Cata is not Classic. Old World is Classic!

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
21

The people who are saying that Cata and WotLK are ‘similar’ are doing what people on these forums have always done. They’re not thinking about the games holistically, they’re just boiling the process down into a comparison of endgame mechanics and concluding that raiding in Wrath is not significantly different to raiding in Cata, save for a few tweaks and difficulty changes.

Because as afar as they’re concerned World of Warcraft is: “A game where I log in, run raids, get the best loot I can and do my best to get the highest possible parses while following the meta as closely as possible so as to achieve peak min/max performance.”

And for them it’s case closed - that defines the game for them.

So of course if you narrow you focus in such a strictly confined manner then obviously Wrath and Cata are gonna seem similar in most respects.

Take a step away though, widen your focus and try thinking of World of Warcraft as something other than “a raiding experience” and it soon becomes clear that most of the key differences between Wrath and Cata are based upon the total and complete remake of the old world, and the destruction of all pre-Cata questing/levelling content.

We have a much more streamlined, faster, linear, super-convenient experience where almost all roadblocks and bottlenecks are removed, many or most forms of travel and exploration have been made obsolete or removed. ‘Inconvenient’ mechanics such as reagents, poisons, soul shards, ammo etc. have been removed, quests made much simpler and more streamlined with massive XP boosts for super-fast levelling group content has vanished and other players are no longer a requirement to complete your journey - not to mention the fact that world mobs are significantly nerfed, and players significantly buffed so that the slow cautious approach of old no longer applies and we can now just steamroller over quest mobs without even the need to slow down, let alone engage our brains.

This is the real reason why Classic era ended with Wrath. It has little to do with end game, or even PvP and everything to do with the journey to get there. A journey that Cata no longer regards as important.

Yes, Wrath paved the way for some of these changes. The expansion put some of the building blocks in place - but it was Cata that truly changed the game to something entirely different.

If you “only care about end game”, than all of the above will mean nothing to you - but if you are anything like me, you’ll understand why Cata was so universally disliked by many of the more oldschool MMORPG players.

2 Likes
22

Well said.

23

Both yes and no, I’d say. It’s true that Cata went further with said changes to the game, but many things were already in action in WotLK (even when disregarding raiding completely).

Azeroth was revamped, which indeed was a big change, and I can see it being offputting to people who only enjoy the old world. But let’s be honest here. After RDF was introduced (WotLK feature), pretty much nobody was leveling in the old world anymore. I did both in WotLK, level pre RDF and post RDF. And even pre RDF, people set up summoning networks outside of the big instances and repeated them until the next one became available. Most commonly with full heirlooms aswell, just mass zerging everything with no effort. This trivialised everything that is supposedly classic, with outdoor leveling, sense of danger, sense of exploration, travelling, the journey and not the destination, etc etc.

Even the questing in Northrend is very similar to the revamped Cata zones. There’s basically one streamlined story that you follow, with little or no choice left to you as a player.

Actually, if anything I’d argue I run into more people in the open world now than I did in WotLK after RDF was introduced.

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So you narrowed it down to

  • huge exp boost from heirlooms that doesn’t allow to complete whole zone, making quest “green” easy and boring.
  • absence of hard elite quests, where instead of gathering full group we control a dragon or heavy siege vehicle that we blast through waves of enemies with.
  • LFD making forming social ties in 5ppl content obsolete affair.

Yet heirlooms, vehicular combat and LFD are Wrath inventions.

It ended in Classic Era with the release of TBC(C). As players reached hi-end content in Vanilla the focus was always on it as the product. Leveling was just for engaging new players with more trivial content and a story narrative. However I really enjoyed Legion leveling model where mobs level was always relevant and zones scaled so the difficulty was closer to original design.

Well in original Cata I was busy working shifts on my mid 20s I had year long suscription to get Tyrael’s charger mount, but didn’t went further than heroic dungeons as I didn’t had time for raiding due to floating schedule. If players do not have time for raiding, even Vanilla where questing was like 40% of the content had little to offer after leveling 3rd alt. If player want solo player content Retail does that. Original MMO players preferred endgame as it engaged collectives with a common goal of clearing content.

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They are doing it because this is the most important aspect. even on Classic era for most players the endgame is the real content, there are many many players just raidlogging or playing gdkp on multiple alts. and when they are leveling they often get boosts from mages. players making new alts over and over again just to level are the vast minority. Back in the days where blizzard decided they wanted to go retail they weren’t as incompetent as many believed. Blizzard recognised the shift from the playerbase to be more interested in the endgame and reacted. with that being said people are comparing wotlk endgame with cata endgame because it is the most important.

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This also not entirely true. this only apllies for leveling, but quests you do at max level can be different depending on what quest you are doing. For example in Legion they introduced worldquests, and with worldquests there also came Elite-worldquests. And the monsters required to kill for Elite-worlquests are tough, i remember joining groups for said world quests. And for the part of “not engaging our brains” is also not true at all. Another example: the giants you have to kill for the molten front dailys can be really annoying as melee since they have a skill they spam which does a lot of dmg and knock you back, the the most convenient way for me as warrior to deal with it is to run out and charge/leap in or stun him to interrupt.