This, my friends, is a reminder to all my fellow PvP and Arenas enjoyers that the state of Retail is an absolute disgrace, but this should not matter.
Cataclysm is one of the best PvP expansion, alongside MoP and WoD. Come play it, it’ll be fun.
Many of you have fears regarding this expansion. Let me soothe your worries:
PvE gear is NOT required in Season 9 & 10, the only exception are DMF Trinket for agility classes, which offers a minimal improvement over PvP trinket in Season 9, and a couple pieces for Feral in Season 10 (worry not, the spec is still totally viable in r1 even without them).
Class balance is… good, actually. Most specs are rank 1 viable throughout seasons 9 and 10. The S tier alone has nearly half of the specs within it. Unless you want to play fury warrior or combat rogue (why??), you’ll be able to reach your goals, granted you play well enough.
Gameplay has aged very well. The leap from WotLK is noticeable, yet it is very different from retail. It feels like a more polished, balanced and nuanced WotLK gameplay.
Season 11 is a dumpster fire, just skip it if you wish.
As someone who played Cataclysm back in the day on a high level, I can tell you, Classic Cata will be nothing like the good old Cata, which is undoubtedly one of the best PvP expacs (with Cata aff lock still being my favourite spec design of all time), apart from the last ssn, which was a total mess, due to disgusting PvE gear from Dragon Soul.
The reason for this is simply that 2v2 awards titles, hence ppl will be playing mainly 2s and 3s will die out, same as it did now for classic wotlk (I don’t play classic, but I’m going off of information I got from a friend, who is a r1 player, actively playing classic wrath). Cata 2s was and will be ATROCIUS. I still get PTSD thinking about playing 2s during Cata.
I think it will be fun for a few weeks max and then the flaws will really start to shine through. Also it’s not like the PvE playerbase will be flourishing, to carry the game in any meaningful way. Only 1/3 raid tiers are hype, with the last one being one of the worst raid tiers to ever grace this game. I think it would have been a better idea, to skip Cata entirely and go straight to MoP classic, which probably would have resulted in a healthier population for the game. My assumption is, that classic will bleed a lot of players during Cata and many of those won’t even show up for a MoP release afterwards.
2v2 as a whole is atrocious, it’s purely match up based at a high rating.
Cataclysm 3s, however, might be alive. There’s a thriving community already, and Retail being as bad as it is might just be enough to bring thousands upon thousands of players who just want to play arenas, but can’t bear the pain of being on Retail.
As for Cataclysm not being “the good old Cata”, I can only disagree. I’ve been playing it over the past few months, it’s truly been a blessing. Balance is good, class design is good, the game is just… good.
There’s no need for a large playerbase running raids for the PvP playerbase to be healthy, the two don’t overlap much. Arenas are quite niche in general, yet have been kept alive for roughly a decade (assuming it died somewhere in the middle of Legion). Even more so at high rating, really, if you’re Q’ing at r1 mmr, do you really care if there’s 100’000 players between 1500 and 2000 mmr? Probably not.
Private server balance and Classic balance are quite different. Many of them are very wrong on many of the numbers. The meta’s already been shown to be different in WotLK Classic, comparing pservers with Blizzard ones. It will no doubt be the same for Cataclysm.
HOWEVER! Even if balance were to be the exact same, would it really be bad? I wouldn’t say so. Balance is actually quite good, even though Feral and Hunter are stronger than other classes and specs, how many comps are good, as in, rank 1 material? An absolute crapton. Season 9 is very good, even though most casters are somewhat underperforming, there’s still spellcleaves that are more than viable. Namely Shatter, Shadowplay, mls, even warlocksd and warlocks2 (can’t type the name of the comps, as the word is on the no-no list due to being the same as the name of a no-no substance). Many melee cleaves are great in S9 as well, less so in S10, but there’s still a very large pool of comps that are r1 viable in 3s.
In 2s? Again, it’s match up based, but a few double DD are good and many comps with a healer as well. Up until S11, rogue/hunter doesn’t just crush every other comp.
Scripters may be a big issue however, that much is true. We shall see.
It was different in the first couple seasons, S8 turned out to be basically identica.
They typically lose to Ret/DK and HPal/DK, Feral/Disc, Rogue/Disc, possibly more comps depending on how balance turns out to be. Many spells are overtuned on private servers while others are undertuned. Wtf is a “blue resto shaman”?
I think changing pet should just not reset the cooldown on pet ability. Not only is it kinda too strong, it also makes the gameplay awful for hunters. They’ll literally dismiss pet every 10 seconds, who enjoys that?
I’m not so sure. It’s true on private server for a multitude of reasons, one of them is lack of playerbase, and another is that they’re filled with third world country children who can’t speak English. There’s no common language, making it harder to play. Still, 3s are absolutely being played currently despite the limited playerbase. If 2k concurrent players is enough to have soloQ popping in less than 5 minutes and 3s popping in even less than that, I have no doubt that the playerbase of Cataclysm Classic will be enough to be sufficient for 3s to be played.
Again, absolute amount of players is meaningless for arenas. Having 300 players at your mmr is much better than having one million players where only 5% of the playerbase ever does pvp, and 1% of that 5% does arenas above 1800 mmr.
thats true, like tsunami trinket on resto shaman in the first season with last cata season class tunings, mana dont move under 99% in whitemane season 1
yep 100%
i mean its the same in wotlk, because u dont need 1 more people and can still get the gladiator
It’s a real cope but i respect the optimistic view.
It is literally gonna repeat lich king just with less people playing. First season might have okaish player base after that complete wasteland. Wrath 3v3 is somehow fun yet nobody plays it since s6.
Wrath 2v2 is probably the worst thing ever happened to wow yet it is the only played bracket for the past 2 years.
If 2v2 titles stay it is doomed and they will stay.
The worst part is the classic community. It is disturbing what people are willing to do for rating and titles that are essencialy 0 value.
You have poeple using weak auras to snipe free wins. Lvl 1 characters running around the arena q NPC. People playing on their 5th character after getting banned for cheating. Subhuman prime time QS at 1am + cause these people apparently have no life while being in their 30s. The list could go on.
Classic will be far opposite from the original game.
I’d wager there will be more players. No one cares for WotLK PvP outside of the private server population, which didn’t even bother leaving it anyway since most of them paid for gear there alreeady.
S10 is great too. S11 is one of the worst ever, outside of TBC/WotLK, obviously.
It absolutely isn’t. There’s never been any hype for WotLK PvP, everyone is waiting for MoP and many are waiting for Cataclysm. When Cataclysm PvP dies, which I believe will only happen on S11 launch, we’ll all be waiting for MoP.
I strongly disagree. Not only is there enough of a playerbase to play 3s on rather small private servers, there’s many classes that can’t realistically get r1 in 2v2 and will be playing 3s.
Half of original Cataclysm rank 1’s were wintrading, everyone had always been sniping and botkicking was already a thing back then. It might be worse this time around though, we will see.
I hate to break it down but private server players make up like 70% of the wrath pvp community.
They are the major reason why the game is trash but also without them q wouldn’t pop. Wrath classic is basicly just a paid version of a private server.
Most private server players are still on private servers. We shouldn’t really be looking for that community to fill Classic servers. Thank God.
The playerbase for Cataclysm is VERY different to that of WotLK. While the latter is private servers Andys who like “Old WoW”, the former is disgruntled PvP enjoyers who think Retail ruined PvP from Legion onwards. That IS most of the PvP playerbase.