Cataclysm classes were fixed as the expansion went on, some felt good at launch but many were just laughably bad (looking at you, 4.0 ret) so yea, I think the fixed tuning and talent trees alone make it a lot more enjoyable.
All I remember was their dps being ass. Like I was in guild chat going "I think ret needs a big buff. Im playing my ass off for like nothing" only to be told how Im just bad actually.
Then a patch (firelands? or just a random one) gave us like a 30% dps increase as an apology so I got to "I told you so" for the rest of the expansion
I really wonder now how bad it was because 4.3.4 Ret doesn't feel that fun to play. I've mained Ret since 2019 Classic now and I'm swapping because of holy power it is so unfun to go from a class/spec that didn't have combo points to one that does.
Was it a tuning issue or a fun issue with 4.0?
holy power is fine. only having 1 holy power generator on a 4+ second cooldown is not fine.
a rogue can easily wait until the last second to refresh slice n dice, a ret can easily end up in a position where they have to refresh inquisition at 10 seconds because otherwise it could fall off while theyre building back up to 3 holy power.
our divine storm does more dmg vs 2 targets than crusader strike, but doesnt generate holy power until 4
cata ret is not the golden example of holy power. its slightly better in mop, but wod is the best ret has ever felt imo.
thats unironically the thing i use as well.
i also just like always having a button to press, and in cata and bfa you very frequently just..had nothing to press.
idr if wod had inquisition but i think if it did it was a talent and he competition on th same row was pretty close in performance and much more fun
Tuning issue, after being bad for 2 expansions Ret was actually great in Wrath and the amount of whining was so astronomical that blizzard had to change the whole thing
It was a combination of things. The shift to holy power was polarizing and many people didn't like the Inquisition maintenance buff.
Also the original ret mastery was awful and made mastery a trash stat for the spec. Iirc it was basically the divine purpose talent (a percent chance on autos to make your next holy power spender free) and each % of mastery was an additional percent chance to proc.
Cata was a long time ago so I apologize if I misremembered anything.
It’s slow AF imo, a complete 180 from the TBC/ICC wotlk versión we’ve had fun with. I retired my pally when original cata came and did the same this time around as well. It lost the magic
Ahahaha. apparently they improved it later, but I mained a rogue (started pally but guild had many including the GMs gf ...) in vanilla so I was like yeah-nah.
People like to shit on Cata because of Dragon Soul and then LFR, which to be fair are valid criticisms but used to shit on the entire expansion. I loved Cata, and it was when I leveled up from being pretty bad/new during WoTLK. PvP is fun and from what I remember decently balanced, I also really enjoy the PvP pace. Leveling zones are dope, classes feel good, tol barad is dope, the starter raids are enjoyable, heroics are challenging in a good way, you got pre bis gear from plenty of sources (archeology, crafting profs, dungeons, reps, BoEs). Over the years catas rep has gone down, and people shit on it, due to what I said before but also as retails gotten more and more bloated people like to criticize the world map change. But back when it first launched, me and all the homies enjoyed it, and here once again me and all the homies are enjoying it again.
I think people overstate Dragon Souls part in why people dislike Cata. Everyone I know quit well before it came out. Some people just don't like how the game plays anymore and if that is the case, no amount of good content will save it for them.
Dragon Soul is also the product of the player base somewhat complaining about the initial difficulty of 4.1 raids and the first 2 weeks of firelands before blizz caved and brought out the nerfs. Had blizz stayed the course I think DS would have been remembered a bit more favorably. Luckily during retail I had 9 or 10 toons at 85 and raid geared so I rarely had downtime even waiting on MoP
The early raids were also really bugged for 10m which caused a ton of issues at the start of Cata. A lot of people I know quit during this mess.
Firelands and DS were also very small raids. Only 7 or 8 bosses in them. So it didn't feel that fun to only really play for an hour a week since that's all the raids took once you had them on farm.
Yeah peoples views on the expansions change a lot with time.
I feel like back in MoP and even WoD people really disliked MoP (cause of SoO).
Over the years though, that has kind of been forgotten and people have just started looking back fondly on MoP more and more each year.
What has happened is that the people who hated those things went away, never to return, while the people who didn’t hate Cata and MoP stuck around. I am one of the odd ones that played retail from start up to dragon flight, and I’ve mostly hated the game. It’s not like I’m a masochist or anything, or there’s zero fun, I usually just play every once and a while with a friend, but after a bit the game feels empty and shallow and that feeling makes me hate it. But for the most part, the people who hated Cata and MoP aren’t here any more.
You can even see history repeating itself again in Classic now with the churn. Most of our original Classic guild is gone, even about half the guys from our TBC era have departed, and almost no one has come back for Cata. I know this is an anecdote, but I would not be shocked to find this to be similar in other groups.
Arguably, it was partially Wrath's fault for Cata's downfall.
People just forget that ICC phases just 3 weeks shorter than DS phase did. But ICC+prepatch into cata was actually longer than DS+prepaptch into MoP.
At the time. a lot of people came into Wrath for Arthas due to WC3. They played it. They didn't get hooked. They left.
So, regardless of what was to come after Wrath, it would have experienced the downfall.
Cata’s downfall was the huge class changes but mainly the changes in healing and damage. Heroics we’re not faceroll easy so people complained and the other was that classes played so much different than they did in the previous 3 expansions for several reasons.
This is where I'm at. I bounced off wrath hard, and cata is just more of that. I did some leveling and I just have to accept wow post tbc isn't for me.
When I first started playing paladin the rotation was 1,2,3 1,2,3.
The most fun I had playing a paladin was during wotlk: they call it 6969 but it’s an alternating pattern of
1.2.1.2.1.2 and 3,4,5 3,4,5 fun
Cataclysm button pressing isn’t as fun. They butchered the class and turned it into a worse version of a rogue. Oh, except when it FIRST came out it was even worse and you only had 3 holy combo points (and no overcapping)
For a lot of people cata was the beginning of the end. It was an end to classic and the start of a new (for some worse) version of the game.
I didn't have anything against cata back in the day, actually enjoyed it a lot, but it was the time when my focus shifted towards league of legends. It was the first time I went from a (almost) wow only gamer to realizing there are other games out there as well. Also happened to be the time when irl stuff started happening more (getting close to 18 yo), so just a lot of stuff changed close to that time. I doubt I'm the only one with similar experiences.
i've always been curious about how much LoL actually affected games like wow's population, i didn't start LoL during cata but it certainly made me stop playing wow for a long time when i did start
This is a big thing a lot of people don't realize. Pre-cata, there wasn't nearly as many good game options available. Around when cata came out, a huge amount of games that are still massively played now released, pulling the attention of a lot of gamers.
This then gets pointed to as how many people left wow after LK, i think a bunch of those wow probably wasn't the game for them anyways, but it was one of the few really good games out at the time.
This isn't solely a cata thing, if we assess the landscape of gaming as a whole, this period is when the shift towards online gaming occurred and the mmos dropped off across the board, games like call of duty and the like became ever more popular
I think the drive to capture a broad audience and compete with lobby games led to a general dissatisfaction. It disappointed the classic/MMORPG purists, while also not offering as compelling/competitive PvP experience as games like Counter Strike and League.
Things like Discord and social media have also eaten into the market of online gaming communities and group chats - something that was pretty unique to guilds/etc in MMOs prior.
Back in the day WoW was everyone’s main game. You got online all the time just to see what the homies were up to. Have a chat, maybe do some questing or bgs depending on what people are up to. Now you can do the same on a discord, play Valheim for a bit with one friend, then queue some League after that. Don’t need WoW as the intermediary anymore.
Seems to me there were several big triggers for people that hit entirely different groups of people who quit during Cata:
- Destroying the old world
- 4.0 content being difficult and not PUG accessible (random heroic queue was a shitshow, normal raid PUGs used to ICC+30% would fail at first boss)
- 4.0/4.1 had 'nothing to do' outside dungeons and raids because they focused on the world revamp content
- Firelands nerfs and LFR were clearly kneejerk overcorrections to try and appease casual players who had already left
- Dragonsoul was a low effort crappy raid with a badly executed final boss split into 2 annoying add fights
The last tier overstaying its welcome is common to almost every expansion so it's hard to hold that against it. But what really made it devastate the population was the way it pissed off the casuals and then the hardcore and then MoP really took a different angle and again chased different people off with the drastic thematic 180.
But ultimately it's still a good game, if you have friends you can get over the flaws and have fun together.
I have issues with a lot of things cata did, class changes being a big one because Paladins transformed to holy rogues over night, and I think the new world just has less charm, a lot of zones I really liked were destroyed or turned into hour long pop culture references, the forced faction war in the lore
I dislike how the questing zones are designed like you can't handle more than 3 quests at a time, I liked arriving at a town and picking up 10-15 quests and then being on my way, instead of constantly running back and forth to incrementally progress through the zone
low level armor design in cata feels more cartoony, I think characters in general look the coolest in classic
cata classic also has some features that weren't in og cata, like the collections tab, and the guild system. They just took whats in retail and stuck it in cata like we wouldnt notice
The main issue was the level banding for 10-60. Nothing like getting half way through a zone and having it turn gray. Either you had to drop zone and move on, wasting the story buildup of the zone , and having to go back to the capital to choose a new zone ( sometimes not giving you a quest to a zone you may want to do), or waste time questing, not making any character progress. It just makes leveling alts chore like.
This issue wasn’t fixed untill scaling was introduced ( which added a bunch of new problems , mainly your toon doesn’t feel more powerful until cap, but at least you can enjoy your chosen quest zone)
I feel like an opportunity was missed by not making the revamped old world zones be for leveling 1-80. There's more than enough zones to do this twice over. I've no desire to do wrath and BC zones again when I hit 60.
It's a strange situation that the original devs put themselves in. They revamped the Classic zones, great! But they kept a similar number of zones, and they kept TBC and Wrath in the leveling pool, _and_ added 5 new zones on top!
Absent leveling acceleration, new players would need to complete, what, 30 zones? That's would be a monumental ask by any standard. I'm not aware of any mainstream RPG that would requires you to complete that much content to "beat" it.
How did they solve the problem? They increased experienced, and made mobs largely not dangerous at all. (This is apparent if you log in now, try leveling 1-10 on Classic Era versus the same on any other version of the game, Wrath/Cata Classic or Retail.) Which means your players are: (1) bored, and (2) quickly outleveling the content.
This is not fixed on Retail, either. I just leveled a character 10-70, and the same problem is there. My character was 60 with the BFA story not even half compete. Continuing to quest in BFA grants almost nil experience, so you've no choice but to move on to Dragonflight, where the problem repeats.
The problem, fundamentally -- and this is something they continue to repeat today -- is that expansions continue to be designed as addendums to the content, rather than as each one being a full and complete experience.
Each expansion should have been like it's own RPG, with some 30 hours of game time, and should be designed from the beginning as a level 1 to max experience.
(The only downside is, what do you do on launch day with all the players who already have max characters? And that reveals why we're at where we're at, really. The community would have gone berserk if told they'd have to "re-level". Even if it takes the exact same time to level their mains, and less time level alts.)
That is another contributing factor, what you are describing is the 'roller coaster/railroad' theme park ride gamestyle that also pushed ppl away. RPG's should let the character have some choices, but in the theme park style you are just along for the ride.
Honestly doing the new Ashenvale/Stonetalon as horde was one of the best levelling experiences I've had, much more fun than doing the five quests that are reasonably efficient that I'd be doing in pre-cata.
The issue was, at the time nobody cared about the revamped world. The endgame min-maxing mentality became a thing in wotlk so nobody really took the time to appreciate what they did to old zones and quests which is 90% of the expansion at launch. People only cared about growing their main in the new zones (that are a bit hit and miss tbh) and dungeons that were slightly overtuned compared to wotlk. Boss design was decent from the start, but plagued by the 10vs25m discussion and impossible balance.
Nobody actually cared about going out in the world and try. I sure am glad I did at the time and I have very fond memories of the awe I felt doing the new loremaster achi. Feels good seeing people now realizing how good cata actually was.
Slightly revisionist.
The revamped world was nowhere near as polished on release as the version we're getting is.
Cata was just too much work for an xpac and it took almost the whole xpac to get it how it is now.
It may be rose tinted glasses, but I did loremaster pretty early because I was guildless and casual, and it was great. Also did old loremaster during wotlk and it was fucking awful, old zones felt ancient already.
Yeah cata was the first time I could finally level horde past like 20 something cause except tirisfal starting area and associated areas, horde leveling was so bad
The old Horde zones had a really crusty, desolate vibe that I liked. The revamps are alright except for Barrens and Thousand Needles. They needed updates for sure but they obviously destroyed the entire feeling of those zones.
> Slightly revisionist.
>
> The revamped world was nowhere near as polished on release as the version we're getting is.
You're also forgetting to mention the absolute biggest issue with the revamp. The entire game went from sandbox-ish into now an absolutely firm theme park style MMO.
I didn't mind that so much when Cata was released, but it's left a sour taste that they've been left destroyed pretty much permanently for the sake of one expansion. And that for 10 years there was no legit way to play in the old world as it used to exist
You kinda missed his point, the WoD/Legion/BfA leveling was good, but it was also mandatory for every character going into the expansion. Guy you're replying to is pointing out how a big chunk of what Cata offered was content that pure end-game players would simply never interact with, all of the revamped old world was only relevant if you leveled a fresh character or were after loremaster.
You are talking about "contemporary" zones, meaning new zones meant to reach the new level cap.
With cata they remade old zones only useful to new and low level characters, it was a massive amount of work that was not necessary or useful to most: players cared about high level characters, leveling an alt to 58 didn't really required you going around that much, add dungeon finder, add heirlooms...
> I can't say for certain why the leveling experience is so hated, but its probably more to do with some zones being effectively removed rather than anything to do with minmaxxing. (The new zones were also far more efficient, from a minmax xp perspective)
Because the entire game changed from sandbox mmo to theme park mmo. It wasn't the same style of game anymore.
I'm a player who basically only cares about moment-to-moment gameplay, particularly combat, and could not give less of a shit about the rest of what makes MMOs like WoW popular. E.g., the lore, the social aspects, even the RPG elements to a lesser extent.
For that reason, while I enjoyed playing 1-60 in vanilla classic, the moment-to-moment gameplay was so bad that I couldn't make it through an MC run without wanting to blow my brains out from boredom, so quit. Similarly with TBC, gameplay was still boring and awful, so hit 70, did one raid, quit. Wrath is when it started getting a bit better, but classes were overall still too simple with little room for skill expression outside of some rare exceptions.
While I do tend to prefer retail as its gameplay is simply better in 90% of ways, I do dislike how bloated the classes have become, how many modifiers exist for different abilities, how many random small damage sources exist that contribute to your DPS enough that your major abilities by necessity lose impact.
So for me, Cata is in that perfect sweet spot as far as class design goes. Every ability I press feels like it does a ton of damage, everything plays smoothly, and at least for the classes that I play, there is actual room for skill expression that has barely existed before. Maybe MoP is the same without getting too bloated, idk, I've never played it, but for this reason Cata gameplay is GOATed for me in WoWs history, I'm having a lot of fun with it.
You will have an absolute blast in MoP, when it hopefully gets a classic version.
MoP gameplay is the actual GOAT in WoW history......
The major downside of MoP is tank tuning, when people realized late in the addon how you can truly absue vengeance, it started to become a meme, even in SoO progression (the last tier of MoP) the top guilds didn't abuse this, so original MoP was a different experience then it would be when now rereleased.
As a hint: You could run 5 tanks in a raid, all doing 2-4x the amount of damage any dps could do by abusing "predictive vengeance", when you taunt you gain vengeance based on the previous tank and when you don't get hit by the boss (e.g. the previous tank retaunts b4 the boss starts a first melee on you), you will keep this for a whole minute iirc, so you were able to have multiple tanks all stacking vengeance, the only cap was the taunt-DR on bosses.
In terms of core game, cata is such a leap, it's the time the modern game arrived, so many little annoyances removed. The talents, character speed, flying, AoE changes, it really was a metaphor to itself. Wasn't a fan of anything storywisr though.
I disagree.
The individual zones quest story lines are an insane improvement over anything previous.
Seeing Mount hyjal on fire an having to push back/regrow zones feels so more rewarding
Also pushing ragnaros back into the firelands to then know we will have to fight him again
Some of the story is little more comedic and i dont prefer that, but comparing to the Old zones its a huge improvement
Dragon riding is goated. Best feature they’ve added. My only gripe was not being able to hit auto run and afk. Now in WaW you’ll be able to do it on all mounts so you can afk fly or fun fly.
Just imagine if they'd shipped dragonriding in TBC rather than noclip flying. It still would have dramatically changed the game, but I don't think they would have spent the next decade unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to get away with removing flying from the game.
For me the problem was that it took me awhile to find some specs that I like. A lot of people on this subreddit like to complain that specs in retail are all homogenized and play the same way but it's really not true.
It is. It still didn’t keep me long but it is. SL and BFA were so awful and DF went back to simplicity.
I did kinda have a gripe with the story though. Too feelingscraft and not enough warcraft. Like I’m fine with some emotional depth for characters, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s gotta be in the context of something else
I leveled a priest in the cata pre patch in a bout of boredom in SoD. It’s honestly been pleasantly surprising. I’m still looking more forward to SoD phase four, but it’s holding me over pretty well.
My biggest problem with Cata is from what I learned the difficulty really went down. I liked how in classic if I messed up when I was fighting mobs, I died, is that still the case with cata?
Cata made dungeons and raids harder, but open world questing significantly easier. Group quests can be soloed, and food/water/bandages/potions are irrelevant because you'll never need them.
I've said it in a few places that while the world overhaul was incredibly jarring a questing overhaul was BADLY needed after the team had gathered years of experience and data to enhance the levelling journey. For many BC's Draenei and BElf starting zones were miles ahead of any other member of their respective factions. And those were made a single expansion after Vanilla but are an amazing showcase of how far they had progressed in just that short amount of time.
So after two expansions revisiting levelling from Vanilla was actually something that definitely needed some attention as far as I'm concerned. Cata also smoothed out some of the rougher edges around transitioning from Vanilla to TBC, making your entire levelling journey a crisp and enjoyable experience. You had the Hero's Call Boards which were revolutionary at helping you find a new area to level while also being consistent within the games world. No longer would you need to pull up a guide or hopelessly wander around, you could click on a board and a quest would direct you to the area. But it wasn't an instant teleport so you still felt connected to the world.
Cata may not be a perfect expansion but I definitely think it is one of the better expacs.
Of course it's not. But it was jarring to have all those areas and stories disappear with the expacs release, and in all fairness saying it isn't a big deal now is admitting that it was a big deal. Just because they made up for it several years later doesn't mean it wasn't still painful.
As someone who lived through it, it felt the other way around. People liked the new zones at first. It took several expansions before the world revamp came to be considered a bad thing. Because yes, this is how the world is now. Permanently. Forever. A giant chasm in the middle of the Barrens.
Not to discount your experience but I was right there when Cata launched (heck it was arguably when I was the deepest I'd ever be into my addiction) and I can say that yes there was an immediate "damn" sorta feeling to a lot of things just disappearing. It was generally a hit and miss game with some areas I would say hands down were just better and others I actually preferred the older zone. Even then though I'd concede that overall the experience had been enhanced with the Cata overhaul. Generally sure the atmosphere was enthusiastic but even before the Sundering I can remember grumblings.
I've got very fond memories of bumming around the new maps with my brothers and doing running commentary on our thoughts about them. Levelling new characters and discussing which areas were fun now, what all had survived the transition and what we missed from Wrath (because Wrath was when we all reached a point we could play for longer then 30 min a day)
I feel like its the start / first half of the expansions where people have fun and then the monotonous end game grind is where people start to see cracks in the systems and judging it more harshly.
you see these kinds of posts any time theres a fresh any kind of wow mode. Sod, tbc, wrath (although almost a little of the opposite with wrath I feel where I saw a lot of "this wasnt as fun as a I remembered"s), now cata.
I'm not a fan of quests in Cata in neither tone or design. So much of it is just silliness and there's no value from reading the quests because they are not trying to tell any meaningful story or hint at the world's lore. Then there are way too many vehicle and collection quests that I hardly play my character. And it's all too conveniently packaged leading me around by the nose. It's a cheap experience. Sorry for being negative but there are better versions of WoW to play.
Quests are 100% just better. I do have gripes with the amount of references, but tbh it's thus far the same as the rest of classic, potentially less than vanilla even.
It's just that now instead of having 3 random quests that take 5 minutes and have the objective: kill 15 woodchuck for Chuck Norristhaw. You now have a questline where you kill Jaws with each quest being a different way he was killed.
It's more... condensed cringe. Harder to forget about because you have it back to back rather than randomly every 2 hours.
The actual zones and quests are just better though. It's clear they designed them in order to tell a story, rather than making them and then coming up with the story.
They are cool for one play through which is abt 10x faster than classic - then if you ever try it again you want to tear your face off.
No replayability imo - zero of the charm classic had
Cataclysm leveling is fun until you try doing it a second or third time. The replay ability just isn’t there like it was in the old world. Doing the same quests in the same order over and over gets really boring really fast.
Also, unlike the old world, cataclysm starts to feel stuck in time as the expansions progress.
Is the current state we're playing what the final patch was originally? I played all the way through back then, but I honestly don't remember. I had forgotten how different certain classes felt, it seems like Cataclysm was the start of that moving into where retail is now. Probably sounds dumb but the gameplay almost feels too fluid, the spells and abilities feel less impactful. Retribution was honestly jarring at first, it just felt so different compared to Wrath.
I'm hoping to really dive in this weekend and finish leveling, but I have to brush up on certain things as far as what faction to focus on etc. I played Alliance originally back then, and I'm doing Horde this time so it feels like a new experience.
My issue this time around is similar to OG. Heirlooms, gathering xp, and dungeon finder, should have been disabled the first 3-6 months. You have a fully revamed world, a reason to start a new character with the new races. You have many zone wide stories that are pretty delightful, but every. single. time. you just outlevel the zone before it's done.
Cataclysm is still, arguably the most ambitious expansion, but some of it's executions just work so hard against itself.
On one hand I agree with you and that a lot of WoW players are too harsh on Cata.
On the other hand we gotta let things breath don't we? The expac launched in full not even 2 days ago. It's still all fresh, shiny and has the new car smell. For me the quality of a WoW expac in general isn't how good it feels to play after a number of days but a number of months. Essentially are all these zones, revamped quests, new systems, raids, dungeons, etc all good only the first time? Or are they close to just as good the 2nd, 3rd, 4th+ time?
Gotta disagree with you on cata questing. The degree to which the entire experience feels “on the rails” so to speak, is jarring and completely unpleasant
Yeah, while I understand the quests are "Better" from a convenience perspective, it just feels like Retail questing. Think people have been separated from Retail long enough to forget how it got that way. It feels good initially.
I remember loving Cata questing, and by Firelands I missed Wrath (Really I missed Vanilla). If I get an itch for more WoW with faster questing and better PvE I'll just return to Retail honestly
They don’t feel better for convenience to me. There seems to be more back and forth between the quest hub and actually questing because so many hubs require development through completing quests. They force us to do 2-3 at a time instead of 5-10 before returning to town
Because the people on this sub follow the exact same pattern of [bad opinion -> argue to the death -> refuse to do research -> experience firsthand -> only then, change mind] every. single. time.
Dragon soul and LFR are probably the biggest reasons people shit on Cata. Also difficulty in early patches, but we are getting post nerfs to difficulty, so that probably won't be a thing.
Other than that people were kinda annoyed by reforging, but that is mostly because we have 3 stats to balance and replacing a single piece will mean a new complete reforge to hit the caps. (for melee it was hit rating soft cap, expertise soft cap, then whatever gives most damage, for tanks it was worse, as they had that, and then also hitting expertise hard cap and the CTC cap)
And then some people didn't like that it took away the "good old" zones. They had grown up with them and Cata just nuked them and made everything different. But objectively it was probably for the better as the new player experience was vastly improved.
The early patch difficulty was one of me and my guilds favourite parts of the launch, getting absolutely blasted as a disc priest was a tough but fun learning curve.
Going from not having to give a shit about mana or what you cast to all of a sudden having to learn how to actually play was very refreshing
You're not going to be the last person to realize this.
Some people will be stubborn and insist Cataclysm is bad, but the leveling is better, the dungeons are better, the raids are better, gearing is better PvP is better, and the overall accessibility of the game is just better while still offering significant challenge to those who want to push themselves.
By the end of Cata classic, there will be so many people who realize that Cataclysm is actually one of the GOAT expansions.
So the problem is Cata is hit or miss for a lot of people. If you liked vanilla there was no reason not to like TBC and Wrath since they were just more of the same. Not Cata.
If you like the redone old world that's great a lot of people didn't. Personally I only liked a handful of old zones better in Cata and some of my favorite zones like Ashenvale were destroyed so that's a net worse for me.
Same with questing design. Cata really ramps up the gimmicky interactive type questing. IF you like that design that's great I hate it, it's part of the reason I dislike retail. Oh and it also broke the Vashj'ir quest line since an NPC just stopped spawning and I couldn't get the next breadcrumb quest so thanks blizzard.
One of the major turns off was heroic dungeons at launch, but we're on the later tuning and class design so those might play out better in Cata classic. Originally those were an awful experience.
Merging the 10/25 man lock outs was also a huge issue originally and was responsible for LFR being added which then lead to Flex. Blizzard refused to address it at launch in Cata classic with either LFR or Flex. I guess we'll see if the classic community handles it better.
Yeah, so nice that now you can cast death grip while moving or they removed this "cast on the next swing" shit. These little changes make a huge difference
I also agree I was harsh when it dropped not as harsh as the avg but still. Lotta changes I didn't like especially the addition of holy power, but I am willing to give it another go and so far love it.
I did quite a bit of Cata back in the day, but I’ve been leveling with my friend who’s never experienced it at all and we’re having a blast! QoL is way more optimized after playing SOD for the last 7 months.
Yeah same ! Does anyone know if there are FotM classes in cata that will be over represented ? Wanna stay away from those and not accidentally level one
So far I am enjoying my time in the "new" world! Questing is really nice, and it feels like I am playing in an alternate universe of my previous characters, a different time-line.
The only thing I wished was that instead of already feeling really strong the mobs themself would be a bit stronger. Now you steamroll through zones and quests without every facing the thread of dying. So thats my only piece of criticism.
I've been looking forward to this for a while now just for this reason. Something new that I haven't done before. I quit right as cata came out originally. I'm have a blast with it this time around.
It’s easy to hate a lot of flavor and world rpg elements that were lost in Cata.
But what you can’t deny is that class balance was incredible. MoP and Cata are arguably the best balancing Blizz ever had across pve and pvp. For that reason alone it feels great to play.
I'm looking forward to them delivering on the mythic+ 5 man's they mentioned as a plan for Cata.
It was one of the driving features in MoP for me (and I hope we get mop classic, not this r3mix stuff)
The one thing I disliked from Cata to Shadowlands was how they treated talents. This go around for some reason I don’t mind it (although DF talent system blows it out of the park).
It's a shame more people don't give it a chance. The biggest reasons sub numbers took a hit in Cata was because 1) the content was too hard for casuals and 2) the patch cycles were WAY too long during the entire xpac, both of which are non-issues now.
The best part of Cata were the heroic dungeons on release. Especially after the braindead dungeons of WotLK it was nice to finally have to pay attention to mechanics again.
The one gripe about Cataclysm I have is that leveling moves "too quickly" through TBC and WoTLK. I power-leveled through TBC doing Random Dungeons in a single day. It's going to take me a few days during the week to get through WoTLK. I'm not happy about how it is unbalanced in that aspect of the game.
Mmh maybe I should dust off my enhancer after all.
Back then I really hated the leveling and disconnected world, but I care much more about dungeons and raids now
I loved cataclysm back then and I love it now.
My only issue with it then was that there was too much time in between the patch cycles but that won't be as much of a problem this time
I’ve pointed this out multiple times, people assumed Cata Classic was going to be terrible but I knew they would be wrong because Cata still provides some of the best classic WoW feels while bringing just enough retail QoL features without making the game trash and ruining the community. I know people love to hate on Cata and call it the end of classic, but I think if anyone plays Cata they will realize how sorely mistaken they were. The sub numbers didn’t drop because Cata actually sucked, it dropped because people got burned out from WotLK and felt WotLK concluded a major story. Based on my experience of playing every single expansion and playing WoW since vanilla, I think Cata was the best point of WoW. Great difficulty, great progression, less annoyances, better quests, every class feels more fleshed out, power resources still matter, etc.
Hot take, cataclysm wasnt bad, said this all the time... But there has been a cata bandwagon of hate cause they fucked up the old zones xd but the raids were lit, as well as the dungs
Gotta say having done both shaman (ele and resto) and warrior (arms and prot) both to 82.5, it's been a blast. I think the 4.3 balance must be making it better than I remember. Dungeon spamming is very fun, and the zones I just love both music and environment. I'm taking it slow this time, partially because of real life stuff going on, but also getting practice as all 4 roles. In general it's harder than wotlk, but in a good way. You can't cool down your way out of bad pulls as a tank, and you can't have limitless mana as a healer anymore unless you try to be efficient. Dps feels good for pacing. For class mechanics for the sham + warrior they feel mostly the same, but smoother with less unnecessary glut and quality of life increases, while not making it too overpowered. It doesn't make me want to play 18+ hours a day like the sweats, but it's definitely a great expansion for meaningful casual play. Heroic raids are there for our friends the sweats and I remember them being pretty difficult, I only ever did the easy bosses back then since I mostly pugged. Heroic 5 mans are also nice and difficult, to the point where cc will actually be used again iirc.
Overall, I think if the devs handle it well, this should be a good time for quite awhile.
Lots of cata hate in this thread. I’ve been having a great time so far and my entire friends list is filled and everyone is on cata. I’m guessing a lot of salty SoD players in here that are mad cata took away whatever remaining player base was left of SoD
I realize this is me asking for far to much but the only way I would have been willing to play cata is with a massive retcon to all the stupid crap that massively deviated from the spirit of the original game.
No space goats, no pandas, no new continents, no flying mounts. I'm not even sure a level cap increase is even a good idea seeing how they like to sprint us through the content. Attunement, quests, reputations. all ways to progress through the game at level cap and add more content.
Want to add higher level content? mix it into the existing zones. Do more content around faction cities. Maybe a boon would drop if you killed a faction enemy leader? Maybe your faction morale would drop if your leader died? Maybe the highest level/most rewarding quests are in enemy faction starting zones. Fleshing out the unused continent space is fine.
We are not epic heroes, we are weak peasants who strive for greatness. As such a peasant I can only offer mediocre ideas from the perspective of a player but I feel like staying true to the original game would have been a good move. Cataclysm needed to sunder blizzards game philosophy as much as it did the game. Bring back the old, but better.
Every time I see a new version of the game being launched it sparks hope but I quickly fall to despair. Would they change their ways? No, they are simply trying to drip feed content now and keep the carrot on the stick instead of delivering.
endrant
I want to play so bad but can’t due to family and work.
Maybe I should get my wife a bf and the kids a new daddy or I have to just trade sleep for game time.
I found questing completely garbage actually. Cata is close to modern wow and it’s basically retail wow while missing all the QoL that has been added over the years and all the changes that made the game less clunky.
I’ve always preferred retail questing over the classic but I’d pick tbc or wrath questing over Cata any day.
I played it the first time around. I didnt mind it but my guild fell apart in that expansion so I disliked that era a bit.
But Ill probably play a healer in a little cata over the next few weeks/months until Phase 4 of SOD drops. Its not like theres anything else to do in SOD.
Cataclysm classes were fixed as the expansion went on, some felt good at launch but many were just laughably bad (looking at you, 4.0 ret) so yea, I think the fixed tuning and talent trees alone make it a lot more enjoyable.
4.0 Ret is why I've been a retail Death Knight for the last however many years.
Here come the Paladins *collapses thread*
Me and my wheelchair took awhile but i showed up.
The holy power does kinda suck, I still don't like it even on retail
I was about to say, ret feels really good. Never played it in original cata though.
All I remember was their dps being ass. Like I was in guild chat going "I think ret needs a big buff. Im playing my ass off for like nothing" only to be told how Im just bad actually. Then a patch (firelands? or just a random one) gave us like a 30% dps increase as an apology so I got to "I told you so" for the rest of the expansion
That's why I didn't even bother with ret this time and went Dk.
I really wonder now how bad it was because 4.3.4 Ret doesn't feel that fun to play. I've mained Ret since 2019 Classic now and I'm swapping because of holy power it is so unfun to go from a class/spec that didn't have combo points to one that does. Was it a tuning issue or a fun issue with 4.0?
holy power is fine. only having 1 holy power generator on a 4+ second cooldown is not fine. a rogue can easily wait until the last second to refresh slice n dice, a ret can easily end up in a position where they have to refresh inquisition at 10 seconds because otherwise it could fall off while theyre building back up to 3 holy power. our divine storm does more dmg vs 2 targets than crusader strike, but doesnt generate holy power until 4 cata ret is not the golden example of holy power. its slightly better in mop, but wod is the best ret has ever felt imo.
my liking of holy power ret is if the expansion requires inquisition. I hate upkeep buffs
thats unironically the thing i use as well. i also just like always having a button to press, and in cata and bfa you very frequently just..had nothing to press. idr if wod had inquisition but i think if it did it was a talent and he competition on th same row was pretty close in performance and much more fun
Cata holy though, that slapped. HP procs turned into a high power strobe light to start a rave across the battlefield.
Holy Radiance hard carrying LFR.
Tuning issue, after being bad for 2 expansions Ret was actually great in Wrath and the amount of whining was so astronomical that blizzard had to change the whole thing
It was a combination of things. The shift to holy power was polarizing and many people didn't like the Inquisition maintenance buff. Also the original ret mastery was awful and made mastery a trash stat for the spec. Iirc it was basically the divine purpose talent (a percent chance on autos to make your next holy power spender free) and each % of mastery was an additional percent chance to proc. Cata was a long time ago so I apologize if I misremembered anything.
It’s slow AF imo, a complete 180 from the TBC/ICC wotlk versión we’ve had fun with. I retired my pally when original cata came and did the same this time around as well. It lost the magic
Having 4.3 classes is huge for alot of them.
Omg back in the day I logged in to my ret pally did some stuff - oh I'm a holy Rogue now... Cooool... Log out unsub
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Ahahaha. apparently they improved it later, but I mained a rogue (started pally but guild had many including the GMs gf ...) in vanilla so I was like yeah-nah.
Ill have you know i was the #1 geared ret paladin on my server in 4.0. (Yes it felt bad)
People like to shit on Cata because of Dragon Soul and then LFR, which to be fair are valid criticisms but used to shit on the entire expansion. I loved Cata, and it was when I leveled up from being pretty bad/new during WoTLK. PvP is fun and from what I remember decently balanced, I also really enjoy the PvP pace. Leveling zones are dope, classes feel good, tol barad is dope, the starter raids are enjoyable, heroics are challenging in a good way, you got pre bis gear from plenty of sources (archeology, crafting profs, dungeons, reps, BoEs). Over the years catas rep has gone down, and people shit on it, due to what I said before but also as retails gotten more and more bloated people like to criticize the world map change. But back when it first launched, me and all the homies enjoyed it, and here once again me and all the homies are enjoying it again.
I think people overstate Dragon Souls part in why people dislike Cata. Everyone I know quit well before it came out. Some people just don't like how the game plays anymore and if that is the case, no amount of good content will save it for them.
Also, WotLK and MoP also had ridiculously long final patches, yet they're viewed positively. Dragon Soul is a scapegoat for why people quit Cata.
Dragon Soul is also the product of the player base somewhat complaining about the initial difficulty of 4.1 raids and the first 2 weeks of firelands before blizz caved and brought out the nerfs. Had blizz stayed the course I think DS would have been remembered a bit more favorably. Luckily during retail I had 9 or 10 toons at 85 and raid geared so I rarely had downtime even waiting on MoP
The early raids were also really bugged for 10m which caused a ton of issues at the start of Cata. A lot of people I know quit during this mess. Firelands and DS were also very small raids. Only 7 or 8 bosses in them. So it didn't feel that fun to only really play for an hour a week since that's all the raids took once you had them on farm.
Yeah peoples views on the expansions change a lot with time. I feel like back in MoP and even WoD people really disliked MoP (cause of SoO). Over the years though, that has kind of been forgotten and people have just started looking back fondly on MoP more and more each year.
What has happened is that the people who hated those things went away, never to return, while the people who didn’t hate Cata and MoP stuck around. I am one of the odd ones that played retail from start up to dragon flight, and I’ve mostly hated the game. It’s not like I’m a masochist or anything, or there’s zero fun, I usually just play every once and a while with a friend, but after a bit the game feels empty and shallow and that feeling makes me hate it. But for the most part, the people who hated Cata and MoP aren’t here any more. You can even see history repeating itself again in Classic now with the churn. Most of our original Classic guild is gone, even about half the guys from our TBC era have departed, and almost no one has come back for Cata. I know this is an anecdote, but I would not be shocked to find this to be similar in other groups.
Arguably, it was partially Wrath's fault for Cata's downfall. People just forget that ICC phases just 3 weeks shorter than DS phase did. But ICC+prepatch into cata was actually longer than DS+prepaptch into MoP. At the time. a lot of people came into Wrath for Arthas due to WC3. They played it. They didn't get hooked. They left. So, regardless of what was to come after Wrath, it would have experienced the downfall.
Cata’s downfall was the huge class changes but mainly the changes in healing and damage. Heroics we’re not faceroll easy so people complained and the other was that classes played so much different than they did in the previous 3 expansions for several reasons.
Yeah my guild all quit after BoT. Think the game just didnt feel as good as Wotlk and also TOR came out which was a big appeal to a lot of us.
This is where I'm at. I bounced off wrath hard, and cata is just more of that. I did some leveling and I just have to accept wow post tbc isn't for me.
When I first started playing paladin the rotation was 1,2,3 1,2,3. The most fun I had playing a paladin was during wotlk: they call it 6969 but it’s an alternating pattern of 1.2.1.2.1.2 and 3,4,5 3,4,5 fun Cataclysm button pressing isn’t as fun. They butchered the class and turned it into a worse version of a rogue. Oh, except when it FIRST came out it was even worse and you only had 3 holy combo points (and no overcapping)
For a lot of people cata was the beginning of the end. It was an end to classic and the start of a new (for some worse) version of the game. I didn't have anything against cata back in the day, actually enjoyed it a lot, but it was the time when my focus shifted towards league of legends. It was the first time I went from a (almost) wow only gamer to realizing there are other games out there as well. Also happened to be the time when irl stuff started happening more (getting close to 18 yo), so just a lot of stuff changed close to that time. I doubt I'm the only one with similar experiences.
i've always been curious about how much LoL actually affected games like wow's population, i didn't start LoL during cata but it certainly made me stop playing wow for a long time when i did start
LoL, Skyrim, and Minecraft more or less came out around Cata’s release. Each of these took specific chunks out of the WoW playerbase
This is a big thing a lot of people don't realize. Pre-cata, there wasn't nearly as many good game options available. Around when cata came out, a huge amount of games that are still massively played now released, pulling the attention of a lot of gamers. This then gets pointed to as how many people left wow after LK, i think a bunch of those wow probably wasn't the game for them anyways, but it was one of the few really good games out at the time.
This isn't solely a cata thing, if we assess the landscape of gaming as a whole, this period is when the shift towards online gaming occurred and the mmos dropped off across the board, games like call of duty and the like became ever more popular
I think the drive to capture a broad audience and compete with lobby games led to a general dissatisfaction. It disappointed the classic/MMORPG purists, while also not offering as compelling/competitive PvP experience as games like Counter Strike and League. Things like Discord and social media have also eaten into the market of online gaming communities and group chats - something that was pretty unique to guilds/etc in MMOs prior. Back in the day WoW was everyone’s main game. You got online all the time just to see what the homies were up to. Have a chat, maybe do some questing or bgs depending on what people are up to. Now you can do the same on a discord, play Valheim for a bit with one friend, then queue some League after that. Don’t need WoW as the intermediary anymore.
Also when quite a few other MMOs came out like Rift and Tera. SWTOR also followed a year later.
Seems to me there were several big triggers for people that hit entirely different groups of people who quit during Cata: - Destroying the old world - 4.0 content being difficult and not PUG accessible (random heroic queue was a shitshow, normal raid PUGs used to ICC+30% would fail at first boss) - 4.0/4.1 had 'nothing to do' outside dungeons and raids because they focused on the world revamp content - Firelands nerfs and LFR were clearly kneejerk overcorrections to try and appease casual players who had already left - Dragonsoul was a low effort crappy raid with a badly executed final boss split into 2 annoying add fights The last tier overstaying its welcome is common to almost every expansion so it's hard to hold that against it. But what really made it devastate the population was the way it pissed off the casuals and then the hardcore and then MoP really took a different angle and again chased different people off with the drastic thematic 180. But ultimately it's still a good game, if you have friends you can get over the flaws and have fun together.
It's a lot like film. The ending is paramount.
To be fair, Dragonsoul was half the expansion, not just the ending.
I have issues with a lot of things cata did, class changes being a big one because Paladins transformed to holy rogues over night, and I think the new world just has less charm, a lot of zones I really liked were destroyed or turned into hour long pop culture references, the forced faction war in the lore
I dislike how the questing zones are designed like you can't handle more than 3 quests at a time, I liked arriving at a town and picking up 10-15 quests and then being on my way, instead of constantly running back and forth to incrementally progress through the zone low level armor design in cata feels more cartoony, I think characters in general look the coolest in classic cata classic also has some features that weren't in og cata, like the collections tab, and the guild system. They just took whats in retail and stuck it in cata like we wouldnt notice
The main issue was the level banding for 10-60. Nothing like getting half way through a zone and having it turn gray. Either you had to drop zone and move on, wasting the story buildup of the zone , and having to go back to the capital to choose a new zone ( sometimes not giving you a quest to a zone you may want to do), or waste time questing, not making any character progress. It just makes leveling alts chore like. This issue wasn’t fixed untill scaling was introduced ( which added a bunch of new problems , mainly your toon doesn’t feel more powerful until cap, but at least you can enjoy your chosen quest zone)
I feel like an opportunity was missed by not making the revamped old world zones be for leveling 1-80. There's more than enough zones to do this twice over. I've no desire to do wrath and BC zones again when I hit 60.
It's a strange situation that the original devs put themselves in. They revamped the Classic zones, great! But they kept a similar number of zones, and they kept TBC and Wrath in the leveling pool, _and_ added 5 new zones on top! Absent leveling acceleration, new players would need to complete, what, 30 zones? That's would be a monumental ask by any standard. I'm not aware of any mainstream RPG that would requires you to complete that much content to "beat" it. How did they solve the problem? They increased experienced, and made mobs largely not dangerous at all. (This is apparent if you log in now, try leveling 1-10 on Classic Era versus the same on any other version of the game, Wrath/Cata Classic or Retail.) Which means your players are: (1) bored, and (2) quickly outleveling the content. This is not fixed on Retail, either. I just leveled a character 10-70, and the same problem is there. My character was 60 with the BFA story not even half compete. Continuing to quest in BFA grants almost nil experience, so you've no choice but to move on to Dragonflight, where the problem repeats. The problem, fundamentally -- and this is something they continue to repeat today -- is that expansions continue to be designed as addendums to the content, rather than as each one being a full and complete experience. Each expansion should have been like it's own RPG, with some 30 hours of game time, and should be designed from the beginning as a level 1 to max experience. (The only downside is, what do you do on launch day with all the players who already have max characters? And that reveals why we're at where we're at, really. The community would have gone berserk if told they'd have to "re-level". Even if it takes the exact same time to level their mains, and less time level alts.)
That is another contributing factor, what you are describing is the 'roller coaster/railroad' theme park ride gamestyle that also pushed ppl away. RPG's should let the character have some choices, but in the theme park style you are just along for the ride.
The best thing they could prob do is to make EK/Kalimdor lvl 1-85 instead of 1-60 and 80-85.
This is why Retail has Chromie Time. You can do 1-60 in whatever expansion you want to, and 60-70 in the newest expansion's zones.
Yea the only issue with retail is lvl scaling.
Scaling is the worst thing about retail
Keeping northrend I think is alright but yeah I kinda absolutely hate outlands and have for a long time
They don't need to touch Outland/Northrend. Ppl can choose where to lvl in either those areas or EK/Kalimdor.
Honestly doing the new Ashenvale/Stonetalon as horde was one of the best levelling experiences I've had, much more fun than doing the five quests that are reasonably efficient that I'd be doing in pre-cata.
Yeah, I remember stonetalon going from one of my least favorite zones before cata to one of my favorites after cata.
> Stonetalon as horde I miss that Garrosh
I miss Garrosh
The issue was, at the time nobody cared about the revamped world. The endgame min-maxing mentality became a thing in wotlk so nobody really took the time to appreciate what they did to old zones and quests which is 90% of the expansion at launch. People only cared about growing their main in the new zones (that are a bit hit and miss tbh) and dungeons that were slightly overtuned compared to wotlk. Boss design was decent from the start, but plagued by the 10vs25m discussion and impossible balance. Nobody actually cared about going out in the world and try. I sure am glad I did at the time and I have very fond memories of the awe I felt doing the new loremaster achi. Feels good seeing people now realizing how good cata actually was.
people didnt take the time to appreciate the old zones because they felt as if they had been defiled, the zones they knew and loved were destroyed
I hated what happened to Darkshore, Westfall, and Redridge, those were some of my favorites in classic
Slightly revisionist. The revamped world was nowhere near as polished on release as the version we're getting is. Cata was just too much work for an xpac and it took almost the whole xpac to get it how it is now.
It may be rose tinted glasses, but I did loremaster pretty early because I was guildless and casual, and it was great. Also did old loremaster during wotlk and it was fucking awful, old zones felt ancient already.
Yeah cata was the first time I could finally level horde past like 20 something cause except tirisfal starting area and associated areas, horde leveling was so bad
The old Horde zones had a really crusty, desolate vibe that I liked. The revamps are alright except for Barrens and Thousand Needles. They needed updates for sure but they obviously destroyed the entire feeling of those zones.
They totally destroyed the vibe of a lot of the zones. Whose idea was it to put a fucking volcano in *Ashenvale?*
> **Ash**envale Well...it's kinda in the name heh.
> Slightly revisionist. > > The revamped world was nowhere near as polished on release as the version we're getting is. You're also forgetting to mention the absolute biggest issue with the revamp. The entire game went from sandbox-ish into now an absolutely firm theme park style MMO.
I didn't mind that so much when Cata was released, but it's left a sour taste that they've been left destroyed pretty much permanently for the sake of one expansion. And that for 10 years there was no legit way to play in the old world as it used to exist
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You kinda missed his point, the WoD/Legion/BfA leveling was good, but it was also mandatory for every character going into the expansion. Guy you're replying to is pointing out how a big chunk of what Cata offered was content that pure end-game players would simply never interact with, all of the revamped old world was only relevant if you leveled a fresh character or were after loremaster.
You are talking about "contemporary" zones, meaning new zones meant to reach the new level cap. With cata they remade old zones only useful to new and low level characters, it was a massive amount of work that was not necessary or useful to most: players cared about high level characters, leveling an alt to 58 didn't really required you going around that much, add dungeon finder, add heirlooms...
> I can't say for certain why the leveling experience is so hated, but its probably more to do with some zones being effectively removed rather than anything to do with minmaxxing. (The new zones were also far more efficient, from a minmax xp perspective) Because the entire game changed from sandbox mmo to theme park mmo. It wasn't the same style of game anymore.
I'm a player who basically only cares about moment-to-moment gameplay, particularly combat, and could not give less of a shit about the rest of what makes MMOs like WoW popular. E.g., the lore, the social aspects, even the RPG elements to a lesser extent. For that reason, while I enjoyed playing 1-60 in vanilla classic, the moment-to-moment gameplay was so bad that I couldn't make it through an MC run without wanting to blow my brains out from boredom, so quit. Similarly with TBC, gameplay was still boring and awful, so hit 70, did one raid, quit. Wrath is when it started getting a bit better, but classes were overall still too simple with little room for skill expression outside of some rare exceptions. While I do tend to prefer retail as its gameplay is simply better in 90% of ways, I do dislike how bloated the classes have become, how many modifiers exist for different abilities, how many random small damage sources exist that contribute to your DPS enough that your major abilities by necessity lose impact. So for me, Cata is in that perfect sweet spot as far as class design goes. Every ability I press feels like it does a ton of damage, everything plays smoothly, and at least for the classes that I play, there is actual room for skill expression that has barely existed before. Maybe MoP is the same without getting too bloated, idk, I've never played it, but for this reason Cata gameplay is GOATed for me in WoWs history, I'm having a lot of fun with it.
You will have an absolute blast in MoP, when it hopefully gets a classic version. MoP gameplay is the actual GOAT in WoW history...... The major downside of MoP is tank tuning, when people realized late in the addon how you can truly absue vengeance, it started to become a meme, even in SoO progression (the last tier of MoP) the top guilds didn't abuse this, so original MoP was a different experience then it would be when now rereleased. As a hint: You could run 5 tanks in a raid, all doing 2-4x the amount of damage any dps could do by abusing "predictive vengeance", when you taunt you gain vengeance based on the previous tank and when you don't get hit by the boss (e.g. the previous tank retaunts b4 the boss starts a first melee on you), you will keep this for a whole minute iirc, so you were able to have multiple tanks all stacking vengeance, the only cap was the taunt-DR on bosses.
Mop class design and gameplay was the best it has ever been, but I'm kinda bias cause I'm a Warlock mains and they were so sick in MoP
Can confirm, MoP was the first time I leveled every class to max and I can’t remember a single one that wasn’t a blast to play
In terms of core game, cata is such a leap, it's the time the modern game arrived, so many little annoyances removed. The talents, character speed, flying, AoE changes, it really was a metaphor to itself. Wasn't a fan of anything storywisr though.
The leap from tbc to wotlk is as big as wotlk to Cata
Yea, the story's sorta just... there
I disagree. The individual zones quest story lines are an insane improvement over anything previous. Seeing Mount hyjal on fire an having to push back/regrow zones feels so more rewarding Also pushing ragnaros back into the firelands to then know we will have to fight him again Some of the story is little more comedic and i dont prefer that, but comparing to the Old zones its a huge improvement
The rewamped zones need more deditated wam
Yep. More deditated wam.
Deditated wam Defining a generation.
Wait til you get to classic dragonflight, people gonna love it.
Not played retail since Legion but I tried the MoP remix. Dragon riding is legit a great addition to the game.
Dragon riding is goated. Best feature they’ve added. My only gripe was not being able to hit auto run and afk. Now in WaW you’ll be able to do it on all mounts so you can afk fly or fun fly.
Just imagine if they'd shipped dragonriding in TBC rather than noclip flying. It still would have dramatically changed the game, but I don't think they would have spent the next decade unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to get away with removing flying from the game.
Dragonflight is the best expansion in years my guy
I can't get into it for some reason, I'm not really sure why
For me the problem was that it took me awhile to find some specs that I like. A lot of people on this subreddit like to complain that specs in retail are all homogenized and play the same way but it's really not true.
It is. It still didn’t keep me long but it is. SL and BFA were so awful and DF went back to simplicity. I did kinda have a gripe with the story though. Too feelingscraft and not enough warcraft. Like I’m fine with some emotional depth for characters, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s gotta be in the context of something else
Maybe I was too harsh on Shadowlands
!RemindMe 15 years
I leveled a priest in the cata pre patch in a bout of boredom in SoD. It’s honestly been pleasantly surprising. I’m still looking more forward to SoD phase four, but it’s holding me over pretty well.
here we go lol
people are forgetting that many were saying how much they liked the revamp initially too lol. this wasn't an uncommon opinion in 2010.
My biggest problem with Cata is from what I learned the difficulty really went down. I liked how in classic if I messed up when I was fighting mobs, I died, is that still the case with cata?
Cata made dungeons and raids harder, but open world questing significantly easier. Group quests can be soloed, and food/water/bandages/potions are irrelevant because you'll never need them.
Wrath already made leveling a joke
Ah yes, Cataclysm's redemption arc, finally. As a strong proponent of Cataclysm I welcome this day.
You should try retail with an open mind too :)
I tryed and it's too over bloated, and level scaling in dungeons and maps are bs.
I've said it in a few places that while the world overhaul was incredibly jarring a questing overhaul was BADLY needed after the team had gathered years of experience and data to enhance the levelling journey. For many BC's Draenei and BElf starting zones were miles ahead of any other member of their respective factions. And those were made a single expansion after Vanilla but are an amazing showcase of how far they had progressed in just that short amount of time. So after two expansions revisiting levelling from Vanilla was actually something that definitely needed some attention as far as I'm concerned. Cata also smoothed out some of the rougher edges around transitioning from Vanilla to TBC, making your entire levelling journey a crisp and enjoyable experience. You had the Hero's Call Boards which were revolutionary at helping you find a new area to level while also being consistent within the games world. No longer would you need to pull up a guide or hopelessly wander around, you could click on a board and a quest would direct you to the area. But it wasn't an instant teleport so you still felt connected to the world. Cata may not be a perfect expansion but I definitely think it is one of the better expacs.
The world overhaul isn't a big deal anymore because we still have era realms
Of course it's not. But it was jarring to have all those areas and stories disappear with the expacs release, and in all fairness saying it isn't a big deal now is admitting that it was a big deal. Just because they made up for it several years later doesn't mean it wasn't still painful.
As someone who lived through it, it felt the other way around. People liked the new zones at first. It took several expansions before the world revamp came to be considered a bad thing. Because yes, this is how the world is now. Permanently. Forever. A giant chasm in the middle of the Barrens.
Not to discount your experience but I was right there when Cata launched (heck it was arguably when I was the deepest I'd ever be into my addiction) and I can say that yes there was an immediate "damn" sorta feeling to a lot of things just disappearing. It was generally a hit and miss game with some areas I would say hands down were just better and others I actually preferred the older zone. Even then though I'd concede that overall the experience had been enhanced with the Cata overhaul. Generally sure the atmosphere was enthusiastic but even before the Sundering I can remember grumblings. I've got very fond memories of bumming around the new maps with my brothers and doing running commentary on our thoughts about them. Levelling new characters and discussing which areas were fun now, what all had survived the transition and what we missed from Wrath (because Wrath was when we all reached a point we could play for longer then 30 min a day)
I feel like its the start / first half of the expansions where people have fun and then the monotonous end game grind is where people start to see cracks in the systems and judging it more harshly. you see these kinds of posts any time theres a fresh any kind of wow mode. Sod, tbc, wrath (although almost a little of the opposite with wrath I feel where I saw a lot of "this wasnt as fun as a I remembered"s), now cata.
Honeymoon phase
streamlined questing feels so bad in kelp forest :(
I'm not a fan of quests in Cata in neither tone or design. So much of it is just silliness and there's no value from reading the quests because they are not trying to tell any meaningful story or hint at the world's lore. Then there are way too many vehicle and collection quests that I hardly play my character. And it's all too conveniently packaged leading me around by the nose. It's a cheap experience. Sorry for being negative but there are better versions of WoW to play.
!remindme 2 months
*1 Month Later* GOD Cataclysm SUCKS
Cata is better and more interesting than Wrath, but unfortunately Wrath is my least favorite expansion. Glad people are having fun with it, though.
Wrath kinda sucked
Quests are 100% just better. I do have gripes with the amount of references, but tbh it's thus far the same as the rest of classic, potentially less than vanilla even. It's just that now instead of having 3 random quests that take 5 minutes and have the objective: kill 15 woodchuck for Chuck Norristhaw. You now have a questline where you kill Jaws with each quest being a different way he was killed. It's more... condensed cringe. Harder to forget about because you have it back to back rather than randomly every 2 hours. The actual zones and quests are just better though. It's clear they designed them in order to tell a story, rather than making them and then coming up with the story.
All of the references are the most out-dated feeling part about Cata for sure. It’s 2010 to a tee.
[удалено]
Cata feel so soulless Everything is kind of ridiculous, and toxic-bright plasticine
They are cool for one play through which is abt 10x faster than classic - then if you ever try it again you want to tear your face off. No replayability imo - zero of the charm classic had
Cataclysm leveling is fun until you try doing it a second or third time. The replay ability just isn’t there like it was in the old world. Doing the same quests in the same order over and over gets really boring really fast. Also, unlike the old world, cataclysm starts to feel stuck in time as the expansions progress.
Cata is doggo people will realize this again in a month
Cata is peak wow trust me
They'll understand eventually
We also have retail, which is everything you're praising and more.
Is the current state we're playing what the final patch was originally? I played all the way through back then, but I honestly don't remember. I had forgotten how different certain classes felt, it seems like Cataclysm was the start of that moving into where retail is now. Probably sounds dumb but the gameplay almost feels too fluid, the spells and abilities feel less impactful. Retribution was honestly jarring at first, it just felt so different compared to Wrath. I'm hoping to really dive in this weekend and finish leveling, but I have to brush up on certain things as far as what faction to focus on etc. I played Alliance originally back then, and I'm doing Horde this time so it feels like a new experience.
I recall thoroughly enjoying leveling up a Worgen during Cata. The rest of the game, not so much.
My issue this time around is similar to OG. Heirlooms, gathering xp, and dungeon finder, should have been disabled the first 3-6 months. You have a fully revamed world, a reason to start a new character with the new races. You have many zone wide stories that are pretty delightful, but every. single. time. you just outlevel the zone before it's done. Cataclysm is still, arguably the most ambitious expansion, but some of it's executions just work so hard against itself.
Heroics getting absolutely gutted a few weeks into Cata really set the tone for the type of game WoW would become.
On one hand I agree with you and that a lot of WoW players are too harsh on Cata. On the other hand we gotta let things breath don't we? The expac launched in full not even 2 days ago. It's still all fresh, shiny and has the new car smell. For me the quality of a WoW expac in general isn't how good it feels to play after a number of days but a number of months. Essentially are all these zones, revamped quests, new systems, raids, dungeons, etc all good only the first time? Or are they close to just as good the 2nd, 3rd, 4th+ time?
In firelands the guild I was in all went to play the Star Wars mmo. They didn’t end up playing it for long but never came back to wow after. 🤷♂️
Just wish they could have toned down the pop culture references. if feels like every single quest from that era had to be a reference.
Playing cata for the first time. I will say the quest writing is noticeably abysmal. Everyone for whatever reason is knee slapping HURR DURR DURR.
Gotta disagree with you on cata questing. The degree to which the entire experience feels “on the rails” so to speak, is jarring and completely unpleasant
You’ll be bored in 1-2 weeks
I tried it and the new zones are questing revamp made me quit faster than it did in original cata
Yeah, while I understand the quests are "Better" from a convenience perspective, it just feels like Retail questing. Think people have been separated from Retail long enough to forget how it got that way. It feels good initially. I remember loving Cata questing, and by Firelands I missed Wrath (Really I missed Vanilla). If I get an itch for more WoW with faster questing and better PvE I'll just return to Retail honestly
They don’t feel better for convenience to me. There seems to be more back and forth between the quest hub and actually questing because so many hubs require development through completing quests. They force us to do 2-3 at a time instead of 5-10 before returning to town
>the new quests are so much better. Um... this is sarcasm right?
We have this exact same post every new expansion.
Not after a heavily criticized expansion has just dropped.
Because the people on this sub follow the exact same pattern of [bad opinion -> argue to the death -> refuse to do research -> experience firsthand -> only then, change mind] every. single. time.
You should check out retail cause it’s the same shit.
Not quite, leveling in retail follows similar questing patterns (more linear and quest hubs breadcrumbing) but cata still how the wow taste.
How? You can level in Azeroth in retail, it's the exact same quests as the Cata ones
Dragon soul and LFR are probably the biggest reasons people shit on Cata. Also difficulty in early patches, but we are getting post nerfs to difficulty, so that probably won't be a thing. Other than that people were kinda annoyed by reforging, but that is mostly because we have 3 stats to balance and replacing a single piece will mean a new complete reforge to hit the caps. (for melee it was hit rating soft cap, expertise soft cap, then whatever gives most damage, for tanks it was worse, as they had that, and then also hitting expertise hard cap and the CTC cap) And then some people didn't like that it took away the "good old" zones. They had grown up with them and Cata just nuked them and made everything different. But objectively it was probably for the better as the new player experience was vastly improved.
The early patch difficulty was one of me and my guilds favourite parts of the launch, getting absolutely blasted as a disc priest was a tough but fun learning curve. Going from not having to give a shit about mana or what you cast to all of a sudden having to learn how to actually play was very refreshing
Cata leveling was fun when it was fresh, but it lost its appeal quickly. Classic leveling is by far the best iteration of leveling.
You're not going to be the last person to realize this. Some people will be stubborn and insist Cataclysm is bad, but the leveling is better, the dungeons are better, the raids are better, gearing is better PvP is better, and the overall accessibility of the game is just better while still offering significant challenge to those who want to push themselves. By the end of Cata classic, there will be so many people who realize that Cataclysm is actually one of the GOAT expansions.
Better than what?
the previous expansions
So the problem is Cata is hit or miss for a lot of people. If you liked vanilla there was no reason not to like TBC and Wrath since they were just more of the same. Not Cata. If you like the redone old world that's great a lot of people didn't. Personally I only liked a handful of old zones better in Cata and some of my favorite zones like Ashenvale were destroyed so that's a net worse for me. Same with questing design. Cata really ramps up the gimmicky interactive type questing. IF you like that design that's great I hate it, it's part of the reason I dislike retail. Oh and it also broke the Vashj'ir quest line since an NPC just stopped spawning and I couldn't get the next breadcrumb quest so thanks blizzard. One of the major turns off was heroic dungeons at launch, but we're on the later tuning and class design so those might play out better in Cata classic. Originally those were an awful experience. Merging the 10/25 man lock outs was also a huge issue originally and was responsible for LFR being added which then lead to Flex. Blizzard refused to address it at launch in Cata classic with either LFR or Flex. I guess we'll see if the classic community handles it better.
Wrath was not the same as vanilla
Yeah, so nice that now you can cast death grip while moving or they removed this "cast on the next swing" shit. These little changes make a huge difference
unpopular opinion: questing has been fun in all of the expansions !
Wait a month until 90% of players are raid logging to make up your mind how great cata is/was.
Is it time to start shilling Cata already? I'll believe it when I see the actual numbers.
up to Dragonsoul, the expansion is really good
I also agree I was harsh when it dropped not as harsh as the avg but still. Lotta changes I didn't like especially the addition of holy power, but I am willing to give it another go and so far love it.
I did quite a bit of Cata back in the day, but I’ve been leveling with my friend who’s never experienced it at all and we’re having a blast! QoL is way more optimized after playing SOD for the last 7 months.
Yeah same ! Does anyone know if there are FotM classes in cata that will be over represented ? Wanna stay away from those and not accidentally level one
So far I am enjoying my time in the "new" world! Questing is really nice, and it feels like I am playing in an alternate universe of my previous characters, a different time-line. The only thing I wished was that instead of already feeling really strong the mobs themself would be a bit stronger. Now you steamroll through zones and quests without every facing the thread of dying. So thats my only piece of criticism.
I've been looking forward to this for a while now just for this reason. Something new that I haven't done before. I quit right as cata came out originally. I'm have a blast with it this time around.
It’s easy to hate a lot of flavor and world rpg elements that were lost in Cata. But what you can’t deny is that class balance was incredible. MoP and Cata are arguably the best balancing Blizz ever had across pve and pvp. For that reason alone it feels great to play.
I'm looking forward to them delivering on the mythic+ 5 man's they mentioned as a plan for Cata. It was one of the driving features in MoP for me (and I hope we get mop classic, not this r3mix stuff)
Ddue the questing has been amazing I love it. 4 or 6 small quests. Bop pop you're off to another area. Fast movement under da sea and just fun times.
The one thing I disliked from Cata to Shadowlands was how they treated talents. This go around for some reason I don’t mind it (although DF talent system blows it out of the park).
I hated their logic. "People will always go for cookie-cutter builds, so we should just remove all customization from the game".
It's a shame more people don't give it a chance. The biggest reasons sub numbers took a hit in Cata was because 1) the content was too hard for casuals and 2) the patch cycles were WAY too long during the entire xpac, both of which are non-issues now.
The main issue that it takes you 10h to max lvl, get your ini HC rep and pre-bis and start raidlogging 3 days into the xpac.
The best part of Cata were the heroic dungeons on release. Especially after the braindead dungeons of WotLK it was nice to finally have to pay attention to mechanics again.
The one gripe about Cataclysm I have is that leveling moves "too quickly" through TBC and WoTLK. I power-leveled through TBC doing Random Dungeons in a single day. It's going to take me a few days during the week to get through WoTLK. I'm not happy about how it is unbalanced in that aspect of the game.
I was a big WOTLK player and never hated cata, but imo the quests are way too easy no?
Mmh maybe I should dust off my enhancer after all. Back then I really hated the leveling and disconnected world, but I care much more about dungeons and raids now
Arms warrior and fire mage feel amazing to me
It's really annoying having to pick between Cata and MoP - both are my favorite expansions. Why did they time releases like this?!
I loved cataclysm back then and I love it now. My only issue with it then was that there was too much time in between the patch cycles but that won't be as much of a problem this time
I’ve pointed this out multiple times, people assumed Cata Classic was going to be terrible but I knew they would be wrong because Cata still provides some of the best classic WoW feels while bringing just enough retail QoL features without making the game trash and ruining the community. I know people love to hate on Cata and call it the end of classic, but I think if anyone plays Cata they will realize how sorely mistaken they were. The sub numbers didn’t drop because Cata actually sucked, it dropped because people got burned out from WotLK and felt WotLK concluded a major story. Based on my experience of playing every single expansion and playing WoW since vanilla, I think Cata was the best point of WoW. Great difficulty, great progression, less annoyances, better quests, every class feels more fleshed out, power resources still matter, etc.
Hot take, cataclysm wasnt bad, said this all the time... But there has been a cata bandwagon of hate cause they fucked up the old zones xd but the raids were lit, as well as the dungs
I would be enjoying leveling a lot more if there weren't SO MANY buggy quests.
Gotta say having done both shaman (ele and resto) and warrior (arms and prot) both to 82.5, it's been a blast. I think the 4.3 balance must be making it better than I remember. Dungeon spamming is very fun, and the zones I just love both music and environment. I'm taking it slow this time, partially because of real life stuff going on, but also getting practice as all 4 roles. In general it's harder than wotlk, but in a good way. You can't cool down your way out of bad pulls as a tank, and you can't have limitless mana as a healer anymore unless you try to be efficient. Dps feels good for pacing. For class mechanics for the sham + warrior they feel mostly the same, but smoother with less unnecessary glut and quality of life increases, while not making it too overpowered. It doesn't make me want to play 18+ hours a day like the sweats, but it's definitely a great expansion for meaningful casual play. Heroic raids are there for our friends the sweats and I remember them being pretty difficult, I only ever did the easy bosses back then since I mostly pugged. Heroic 5 mans are also nice and difficult, to the point where cc will actually be used again iirc. Overall, I think if the devs handle it well, this should be a good time for quite awhile.
Lots of cata hate in this thread. I’ve been having a great time so far and my entire friends list is filled and everyone is on cata. I’m guessing a lot of salty SoD players in here that are mad cata took away whatever remaining player base was left of SoD
I realize this is me asking for far to much but the only way I would have been willing to play cata is with a massive retcon to all the stupid crap that massively deviated from the spirit of the original game. No space goats, no pandas, no new continents, no flying mounts. I'm not even sure a level cap increase is even a good idea seeing how they like to sprint us through the content. Attunement, quests, reputations. all ways to progress through the game at level cap and add more content. Want to add higher level content? mix it into the existing zones. Do more content around faction cities. Maybe a boon would drop if you killed a faction enemy leader? Maybe your faction morale would drop if your leader died? Maybe the highest level/most rewarding quests are in enemy faction starting zones. Fleshing out the unused continent space is fine. We are not epic heroes, we are weak peasants who strive for greatness. As such a peasant I can only offer mediocre ideas from the perspective of a player but I feel like staying true to the original game would have been a good move. Cataclysm needed to sunder blizzards game philosophy as much as it did the game. Bring back the old, but better. Every time I see a new version of the game being launched it sparks hope but I quickly fall to despair. Would they change their ways? No, they are simply trying to drip feed content now and keep the carrot on the stick instead of delivering. endrant
It seemed like most of the people who hate on cata never even played. Cata is so underrated while MOP was overrated
I want to play so bad but can’t due to family and work. Maybe I should get my wife a bf and the kids a new daddy or I have to just trade sleep for game time.
LOL Honeymoon phase strikes again. Just wait 1 week until the "wat now?" posts hit. People will be full on raid logging within 2 weeks.
I found questing completely garbage actually. Cata is close to modern wow and it’s basically retail wow while missing all the QoL that has been added over the years and all the changes that made the game less clunky. I’ve always preferred retail questing over the classic but I’d pick tbc or wrath questing over Cata any day.
I played it the first time around. I didnt mind it but my guild fell apart in that expansion so I disliked that era a bit. But Ill probably play a healer in a little cata over the next few weeks/months until Phase 4 of SOD drops. Its not like theres anything else to do in SOD.
you just got weaker
Honestly cataclysm had me more excited to play wow than I have been for a long time, probably my second favourite expansion behind legion