Best expansions in the history of WoW.
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cata>mop /10char
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Cata wasnât as bad as most remember (mostly thanks to how awful the game has become Post-MoP. But itâs fairly skippable in my opinion.
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Cata was barrely playable. Bloody period.
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S11 was the best season in WoW
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Cata started very high and ended very low. T11 was one of the best tiers of raiding ever, meanwhile T13 was rock bottom.
And since T13 went on for so long and was basically half of the expansions duration, that is the part people remember most.
MoP classical is da place to be.
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If I was to play asian mmo with fanfic race/class I would join 10 other mmos, WoW always had unique fantasy vibe and MoP shreds it into pieces.
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What would be the point in making a Pandaland Classic? You can already play that content on retail pretty much as it was.
Classic needs to stop at WotLK. Thatâs when the game ended in itâs original form. Everything from Cataclysm onward saw all the original systems removed and the game change into itâs current format of a shallow, soulless, dumbed down looter shooter.
We donât need legacy servers to revisit that nonsense, as it still exists on retail.
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Bipedal kung-fu pandas are still an april fools joke to me and should never return.
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Why would any of us go to retail, when we can take our chraracter we have played for years now into a new ERA?
And no retail is nothing like original MOP⌠The whole combat system has been revamped since then. And nothing is stopping you from staying in WOTLK forever. I want Cata and MOP.
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Do you imagine yourself one day playing âShadowlands Classicâ, and assume Classic servers will just mirror retail, infinitely moving to each expansion?
MOP saw talent trees removed and replaced with the retail version consisting of simplified Diablo III-style abilities that could be swapped on the fly. Huge numbers of spells and abilities were cut from the game, huge numbers of mechanics and systems were cut from the game, everything became streamlined and simplified.
As far as I can tell Retail keeps these same systems. There might be a few superficial changes and additions, but itâs hardly a complete revamp. The complete revamp happened at the end of Cataclysm during the MOP patch.
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It was an easter egg in Warcraft 3 RoC based on a fursona of Samwise Didier (Iâm not even joking) that somehow evolved into an all out wow expansion that was supposed to cater to a certain âeastern marketâ.
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MoP may have had the new talent trees, but classes still had their own flavours.
There were still new spells and abilities being added in MoP.
Still remember MoP Ele Shaman as being my favourite version, the incredible RNG based burst combined with fantastic mobilty. I liked it that much I levelled two to 90, one on each faction.
Not fussed about anything that came after MoP, things went downhill with WoD
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Letâs face it: blizz will re-release classic versions of each expansion as long as people will play it (duh). Wrath will be hugely popular because it caters to all crowds and both the questing/raiding, aka PvE and PvP were fun.
I personally love TBC a bit more because of the dark and dangerous atmosphere but Northrend has a better story in general.
After WoTLK blizz will look at the sub nrâs and server populations of those servers and will release cata classic. That will be the tipping point imho. Cata is very controversial in the sense that a lot of people consider it to be the first of the expansions that made wow become what it is today. If Cata is not popular enough it will end there. If not Iâm sure we can go as far as Legion Classic in 8 years or so.
This particular rabbit hole is deep, and blizz can go as far as it likes.
Or there is scenario B:
Blizz will press the reset button and re-release Classic Vanilla, TBC and then WoTLK again, since those are the most popular private servers and people are already asking for a fresh classic server. Imagine in a few years after wotlk maybe, Classic re-release will be hugely popular. And so it starts again. Potentially every 6 years, who knows.
Which is a false narrative because it was actually WoTLK that started the plunge into the modern era of MMORPGs.
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At the end, which is 3.3, yeah kinda. We got LFD but it was only for your own server.
In cata this was expanded to your battlegroup + we got the talent revamp that lead to MoPâs one, we got all kinds account bound stuff, transmog, LFR, more class pruning etc.
So Iâd still say cata is to be considered more to be the start of the way retail is now. The seeds might be planted at the end of WoTLK, but it sprouted fully in Cata.
Yes and no.
Whilst your assessment is factually accurate it doesnât necessarily encompass the mindset of boring old school RPG nerds such as I.
You see at the time I could live with the âdeath by a thousand cutsâ changes brought in by WotLK because they were individually minor changes that only seemed alarming when viewed as a whole. As a perfect example it was no longer necessary to visit the guy in Arathi Highlands to learn the Expert First Aid, it could now be learned directly from the trainers in capital cities.
We can add removed reagents for cooking etc, simplified Rogue poisons and all the rest, which cumulatively added up to a significant simplification/dumbing down of the game, but when consumed individually over the course of the expansion only seemed like relatively small annoyances, because the game as a whole was still the same game weâd fallen in love with back in 2005.
Thatâs the thing about death by a thousand cuts - individually the cuts are not that noticeableâŚuntil youâre bleeding out.
Contrast that with the very, very aggressive âin your faceâ changes that came with Cataclysm - starting with the whole Shattering, with itâs removal of old quests, complete rework of classic zones, hyperfast levelling, and eventually moving on to the removal of talent trees, offhand weapons⌠and all the other stuff that was done for the explicit purposes of making people like me throw their dummies out the pram and quit.
Yes and no, IMO. Itâs true that WotLK changed the gameâs feel and pace a lot more than TBC did. In many ways, TBC stayed true to Vanillaâs âclunkinessâ: weird mob behavior, very clear and major weakpoints for the various classes, strong emphasis on resources, group building and attrition over tactics and sheer âgameplayâ. WotLK does away with most of this, for good and ill.
However, I donât think you can really coalesce every single expansion from WotLK to Shadowlands into âModern WoWâ, as the game feel of the two is WAY too different. IMO there are at least two different version of Modern WoW -one, inaugurated by WotLK, and another that began somewhere between MoP and Legion which combined pruning, a much larger emphasis on multiple major cooldowns and insane mobility/survivability to turn the game into what is today.
To put things into perspective, as a person who stopped playing in WotLK and only recently gave BFA a try⌠when I see a video of a raid boss from Cata, I can still sorta understand whatâs going on -it still feels roughly the same game as WotLK but with some extra skills thrown into the mix. Jump all the way to WoD or Legion boss fights, and I feel like Iâm watching something else entirely, more akin to an ARPG like PoE or Lost Ark than the WoW I knew
Edit: lol apparently Lorranâs wall of text was faster to build than mine (tho we do seem to be making slightly different points after all, despite the same intro^^)
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We are, but youâre looking at the game from the point of view of an end game player, with a good knowledge of mechanics and theorycrafting, whereas Iâm looking from the point of view of a scrubby casual RPer who spent most of the original WotLK RPing, exploring the world, levelling alts, and only viewing end game content as an additional bit of spice on top of the existing game.
I guess weâll meet in the middle in some areas, but I think we both have very different personal goals when it comes to the game.
Having said that WotLK was the expansion when I was the most âhardcoreâ Iâd ever been, in that I actually did have a well geared main, and actually did an amount of raiding, to the extent of even having a Kingslayer title. I also did quite a lot of PvP toward the latter stages of the expansion⌠and enjoyed it too!
By contrast, here in TBC Classic I pretty much have Khara on farm, still to defeat Magtheridon, have managed Gruul once, and our one attempt at ZA thus far was a wipe fest where we managed the bear boss, and that was all. Casual scrub that I am!
This probably speaks volumes about the casualisation of WotLK and the ease of gearing up due to the badge system and spammable heroics.