Man, I just so hope you’re right in this.
Forcing everyone into Cata with no Wrath C Era servers would be so stupid that I would only trust Blizz to do this. Yes I have gotten old and bitter. Every time there’s two possible solutions, Blizz choses the bad one.
I know it’s not actually Classic but I never played Cata and MoP so I would love to experience that and progress my character from Wrath.
I’m also cool staying in Wrath forever if that’s what they decide in the end.
Why do people hate cata So much? Sure cataclysmic season/DS was awful however i would argue first 2/3 of expansion was blast. It also had peak of subs at start of cata. Imo class design was at its best ever, raids were decent. Personally i loved cata and would love to play it again.
And why did it hold the peak of subs at the start?
Because WotLK had the peak, and that was a spillover from the previous expansion.
Those subs soon declined, in fact they declined so rapidly that there was an investor panic.
I’m not sure but it may be that you are viewing Cata through the lens of 'raiding, raiding, raiding, end game, more raiding and endgame’.
So yeah, Cata raids might have been brilliant. I’ve no idea I never did any raiding in that expansion, because by that time almost all my guild had quit the game in utter disillusionment. I do recall that the heroic dungeons were pretty good at the start of the expansion, before they were nerfed into oblivion, so I guess that counts.
But for players who love Classic and hate what the game became after Cata the reasons go far beyond raiding, raiding, end game and raiding.
I’ve met very few PvPers who had anything positive to say about the expansion. They widely felt that PvP was like an afterthought, tacked on to the game rather than an important part of it.
For those like me who love the old world, and the old RPG mechanics that went with it, Cata was a disaster, as it removed or streamlined most of them into oblivion. If you’re only raid-focussed than none of this will matter to you, but for the likes of myself and Vanillataur this was a very big deal.
In fact it was due to these very changes to the game that the demand for Classic servers was so high.
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Obviously since every expansion has its peak at start. Still it had over 10 mil subs for most of the expansion.
Ye except i play pvp mainly, not pve.
? Cata is exactly the same as tbc and wrath in that regard - you afk in shatrath/dala/og while queing arenas/doing pve/anything else.
Would you mind to elaborate? Dont see how changing the world destroyed any of rpg mechanics. If that means that each location has some quest chain and its own story then idk i prefered cata.
Was it tho? Maybe partly but i would argue theres other stuff making wrath So much more Fun than retail such as no mandatory daily farm of borrowed power or class design.
New talent trees, forced specs, new resources, even more OP Characters as compared to NPCs. No feed pet, no ammo, no nothing! That so is not the same. You STILL talk only raiding/Dungeons here.
Quests became streamlined, hand-holding. Old Quest-hubs were destroyed in favour of breadcrumbs - without which you could not do anything in the relevant zone - and other zones too. I still remember how frustrated I was arriving in the flooded Thousand Needles and not able to pick up one single quest, stranded for a long time until I looked in Wowhead’s predecessor and found you HAD to do some inane PvP quest in Feralas to even think of Questing in Thousand Needles … But sure … all is the same … NOT!
PS Sorry Lorraen for answering, you can add as needed - I sure left something out here.
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I dont really think thats an issue. I guess you could play some hybrid if Its meta however of its not meta youre trolling hard.
I never played hunter however not having to farm 60 soul shards every day is probably the best thing that ever happened to this game. I guess you love wasting your time. Me on the other hand I want to play the game. I dont want to ne a slave.
I would argue thats terrbile design if you waste Hour of your time just to do a single quest.
No, hybrid specs got virtually abolished, as you were forced to put a certain number of TPs in one spec before you could open the next one. I never went for meta.
And what about Tauren Pallys & Priests and Dwarven Shamans? Holy cow!
It was not the only things that were not there any longer, a lot of class specific items were removed: Sacred Candles for Priest etc.
If by “I want to play the game” you mean the end game - I think you’re the one wasting your time. I love levelling, having to manage ressources etc.
But this discussion is futile, I see now. You are what Lorraen describes this way:
@Yzzie: To be blunt, this was not always true. Both original TBC and original WotLK started with less people than they ended with…
Honestly really want to play Legion again. And really hope it will be way sooner than it supposed to be in schedule.
Ye i didnt Finish my thought. What i meant is theres like 1 hybrid spec in wrath and in other cases youre trolling if you dont go full fotm.
I dont see why shouldnt dwarfs, who live in mountain and deal with rocks their whole life, be shamans who also deal among others with rock? And idk at this point youre just picking the most random stuff while ignoring low points of vanilla-wrath.
Yes and again i dont see anything wrong with that since it improves quality of life. Buying candles is just annoying and doesn’t help the game in any way.
I enjoyed cataclysm leveling waaaaaay more than pre cata leveling. What i mean is for example drain soul is in affliction warlock rotation and you can have 32 soul shards (or unlimited amount before wrath). If i want to do proper rotation while killing mobs i’m gonna have full inventory of soul shards and have to remove them from my inventory after every mob i kill while leveling which is annoying. (Yes i can choose to not use drain soul obviously however if i’m in low lvl dungeon thats not efficient or idk). In addition to those low lvl issues Its also extremely annoying in end game.
Yes i care about end game more than i care about low lvl however i can’t enjoy end game unless i go through low lvl stuff and i want that to be enjoyable too (i’m not saying faster or w/e just enjoyable so i dont have to deal annoying stuff such as buying ammo every time i visit a village). I just want to do my quests and stuff instead of tracking some random stuff or clearing bags 24/7.
Well yes i forgot people have nothing to say about my main point and have to argue about the smallest things. So yes sub numbers grew cos of the era where people enjoyed fantasy where also werent many games people could play instead etc. However what i said is kinda expected after the game milked all its possible audience since theres no more room to grow.
spellhance, restokin, premuti, dk hybrids … firefighters, pompyro, shockadins, SSarms …
And who knows how many would people create if we got proper talents in future xpacs instead of garbage “flavors”
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Yes as i said its pure trol and you even missed the most broken one.
Sounds like PvE player who cant play anything beside copapyasted fotm … yeah pure trol to be able to actually make build for your character … you know in RPG …
But dont worry, blizz agrees with you and classes arent the last thing their devs raped …
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@Yzzie: Ummm, Lorraen and Vanillataur have already made various good points. That you do not share them is equally clear. But let me expand on my brief reply. I am not going to say Cataclysm was a bad expansion, because that would be an overtly subjective observation (and also faulty, Cataclysm did have things some players liked). What I can say is based on the data Blizzard released in the past is that Cataclysm was objectively speaking not very popular. In fact, among the expansions that have available public numbers, Cataclysm caused the largest permanent player loss and we ended up with the now familiar launch spike pattern. In addition, the decline began faster after the launch than the drops in later launch spikes, which means that the decline had actually already partially started by the time Cataclysm was launched.
My PvP experience is (very) limited, but based on what you said in an earlier post I suspect that you were less impacted by Cataclysm than many others. If I am not entirely mistaken, both Lorraen and Vanillataur mostly do PvE content. This means that you have a somewhat different experience base than they (or I, for that matter) do…
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Good points well made, and you’re right about me mostly doing PvE content, though not exclusively. I certainly enjoy a bit of PvP from time-to-time, though I’m not really very good at it. I’m more of a team player who protects flag holders, defends captured points, heals people - that kind of thing - rather than a supa pwnage wrecking ball. If someone fights me one-on-one I’ll usually lose.
Be that as it may I certainly do recall that the general consensus among the PvP community during the Cata era was that PvP was largely stagnant. There were very few incentives to put time and effort into PvP and with classes becoming increasingly homogenised whole ‘rock paper scissors’ system was beginning to show some wear and tear - save at the absolute cutting edge of competitive level E Sports and the top Arena teams,
Tol Barad was also (for many) a huge disappointment, as were the new ‘gimmicky’ battlegrounds.
Nope, that’s about the size of it. I could also mention profession quests such as First Aid Triage, and Old Man of the Sea being removed entirely - it was bad enough that they were made optional in WotLK. I could definitely mention those all-important class quests. Shaman totem quests, Druid form quests, Warlock summoning quests, Hunter tame pet quests… the list goes on ad nauseum. Removing reagents, ammo, poisons etc. was simply the last straw.
All this and more were done in the name of ‘streamlining’. Removal of content, mechanics, game systems and rules that served to ‘slow us down’. For some this felt like a good thing. Simpler gameplay, faster progress, easier to concentrate on the destination of end game without getting bogged down with all those pesky RPG aspects.
But it’s a fact that what players want is definitely not the same as what they need.
Those things were put into the game for very good reasons.
They original devs were creating a WORLD of Warcraft, not ‘Warcraft: The Raid’
Those things added vital depth and breadth to the game. Sure it might have felt annoying to go and buy poisons for your Rogue, but doing so added a unique feeling of of being that Rogue, not just whacking pixels with your toon.
I feel that a lot of players felt these absences on an instinctive/subconscious level, even if they could never express it, or admit it. They definitely was a sense that something vital was missing from the game - some spark was dampened, though it was hard for them to pin down precisely what it was - but declining subs do not lie.
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I thought Cataclysm being terrible Xpac was already known fact lol
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If they leave ICC phase servers up WITH RDF, i may level some alts on them. If they progress everything to Cata I quit right there. I honestly kinda hope they do, just so I have an excuse to drop it, much like I did 15 years ago.
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The best expansion WoW ever had was Legion. I wouldn’t mind if they stopped with WotLK (my 2nd favorite), but if they go further I really hope we get another play of Legion.
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