s Lair does not count due to being copy-pasted from Vanilla.)

People think that because WotLK wraps up a story from WC3, it’s somehow more of a legitimate part of the “classic era” than Cataclysm, but actually Shadowlands is the expansion that wraps up that story, so they’re wrong about that anyway, plus having a main villain who is at the center of all the events in the expansion actually makes WotLK less like Vanilla WoW compared to Cataclysm.

Also, Cataclysm was the first expansion since like maybe the beginning of TBC where you were likely to see people walking around in gear from Vanilla, because of transmog. In WotLK you mostly only saw gear from WotLK, and it was all brown and BORING, and people hated that so much that maybe that’s why people petitioned for an “appearance tab” (i.e., what people called transmog before transmog became a thing).

Also, compared to WotLK, the number of people who were subscribed to the game by the end of Cataclysm was much closer to the number of people who were subscribed to the game by the end of Vanilla.

Also is it a coincidence that the least liked raid of Cataclysm (Dragon Soul) reuses a lot of WotLK assets? In a way it’s like Dragon Soul was really a WotLK raid in spirit, if you think about it, and that may be why everyone hated it. In contrast, everyone loved Bastion of Twilight, Blackrock Descent, Throne of the Four Winds, and Firelands.

Blizzard needs to know true classic fans want to skip WotLK Classic and go directly to Cataclysm Classic!

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Cataclysm is around when content started to become too difficult and hopes were shattered, so while I think they’ll have a continuous server that progresses forever, alongside a classic and wotlk server, I don’t imagine Cata will be super popular.

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what in the world is this

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Hard no

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Still wish they had some TBC era realms, but hopefully they’ll keep a few Wrath era ones around should they choose to push on to Cataclysm. Being able to go back and see the world as it was once upon a time is the real draw for me.

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This right here, I found it odd they didn’t leave even 1 or 2 BC servers left behind for those that wanted it. In this current progressing version of classic if they keep going forward I think that would be ideal to leave 1 to 2 on each expansion as the cap. Or else classic isn’t really classic and is just progressing again. More let’s just do wow over again.

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There is no difference between them adding new zones for Cata and adding new zones for Northrend. They both took place on the same world (unlike BC) so they would both be in the “classic” world.

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Cata destroyed the old world, destroyed Classic. This is why private servers were so popular, it was the old world.

Blizzard couldn’t stop them, just like the gold selling. So the token pretty much killed the gold selling. And after years of saying “it’s not possible to go back”, they finally realized they could make money bringing back the old world, and here we are.

My Classic journey ends with wrath. Even if they released cata, why would I go there? It’s just retail…

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Counterpoint: Cataclysm sucked.

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Those existed even before Cataclysm; the reason they were popular is because you could play on them without paying any money, not because of the old world.

If the old world is so popular, why did the realms where most of the endgame content was in the old world die instantly when TBC came out? Why are people ostensibly excited to play WotLK, where the old world will very likely be a ghost town a few months in? In fact it’ll probably be even more dead now than back in the day (when it was extremely dead, despite WotLK’s supposedly high sub count), due to how many people are going to pay to skip to Northrend or just roll DKs and skip most of the old world for free.

idk, to enjoy the raids precisely as they existed back when Cataclysm was current content, with the same class tuning and everything. You can’t actually really get a similar experience to that at all in retail; the closest thing is Firelands during Cata timewalking and that’s still way different from how it was back in the day

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Cataclysm was a disappointment for me but I kept playing. Doggedly trudging along wishing for something better. When MOP came out I quit. I realized Blizzard was struggling to keep it interesting as they started adding mini games fashioned after popular browser games like plans vs zombies. WoW largest sub and server populations were during Wrath. If they bring out Cata and close the Wrath servers, Blizzard will again see a decline. The player base prefers Wrath over the others. No matter if a few ppl believe Cata to be more “Classic” than Wrath. At the end of the day more players, including myself, prefer to play Wrath over Cata.

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Cataclysm was rushed and done badly. I’m glad to hear someone likes it.

Someone had to.

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First of all the Plants vs. Zombies mini-game was from Cataclysm, not MoP.

Secondly, that’s probably one of the most fun questlines in the game and proves that Cataclysm is better than WotLK.

Thirdly, the whole mini-game style of dailies thing actually started in WotLK when the devs introduced vehicle combat into the game and thought it was like the best thing ever and tried to cram it into everything, including raids.

Fourthly, subs actually went up and peaked at the start of Cataclysm. What did people actually know about the expansion at the start other than that the pre-TBC world was getting revamped? If anything that’s one of the things people were most excited about. The reason people soured on Cata was not because they didn’t like the new old world or want to be able to fly in pre-TBC zones, it’s because Blizzard listened to the people who thought WotLK was for babies (hence the popular use of the term “Wrathbabies”) and just too easy in general, so they made heroic dungeons pretty difficult. This led to a lot of complaints, which led to a famous blog post by Ghostcrawler where he said they made the dungeons hard on purpose and they were not going to acquiesce to demands for significant nerfs and people needed to just git gud. That’s when the bleeding started. They eventually nerfed the dungeons a bit but they were still more difficult than the ones from WotLK even after nerfs.

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Why Cataclysm is more classic than WotLK

Because of the fact that it started the downfall of the once great empire that was WoW?

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I think Cataclysm was intended to be a revival of a game that was already on the verge of a decline. WotLK fans like to argue that’s when the game had the highest sustained number of subscribers but that’s also when it stopped growing. The new player experience was garbage because the zones had the most dated content (part of the world revamp was making pre-TBC quests more like WotLK in terms of design), and also everyone was in Northrend so it didn’t even really feel like an MMORPG at all if you weren’t in Northrend too.

Also there were no cross-realm zones. People talk about how much they hate what cross-realm zones did to the game, but now they go on classic and want to play on realms that are several times larger than the largest realms that existed back in the day.

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Just to prove that it is always Sunday, somewhere on Earth… :rofl:

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That was flying in the old world.

And subs may have hyped up at the start, but then quickly started tanking.

You seem to love cata, and that’s OK. But it ranks just one above the bottom for me, it’s hard work to suck worse than the going’s on in WoD.

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Cata was my favorite expansion and even i think the OP is being silly saying that people want it more thant wotlk.

That being said, since BC servers got replaced with lich king servers, and bc classic is gone. I fully expect all wotlk servers to fully convert to cata servers when cata classic launches.

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Cata is absolutely not retail. We don’t have the same professions, same talent system, same guild functionality, same leveling experience, etc.

“MuH zOnEs” is not a reason to claim Cata is retail. So much has changed since Cata.

Counter counterpoint: Cata was my favorite expansion.

It didn’t. Subs were dropping way before Cata. People just like to blame Cata because they whined it was too hard after sleep walking through Wrath.

I don’t. I expect they’ll keep a couple Classic and Wrath servers. But we’ll see how many people actually stick around first.

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Incorrect, it added Stormwind Harbor. Which is quite large.

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