So I plan on leveling in Cataclysm content.
I think the dungeon is a masterpiece.
I made a question as the title of my topic but im pretty sure I know the answer.
The loyal, old fans of Warcraft could not face the fact WoW would go on.
Now, I guess I can include myself in the old…?
I was playing WC3 in 2009. I liked it alot.
Some people might not understand where villains come from.
Dungeons are good. Music is awesome.
We got to see more of the elementals.
There wasn’t exactly stuff made up out of nowhere.
Deathwing is Neltharion the Earth Warder. Not a made up character, he appeared in WC2.
He actually feels like a HUGE Threat.
He left his mark in Stormwind. He killed players who crossed his path.
I loved Throne of the Tides.
We got more traditional Blackrock content, which I find absolutely amazing.
The PvE was challenging, or so I was told, I played in a private server and I absolutely loved it.
The combat in cataclysm, or rather it’s complexity was the best.
You had the peak of skill variety, not to mention you still had resillience, parry, block, and mastery.
You could put more damage in your poisons or in other things, or just put raw power into a skill you’d like.
Honestly, Cataclysm is such a precious expansion.
Tol Barad had such a grim feeling to it.
Sure the dailies could get boring, but the battle? It was SO cool. The prison concept? Jesus…
What do you guys think?
Cataclysm was the last good expansion and they all know it.
Only issue was GC project homogenization started there.
Now you know why it was called Cataclysm.
I think you forgot about MoP
Yeah that was fun
The end of the expansion dirtied it all.
Pandiarrhea was bad.
Reasons? New talent tree. Peak of Homogenization. Bad Dungeons. Pandas. Titanforge. Among so many OTHER reasons.
In this expac they killed Shaman totems and with that I benched Shamans. Until BFA that is.
Mists was the last good expansion.
?
Is this meant to talk smack about the expansion?
I loved it.
Firelands looks so massive, so intimidating, and I never raided.
For me personally?
I’m a bad player and had been on a 3 month break. I came back and when the first Cata dungeon kicked my butt while healing and everyone got pissed off at me, i pretty much logged and didn’t come back.
I came back later in the expansion and just couldn’t stand questing under water, hope to never do that again.
If i remember right it also destroyed zones that were beloved on RP servers like the Stormwind Park.
I loved cata and always wondered why people didn’t, but this could be because it was the first expansion during which I was able to sub for however long I wanted as I was finally able to afford it, I’ve played on WotLK but only every now and then when I got a bit of money for a 2 months sub card. So many of my irl friends played back then and we’ve had a lot of fun together in lots of content. The pvp gearing was just perfect, going through bgs first on a new alt and then getting the conquest caps for upgrades that I was able to choose, oh man… I miss it so much. I didn’t get into serious raiding but I still have some good memories from normal dragon soul, although it wasn’t as good as ICC by far. I really enjoyed every class I’ve played, besides maybe blood DK that was butchered and never restored to how fun it was in wotlk. One thing that I didn’t love so much was the 40-minute long 2v2 arenas due to no dampening, all day long. Overall good times.
the MoP dungeons are the worst things ever. good god they’re almost as bad as leveling in WoD, legion or BFA
But there was only a normal and a heroic mode, so they don’t bother later in the expansion.
They nerfed the heroic dungeons pretty fast and the raids were like always. Not less or more difficult than before.
The biggest problem with Cata was the endgame content. There was none besides raiding and maybe pvp stuff.
And the last raid of the expansion sucked. Spine of Deathwing is to this day the worst encounter ever made.
you should be a comedian mate.
Its the absolutely worst expansion by far.
It destroyed all good zones and just splashed some lava here and there. alot of zones only got zone pop culturue references quests. Especially the alliance since blizz literally stated they ran out of time for the alliance side.
The dungeons started out good, but then got nerfed into the bloody ground.
the story of it was basicly green jesus deus ex machina.
Play classic and then understand how destroying all zones along with their quests was a huge plus in this game.
I did play classic and thats exactly why i am saying it destroyed good zones. The horde zones in cataclysm especially forsaken starting areas are not that bad. but most zones were a hot pile of garbage
You went from being an adventurer to being the chosen hero every single expansion since cata
Gonna post on my classic character because for some reason all my retail ones can’t be found any more…
Explaining why Cata is considered worse than Vanilla is actually fairly complicated.
What is clear, however, is that explaining it requires getting into all of the things that this forum has now decided is stupid or unnecessary or not a problem.
Map size and levelling speed. People levelled much quicker and the map was over twice as large as the original, and many people were already near max level.
Result: You don’t meet any one.
Quests are far more story-driven, rather than lore-driven, and there is no more than a single storyline in a zone.
Result: You can’t make roleplaying choices and everything feels weirdly convenient.
People say Cataclysm was low on content, but the reality is that Cataclysm had more content than any other WoW expansion by miles. But none of you ever stopped to small the roses. By this point Blizzard was starting to become convinced that streamlining out travel and group finding was a good idea.
This streamlining wasn’t really thought through on the difficulty side, either. I think everyone who were there remembers LFD Heroics as a harrowing experience, and for good reason.
Core to WoW is: Social interaction and identity, a sense of world and scale, and good (and difficult?) gameplay.
Cataclysm shows us what happens when you streamline the social interaction away and eventually kill off the sense of scale while still increasing map size. That’s Cataclysm’s failure, and it was a mistake Blizzard would go on to make 28529525 times more, and that they’re still making.
So how to fix it? See, this is where things get controversial:
- Smaller maps or longer levelling time or bigger servers - maybe a combination of them all?
1.a) If bigger servers, can’t have too many in one spot, and is less personal
1.b) Clean way of increasing sense of scale without making map bigger is no flying. - LFD and LFR must be removed. This shouldn’t be as big a problem with the smaller maps though.
- Mobs must deal more damage. You should not be able to pull giant packs on your own with impunity. That guy or girl that randomly shows up should be a real godsend for you.
Is Shadowlands fixing any of this? No.
And I can predict what’s going to happen if they attempt to.
And why? Because you think the end-game is the right place for you from the beginning of the game. You think the game should be running out of content and reach its zenith a few weeks into what is supposed to be a 2 year adventure - and you won’t hear any suggestion otherwise.
You think you want to hit end-game instantly, but you don’t.
You only want to hit it instantly today because the levelling game is broken. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t - and it’s only broken because of your well regarded changes to skip it instantly.
For as long as the social RPG gameplay is not respected these problems won’t go away.
Now, go ahead and tell me you’d quit because of those changes.
But let me tell you: If you do it for the reason I think you might, that can only be because your analysis is skin-deep.
I feel like you weren’t playing horde during Cata, and you definitely weren’t playing when 4.1 went live. Aggra was unleashed upon the horde and we saw Thrall die as a character. As for 4.1, do you like valor points? Then I hope you like the two troll dungeons, because you’re going to be seeing those two a lot.
But yes, the original dungeons were great for about two weeks, and then they were nerfed into the ground. Remember, Cata was also the point where healers suddenly had blue bars that actually went down. The mass exodus of healers also meant dps queues were a miserable hell.
Oh, and they ruined my GCD capped MM hunter with energy. I’m definitely not still bitter.
Dungeons were hard. Gear wasn’t on welfare anymore. Almost every dungeon had a one shot mechanic that required you to co-operate as a party.
Raids were also extremely hard, but 10 man content was simply better and easier to do than 25 man, but unlike in Wrath, both modes dropped the same Ilvl, so guilds were falling apart and splitting up in different smaller groups
After a while they nerfed PvE content, which caused a lot of players to quit aswell.
In PvP, Frost Mages were an absolute bane to most classes. Simply because they had so many CC tools and could burst you with a lot of damage aswell. I remember I played as a ret paladin and mages could spellsteal wings for example, it was starting to get out of hand.
That being said I enjoyed the expansion at the beginning but Dragon Soul was the worst raid since the Mount Hyjal one from TBC. Introduction of LFR caused a lot of people to quit aswell, and PvP was beyond broken because there were almost no hotfixes until MoP came out. Warriors had to get Gurthalak to even be mediocre, instead of being really bad in PvP.
Having its areas incredibly spaced out and relying on teleports was annoying, and having the world revamped regardless of if you liked the old one or not was also a problem, being the start of the “if you don’t like it screw you” attitude to changes that continue with stuff like Darnassus. Similarly the revamped talents and stuff also messed up what was originally a good system and in general anyone who liked how the game used to be either as a gameplay or atmosphere style got shafted.