Cataclysm was the expansion that came and took WotLK away from me in 2010, and again in 2024. For that it will always hold a bitter taste in my mouth.
I assume they will go the way of MoP later on, but for me the renewed classic journey ended with WotLK and my characters will reside in Dalaran until the realms close.
I do still play era from time to time though. Levelling there is a nice little nostalgia trip for myself. People keep coming back to those servers when the hype for the latest re-release of their classic expansions or new retail expansions has died down.
Cata updated the storyline- retail version
Cata updated gamemechanics and talents - retail version
Wotlk (tbc, vanilla) - is the old storyline and the old gameplay and the old way of configure your character and gameplay.
what i would say here is that wow before cataclysm was a completely different game and an unknown mass of us liked it.
vanilla classic standalone has a small fanbase, tbc standalone has a small fanbase and wotlk standalone has a small fanbase. but all put together should be a reasonably large group of fans to defend haveing them all active on classic servers.
People like to progress.
I personally like the old Cata/MOP progression
I didn’t care about tbc or wotlk for me those 2 are trash expansions
So right now i feel good playing cata and i hope they bring MOP
It probably had very little do do with the Cataclysm. MMO have always been very niche. WoW might have been the most popular but compared to other genres it was still low.
Everything has a peak and that peak was the end of Wrath/start of Cataclysm. One you reach the peak the only way is down. Netflix has been in the news this week with the exact same problem.
I don’t think the destruction was that big a deal, it reinvigorated levelling and nurtured the alts culture that started during Wrath.
The biggest problem I saw was the difficulty. I was guilded at the time so never needed to PUG. During Wrath gear made heroics easy so they were 10 minute runs. Some players complained so Blizzard made them hard… or shall we say require some thought, that included crowd control etc. The first tier of raids were quite challenging for the average guild too. You could PUG the first 6-8 bosses in ICC but couldn’t pug these with most groups! Blizzard made the troll remasters brutal. Again complaints.
When it came to the finale they made the dragon soul heroics so easy with the exception of a few bosses.
The sticking point was probably the end raid Dragon Soul. It suffered from the eternal question: how do you make a raid encounter with a huge boss the size of Deathwing.
The answer: platform jumping and lots of tentacles. The players said no!
I loved the Firelands patch, it had good questing zone and a good raid imo.
People left Cata because WOTLK kids got a reality check in the first normal dungeon, where they wiped cause nobody used kicks and stuns. Stonecore made many melee ragequit, since you need to use defensives when fighting mobs.
That sure was a bold statement! SO it could not have anything to do with the fact that many of the social guilds split up after Cata, because the social aspect of WoW disappeared?
Story in cata was meh, you had no idea who Deathwing was if you didn’t plat Warcraft 2. Flying from start so maps were made with flying in mind so they were forgettable. Dungeon were hard and people were doing exactly same thing that happens in m+ right now - leaving after one wipe.
IMHO what they need to do is open fresh classic server after a year or so change it to TBC and then WOTLK and repeat. Anything that was released after Wrath can be made into Remix event like MOP Remix was.
“IMHO what they need to do is open fresh classic server after a year or so change it to TBC and then WOTLK and repeat. Anything that was released after Wrath can be made into Remix event like MOP Remix was.”
I’m not sure I get the last bit. DO you mean to let the servers roll Classic - BC - WotLK - Wipe and return to Classic? That could work, of course, but I believe just the mention of “wipe” will turn away a large percentage, and a real wipe would turn away most of the rest. Making the second go around with 100 players spread over all servers.
It could be wipe or just transfered to Cata or other Wotlk servers.
In ARPG like diablo or poe they have seasonal servers that last 3-4 monts and after season ends they are transfered to standard server with all old characters.
So if wow did similar thing but with year per expansion Vanila - TBC - Wotlk and after 3 years those character would be transferes to permament Wotlk server and they could release vanilla once again.
Problem right now is Vanilla Classic server have too much gold farmed by bots so AH is either dead or everything costs much more than is should. Cata on other hand is worst expansion ever released in wow. So there is nowhere to start fresh if you want play classic wow.
I agree with the thread creator. Cataclysm is one of those infamous expansions where there was hardly any content or updates to keep people occupied, besides raiding. And in my opinion the few content that you did was mostly not even that impressive, they were much lower in quality if you compare Cataclysm to its predecessor Wrath of the Lich King. An expansion which is in comparison highly loved by most people, and it also had the highest amount of subscribers in WoW’s history: 12 million. In Cataclysm the subscription numbers rapidly dropped, likely due to the reasons mentioned before.
However I must mention that Firelands is the second best raid I have ever seen in my 18 years of playing WoW, after Battle of Dazar’alor. At the time as similar to Battle of Dazar’alor it was an incredibly revolutionary raid with new and unique fight mechanics, which could oneshot people if you played them wrong.
The dungeons in Cataclysm are also mentionable, I think they were at the time also very revolutionary. Mostly because people had to get used to doing tactics in there or the group would wipe in an instant, something which was a large step up next to previous expansions and vanilla when people disregarded tactics in dungeons.
IMO… Season of discovery should of been added to Wotlk classic to keep things interesting.
It shouldn’t have gone beyond Wotlk… Classic stops being classic at a certain point.
Its almost like blizzard doesn’t understand where classic ends and retail begins. But the classic factor will stop if they keep going further after cataclysm.
Not quite so bad, but that was the intention. Blizzard’s feedback was Arthas was everywhere in Wrath. Perfectly acceptable to me! So bi-polar blizzard removed Deathwing from most of the expansion. You did get to punch him in badlands though!