Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring today's video. Go to strms.net/hellofresh_willemmo, use my code POGWILLEFREE, and receive one free breakfast item per box while subscription is active!
Beinging of the end was TBC. The nerfs to heroic dungeons mid way through the TBC patch cycle turned every dungeon into an aoe sh** show, WOTLK and on made that far worse. The game was at its very best at the very start of Vanilla WoW, as is so often the case with Blizzard. They make decent games and are terrible at managing them. That has really never changed in all these years.
Nobody gives a f if it wasn't "that bad". We just don't want blizzard to fing profit off lazily releasing their entire expansion list over again. wotlk is ALREADY too much wow. I couldn't play pass naxx and just went to HC MODE wow. I was a giga NOOB when cata launched and i quit the game until legion because of all the bad things cata did. That's not why I say we shouln't get classic cata. it's because cata isn't classic and we wan't new ish. I'm not going to keep playing wow if everything that comes out is solved for the last 20 years and has 10 expansions worth of content. we need classic + seasons. Each season we get a reset, like poe /d4. We work our way up to being able to beat the new content ( that hasn't been solved on ptr ). We get new quests, new items, or at least changes to items. Like if a green drops, instead of just +2 str +2 stan. there's a chance at a seasonal mod. idk LITERALLY ANYTHING OTHER THAN JUST RELIVING ALL THE TRASH EXPANSIONS.
this video proves what i've been saying to all you content creators. You just want cata because you know you can make 1000 videos about it since you already know everything about it. then we will watch and know everything about it. and on launch we beat the game in 2 days. but classic +, assuming there's no ptr, you can't do the same. or maybe you can but you're just not willing to learn something new and want to stay safe and make content about what you already know.
3:00 already dog ish. what's great about classic? leveling. why? because each level you get to do something crazy... put a point in a talent. it might not change much because classic talents are trash but you still get to do it and you push for that next level for it. imo you get too little points and getting to a new talent point takes too long. I'd be find with the lvl cap being 100 just to get 40 extra points. in classic + they better make talent trees better, preferably wotlk but for lvl 60s. 4:20 trash
@jeffm1064 quests are more fun, it's not the same 3 quest done over, you have fun quest like in STM you going into a a shredder, and the story in each zone plays out better and some zones have really cool endings like SilverPine forest with battle gilneas . Also there are enough quests so you don't have to zone hop every other level.
Cataclysms biggest problem was that 5 mans had been made so faceroll easy during Wrath that when difficulty was slightly ramped up people had forgotten that CC's & dispels were something you could use on trash mobs etc. The amount of PuGs I got that were incapable of basic communication because it hadnt been needed all throughout WOTLK was infuriating. Blizzard had killed the community & camaraderie that existed during vanilla & TBC with players now being acclimated to gogogo attitude, kicking anyone that fails or leaving after 1 wipe. I still loved the world & the story but the players had mostly become a-holes.
Unpopular opinion, but I blame RDF for that. With RDF you couldn't make dungeons too hard, because a bunch of randoms from different servers and also un-social people that normally wouldn't have run dungeons, gets bunched together. Add in the fact that people are also very anonymous and replaceable because of that system, it's very easy to be toxic and kick under-performing party members. Previously, when finding new party members took more time and was a hassle, you would rather help out noobs instead of kicking them for being a liability. I believe Preach said so in his Wrath legacy video, that people that didn't know how to play their class and that usually wouldn't do dungeons, now were found everywhere. This created a disaster and toxicity when dungeons were made TBC-like again in Cata.
@@dannyp9210 yeah I hated the system when it came out in WOTLK. Basically negated the friends list which people built throughout vanilla & TBC because the ease of getting into a random group & instantly porting to the dungeons was to convenient for people not to use. The ease of Wrath dungeons also made it so you didn't ever need to talk either.
I'm starting to feel like WillE is part of a Blizzard astroturfing campaign to prep the classic community for the inevitable cata announcement at blizzcon.
I’ve had this thought. I’m not interested in cata Hope they have something new to announce that’s not cata and not a new retail xpac…. Have we suffered enough blizz for a wow2 or classic+?
@@TheOtaxephon he can have his opinion and his Cata. Just saying my opinion. That Spine of Deathwing and Deathwing fight are such a nice close out for the xpac. Everyone loves those end of xpac fights
Came to the comments section specifically to see if anyone else was on this conspiracy theory train. I think this is one of the few times my opinions differ fundamentally from WillE here. Cata really was that bad. The only positive thing I can say about it was that I think it was the last expansion that took risks with the franchise, and we haven't seen any more risk-taking because of how bad it was. Literally scared it out of them forever.
I mean, from what I can gather, Shadowlands had potential. The story was just awful. But I have heard good things about some of the raids (Castle Nafria? Something like that).
is that you being obtuse trying to play of criticism as "you are just being stupid and wanting to complain about something" or are you ignorantly defending a clearly bad expansion. there are some good points in shadowlands but as a complete package it was absolute trash. thats like saying having a clean table in the middle of a filthy room, the table excuses the disgusting mess everywhere else, it doesnt.
@@andromidius The problem with Shadowlands is that the WoW community is too awful these days, Shadowlands was going to attempt to make a return to some traditional MMO elements but players lost their minds about not being able to play their spreadsheet simulator optimally so all those MMO style systems were never properly fleshed out.
I really think that the fall off from WotlK was inevitable no matter what blizzard did, killing Arthus wrapped up so much of the lore that players were there for, many people through a combination of just growing up and moving on we’re fine to call it quits after that
I definitely agree, and the “kill big bad guy on the front of the box” felt like it was getting a little old. Also topping Illidan and the TBC cinematic was hard, but wrath did that, and topping wrath seemed impossible. Whatever Blizz did was doomed to underperform, but that also doesn’t entirely justify how bad of an expansion it was
I think it’s also just the rose of amazing free to play games of that era. A lot more people got into online gaming since it was more accessible and a lot of people flocked to free to play titles at the time and that influenced others to play with their friends. I remember everyone in my class started playing League of Legends during this expansion and that’s the only reason I tried it out
@@ejlorbz Another data point (personally anecdote and people I know felt similarly), is that MoP was obviously leaked/announced during Cata, and I honestly quit because of how stupid Kung Fu Panda: The Expansion was. I wanted to play a game as a warrior in a war or whatever, not a bunch of goofy pandas. To this day it still baffles me how they made such a stupid premise for an expansion. I already did not like Cata but MoP was the nail in the coffin for me. I went on to play Call of Duty and Skyrim and Borderlands for the most part after that.
Cataclysm will always be dear to my Heart as I got realm first 85 by not killing a single mob. Druid tauren leveling only by gathering herbs with the insane Spawn rate the first two weeks of cata.
@@brunz6265 To put things into perspective, I won my realm first race by about 30 minutes. 1) This couldn't have been done on any other class/profession, druids could gather herbs while in flying form and go from node to node dropping aggro from mobs every time. Had a few close calls from ranged mobs in the last zone while stile being 80 but it got easier as I leveled up obviously. 2) I would have lost if I had been a night elf druid, the tauren racial used to cut the herb gathering time from 3 seconds to 1.5 second, which saved between 1hour and 1 hours and a half of pure gathering time. Not to mention that I should have skipped a ton of nodes that could be gathered in 1.5 sec before getting hit, but not in 3 sec. So time gained was probably much higher than that. 3) Obviously, couldn't have been done with normal herbs spawn timer, which got put in like 10 days after launch. Cata classic will most likely not have the hyperspawn of original Cata, so I would recommend not to try this at home this time around :p It was pure dumb luck, I only prepared a mental route with external ressources for Realm First herbalism (I didn't use the PTR, I rejoined Wotlk like 3 days before Cata); which I got, and then decided to try it out since I was getting decent xp. I gifted alchemy realm first to a guildie since I had so much ressources, and tried to go for inscription myself after dinging 85 but was denied by the fact I hadn't done any quests and I needed an NPC that was gated behind said quests to level up to max (IIRC).
LFR was not added to get more people into raiding (as in, organized progression raiding) - it was added to increase overall engagement in content that costs a lot of time and money to produce in order to justify further production of said content. Looking at it from a business perspective, it doesn't make sense to spend so much time and money on content that only ~8% would ever see; it made far more sense to invest that time and money into content that ~85% would be actively engaged with on a frequent basis. The catalyst for this change in thinking (by suits, not Devs, the latter understands why raid content is vital to an MMO's success) was the huge success of games such as Farmville...and we got a limited version of that in the next expansion, and a less limited version of it in the following expansion.
It's hard to overstate how bad the initial implementation of LFR was. You were effectively forced to do it every week as the gear could be a massive upgrade from the previous raid tier, but there was no way of knowing if you were being dropped into a doomed run. Some fights were tuned so only 4-5 competent players could steamroll it; others were effectively impossible for a pug group with 10 people afk. It was truly miserable. If they do put in LFR they have to add other systems that exist in retail so this is not mandatory "content" for every raider.
You would just que with your guild until it would pop for all of you at once or you just qued as a guild I don't remember I was like 14 when lfr came out
Care to explain the logic behind the "mandatory content"? Who says it's mandatory, your raid members? Great, they can take their asses over to LFR to help you farm it if they deem it mandatory. It's probably the weakest argument raiders had for LFR. You already have a dedicated 10/25 man group ffs, you could get all the bosses done in 30 minutes.
@@Numbers_Game thank you for that take. I have never understood the hardcore raiders bitching about lfr. Yes it could be used as something initially get some better gear to help with progression on harder modes of the raid, but it's not necessary, it wasn't necessary back then and it's not necessary now. It's great for someone like me that doesn't work a conventional schedule and can't commit to a steady raid team because of it. I still get to see the content. It's also a great place to take alts to learn encounters and how to play your character better in a raid setting.
If we get the chance to permanently park our characters in Wrath going forward, that is where mine is staying this time. I have no inverest in doing Cata again.
I thought this was supposed to talk about the good aspects of cata? After watching this video it feels like the titles wrong. TLDR maybe cata actually DID deserve the bad reputation???
Yeah, it's like he took all the valid criticisms of Cata and just said "No, look guys. It's actually a good thing that they changed the thing you liked into something you don't!".
To "steelman" what I think this video is trying to say: Cataclysm is at least partially a scapegoat for all kinds of changes that had already started happening in TBC/WotLK and/or is blamed for continuing that path instead of correcting the ship before we even get to the waters with icebergs like WoD and BFA.
@@Xazamas That is very valid criticism of the way other people criticise Cata, I like that a lot. Although I really dont think this video does that very well, as just going "So this thing that happened (or got worse) in cata that you hate was actually good" is not a very convincing way to make people change their minds on something lmao
Cata raiding killed a lot of the 10 man guilds and PuG raids that I use to see constantly during Wrath. They should never have killed the "friends and family" guild raiding scene.
They've explained time and time again why they had to axe it. It is literally one or the other. Obviously, they're gonna keep 20 man. I really liked 10 man as well but they simply can't design encounters for both.
Because raiders were doing multiple difficulties of the same raid in Wrath to gear - that was why you saw so many PuGs. It also led a large amount of burnout. Stopping this nonsense wasn't what damaged 10 M's in Cata. The launch raids were a buggy nightmare mess of imbalance with a large amount of interrupts/cleanses needed and this impacted 10 M far more than 25 M. Casual guilds were slammed into a wall because the two sizes were supposed to be the same difficulty for the same gear instead of 10 M being easier as it was in Wrath. Very large servers did have a PuG scene for the launch of Cata - Stormrage was one but I feel that is due to the large playerbase available. You'll naturally have more raiders than smaller servers.
This is what I keep saying. The servers were actually communities people knew each other and worked together. The bad people(literally and figuratively) were found out and avoided and they sorta banded together. Raid finder made the game less human and gave progression to incredible rude people.
Getting rid of talent trees and destroying Azeroth is why people rightly think it was the beginning of the end. It isn’t classic, hard stop, and that’s fine but it’s not classic.
My biggest problem with Cataclysm is that it doesn’t feel Classic. I think they are now at the point where they have to decide “what does Classic mean”. It is just going through every expansion in a faster release cadence and with some changes? (I dont know if Shadowlands Classic makes sense tbh). Is it about releasing the big 3 over and over? Is it about the vanilla content with heavy changes and iterating on that?
@@JohnRock14 if that’s what they want, it’s fine. They should say thats what they want to do with the Classic “brand” and commit to it. I agree it kinda still works for this but I dont know what the state of Classic will be when it’s time for WoD Classic, BFA Classic or Shadowlands Classic.
I'd argue that wrath is actually nothing like classic in any way, shape or form. We just said it was because of the world change in cata all these years.
@@Qatch1140 people are learning now that a lot of the stuff they didn't like in Cata started in Wrath. It's like when someone is suffering from cancer but they look fine on the outside. Cata was just when the sickness started to show. That's why Classic era is making a come back.
Honestly, for me at least, the only thing i hated about cata was the fking world change. Legit ruined some of my favorite zones for no reason. Although they also added my most favorite zone in Vash'Jir, so I can't complain that much. Also loved cata pvp a lot and would love to experience it again
At what point does classic stop going through the expansions? I’d say mop is the last expansion in the classic era if we are now talking graphics wise, because cataclysm isn’t very classic imo. Mop would be good to stop at and then create their own classic expansions?
Cata was an okay expansion, but I feel it shouldn't be classed under the 'Classic' banner. Blizzard are bound to announce a re-release to keep a few happy. I won't be playing it though.
Cata up to end of firelands raid would be what I consider to be the real end of the "classic" Era (pre-nerf launch dungeons that needed CC, dispells and co-ordination; two full-sized raids to swap between at launch with BoT and BWD; Throne of 4 winds was unique filler raid; Firelands event and raid were good). Everything post Firelands raid (from Dragonsoul to Dragonflight) I would consider to be the "retail" Era.
I don't know, man... I think people are forgetting that it was on Cataclysm that started the trend of being almost obliged to login and do daily chores. That sucks.
They did backtrack on that some and made it so people who were capping VP in 5-mans have a week to do all seven (or five I believe if you did troll ones). You didn't need to log in everyday to get the VP from heroics. Rep barring TB was gained by dailies, zone questing, and wearing the tabard in 5 mans for level 85 and all heroics, meaning you could crush the reps out quickly to get the rewards to go straight into raiding. Crafting was helpful and the CDs for high level materials could be a pita but understandable given their high level. TB sucked as a raider with it's dailies to get that stupid trinket to help with the heroic Ony fight. Molten Front with FL was skippable for raiders thankfully, because I dislike dailies. It didn't take much to unlock a few pieces of catch up gear though. I don't think DS launched with anything off the top of my head that required daily logins. For most of it, if you wanted to do high level content or get gear as a casual player, you had other avenues that didn't require daily logins, including one piece of VP gear per tier available to be traded/sold. Now MoP, at launch, with entry level raid gear trapped behind a wall of dailies and no way to overcome this was a nightmare. I didn't play MoP until almost two months in and I'll always be grateful for missing that fiasco. Honestly, the more daily crap Blizzard has put in, the less I play. It's a monthly sub game, I don't understand why they are so focused on daily logins instead of having weekly caps. Policing people's play time doesn't seem to have done them favors, especially since I think there's a lot of people out there like me who play a lot a couple of days and skip some others for whatever reason. Feeling like you're getting more and more behind because you can't log in to do an hours worth of stuff isn't a good feeling.
all i know is when cataclysm came out it felt like shit to me. i remember the disappointment. like it had lost its soul and i became really pessimistic about the future of wow
People seem to forget that, wow is/was an old game back then in late 2011. Majority of players back then were in there mid 20's if not mid 30's, meaning a lot of people quitted because of IRL issues. E.g. getting kids, furthering their career etc.
I'd like them to add in chromie time so that instead of leveling through tbc and wrath as you usually would, you just stay in the post cata azeroth and keep leveling.
Cataclysm had one major flow. Blizzard went from piss easy to hard as hell. The other was lack of content for months after initial release. The last was a shattering of old world. In some cases it worked in others id didnt! Just finished questing in Loch Modan. They butchered it!
Memory must be short, since after those complaints about being 'hard as hell' is a crock of shit. The difficulty was no different than Vanilla and TBC; the fact is "wraithbabies" were 'babied' with slick easy winning of WLK going overboard with LFD while AOE spamming for welfare T10 badge loot, so when CAT "promised' a return to form, those wraithbabies complained and the so-called difficulty was nerf 4 months after CAT's launch......the "flaw" was in that moment Blizzard and everything it stood for DIED in that moment revealing Activision's machinacations.
I remember the players wanted to go straight into heroics dungeons and were not used to obeying game mechanics or communicating with each other, but were used to instant gratification, the lack of which, caused them endlessly whine about the game being too hard.
@@OGNord many many players were too used of their overloading of stats from icc gear, i lost count of the numbers of healers that coudn't manage their mana in HC dungeons, the number of wipes because one guy wanted to pull the whole pack in grim batol when some needed to be cc because of being undergear in early weeks. Tldr: i believe what he means is : after icc was on farm for most guilds, a lots of players didn't knew how to play their class right because the stats was compensating for their lack of knowledge of the games mechanics etc... Btw icc gear was so incredibly power that a lvl 80 shadowpriest with full icc gear was rekking lvl 85 early expansion, no mana management, way too much haste, enough crit rate you don't even think you will miss one.
@@Elypsen This time around, I think Blizzard will keep the 'hard' heroics. Players are a lot more skilled this time around, I know I am, and with all the knowledge and hindsight, there's no reason NOT to have Cata content be pre-nerf. There will be those who will whine and cry about it being too hard. That's when players should point them to WoWhead or any other resource of WoW knowledge and tell them they have to LEARN how to play instead of treating them like they did Wrath gamma dungeons day 1. I just want my goddamn Light of Dawn spell!
Hmm... so many people have good points, but we have to look at the TYPE of content. Leveling was the most difficult in Vanilla (not just in time but in challenge), and just got easier from that point onwards. I miss the challenge in leveling, and I think the big mistake of the Cata rework was not to buff the mobs to match the increase in player power... this is what made spamming LFG dungeons THE leveling meta (five overpowered players can push through the content fast enough it is the clear winner), and also what cemented the "rush rush go go" attitude of leveling to get to the "real game." Heirlooms also play a role in this since they both add power and diminish gear upgrades as a form of progression while leveling, but beside that buffing the mobs fixes these issues. TLDR: the leveling has to be part of the "real game" and that comes from proper challenge and reward. So you go from easy leveling to difficult heroics at cap... and pre nerf that is one HELL of a jump. You aren't teaching new players how to use their class while leveling to ease them into more difficult content so they are screwed and hit a wall, and Wrath made returning players complacent when they could just AoE everything down without having to think (look at how the average group crumbles on faction champs and it's hard to get them to use CC... I've seen people say "oh let me put that on my bar"). No one had to use these tools while leveling or doing dungeons in the previous xpac, and all it took was people to understand what they needed to do and the player base started to adjust... and THEN heroics were nerfed, which then pissed everyone off a second time. They should have stuck to their guns. Ghostcrawler was right: people needed to get good. The raids were also a considerable jump in difficulty and I think the first two tiers are really where we see raid mechanics get good. It caused players to rise to the occasion (and most people are able to do that) but it wasn't to the point of insanity like some of the fights in Legion where they pushed it beyond what most players could do in the most difficult content. Ghostcrawler was right again, as he later said after leaving Blizzard that LFR was a bad solution to the problem of accessible raiding. I would argue that if they had stuck to heroics being like "mini raids" and added more for people to do with 5 man content, this could have been the accessible entry point. Once you've mastered them, you are ready to take on a real raid.
I don't intend to play cata classic and i believe all the hate it gets is justified. Personally i hate the updated talents system, the world revamp, the raids and the new zones. Nothing about Cata gets me hyped tbh. Classic set out to bring back wow as it was in the good old days - Cataclysm is literally retail. The only reason we get cata "classic" is because Blizzard wants to milk this shit as hard as possible.
@@keelhld94 no i mean the cata talent system. MoP is even worse. Done leveling or not, personally i prefer the old world and i know a lot of people feels the same. This is just my personal opinion on Cata. I respect the fact that other people disagree with my opinions.
It was actually the explosion of alts expansion with the revamped story and zones. It was very, very fun for a while but as the expansion dragged on the problems started to pile up. I'll always remember Cata as the expansion that pushed alts for me but on the other hand that so much got forgotten on the wayside with Cata was a huge disappointment.
Opinion aside, Cata is factually not classic because: If you log into retail WoW and go to Westfall or the Barrens, you will see the cataclysm zones. You cannot see the old world or its content. Cataclysm zones are currently in the game more or less as they appeared. Cataclysm =/= Classic.
Same, i had a lot of fun. Maybe because of the expac itself, maybe because i played with friends, maybe both. I don't see much fundamentally wrong with it, would def give it another go.
As a player who started towards the end of wrath I didn't reach max/kill lich king until Cata launch, so I get my 'nostalgic' feels from wrath era but I actually enjoyed and played Cata more than any other xpac. The Cata announcement is the only reason I've resubbed this week since Legion. I played Ret pally PVP and Mage pve so am currently leveling mage again in hopes of grinding for Tarecgosa's Rest come Cata. Hope to see you all back in Tol Barad ;)
What Cataclysm doesn't deserve is a classic because the world and the zones are already there unchanged in retail. Unless they revamp azeroth for retail to make it make sense as classic 2.0?
Cata deserves a classic more than TBC and WotLK. Cata was the only expansion to add/revamp non-endgame expansion leveling content and the revamped world was great, outside of a few zones. Cata also brought back Deathwing from warcraft 2, along with Nelfarian, Onyxia, Ragnaros which are all Vanilla characters. It brought back Thrall in a more prominent role, which is a WC3 character. Cataclysm was a huge love letter to anything from Warcraft 2 to and including Vanilla WoW. Cataclysm is more old-school than TBC and WotLK and more respectful to Vanilla than those too.
Cata heroic dungeons were decent, raids were good (except the end of dragon soul) but I firmly believe the complete revamp of the world was the moment "old wow" died and i think most people didn't like what they did with it, its even worse due to the fact that to this very day, over a decade later, the changes are still present in retail for no reason
its not just that it kinda sucked but also that the revamping probably consumed half of the developement ressources of the addon leaving us with less new content to do. and how to people level for the most part anyway since the dungeonfinder? by powerleveling in dungeons and avoiding the open world as much as possible. the person who thought the revamping was a good idea should be fired immediately.
@@mcdick1621 if cata had no content/develop how does Wrath fit into those standarts because so far Wrath is the weakest expansion i've played so far my nostalgia glasses were off
I didn't particularly appreciate that they either removed epic quests from the old content or revamped them so they were condensed down to nothing more than a blip. A lot of the newer quests simply didn't leave much of an impact on me one way or another and I did do all the zones. Small hidden quests, like Ally for the fey dragon pet were either changed for the worse or simply stripped completely. I think another part that isn't talked about is when they did this revamp they subtracted from your quest counter. Apparently, removing quests from a game means you never did them in Blizzard's stance. Due to a bug, you could be rewarded all your quests again (and get the achievement again) in some areas just playing the game. They tried to do this with the hard-earned Exalted title concerning reps, simply raising the bar and stripping it from players that had earned it - and then had to undo this choice due to outcry as it was rightfully pointed out that this achievement was not listed as temporary. Is it pretty easy now to get this title? Sure, but that doesn't bother me given that I've had it for fourteen years. :)
Wow youtubers: Classic era ends with Wotlk, its all down hill from Cata... *3 years later Cata classic is on the horizon* Wow youtubers: Everyone was wrong about Cata, it was amazing! Keep playing please!
@@rattlehead999 hey, if you enjoy it - there is nothing wrong with that. More just a comment about how many wow classic youtubers have changed their tune. But no shade at Cata itself.
Cataclysm told all the people that wanted an RPG to go look somewhere else and told the ones that wanted to live forever in the hamster wheel of raiding to come RIGHT ON IN.
@@ryanglacier30 don’t really disagree but I would say it’s felt like a sort of “frog in the boiling pot” thing where it only felt like the rpg died outright jn cataclysm whereas in tbc and WotLK, you could sorta trick yourself that the leveling journey still mattered and that the questing wasn’t borked with some stuff improved and others absolutely ruined. Mop and WoD felt like they tried to balance out things out again before legion came and said “fuck it, back to committing 100% to the raiding being all that matters”.
Youre kinda wrong. Popularity of wow fell because it was no longer cattering to casuals. People say they want difficulty, but the difficulty of cata turned so many people off. There is this elitism in wow but its so ironic, because the strength of wow was in its accessibility.
@@seanwilliams7655 As someone who started in Vanilla, dude 100%. I never even really thought of it but yeah bahaha vanilla was casual and chill as fuck until the internet and logs blew shit up, then it became just annoying and boring from world buffs alone.
I quit after cata due to being burned out by that time, i think im far from alone and many people quit before me after wrath as well. the game was already 6 years old by the end of wrath and 8 by cata. thats a very old game to still be expected to not be loosing any popularity imo. i think the decline is natural of any aging game and not really tied to any decisions blizzard made.
@@raiden000 while I think you're right that a decline was inevitable, that still doesn't mean that Blizzard didn't drop the ball. And when I say they dropped the ball, it's not even a jab at them. WoW was the biggest MMO in the world by a wide margin at the time. So Blizzard was in uncharted territory. That said, I think they dropped the ball because, somewhere between the middle of TBC and Cata, they started designing the game for a different type of player. Moving away from the "slow burn" style that was how the genre traditionally did it, and offering more little hits of dopamine. The more they did this, and the more they removed those RGP elements that slowed the game down, the more people started playing. Wrath was an attempt to make both the newer players, and the older crowd, the people who either started in Vanilla or came from older MMOs like EQ or DAoC, happy. This eventually came to a head in Cata and Blizzard had to pick a side. They decided to side with the new players. Which was probably the best business decision because, as you said, people were getting older, and new blood was needed.
classic was ruined when modern people started playing it. Its why the latest iteration is an absolute hellhole. its not "classic" its just modern players min maxxing an old game. The game was always fine, its the people that turned to shit over the years. Everyone that uses the phrase "the spirit of classic" is also desperately buying gold to keep up with either streamers getting given thousands of guilds making millions from running people like you and others through the game. There is no classic. It died years ago. Private servers almost encapsulated "vanilla" years ago, but then all the "modern" gamers that want their 30 second dungeon run with bis geared people came along and it was dead.
Yes the only reason Cataclysm isn't the best expansion(until Dragonflight) is because 4.1 had no Raid tier, 4.2 got 1 fewer raids than planned(scrapped water themed raid) and LFR was NOT a good replacement for WotLK's 10 Man Normal(easy) raid difficulty. Dragon Soul was also infinitely better than Trial of the Crusader which is the worst raid in WoW's history and when a ton of players started leaving. DS is also better than Eye of Eternity, Obsidian Sanctum, Ruby Sanctum, Onyxia and Wrath Naxx(even though I like wrath naxx). Cata also had a Dungeon Tier for each Raid tier and we got more than one dungeon which is great.
I wouldnt say nobody loved the revamped zones. I know there was a loud outcry against it because they removed the old world but again old world had lower quality quest and map design if we are really being honest about it. What Cata added was a new and better quality of the levelling experience. This was the time when Blizz really started to focus on WoW from an RPG approach than a traditional MMO approach. And that s why i say it is not Classic. I categorize from Vanilla to WotLK as first era (classic) and Cata to WoD as the second era and Legion to SL as the third era. There are reasons behind this categorization, and u can change it here and there but first three MMO era is usually accepted. IF ONLY we have to choose between Cata Classic and Classic+ would i prefer Classic+ over Cata. Because i would prefer something more experimental than something less risky and uninspiring.
@@dreamermagister8561 The MMO approach was removed in WotLK, Cata just improved on WotLK. Cata is WotLK+ TBC is Vanilla+ WoD is MoP+++++ BFA is Legion- I used to Categorize them like you back in the day. Now It's in pairs. Vanilla + TBC WotLK + Cata MoP + WoD Legion + BFA Shadowlands => Huge course correction so no pair. Dragonflight + probably next expac, cuz due to DF being success. And it makes sense since 2 teams develop WoW at a time. WotLK is when leveling became streamlined especially with the LFD and all the XP nerfs and all the harder group content in the open world was gone both 1-70 and there was no 70-80 hard content.
@@rattlehead999 some ppl prefer to categorizing it that way too. But again that approach at the end make it so every expansion is its own era/period while the initial idea was trying to find enough similarities in design approach between them to categorize them above-expansion level, if you know what i mean. It is similar in a way how history is split in periods. They are arbitrary, just like any categorization, periodization is.
@@dreamermagister8561 Well yes, but WotLK was very different from TBC(and vanilla). In both leveling and endgame desgin. WotLK was the first time we didn't get full raid progression, now you had badges from the get go, no catchup raids, no nothing. And in WotLK(and then Cata) you did 2 raid tiers at a time, while in Vanilla and TBC you had to do them in order of release + catch up raids. The leveling in WotLK is very similar to the one in Cata, I'd say Cata is a little bit easier, but in WotLK 1-60 is basically streamlined as much as possible at the time, without actually changing the content itself like in Cata. And WotLK was when professions weren't as important anymore, Cata professions were on par with how important they were. WotLK was when endgame became the mainstay for WoW. I can't put WotLK with TBC without Cata being in it too. There were things WotLK continued and polished from TBC like reputations and the addition of tabards and better faction rewards. WotLK was also when a lot of the classes got a bigger kit, Cata just finished it. While MoP was a big course correction, bucause I think Blizzard didn't undertand why they lost people. MoP was when pulling 10 enemies at a time became a thing, when LFD was already established as a leveling method better than the open world and Blizzard was catering towards it, completely ignoring the open world pre-85. MoP also started with tons of Daily quests. And super annoying rep grinds that weren't present before. And they removed the talent trees. MoP and WoD outside their respective expansion leveling zones, pretty much tried to kill the rest of the world, while mostly focusing on Instanced content. The timless isle, isle of thunder and Tanaan jungle were again endgame content and a single zone each, with very different at the time content. Now they set the groundworks for Zereth Mortis and the Zaralek Cavern, but they were different than pre-MoP content. And there is no doubt Legion and BFA are tied at the hip and different from previous expansions. While Shadowlands changed quite a few things. It unpruned classes, it fixed the PVP systems and PVP itself, it had more challenging open world, it had better leveling with chromie time, the professions saw an upgrade there(and in Legion). While Dragonflight is on a whole new level.
My biggest issue, a cataclysm was the amount of stuns and heels. Every class it seems got. I was in so many BG PVP encounters, where I could not move at all because it was instant stunning or instant movement slowing. And never got a chance to do anything. And thats all i like doing in wotlk and cata
They also started removing things that didn’t fit blizzards new class rotations. Rotations were created by players not blizzard. Blizzard co-opted the idea and ruined player agency and creativity.
@@sardonicspartan9343 I don't know why people keep saying this, lots and lots of people PvP'd, that's pretty much all I did. Never had to wait on queues, they were instant. To suggest PvP shouldn't matter is absurd and you people are annoying. Maybe nowadays PvP fell off for whatever reason, but it was a big part of the game.
whenever I hear people complain about cata and even mops talent system they have no idea how they actually work on a fundemental level. you get talent points but those points dont go into actual skills you use, most go into fluff boxes of boring stat/damage/healing increases. like "lightning bolt's damage increases by 10%" but with mop, when you go to the level where you inevitably would get to that point in a talent tree, your lightning bolt just scaled to do 10% more damage. nothing was lost, except the useless action of opening a window and clicking a box. which is why I always called them placebo points, you dont lose anything but the placebo effect of clicking boxes. its all automatic, and the meaty skills you would normally get, you get at the normal intervals you would from the talent tree. the fact is the mop trees, nothing changed you just got upgrades automatically, and with cata, they simply cut down the amount of times you opened a window to hit fluff bonuses. Blizzard could literally make a tree that doesnt absolutely nothing and people would praise it as the greatest thing ever. Hell in DF, they gutted everyones spell book and slapped it on a tree for you to buy back via placebo points and people cheered. its baffling really, the sheer stupidity of the wow playerbase.
The reason I despised MoP's talent system is that as a Resto Shammy primarily for that x-pac, they took core abilities I had at baseline in Cata and offered them to me as talents to choose from in MoP. That felt bad, but they had to constantly change our talent system over the course of MoP and return some of those things to baseline. It wasn't fun to me. Losing abilities I was freely using and then being told I had to pick and choose really soured me on the whole talent system, especially when other classes weren't hit nearly as hard. There is a lot to be said about constant character progression even if you want to say, "oh, it's just a point each level barely doing anything". You still have that idea that you are working on something. This is a conversation being had in D3 currently with Paragon capped at 800 this season. Sure, one can still work on gear upgrades after that, but the sense of progression, of slowly becoming more and more powerful no matter if you are cursed with poor RNG is gone. These things are important in an RPG - the sense of progression, even tiny, can help drive people forward to that end goal. It may not be something you notice but for many, the loss of slow progression did actually eat away at them. WoWCrendor, while talking to a Dev years ago, brought this up. Even if those old talents weren't the most useful, you still got to add to your character in a way that was outside of gear.
@@rattlehead999 If you consider each 'expansion' as separate games, I agree with you. Revisiting and playing older games can indeed be enjoyable. Now, imagine if there existed just a single game that encompassed the content created over the past 19 years. For that to work, for example a level cap at 60 would be required.
@@wartem People wanted zone progression ever since TBC, so IDK how Cata wasn't what people wanted. The idea of zone progression was popular and big for MMOs back in the day. I do think that Blizzard missed and are still missing the chance to do horizontal progression. They could easily scale all/most old max-level zones to current level and most older dungeon and raids to Normal raid difficulty ilvl or just below that. Also yeah Shadowlands gave you that level 60 cap.
I enjoyed the first half of Cataclysm. The pre-nerf launch dungeons were fun and required CC/co-ordination, having two full-sized raids to swap between to keeps fresh with BoT and BWD, Al'akir raid boss was unique. Firelands event and raid which were both good. End of firelands felt like the natural end for the OG "Classic" gameplay experience. Everything after that (from Dragonsoul to Dragonflight) are what I consider to bevthe "Retail" era.
@@seanwilliams7655 yeah that DEFINITELY made a ton of side content that was never in that state before. By the time dragon soul came out everyone was already adjusted to it just being in the game
When Cata launched, not all classes had the interrupts they would end up with - that wouldn't come until mid/end-Jan, around 6 weeks after launch. And a huge reason for them being added was the sheer amount of interrupts needed in the H 5mans, followed by ten man raids. It wasn't unheard of to get a group with only one interrupt when you need three for the first boss in H SFK. This affected even guild groups because you needed those interrupts. As a tankadin, I had AS but would not get an actual true interrupt until that mid/end Jan point (Rebuke was Ret only)- so yes, I was losing part of my rotation to interrupt and you can imagine the problems with this. AS is also huge threat generation, so at the time, if I had a high DPS group, I really had to pay attention if I had to sit on part of my rotation. It was made more stressful in H 5M's because if I made a mistake using AS my group may wipe. And this is from someone who ran LFD solo for fun as a tank or healer long before the satchel was put in - I really liked the launch 5 mans, but several bosses were overtuned. I do miss soloing down a boss because my group all stood in fire or Throngus double jibbed the healer, lol. The lack of interrupts among classes at launch spread into the 10 man scene. You had a much smaller set group but high need for certain things - the ability to remove curses and interrupts. 10 man really suffered from massive balancing issues and bugs - it was the tier where 10 M was seen as harder than 25 M. LFR really was the beginning of the end of raiding for me. They had done a good job of limiting how many raids people felt compelled to run through after the end of Wrath had people doing everything four times. People always talk about the PUG scene esp. with ICC, but forget that raiders were often running multiple difficulties per week. You essentially set about the difficulty you wanted for T11/T12 and it felt good. Then, we got a system where, with a bunch of strangers acting worse than a herd of rabid feral cats, you blasted through the raid in no time. There was no progression, you got the set items with slightly lower stats, you got the end game weapons and got to see the entire thing without any real work. Yes, I did run LFR when it came out just to see and for anyone wanting to say it still took any form of concentration - no, it did not. It was so dumbed down that most insta-kills became a gentle tickle and DPS reqs were very low. It became a loot pinata. In fact, I would say it "trained" people wrong given the amount of people I met attempting normal after running LFR a few times and not understanding about pushing a button or fire being deadly. I'm all for people seeing the story and Blizzard should have implemented a story mode for raid bosses in some way a long time ago, but this did nothing for raiders outside of one more thing to farm while sucking the life out of the will to raid. Later, in MoP, we would go back to the multi-level system and it would be the last time I truly ran with a set raid group. Ironically, up to the inclusion of LFR, there was a really good VP system in Cata that allowed non-raiders to get most of the raid gear. VP collection had been changed to be weekly instead of daily - you could do all seven heroic 5 mans as a non-raider all on one day or spread across several, there wasn't a "daily dungeon" you had to complete in order to not feel like you were falling behind. Then Blizz became obsessed with time played on a monthly sub game which then led to a good deal of the systems that drove people away later on. All the convenience really made the game smaller to me. It took away the feeling of progression on a raid when it was extremely doable and I had already done it on LFR. The 'need' for the cross-server stuff really ripped out the heart of the community that was very much still there during Cata. Going into SW and seeing a bunch of random people or being phased from my own guild during the MoP pre-patch and on made you really feel alone. At Cata launch, LFD was Battlegroup and it wasn't unheard of to see someone more than once in a 5 man if you ran them frequently. At the time, we didn't have actual battletags, and by the time we had that ability, LFD just flung whoever in there. It feels like Blizzard was so desperate for their world to look highly populated and for people to feel like they could do whatever they wanted as fast as possible, it tore apart the core community and took away the anchor for many players. I liked the front part of Cata despite it being deeply flawed, a buggy mess at times (lol blind dragon in T11 ftw), ass backward on re-introducing difficulty into 5mans and no way to restore the old world after the revamp. DS is really where I feel like it began to fall apart and when my server began to feel like it was dying. I also see it rarely mentioned but during T12, Blizz offered a deal where if you pledged to stay subbed to WoW for a year you got D3 for free (another mess), a special horsie flying mount, and access to the Beta (I think there may have been a boost). You could pay by the month if you wanted. Players were so upset over DS, LFR and the state of the game that Blizzard was willing to refund if possible but remember that it locked you in for a year otherwise, thus inflating numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the drop off towards the front half of MoP was these special subs just running out.
Cata introduced too many changes in one shot. To take one: Cata supposed 10 man and 25 man raiding were equivalent, and hence awarded the same loot. This was stupid. The 2 raiding formats pose inherently different challenges (eg, player spreading when dmg chains, harder on 25 man; covering all buffs, harder on 10 man), such that 10 and 25 man could never realistically achieve balance. Take another: LFR was let loose. And the list of badly conceived changes that Cata unleashed goes on. Cata was a significant step down and back for WoW. It exposed a particular inertia that had infected the Blizzard game development team: for some weird reason, they were very reluctant to meaningfully address their errors.
The problem with Cataclysm is that following Vanilla and TBC was already hard. WotLK, while having some problems, is also very fondly remembered. Cataclysm came out and it was the first middling expansion. There hadn't been others to compare it to yet, so it got a lot of hate. Now that we've had trash like WoD and SL, it puts it into perspective that most of it was good. That being said, I don't think anything in Cata held people like the mechanics in WotLK or even its next expansion MoP with Timeless Isle
Hot take but I think Wotlk was the beginning of the end. Everything was spoon fed from that expansion onwards. But I’m old and most people won’t agree. Vanilla and BC were just on another level. And NO, you did not experience vanilla and BC if you played classic… I’m sorry, it was a completely different experience from then and now.
Almost every single issue with cata was just a reverberation from a mechanic added in THC or wrath. A lot of people seem more aware of it now than they did back in 2010
I haven’t seen any content creator talk about classic difficulty from the POV of every classic expansion being on the last patch, class balance wise. This has had a profound effect on every stage of classic and has made it notably easier. Why can’t blizzard do progressive balance patches along with the content patches?
I appreciate what WillE is trying to do but as someone who is legitimately wanting to try Cata for the first time I'd prefer to see videos talking about Cata's positives. Not trying to down play it's negatives. It kinda reframes the conversation from 'Cata wasn't that bad!' to 'Cata was good, and here's what you'll be missing if you skip it'.
That's funny, seeing excerpts of totalbiscuit's wipe a thon videos really took me back in time. Had the most fun I've ever had playing WoW during the cata beta, dungeons & raids were much harder there vs their release versions that consequently got nerfed. Dragon soul was a pretty good raid compared to the avg raid in WoW history, most of people's complaints are towards reused models & zone so you'll probably enjoy the raid if you don't care immensely about those things.
I had a fantastic time leveling alts in Cata! I think this time around, given the quicker release schedule for patches and availability and popularity of old school classic wow, Cata’s going to be a much more refreshing experience versus a contentious pariah of an expansion
I was shocked at how much worse the leveling experience was. There was nothing to explore, the questing was all super linear, I just felt super railroaded into playing _exactly_ how they wanted me to play. All of the wonky non-linear randomness was gone and the only thing left was the single most formulaic RPG I've ever played in my life: Retail WoW.
Cataclysm was not nearly as good as prior expansions, but it wasn't as bad as later expansions though. I had fun with Cataclysm personally. The PvP was really damn good and the PvE wasn't as horrible as people make it out to be. Even Dragon Soul wasn't as bad; the only thing I hated about the raid was Deathwing.
I am playing Wotlk and I just can't find a single point where Wotlk is better than Cataclysm... I've compared literally every single aspect of it and Cataclysm just smashes it to the ground. And hey, I'm not saying I'm not liking Wotlk (because I am very much enjoying it) but again, I haven't found a single part where it is better than Cata.
People love to hate on Cata. Is basicaly a meme. The expansion was not bad. Certainly had some not-amazing aspects, such as the lack of the promised underwater raid, and well, the introduction of LFR. But the leveling experience was amazing, the heroic dungeons were so good! (pre-nerf) then the twilight dungeons omg, well of eternity, i almost can't believe we got such a great piece of lore! The raids were good too: Bastion, BWD, Throne, Firelands! ...Dragon Soul was disapointing, yeah, but thats 1 out of 5 raids. Even archeology was good. I did enjoy doing it because it was relaxing content... flying zone to zone, just chilling to the wow music. That is something i had been missing for a while back then. Sure, nowadays is stale but hey, back then, it even gave me cool rewards!
@josedavidmunozmartinez4722 Because you are moron, if you were back there, you would know. For your wow is just some mobile game, because it is now. Back then, that game had story, passion in it. Not just financial focus. Cata is made for people like yo u that "can't see".
@@josejuanandrade4439 Exactly. People complain at reused assets in Dragon Soul a lot too but like...Blizzard does that for everything? And the low amount of bosses but also not everyone wants to spend 4 hours on a raid.
@@josedavidmunozmartinez4722 Because there isn't one. Wotlk as an expansion got carried by Arthas and Arthas only. If you slap Wotlk's story onto Cata's class design, badge currency system, new leveling zones, new race/class combinations, raids and PVP you would have a 10 times better expansion than what Wotlk is. Hell, Cata did more with the old world than wotlk ever did. 80 to 85 leveling was done in Kalimdor and Eastern kingdoms, the raids were in Kalimdor and Eastern kingdoms and Archaeology took you across Kalimdor and Eastern kingdoms once again. Shattering the continents was a small price to pay when seen from that perspective.
Cata my first end-game expansion. I started in Wrath, but never made it to endgame. I'm very excited to get stuck back into Cata, I want to get clears on all the raids I missed as I only raided Firelands and Dragonsoul, plus maybe finally getting Heroic Madness down as my guild got stonewalled on Spine.
very similar for me i did a bit endgame in wrath but really got into all endgame meta pvp and pve in cata so i have nothing but praise and enjoyed the harder dungeons as a tank it was so much fun but i can see why other hate it .
@@callukcraft I loved tanking the Cata launch heroics - I used to just queue solo to do them long before the satchel was a thing. Back when we could invite for LFD groups, I'd pick up extra gold to come tank the final boss (typically H GB) for groups that had been trapped in a wipe fest due to a bad tank. I also liked joining groups in progress - helping people complete these was a good experience. I rarely had a group that failed, even at launch but I will straight up say a handful of the bosses were simply overturned either in damage or the sheer amount of interrupts needed to deal with them. Sometimes I'd get groups that simply did not have the DPS, like for the boss in HoO (hall of lights I think). We also still had server communities back then and I would be asked by other guilds to come help them learn the 5 mans because I had a rep of both being one of the best tanks and liking to help teach. Some of my best experiences in those launch ones were groups I taught - typically we had only 1-4 wipes for an entire clear, including H SC and H GB. Just talking to people helps greatly. I still remember the RP groups from WrA I'd get randomly - they were a lot of fun and did well. Was not a fan of the troll ones though, grateful when they took those out of the main LFD rotation. Lol, thinking about this, I remember the pain of doing LFD with my Mage. I ran as frost and I can say that the tank really made or broke a lot of these. Too many tanked with wrong gear, refused to listen to anything, used the wrong abilities, etc. I often ended up being the tank with the healer just dumping everything on me for those ones. My Resto Shammy could at least keep a poor tank up, my Mage just had to tank. Thankfully, she had gear. The sad part is that people wouldn't learn - they'd just claim it was too hard or that people were mean, or that they were kicked all the time without reason. There's a poor mentality that you shouldn't have to do anything because it's a game/hobby but in life you need to practice/learn to get good at something no matter what it is. I taught myself to crochet last spring but I watched a lot of videos, dedicated a lot of time to it, and can now make more complicated patterns. I didn't just randomly know how to do it. I didn't randomly know how to play my classes in WoW as soon as I picked them - I practiced, failed at times, asked people, and read things. For some reason, learning in a video game is looked down upon and as a whole, with game companies catering more and more to this mindset, I think games as a whole are really suffering. Sorry, didn't mean this reply to get so long, just a pet peeve of mine in general. I think people chase the dopamine hits with easy activities, missing out on the deeply satisfying ones that come from successfully completing and understanding something they find difficult. I think they did do the difficulty spike in Cata backwards but I still loved the launch heroics.
At the end of wrath, every class/spec gameplay had reached the limits of what it could do since we had 100% crit, 100% arp, 50% haste with every spell having the casting speed of a gcd, 0 concerns about healer's mana and dps optimization to the extreme. Now , if you calm down for a second and think about it, how could the wotlk specs progress further than what they already were? Answer is: They couldn't. Blizzard reached the limit of their past class design philosophy. From classic until wrath, class design had been a linear upwards trending line with improvements on a pre-existing structure but no change to said structure. With wrath, that structure could no longer support any more additions so they had to either completely re-build it or start supporting it from the ground up and that's what they did. If we didn't have the class/spec changes we had in cata and instead the classic/tbc/wrath talent/class system with new additions, every spec would be a nightmare to play. Not completely rebuilding class/spec gameplay in cata was one of the reasons we had a pruning in word and an overhaul in legion.
Cata is going to be a complete ghost town since season of discovery was announced (it was going to be a ghost town regardless because its a shit expansion hahaah)
Cata did some cool stuff - its not for me - but i know why people like it. Hindsight it wasnt too bad - i think my big gripe is a business point more than a game point but Transmog was bad for the game imo and thats the only really bad thing - games evolve and change daily, something that was for you may not be for you tomorrow - its just how life works - transmog though: (Big explanation warning) Removing recognizable chads / special items was bad - especially since the cool things that are special and recognizable require you to be in that specific season to transmog to them (Namely Seasonal event items) which also caused stagnation and lack of development of new items because theres no reason to make a new Xmas shirt when people are only able to Xmog to it on Xmas - Or no reason to make unique sets for each and every zone and level bracket and ending up with the "Its just a re-colour of the dungeon gear / Covenant gear" from shadowlands - This is blizzard we're talking about not SQEX - and even SQEX has the same problem - all crafting gear is just NPC gear thats been shown off from the launch of expansion - it lasts 2 years and theres little to no new gear for anyone outside of seasonal events or new raids dropping and if you dont raid well too bad, and PvP only gets a single new set once every other season which lasts 2 whole patches. Transmog / Glamouring makes for lazy artists and just supports Cash shop domination of new assets - it doesnt cause it but it most definitely gives blizz a reason to not care about in game items when they can sell you a whole set for $20 that you're gonna Xmog to - why? because it looks better than the items you just got from raid AND you dont have to wait X weeks for a CHANCE to have the items - which is also a reason why Xmog is good - you can fix a set thats incomplete but it makes for bigger issues than it solves. I can deal with my shoulder pads being green and my other armor being blue if it means the armour looks better than cash shop armour. All it does is allow blizz to sell more to us via cash shop for classic rather than putting that time into developing classic+ assets and content (Which honestly would make them more money - if whales are only 1% of the game on classic then classic+ would make more money than cash shop but because their investments are into cash shop its just gonna be pushed into that - Starting to think i should make my own videos with how long my rants are and just disclaimer it that youre allowed to disagree with me and i encourage it because hopefully someone who knows more than both parties can figure out a happy middle ground for both of us
Been playing Classic ever since it got released. Haven't been playing Retail much at all. Did get to max level in both Shadowlands and Dragonflight, but there is just nothing appealing with retail for me anymore. I've figured the reason why I love Classic is because it's slow, chill and easy, make it very social-first. There is no APM spamfest like on Retail. You have to traverse the world in a much greater extent, and while travsering you are more likely to spend time communicating with guildies etc. Vanilla and TBC is mostly the same. TBC does follow the same logic as pretty much every WoW expansion where all players are shuffled off into a new continent, leaving pretty much everything from the old world irrelevant. But at least TBC keeps pretty much all the slow, chill and easyness from Vanilla. Making it still a much more relaxed and social experience. WotLK is where it started to remove from all of this. The Dungeon Finder, having access to far more powerful talents early, especially when combined with the removal of pretty much every elite quest during levelling made it so that levelling becomes a solo experience for the most part. Whereas in Vanilla and TBC you had lots of quest-chains etc. that required grouping and socialisation. When we remove Dungeon Finder, I wouldn't say WotLK is bad by any means. But this is where the game started to remove itself from Vanilla. With the release of Icecrown and all the new 5-man dungeons, WotLK also became the first expansion where we started to get content patches that rendered pretty much everything previously released within the same expansion irrelevant. Cataclysm is a massive step in the wrong direction, at least for me personally. Not only do we have Dungeon Finder, we also get Raid Finder. The new talent system makes levelling even worse. With Cataclysm the revamped Azeroth gives you a much more dumbed-down version of questing. You just walk aimlessly from quest-hub to quest-hub, nothing requires attention or a group to complete. It all feels terrible compared to Vanilla. All these quality of life improvements, dungeon finder, raid finder and everything makes the game much more "efficient", which removes a lot from the social aspect of the game. Cataclysm is also a massive step up in terms of boss mechanics and design. The game requires a lot more attention from you as a player. Removing from the relaxed and chill experience of Vanilla.
Cata was the beginning of Retail WoW, lvling didnt matter anymore, raid difficulty went through the roof. And the overall seasonal model of playing the game killed any last vibe. AND OFC THERE WAS LFR AND DRAGONSOUL LMAO
I think Cata had a lot of positives, but imo, especially with hindsight, I think there were more negatives than positives. Transmog is one of the few things that cata brought that I think was overwhelmingly positive for the game, but I also think the world revamp was overwhelmingly negative (and only ages worse every year imo.) There's some Cata stuff that could be ironed out with classic, though, so.. I'm hoping it's not so bad.
well i thinke would more lean on nobles take on cata questing from alpha testing. that was how much more funn it was to vocie and act out quest for people that love lore. hey you do you. if you find reading a wall off text. hey worst real lore part off cata was red cone. no ide about about lore in wow after leigon. Wod to legion full game thrones kill people. bring dead back BFA. just makes fell plaing out this book 1 step at the time. that gone be shit storye that makes no seanse at all.
live hotfix, be able play game not done updating. not wating on blizzard try fix boss wensday if it fail need wait next wensday. so transmog, bring the player not the class. easy rep fram, pet battle. makeing easyer to get raid on small server. streamling the hit and exspertisted cap befor blizzard removed it. dbm not real needing more raid timer. insted have extra addone just for boss mechaning. making more filler content for people not raiding. makeing new shit people that altoholiker. for my part thinke transmog was probly the worst ting that cata did for wow. not making the levling q fun to do. hate vanili q when i was 11 years old was shure hell not gone be reading if thinke cate gave game shit then good. probly no ide what cate gave you what i found the worst about cata was all dead end in questing that either got removed. and haveing to wipe jumping off the spine not beacuse die fighting boss. fail at kill the scale.
i would say that legion had way more loong term negtive ting put in to that game. real disrepicted player that invest many hours in too the game. leiong did respect my time so i did respect it. just most mmo to day dispecting your time and wallet. Cata and mop are probly the gold age for casule player that want hard content. not want hit head in brick wall slow progress artifacetd wepones, random legos, boss tune 90% bracked. liked get new player in help them get good.
It’s not all down to the game itself. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of people had played the game so much that it probably affected their real lives drastically by this point, so lots of the attrition in Cata was down to the expo being the straw that broke the camels back, leading many to quit for good until classic came out. The game then attracted a new generation of players and diverged in content and player base from there.
I've made this same argument. Perhaps Blizzard knew that they needed to attract new blood to the game, and that's why they started the streamlining and the removal of RPG elements in Wrath. They had pushed the game as far as the could as an RPG.
I started with vanilla, and its still by far the game I look back upon the most fondly, but there is no doubt about one thing: Cataclysm was the first expansion where I genuinely had a lot of fun playing a healer in dungeons, and in general I thought the new dungeons almost all turned out fantastic. Hell, even achievements, which I usually hate, added some fun additional challenges and made those dungeons really replayable. I also liked being able to reforge items, I thought the PVP/arena was very solid in cata, and I liked all the new 80-85 zones quite a bit. But just like everybody else I really did not enjoy the last big patch (the caverns of time dungeons were a joke, and deathwing was meh) and felt disappointed about the weak finale.
I liked the new races, new combinations (my gnome priest was adorable), the model and graphic overhaul, the LFD finder added maps for the older dungeons even the non-reworked ones, the choice of questing or dungeon leveling was a fun idea. The main profession dailies were fun to do. I think this is when they had the toy collections tab? I remember the final raid when you're on the airship chasing deathwing I was blown away how great it looked. I did not like some zones turning into theme parks like Redridge was Rambo, First blood Part two, Uldum was Indiana jones complete with Nazi like soldiers. I used to say I didn't like the talent tree revamp, but now I realize MoP did that.
The theme park zones were the best part of the revamp imo. New Stonetalon will always be my favorite zone. That and new Ashenvale. They really push the feeling of Horde domination which I adore
@@scarletcrusader5431stonetalon was WoW-specific lore, whereas what he mentioned was real life references made in to complete quest lines.. the overwhelming 4th wall breaking can be a bit much lol anyhow i agree with both of u
@dotmadhack obviously. I just thought you had thought those zones were like those movies. I'm very aware of what they were referencing and I love them for it. I think the dude who originally responded didn't know what your were saying
The reason Cata gets even more negative reputation is because a lot of the problems started in wrath, but the Lich King narrative causes them to have rose colored glasses for wotlk. So then all the problems that were actually caused by wrath are lumped onto cata.
To be fair, those changes started in Wrath. But I get why people say Cata because it's like they saw how many people joined in Wrath, and decided to push the changes into over drive.
First tier seems cool, second tier seems fantastic. Looking forward to the PvP, I'm not sure, but I'd hazard a guess that Cata PvP is a bit less "solved" than Wrath is, so it'll be fun to figure out. Gonna be a hard maybe for me.
Cata's reputation is unfair, imo. I look forward to Cata Classic & MoP Classic. You can say its not "classic" but i'd argue any xpac we havent visited in a decade+ could be considered "Classic", even if said expansion did start to shift the game. IMO the game started to feel like how Retail does around WoD/Legion. There was ton of good things added in Cata & MoP. Myself & some friends are quite excited to play Cata & hopefully MoP again, especially as they were the height of PvP. (especially MoP specifically), while also being fun for raiding. P.S - Class design, while fun & good in vanilla-wrath, IMPROVES in Cata/MoP, theres more depth added in, more cool combo's you are capable of, & (in PVP specifically) more outplays you can do, its just fun. I'd also argue that the component of classes starting to "feel a bit similar to eachother" is a bit niche, and is already present in WoTLK currently. But even if its true, it doesn't outweigh the fact that class designs still become more fleshed out, indepth, & fluent in Cata/MoP for the most part. Again, WoD's shift in class design & the start of pruning, then Legion's reinforcement in pruning is when Class Design truly started going downhill, imo. But Cata/MoP were the height of class design with Wrath being close behind.
WoW's classic part ended with the Death of Deathwing. Deathwing is a WC2 character, Cata also brought back Nelfarion, Onyxia, Ragnaros, was the only expansion to add/revamp Vanilla leveling content(1-60 back in the day). It was a huge love letter to all WC2, WC3 and Vanilla WoW fans. Sadly it had cut content and LFR was a poor replacement for WotLK 10 Man Normal.
I don't think Cataclysm was bad in of itself, as Deathwing's story is a good one. But when there's too many expansions, the fundamentals begin to change. It also doesn't help that the talent tree, which worked in its original format, was changed. After WOTLK, WoW should've just expanded laterally.
Honestly not looking forward to cata i hope they do something other than cata give us something else anything but cata again; im assuming you were there when it was current it was just a drag
I liked this video. However one thing with class homogenization I felt was overlooked was the introduction of Time Warp for Mages and what that meant for Shamans as a class. Cataclysm because an expansion where shamans didn't really have a class identity other than "we can't recruit x class so we have a shaman to cover" which I fell now a days would mean Shamans just get shafted. My experience in cataclysm was always "why do we need a shaman when we have X class?" which made it feel especially bad for me.
I just hate that you have to have a shaman in the group. It limits options when you are planning on forming groups and you sometimes have to even kick a guild member out of your 10 man group just to get a pug shaman in. That is bad design in my eyes. I understand totally why they would give bloodlust to other classes too, its just way too powerful of a cooldown.
I don't agree mainly because would you rather have class diviersity in a raid group or stack a billion mages and warlocks? I think each class should bring something special to the raid and Shamans did bring something special, totems and bloodlust. That was the shaman gimmik, we helped the rest of the raid. When that got taken away we had no reason to be in the raid group and that feels bad.@@rufipufi
As someone who raided as Resto/Enhance in Cata, the passing of heroism to Mages wasn't that big of a deal. If we're discussing niches, the changes made to Holy Pally's and allowing other healers to be good at AoE healing helped to erode the niche of the Shaman more than just the heroism. That being said, Shamans still had a good deal of utility and I was never shafted from a group on my Shaman. Enhance, when you understood it, was a power house - we did high DPS to the point of accidentally stripping threat. Resto had deep healing as mastery and that coupled with crit made us remarkable healers. All specs had access to totems for utility and life saving measures for the raid. For the infamous Spine fight, I could pretty much one heal normal as Resto not just because of my totem but because if I slightly tweaked my play style, my class was built to handle the debuffs. I liked healing Spine because it was interesting and actually used the way my class worked. Overall, while Shamans got a bad rap at launch for being "weak", with a little bit of gear we were far from being undesirable. MoP would do far more for class homogenization yet it is often brought up fondly by people for gameplay.
I did not have this experience when raiding in Cata, I could never find a place to raid as an enhance shaman. I actually had to pay for a dragon soul clear for my enhance shaman because I could not get into any groups. Yes I did LFR but I wanted to do normal and heroic. However my main crowning achievement was doing Firelord, albiet it was when Dragon Soul was out so it wasn't when it was current content.@@Amoreyna
It's a world of warcraft but the world was not well thought compared against the earlier expansions. Blizzard should've better designed the open world. Cata was very bad. I got to level 62 and quit
The more me and my guild talk about cata the more we realize how great it was. Had half go from not wanting to play to most are waiting pretty eagerly for it to come
tbh i actually view Wrath more negatively now than i did back in the day as I started to see all the things i didn't like "in cata" actually came in during wrath, like split raid size and difficulties, bosses having like 4 different loot tables, the whole gearing structure was totally ruined imo. Long ass boss fights in ICC, like why is Sindra, Putricide and LK so long? Prog on them is just annoying, let us blast for 3mins, nobody wants a 12 minute fight with multiple intermission phases, argh! Vanilla and TBC were just so simple and pure and as i played through classic the last 3 years it's solidified my opinion that Vanilla and TBC were the golden years 100%.
Being a healer or tank was boring until Cata. Truly felt like a chore to switch when u were needed or just wanted to get ur dailies done. U get so many good utility/abilities introduced and every class feels unique in their roles. I loved Cata it was amazing and I am dying to make a worgen again! I didnt make a rogue in classics for this very reason so PLEASE give us Cata.
Cataclysm strikes a good balance between it staying classic but with a bit of a boost in all of its aspects. For instance, class rotations are now dynamic (mages used to press 2 buttons in vanilla and TBC) but not to the point retail is when you are literally a super sayan. Quests are revamped with good drop rates and even more variety than wrath. So, on the downside, my major issue is that the world doesn't really feel that it underwent a cataclysm. It might have been a tech limitation back then but I don't think that the world changes were too striking. Also, Northerend should have been hit too, especially Dragonblight.
I think cata will be looked at different on re-release. If dragon soul wasn't such a letdown. it'd simply just be a straight improvement from wotlk in all areas. The first half of the expansion is literally perfect.
Cataclysm PVP was some of the most fun I ever played as a Hunter. I still have the Season 9 PVP Elite set on my retail character that I haven't logged into in 5 years haha.
Cataclysm was the pinnacle of wow pvp. Best balance, more viable team comps with mana not being as problematic,pvp gear ACTUALLY BEING BIS FOR PVPERS, cc re works, etc..
Uh, I personally wouldn't call TBC/Vanilla good, depending on what class you were playing. Some classes/specs could get away with crafted gear for long periods in TBC. Others were seeking out weird items to be able to do their roles. A lot of the gear had terrible itemization - I remember struggling in OG TBC while leveling as a Pally tank and getting plate that was terrible for a warrior, never mind me at the time. A lot of stuff I got simply wasn't usable and I was chasing certain bosses for that one piece (not that I minded this, I like the endpoint instead of the constant variations of the modern loot tables). If anything, I would say that Wrath was where streamlining really began for gearing and in Cata some things were removed, like Armor Pen because a good chunk of the player base did not understand it. But in Wrath, we would walk around with so much extra on our gear, like hit, due to power creep, that ICC bosses were designed with this in mind which in turn lead to spiky encounters, healing wise. Cata introduced reforging, allowing for us to dump surplus stats into more useful things, while eliminating redundant or archaic stats. Not only did you get tier gear for your class/spec, you could customize it. I really despise the current game model of gearing, not to mention the years of TF/WF before this but there were definite problems pre-Cata with gearing. I think I have a soft spot for Cata as it allowed me control, including making gear more useful, and I didn't need to use an addon/website to figure things out. Plus, it added mastery which depending on your class/spec was either really good or meh.
I came back for WOTLK back in the day and I hated the tank and spank overall philosophy, when Cata came I wasn't expecting anything but I had a lot more fun with it. I'm leveling in classic WOTLK specifically for cata
The issue with Spine of Deathwing wasn't so much that it was harder than Madness, it was that it was artificially more difficult. Mechanically it was actually easier, you just needed to class stack like crazy to have the required burst for the tendons, and enough healing CDs to let everyone live through the insane throughput requirements.
I think a lot of players have a problem with fights that require class stacking. It's a horrible feeling to have a raid leader or officers in your guild tell you that because of the class or spec you play you won't have a raid spot unless you change to something else. I get that it happens and it's not always intentional but I think it's a poor design on a fight when even more casual guilds will class stack to progress through content the same way guilds chasing world firsts do.
I loved the Cata talents, getting that signature ability at level 10 felt great. Once I rolled a human paladin and was dying to murlocs in Elywn forest, I hit lvl 10 picked Protection and got Avenger's shield - suddenly i'm tanking all the murlocs in the zone! If anything I just want Cata out to level different specs through the re-made zones.
@@TheFroztfire Pretty much. I think the signature spells at lvl 10 were a poor move. AS used to come at around lvl 45 talent wise, with HotR being an end of tree one. I learned how to tank without AS, which I think is a good thing. Frost Mages used to get their elemental pet at the bottom of their tree and it had a short duration originally. In Cata it is just handed over at lvl 10 like a hunter pet. I think there's a lot of of loss when iconic class abilities are just given at low levels in an effort to make it easier.
@@Amoreyna in case of rogues for example, in classic to wotlk you slowly got your dmg spenders, you had time to learn what they do. With Cata Assa, you just got envenom at 10 and never used anything else
In my opinion cataclysm is great but was unfortunate to be release in 2011... because in these years 2011 - 12 was a start and rise in popularity for games like League of Legends, CS:GO and so on... so the players got option to start playing a game and jump straight in to the action where dopamine kicks in. This is why cataclysm "was not popular" ppl were not willing to level up their characters for hours to get in to the end game where WoW starts to be fun and instead just choose play another game where they can instantly play. Same things we can see today with tiktok, instagram, youtube shorts... Attention span is the cause today and it began about the year i mentioned with all these "Straight in to the action" games
Minecraft craze started in those days too sub numbers were way more reflective of the increased competition in the online game space than anything cata did.
Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring today's video. Go to strms.net/hellofresh_willemmo, use my code POGWILLEFREE, and receive one free breakfast item per box while subscription is active!
Beinging of the end was TBC. The nerfs to heroic dungeons mid way through the TBC patch cycle turned every dungeon into an aoe sh** show, WOTLK and on made that far worse. The game was at its very best at the very start of Vanilla WoW, as is so often the case with Blizzard. They make decent games and are terrible at managing them. That has really never changed in all these years.
Nobody gives a f if it wasn't "that bad". We just don't want blizzard to fing profit off lazily releasing their entire expansion list over again. wotlk is ALREADY too much wow. I couldn't play pass naxx and just went to HC MODE wow. I was a giga NOOB when cata launched and i quit the game until legion because of all the bad things cata did. That's not why I say we shouln't get classic cata. it's because cata isn't classic and we wan't new ish. I'm not going to keep playing wow if everything that comes out is solved for the last 20 years and has 10 expansions worth of content.
we need classic + seasons. Each season we get a reset, like poe /d4. We work our way up to being able to beat the new content ( that hasn't been solved on ptr ). We get new quests, new items, or at least changes to items. Like if a green drops, instead of just +2 str +2 stan. there's a chance at a seasonal mod. idk LITERALLY ANYTHING OTHER THAN JUST RELIVING ALL THE TRASH EXPANSIONS.
this video proves what i've been saying to all you content creators. You just want cata because you know you can make 1000 videos about it since you already know everything about it. then we will watch and know everything about it. and on launch we beat the game in 2 days.
but classic +, assuming there's no ptr, you can't do the same. or maybe you can but you're just not willing to learn something new and want to stay safe and make content about what you already know.
3:00 already dog ish. what's great about classic? leveling. why? because each level you get to do something crazy... put a point in a talent. it might not change much because classic talents are trash but you still get to do it and you push for that next level for it. imo you get too little points and getting to a new talent point takes too long. I'd be find with the lvl cap being 100 just to get 40 extra points. in classic + they better make talent trees better, preferably wotlk but for lvl 60s. 4:20 trash
Congratulations reminding everyone why Cata should never be rereleased and why we hated it in the first place.
Cataclysm made me quit wow. Also killed my parents. Im now Batman.
The biggest issue with Cata.. was they never followed up with a "healed world" expansion.
was that a cata issue or a furture expasions fault?
@jeffm1064 I really enjoyed the cata quest and zones
Straight up this is a great idea
@jeffm1064 quests are more fun, it's not the same 3 quest done over, you have fun quest like in STM you going into a a shredder, and the story in each zone plays out better and some zones have really cool endings like SilverPine forest with battle gilneas . Also there are enough quests so you don't have to zone hop every other level.
@jeffm1064 I do read quest texts
Cataclysms biggest problem was that 5 mans had been made so faceroll easy during Wrath that when difficulty was slightly ramped up people had forgotten that CC's & dispels were something you could use on trash mobs etc. The amount of PuGs I got that were incapable of basic communication because it hadnt been needed all throughout WOTLK was infuriating.
Blizzard had killed the community & camaraderie that existed during vanilla & TBC with players now being acclimated to gogogo attitude, kicking anyone that fails or leaving after 1 wipe.
I still loved the world & the story but the players had mostly become a-holes.
Yup and sadly the game really never recovered from that mindset.
I love the fact the dungeon were easy in wrath and raids were hard. They can actually make raids even harder imo.
12 year old me could do it. It wasn't as bad as everyone said just requires any form of cc before you have gear
Unpopular opinion, but I blame RDF for that. With RDF you couldn't make dungeons too hard, because a bunch of randoms from different servers and also un-social people that normally wouldn't have run dungeons, gets bunched together. Add in the fact that people are also very anonymous and replaceable because of that system, it's very easy to be toxic and kick under-performing party members. Previously, when finding new party members took more time and was a hassle, you would rather help out noobs instead of kicking them for being a liability. I believe Preach said so in his Wrath legacy video, that people that didn't know how to play their class and that usually wouldn't do dungeons, now were found everywhere. This created a disaster and toxicity when dungeons were made TBC-like again in Cata.
@@dannyp9210 yeah I hated the system when it came out in WOTLK. Basically negated the friends list which people built throughout vanilla & TBC because the ease of getting into a random group & instantly porting to the dungeons was to convenient for people not to use. The ease of Wrath dungeons also made it so you didn't ever need to talk either.
I'm starting to feel like WillE is part of a Blizzard astroturfing campaign to prep the classic community for the inevitable cata announcement at blizzcon.
I’ve had this thought.
I’m not interested in cata
Hope they have something new to announce that’s not cata and not a new retail xpac…. Have we suffered enough blizz for a wow2 or classic+?
God forbid somebody have their own opinion.
He's on their payroll publicly soooo....:)
@@TheOtaxephon he can have his opinion and his Cata. Just saying my opinion.
That Spine of Deathwing and Deathwing fight are such a nice close out for the xpac. Everyone loves those end of xpac fights
Came to the comments section specifically to see if anyone else was on this conspiracy theory train. I think this is one of the few times my opinions differ fundamentally from WillE here. Cata really was that bad. The only positive thing I can say about it was that I think it was the last expansion that took risks with the franchise, and we haven't seen any more risk-taking because of how bad it was. Literally scared it out of them forever.
WillE in from 5 - 8 years from now
"Shadowlands Doesn't Deserve It's Negative Reputation - Here's Why | WoW Classic"
I mean, from what I can gather, Shadowlands had potential. The story was just awful. But I have heard good things about some of the raids (Castle Nafria? Something like that).
is that you being obtuse trying to play of criticism as "you are just being stupid and wanting to complain about something" or are you ignorantly defending a clearly bad expansion. there are some good points in shadowlands but as a complete package it was absolute trash. thats like saying having a clean table in the middle of a filthy room, the table excuses the disgusting mess everywhere else, it doesnt.
@@andromidius The problem with Shadowlands is that the WoW community is too awful these days, Shadowlands was going to attempt to make a return to some traditional MMO elements but players lost their minds about not being able to play their spreadsheet simulator optimally so all those MMO style systems were never properly fleshed out.
I really think that the fall off from WotlK was inevitable no matter what blizzard did, killing Arthus wrapped up so much of the lore that players were there for, many people through a combination of just growing up and moving on we’re fine to call it quits after that
arthus btw
I definitely agree, and the “kill big bad guy on the front of the box” felt like it was getting a little old. Also topping Illidan and the TBC cinematic was hard, but wrath did that, and topping wrath seemed impossible. Whatever Blizz did was doomed to underperform, but that also doesn’t entirely justify how bad of an expansion it was
I think it’s also just the rose of amazing free to play games of that era. A lot more people got into online gaming since it was more accessible and a lot of people flocked to free to play titles at the time and that influenced others to play with their friends. I remember everyone in my class started playing League of Legends during this expansion and that’s the only reason I tried it out
Hard to take you seriously when you cant even spell Arthas correctly. Probs just a bandwagoner tbh
@@ejlorbz Another data point (personally anecdote and people I know felt similarly), is that MoP was obviously leaked/announced during Cata, and I honestly quit because of how stupid Kung Fu Panda: The Expansion was. I wanted to play a game as a warrior in a war or whatever, not a bunch of goofy pandas. To this day it still baffles me how they made such a stupid premise for an expansion. I already did not like Cata but MoP was the nail in the coffin for me. I went on to play Call of Duty and Skyrim and Borderlands for the most part after that.
Cataclysm will always be dear to my Heart as I got realm first 85 by not killing a single mob. Druid tauren leveling only by gathering herbs with the insane Spawn rate the first two weeks of cata.
Dude I think I remember hearing about that!
@@brunz6265 To put things into perspective, I won my realm first race by about 30 minutes.
1) This couldn't have been done on any other class/profession, druids could gather herbs while in flying form and go from node to node dropping aggro from mobs every time. Had a few close calls from ranged mobs in the last zone while stile being 80 but it got easier as I leveled up obviously.
2) I would have lost if I had been a night elf druid, the tauren racial used to cut the herb gathering time from 3 seconds to 1.5 second, which saved between 1hour and 1 hours and a half of pure gathering time. Not to mention that I should have skipped a ton of nodes that could be gathered in 1.5 sec before getting hit, but not in 3 sec. So time gained was probably much higher than that.
3) Obviously, couldn't have been done with normal herbs spawn timer, which got put in like 10 days after launch. Cata classic will most likely not have the hyperspawn of original Cata, so I would recommend not to try this at home this time around :p
It was pure dumb luck, I only prepared a mental route with external ressources for Realm First herbalism (I didn't use the PTR, I rejoined Wotlk like 3 days before Cata); which I got, and then decided to try it out since I was getting decent xp.
I gifted alchemy realm first to a guildie since I had so much ressources, and tried to go for inscription myself after dinging 85 but was denied by the fact I hadn't done any quests and I needed an NPC that was gated behind said quests to level up to max (IIRC).
LFR was not added to get more people into raiding (as in, organized progression raiding) - it was added to increase overall engagement in content that costs a lot of time and money to produce in order to justify further production of said content. Looking at it from a business perspective, it doesn't make sense to spend so much time and money on content that only ~8% would ever see; it made far more sense to invest that time and money into content that ~85% would be actively engaged with on a frequent basis. The catalyst for this change in thinking (by suits, not Devs, the latter understands why raid content is vital to an MMO's success) was the huge success of games such as Farmville...and we got a limited version of that in the next expansion, and a less limited version of it in the following expansion.
It's hard to overstate how bad the initial implementation of LFR was. You were effectively forced to do it every week as the gear could be a massive upgrade from the previous raid tier, but there was no way of knowing if you were being dropped into a doomed run. Some fights were tuned so only 4-5 competent players could steamroll it; others were effectively impossible for a pug group with 10 people afk. It was truly miserable. If they do put in LFR they have to add other systems that exist in retail so this is not mandatory "content" for every raider.
You would just que with your guild until it would pop for all of you at once or you just qued as a guild I don't remember I was like 14 when lfr came out
LFR has never really added value to wow. it’s been horrible since day 1
Care to explain the logic behind the "mandatory content"? Who says it's mandatory, your raid members? Great, they can take their asses over to LFR to help you farm it if they deem it mandatory.
It's probably the weakest argument raiders had for LFR. You already have a dedicated 10/25 man group ffs, you could get all the bosses done in 30 minutes.
@@Numbers_Game thank you for that take. I have never understood the hardcore raiders bitching about lfr. Yes it could be used as something initially get some better gear to help with progression on harder modes of the raid, but it's not necessary, it wasn't necessary back then and it's not necessary now. It's great for someone like me that doesn't work a conventional schedule and can't commit to a steady raid team because of it. I still get to see the content. It's also a great place to take alts to learn encounters and how to play your character better in a raid setting.
LFR most likely the worst failed system they have added
If we get the chance to permanently park our characters in Wrath going forward, that is where mine is staying this time. I have no inverest in doing Cata again.
I thought this was supposed to talk about the good aspects of cata? After watching this video it feels like the titles wrong. TLDR maybe cata actually DID deserve the bad reputation???
Yeah, it's like he took all the valid criticisms of Cata and just said "No, look guys. It's actually a good thing that they changed the thing you liked into something you don't!".
To "steelman" what I think this video is trying to say: Cataclysm is at least partially a scapegoat for all kinds of changes that had already started happening in TBC/WotLK and/or is blamed for continuing that path instead of correcting the ship before we even get to the waters with icebergs like WoD and BFA.
@@Xazamas That is very valid criticism of the way other people criticise Cata, I like that a lot. Although I really dont think this video does that very well, as just going "So this thing that happened (or got worse) in cata that you hate was actually good" is not a very convincing way to make people change their minds on something lmao
@@JayTheProduct To be fair there aren't many Cata haters who would be willing to actually be rational for a discussion anyways lol
Cata raiding killed a lot of the 10 man guilds and PuG raids that I use to see constantly during Wrath. They should never have killed the "friends and family" guild raiding scene.
They've explained time and time again why they had to axe it. It is literally one or the other. Obviously, they're gonna keep 20 man. I really liked 10 man as well but they simply can't design encounters for both.
Because raiders were doing multiple difficulties of the same raid in Wrath to gear - that was why you saw so many PuGs. It also led a large amount of burnout.
Stopping this nonsense wasn't what damaged 10 M's in Cata. The launch raids were a buggy nightmare mess of imbalance with a large amount of interrupts/cleanses needed and this impacted 10 M far more than 25 M. Casual guilds were slammed into a wall because the two sizes were supposed to be the same difficulty for the same gear instead of 10 M being easier as it was in Wrath.
Very large servers did have a PuG scene for the launch of Cata - Stormrage was one but I feel that is due to the large playerbase available. You'll naturally have more raiders than smaller servers.
This is what I keep saying. The servers were actually communities people knew each other and worked together. The bad people(literally and figuratively) were found out and avoided and they sorta banded together. Raid finder made the game less human and gave progression to incredible rude people.
Getting rid of talent trees and destroying Azeroth is why people rightly think it was the beginning of the end. It isn’t classic, hard stop, and that’s fine but it’s not classic.
11:20 what im hearing is thst its clearly wow updating its system to change = its not classic anymore
My biggest problem with Cataclysm is that it doesn’t feel Classic. I think they are now at the point where they have to decide “what does Classic mean”. It is just going through every expansion in a faster release cadence and with some changes? (I dont know if Shadowlands Classic makes sense tbh). Is it about releasing the big 3 over and over? Is it about the vanilla content with heavy changes and iterating on that?
Youre right, it definitely doesnt feel classic, but its still a great game and a chance for people to carry on playing their new characters.
@@JohnRock14 if that’s what they want, it’s fine. They should say thats what they want to do with the Classic “brand” and commit to it. I agree it kinda still works for this but I dont know what the state of Classic will be when it’s time for WoD Classic, BFA Classic or Shadowlands Classic.
I'd argue that wrath is actually nothing like classic in any way, shape or form. We just said it was because of the world change in cata all these years.
well Shadowlands Classic, if it even happened, would happen in about 8 years maybe? so, yeah by that point it would be "classic"
@@Qatch1140 people are learning now that a lot of the stuff they didn't like in Cata started in Wrath. It's like when someone is suffering from cancer but they look fine on the outside. Cata was just when the sickness started to show. That's why Classic era is making a come back.
That Gilneas music at the end was a nostalgia trip. Wow
Honestly, for me at least, the only thing i hated about cata was the fking world change. Legit ruined some of my favorite zones for no reason. Although they also added my most favorite zone in Vash'Jir, so I can't complain that much. Also loved cata pvp a lot and would love to experience it again
At what point does classic stop going through the expansions? I’d say mop is the last expansion in the classic era if we are now talking graphics wise, because cataclysm isn’t very classic imo. Mop would be good to stop at and then create their own classic expansions?
Cata was an okay expansion, but I feel it shouldn't be classed under the 'Classic' banner.
Blizzard are bound to announce a re-release to keep a few happy.
I won't be playing it though.
Same.I wouldnt bother to play either.Already experienced "Cata" in retail.
Same. I prefer the old world
I agree and this video is far from WiLLE's best work....
He's a content creator, Cata re-release keeps the content rolling from him.
I do like him a lot, I'm just not a fan of Cata, just my opinion.
Cata up to end of firelands raid would be what I consider to be the real end of the "classic" Era (pre-nerf launch dungeons that needed CC, dispells and co-ordination; two full-sized raids to swap between at launch with BoT and BWD; Throne of 4 winds was unique filler raid; Firelands event and raid were good).
Everything post Firelands raid (from Dragonsoul to Dragonflight) I would consider to be the "retail" Era.
I don't know, man... I think people are forgetting that it was on Cataclysm that started the trend of being almost obliged to login and do daily chores. That sucks.
They did backtrack on that some and made it so people who were capping VP in 5-mans have a week to do all seven (or five I believe if you did troll ones). You didn't need to log in everyday to get the VP from heroics. Rep barring TB was gained by dailies, zone questing, and wearing the tabard in 5 mans for level 85 and all heroics, meaning you could crush the reps out quickly to get the rewards to go straight into raiding. Crafting was helpful and the CDs for high level materials could be a pita but understandable given their high level.
TB sucked as a raider with it's dailies to get that stupid trinket to help with the heroic Ony fight.
Molten Front with FL was skippable for raiders thankfully, because I dislike dailies. It didn't take much to unlock a few pieces of catch up gear though.
I don't think DS launched with anything off the top of my head that required daily logins.
For most of it, if you wanted to do high level content or get gear as a casual player, you had other avenues that didn't require daily logins, including one piece of VP gear per tier available to be traded/sold.
Now MoP, at launch, with entry level raid gear trapped behind a wall of dailies and no way to overcome this was a nightmare. I didn't play MoP until almost two months in and I'll always be grateful for missing that fiasco.
Honestly, the more daily crap Blizzard has put in, the less I play. It's a monthly sub game, I don't understand why they are so focused on daily logins instead of having weekly caps. Policing people's play time doesn't seem to have done them favors, especially since I think there's a lot of people out there like me who play a lot a couple of days and skip some others for whatever reason. Feeling like you're getting more and more behind because you can't log in to do an hours worth of stuff isn't a good feeling.
That exists since TBC. In that expansion and WOTLK it was worse that daily stuff for reputations and emblems.
all i know is when cataclysm came out it felt like shit to me. i remember the disappointment. like it had lost its soul and i became really pessimistic about the future of wow
Well, maybe adding actual skill to finish a dungeon is not for everybody.
IT did, during wrath. Wow became chinese mmo.
real
People seem to forget that, wow is/was an old game back then in late 2011. Majority of players back then were in there mid 20's if not mid 30's, meaning a lot of people quitted because of IRL issues. E.g. getting kids, furthering their career etc.
For me Vanilla and Classic mean the old world. You can't have Classic without the old world.
I'd like them to add in chromie time so that instead of leveling through tbc and wrath as you usually would, you just stay in the post cata azeroth and keep leveling.
Cataclysm had one major flow. Blizzard went from piss easy to hard as hell.
The other was lack of content for months after initial release.
The last was a shattering of old world. In some cases it worked in others id didnt! Just finished questing in Loch Modan. They butchered it!
Memory must be short, since after those complaints about being 'hard as hell' is a crock of shit. The difficulty was no different than Vanilla and TBC; the fact is "wraithbabies" were 'babied' with slick easy winning of WLK going overboard with LFD while AOE spamming for welfare T10 badge loot, so when CAT "promised' a return to form, those wraithbabies complained and the so-called difficulty was nerf 4 months after CAT's launch......the "flaw" was in that moment Blizzard and everything it stood for DIED in that moment revealing Activision's machinacations.
I remember the players wanted to go straight into heroics dungeons and were not used to obeying game mechanics or communicating with each other, but were used to instant gratification, the lack of which, caused them endlessly whine about the game being too hard.
@@OGNord many many players were too used of their overloading of stats from icc gear, i lost count of the numbers of healers that coudn't manage their mana in HC dungeons, the number of wipes because one guy wanted to pull the whole pack in grim batol when some needed to be cc because of being undergear in early weeks.
Tldr: i believe what he means is : after icc was on farm for most guilds, a lots of players didn't knew how to play their class right because the stats was compensating for their lack of knowledge of the games mechanics etc...
Btw icc gear was so incredibly power that a lvl 80 shadowpriest with full icc gear was rekking lvl 85 early expansion, no mana management, way too much haste, enough crit rate you don't even think you will miss one.
@@Elypsen This time around, I think Blizzard will keep the 'hard' heroics. Players are a lot more skilled this time around, I know I am, and with all the knowledge and hindsight, there's no reason NOT to have Cata content be pre-nerf. There will be those who will whine and cry about it being too hard. That's when players should point them to WoWhead or any other resource of WoW knowledge and tell them they have to LEARN how to play instead of treating them like they did Wrath gamma dungeons day 1.
I just want my goddamn Light of Dawn spell!
Hmm... so many people have good points, but we have to look at the TYPE of content. Leveling was the most difficult in Vanilla (not just in time but in challenge), and just got easier from that point onwards. I miss the challenge in leveling, and I think the big mistake of the Cata rework was not to buff the mobs to match the increase in player power... this is what made spamming LFG dungeons THE leveling meta (five overpowered players can push through the content fast enough it is the clear winner), and also what cemented the "rush rush go go" attitude of leveling to get to the "real game." Heirlooms also play a role in this since they both add power and diminish gear upgrades as a form of progression while leveling, but beside that buffing the mobs fixes these issues. TLDR: the leveling has to be part of the "real game" and that comes from proper challenge and reward.
So you go from easy leveling to difficult heroics at cap... and pre nerf that is one HELL of a jump. You aren't teaching new players how to use their class while leveling to ease them into more difficult content so they are screwed and hit a wall, and Wrath made returning players complacent when they could just AoE everything down without having to think (look at how the average group crumbles on faction champs and it's hard to get them to use CC... I've seen people say "oh let me put that on my bar"). No one had to use these tools while leveling or doing dungeons in the previous xpac, and all it took was people to understand what they needed to do and the player base started to adjust... and THEN heroics were nerfed, which then pissed everyone off a second time. They should have stuck to their guns. Ghostcrawler was right: people needed to get good.
The raids were also a considerable jump in difficulty and I think the first two tiers are really where we see raid mechanics get good. It caused players to rise to the occasion (and most people are able to do that) but it wasn't to the point of insanity like some of the fights in Legion where they pushed it beyond what most players could do in the most difficult content. Ghostcrawler was right again, as he later said after leaving Blizzard that LFR was a bad solution to the problem of accessible raiding. I would argue that if they had stuck to heroics being like "mini raids" and added more for people to do with 5 man content, this could have been the accessible entry point. Once you've mastered them, you are ready to take on a real raid.
I don't intend to play cata classic and i believe all the hate it gets is justified. Personally i hate the updated talents system, the world revamp, the raids and the new zones. Nothing about Cata gets me hyped tbh. Classic set out to bring back wow as it was in the good old days - Cataclysm is literally retail. The only reason we get cata "classic" is because Blizzard wants to milk this shit as hard as possible.
@@keelhld94 no i mean the cata talent system. MoP is even worse. Done leveling or not, personally i prefer the old world and i know a lot of people feels the same. This is just my personal opinion on Cata. I respect the fact that other people disagree with my opinions.
It was actually the explosion of alts expansion with the revamped story and zones. It was very, very fun for a while but as the expansion dragged on the problems started to pile up. I'll always remember Cata as the expansion that pushed alts for me but on the other hand that so much got forgotten on the wayside with Cata was a huge disappointment.
Opinion aside, Cata is factually not classic because:
If you log into retail WoW and go to Westfall or the Barrens, you will see the cataclysm zones. You cannot see the old world or its content. Cataclysm zones are currently in the game more or less as they appeared.
Cataclysm =/= Classic.
Its easy copy and paste.
I have a lot of nostalgia for cata. It was the peek of my wow addiction. Very fond memories.
Peak though
Nobody's judging you Jimbo, homophones deserve a pass. The correction is warranted though.
Same, i had a lot of fun. Maybe because of the expac itself, maybe because i played with friends, maybe both. I don't see much fundamentally wrong with it, would def give it another go.
Cata was truly one of my favorite xpacs however I have no intention of playing a classic cata, it’s basically retail.
If they go to cata and not leave a wotlk server behind im going back to warmane no no not doing this again blizz
As a player who started towards the end of wrath I didn't reach max/kill lich king until Cata launch, so I get my 'nostalgic' feels from wrath era but I actually enjoyed and played Cata more than any other xpac. The Cata announcement is the only reason I've resubbed this week since Legion. I played Ret pally PVP and Mage pve so am currently leveling mage again in hopes of grinding for Tarecgosa's Rest come Cata. Hope to see you all back in Tol Barad ;)
What Cataclysm doesn't deserve is a classic because the world and the zones are already there unchanged in retail. Unless they revamp azeroth for retail to make it make sense as classic 2.0?
Cata deserves a classic more than TBC and WotLK.
Cata was the only expansion to add/revamp non-endgame expansion leveling content and the revamped world was great, outside of a few zones.
Cata also brought back Deathwing from warcraft 2, along with Nelfarian, Onyxia, Ragnaros which are all Vanilla characters. It brought back Thrall in a more prominent role, which is a WC3 character. Cataclysm was a huge love letter to anything from Warcraft 2 to and including Vanilla WoW.
Cataclysm is more old-school than TBC and WotLK and more respectful to Vanilla than those too.
you missed the point@@rattlehead999
Cata heroic dungeons were decent, raids were good (except the end of dragon soul) but I firmly believe the complete revamp of the world was the moment "old wow" died and i think most people didn't like what they did with it, its even worse due to the fact that to this very day, over a decade later, the changes are still present in retail for no reason
its not just that it kinda sucked but also that the revamping probably consumed half of the developement ressources of the addon leaving us with less new content to do.
and how to people level for the most part anyway since the dungeonfinder? by powerleveling in dungeons and avoiding the open world as much as possible.
the person who thought the revamping was a good idea should be fired immediately.
I don't blame them for not changing it again. The playerbase turned on them the last time they did it🤷🏼♂️
@@mcdick1621 if cata had no content/develop how does Wrath fit into those standarts because so far Wrath is the weakest expansion i've played so far my nostalgia glasses were off
I didn't particularly appreciate that they either removed epic quests from the old content or revamped them so they were condensed down to nothing more than a blip. A lot of the newer quests simply didn't leave much of an impact on me one way or another and I did do all the zones. Small hidden quests, like Ally for the fey dragon pet were either changed for the worse or simply stripped completely.
I think another part that isn't talked about is when they did this revamp they subtracted from your quest counter. Apparently, removing quests from a game means you never did them in Blizzard's stance. Due to a bug, you could be rewarded all your quests again (and get the achievement again) in some areas just playing the game.
They tried to do this with the hard-earned Exalted title concerning reps, simply raising the bar and stripping it from players that had earned it - and then had to undo this choice due to outcry as it was rightfully pointed out that this achievement was not listed as temporary. Is it pretty easy now to get this title? Sure, but that doesn't bother me given that I've had it for fourteen years. :)
@@jamespadgett8660 yeah because the changes were shit. Cata was a garbage expansion.
Wow youtubers: Classic era ends with Wotlk, its all down hill from Cata...
*3 years later Cata classic is on the horizon*
Wow youtubers: Everyone was wrong about Cata, it was amazing! Keep playing please!
Cataclysm is the last Classic expansion.
@@rattlehead999 Yeah, thats what everyone has very recently started saying. Its almoat as if people are scared their fan bass is going to shrink.
HAHAHA They want it so bad 💸💸🤑
@@Chris44sun Cata is a love letter to all Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3 and Vanilla fans. It's more classic than TBC and WotLK.
@@rattlehead999 hey, if you enjoy it - there is nothing wrong with that. More just a comment about how many wow classic youtubers have changed their tune. But no shade at Cata itself.
Cataclysm told all the people that wanted an RPG to go look somewhere else and told the ones that wanted to live forever in the hamster wheel of raiding to come RIGHT ON IN.
Wotlk did that entirely. That expansion was only raidlogging
@@ryanglacier30could even argue TBC did the same
@@Himadpeoples TBC had reps to farm with purpose. Wotlk had one or two and it was only to min max raid performance
I stopped raiding after cata launched. Used to raid during TBC and wrath hardcore. Cata was too much.
@@ryanglacier30 don’t really disagree but I would say it’s felt like a sort of “frog in the boiling pot” thing where it only felt like the rpg died outright jn cataclysm whereas in tbc and WotLK, you could sorta trick yourself that the leveling journey still mattered and that the questing wasn’t borked with some stuff improved and others absolutely ruined.
Mop and WoD felt like they tried to balance out things out again before legion came and said “fuck it, back to committing 100% to the raiding being all that matters”.
Youre kinda wrong. Popularity of wow fell because it was no longer cattering to casuals. People say they want difficulty, but the difficulty of cata turned so many people off. There is this elitism in wow but its so ironic, because the strength of wow was in its accessibility.
It's like people either forgot or didn't know WoW was the super casual MMO of its time.
@@seanwilliams7655 As someone who started in Vanilla, dude 100%. I never even really thought of it but yeah bahaha vanilla was casual and chill as fuck until the internet and logs blew shit up, then it became just annoying and boring from world buffs alone.
Cata has hard?
I quit after cata due to being burned out by that time, i think im far from alone and many people quit before me after wrath as well. the game was already 6 years old by the end of wrath and 8 by cata. thats a very old game to still be expected to not be loosing any popularity imo. i think the decline is natural of any aging game and not really tied to any decisions blizzard made.
@@raiden000 while I think you're right that a decline was inevitable, that still doesn't mean that Blizzard didn't drop the ball. And when I say they dropped the ball, it's not even a jab at them. WoW was the biggest MMO in the world by a wide margin at the time. So Blizzard was in uncharted territory.
That said, I think they dropped the ball because, somewhere between the middle of TBC and Cata, they started designing the game for a different type of player. Moving away from the "slow burn" style that was how the genre traditionally did it, and offering more little hits of dopamine. The more they did this, and the more they removed those RGP elements that slowed the game down, the more people started playing. Wrath was an attempt to make both the newer players, and the older crowd, the people who either started in Vanilla or came from older MMOs like EQ or DAoC, happy. This eventually came to a head in Cata and Blizzard had to pick a side. They decided to side with the new players. Which was probably the best business decision because, as you said, people were getting older, and new blood was needed.
Shilling cata because it's getting announce in blizzcon now?
Quality video, but I'll be honest i disagree entirely.
If you make catacalysm, the spirit of classic is ruined. Its got to stay to wrath and thats it.
classic was ruined when modern people started playing it. Its why the latest iteration is an absolute hellhole. its not "classic" its just modern players min maxxing an old game. The game was always fine, its the people that turned to shit over the years. Everyone that uses the phrase "the spirit of classic" is also desperately buying gold to keep up with either streamers getting given thousands of guilds making millions from running people like you and others through the game. There is no classic. It died years ago. Private servers almost encapsulated "vanilla" years ago, but then all the "modern" gamers that want their 30 second dungeon run with bis geared people came along and it was dead.
@@everythinggamingnowYou sure make alot assumptions about me without knowing me at all.
Please delete your comment. It was pathetic.
@@anannoyedpanda delete classic, it's pathetic
@@everythinggamingnowYou're offering nothing of value.
Goodbye. Do not reply.
Problem with Cata is nobody likes removed content (questlines and other stuff)
And Dragon Soul patch seemed like rushed, alpha/beta content.
Yes the only reason Cataclysm isn't the best expansion(until Dragonflight) is because 4.1 had no Raid tier, 4.2 got 1 fewer raids than planned(scrapped water themed raid) and LFR was NOT a good replacement for WotLK's 10 Man Normal(easy) raid difficulty.
Dragon Soul was also infinitely better than Trial of the Crusader which is the worst raid in WoW's history and when a ton of players started leaving. DS is also better than Eye of Eternity, Obsidian Sanctum, Ruby Sanctum, Onyxia and Wrath Naxx(even though I like wrath naxx).
Cata also had a Dungeon Tier for each Raid tier and we got more than one dungeon which is great.
I wouldnt say nobody loved the revamped zones. I know there was a loud outcry against it because they removed the old world but again old world had lower quality quest and map design if we are really being honest about it. What Cata added was a new and better quality of the levelling experience. This was the time when Blizz really started to focus on WoW from an RPG approach than a traditional MMO approach. And that s why i say it is not Classic. I categorize from Vanilla to WotLK as first era (classic) and Cata to WoD as the second era and Legion to SL as the third era. There are reasons behind this categorization, and u can change it here and there but first three MMO era is usually accepted.
IF ONLY we have to choose between Cata Classic and Classic+ would i prefer Classic+ over Cata. Because i would prefer something more experimental than something less risky and uninspiring.
@@dreamermagister8561 The MMO approach was removed in WotLK, Cata just improved on WotLK.
Cata is WotLK+
TBC is Vanilla+
WoD is MoP+++++
BFA is Legion-
I used to Categorize them like you back in the day.
Now It's in pairs.
Vanilla + TBC
WotLK + Cata
MoP + WoD
Legion + BFA
Shadowlands => Huge course correction so no pair.
Dragonflight + probably next expac, cuz due to DF being success.
And it makes sense since 2 teams develop WoW at a time.
WotLK is when leveling became streamlined especially with the LFD and all the XP nerfs and all the harder group content in the open world was gone both 1-70 and there was no 70-80 hard content.
@@rattlehead999 some ppl prefer to categorizing it that way too. But again that approach at the end make it so every expansion is its own era/period while the initial idea was trying to find enough similarities in design approach between them to categorize them above-expansion level, if you know what i mean. It is similar in a way how history is split in periods. They are arbitrary, just like any categorization, periodization is.
@@dreamermagister8561
Well yes, but WotLK was very different from TBC(and vanilla). In both leveling and endgame desgin.
WotLK was the first time we didn't get full raid progression, now you had badges from the get go, no catchup raids, no nothing.
And in WotLK(and then Cata) you did 2 raid tiers at a time, while in Vanilla and TBC you had to do them in order of release + catch up raids.
The leveling in WotLK is very similar to the one in Cata, I'd say Cata is a little bit easier, but in WotLK 1-60 is basically streamlined as much as possible at the time, without actually changing the content itself like in Cata.
And WotLK was when professions weren't as important anymore, Cata professions were on par with how important they were.
WotLK was when endgame became the mainstay for WoW.
I can't put WotLK with TBC without Cata being in it too.
There were things WotLK continued and polished from TBC like reputations and the addition of tabards and better faction rewards. WotLK was also when a lot of the classes got a bigger kit, Cata just finished it.
While MoP was a big course correction, bucause I think Blizzard didn't undertand why they lost people. MoP was when pulling 10 enemies at a time became a thing, when LFD was already established as a leveling method better than the open world and Blizzard was catering towards it, completely ignoring the open world pre-85.
MoP also started with tons of Daily quests. And super annoying rep grinds that weren't present before. And they removed the talent trees.
MoP and WoD outside their respective expansion leveling zones, pretty much tried to kill the rest of the world, while mostly focusing on Instanced content. The timless isle, isle of thunder and Tanaan jungle were again endgame content and a single zone each, with very different at the time content. Now they set the groundworks for Zereth Mortis and the Zaralek Cavern, but they were different than pre-MoP content.
And there is no doubt Legion and BFA are tied at the hip and different from previous expansions.
While Shadowlands changed quite a few things. It unpruned classes, it fixed the PVP systems and PVP itself, it had more challenging open world, it had better leveling with chromie time, the professions saw an upgrade there(and in Legion).
While Dragonflight is on a whole new level.
My biggest issue, a cataclysm was the amount of stuns and heels. Every class it seems got. I was in so many BG PVP encounters, where I could not move at all because it was instant stunning or instant movement slowing. And never got a chance to do anything. And thats all i like doing in wotlk and cata
That only matter if you play pvp, which most dont.
What’s wrong with “heels”? Everyone deserves to be able to stand if they want.
They also started removing things that didn’t fit blizzards new class rotations.
Rotations were created by players not blizzard. Blizzard co-opted the idea and ruined player agency and creativity.
Skill issue
@@sardonicspartan9343 I don't know why people keep saying this, lots and lots of people PvP'd, that's pretty much all I did. Never had to wait on queues, they were instant.
To suggest PvP shouldn't matter is absurd and you people are annoying. Maybe nowadays PvP fell off for whatever reason, but it was a big part of the game.
whenever I hear people complain about cata and even mops talent system they have no idea how they actually work on a fundemental level. you get talent points but those points dont go into actual skills you use, most go into fluff boxes of boring stat/damage/healing increases. like "lightning bolt's damage increases by 10%" but with mop, when you go to the level where you inevitably would get to that point in a talent tree, your lightning bolt just scaled to do 10% more damage. nothing was lost, except the useless action of opening a window and clicking a box. which is why I always called them placebo points, you dont lose anything but the placebo effect of clicking boxes. its all automatic, and the meaty skills you would normally get, you get at the normal intervals you would from the talent tree.
the fact is the mop trees, nothing changed you just got upgrades automatically, and with cata, they simply cut down the amount of times you opened a window to hit fluff bonuses.
Blizzard could literally make a tree that doesnt absolutely nothing and people would praise it as the greatest thing ever. Hell in DF, they gutted everyones spell book and slapped it on a tree for you to buy back via placebo points and people cheered. its baffling really, the sheer stupidity of the wow playerbase.
The reason I despised MoP's talent system is that as a Resto Shammy primarily for that x-pac, they took core abilities I had at baseline in Cata and offered them to me as talents to choose from in MoP. That felt bad, but they had to constantly change our talent system over the course of MoP and return some of those things to baseline. It wasn't fun to me. Losing abilities I was freely using and then being told I had to pick and choose really soured me on the whole talent system, especially when other classes weren't hit nearly as hard.
There is a lot to be said about constant character progression even if you want to say, "oh, it's just a point each level barely doing anything". You still have that idea that you are working on something. This is a conversation being had in D3 currently with Paragon capped at 800 this season. Sure, one can still work on gear upgrades after that, but the sense of progression, of slowly becoming more and more powerful no matter if you are cursed with poor RNG is gone.
These things are important in an RPG - the sense of progression, even tiny, can help drive people forward to that end goal. It may not be something you notice but for many, the loss of slow progression did actually eat away at them. WoWCrendor, while talking to a Dev years ago, brought this up. Even if those old talents weren't the most useful, you still got to add to your character in a way that was outside of gear.
I didn't start playing retail until cata. Would definitely play it if they did a classic version
The "expansion" literally raided the map of vanilla. A master of continued obsolescence.
And that was a good thing. Especially back in the day, when people were tired of doing the same content for 6 years.
@@rattlehead999 If you consider each 'expansion' as separate games, I agree with you. Revisiting and playing older games can indeed be enjoyable. Now, imagine if there existed just a single game that encompassed the content created over the past 19 years. For that to work, for example a level cap at 60 would be required.
@@wartem People wanted zone progression ever since TBC, so IDK how Cata wasn't what people wanted. The idea of zone progression was popular and big for MMOs back in the day.
I do think that Blizzard missed and are still missing the chance to do horizontal progression. They could easily scale all/most old max-level zones to current level and most older dungeon and raids to Normal raid difficulty ilvl or just below that.
Also yeah Shadowlands gave you that level 60 cap.
The beginning of the end.
I think that the fact its no longer old world content is enough for it to not be classic for a lot of people.
I would love for Gilneas to be rebuild & become a city again, but overall, I'm looking forward to cata
I enjoyed the first half of Cataclysm. The pre-nerf launch dungeons were fun and required CC/co-ordination, having two full-sized raids to swap between to keeps fresh with BoT and BWD, Al'akir raid boss was unique. Firelands event and raid which were both good. End of firelands felt like the natural end for the OG "Classic" gameplay experience. Everything after that (from Dragonsoul to Dragonflight) are what I consider to bevthe "Retail" era.
Keep in mind, ICC lasted longer than Dragonsoul did. Ironic, isn't?
The only reason that felt better was probably due to the different wings opening separately
@@Qatch1140 and the fact that RDF was added around that time. So people dungeon leveled alts to keep busy.
@@seanwilliams7655 yeah that DEFINITELY made a ton of side content that was never in that state before. By the time dragon soul came out everyone was already adjusted to it just being in the game
When Cata launched, not all classes had the interrupts they would end up with - that wouldn't come until mid/end-Jan, around 6 weeks after launch. And a huge reason for them being added was the sheer amount of interrupts needed in the H 5mans, followed by ten man raids. It wasn't unheard of to get a group with only one interrupt when you need three for the first boss in H SFK. This affected even guild groups because you needed those interrupts.
As a tankadin, I had AS but would not get an actual true interrupt until that mid/end Jan point (Rebuke was Ret only)- so yes, I was losing part of my rotation to interrupt and you can imagine the problems with this. AS is also huge threat generation, so at the time, if I had a high DPS group, I really had to pay attention if I had to sit on part of my rotation. It was made more stressful in H 5M's because if I made a mistake using AS my group may wipe. And this is from someone who ran LFD solo for fun as a tank or healer long before the satchel was put in - I really liked the launch 5 mans, but several bosses were overtuned. I do miss soloing down a boss because my group all stood in fire or Throngus double jibbed the healer, lol.
The lack of interrupts among classes at launch spread into the 10 man scene. You had a much smaller set group but high need for certain things - the ability to remove curses and interrupts. 10 man really suffered from massive balancing issues and bugs - it was the tier where 10 M was seen as harder than 25 M.
LFR really was the beginning of the end of raiding for me. They had done a good job of limiting how many raids people felt compelled to run through after the end of Wrath had people doing everything four times. People always talk about the PUG scene esp. with ICC, but forget that raiders were often running multiple difficulties per week. You essentially set about the difficulty you wanted for T11/T12 and it felt good.
Then, we got a system where, with a bunch of strangers acting worse than a herd of rabid feral cats, you blasted through the raid in no time. There was no progression, you got the set items with slightly lower stats, you got the end game weapons and got to see the entire thing without any real work. Yes, I did run LFR when it came out just to see and for anyone wanting to say it still took any form of concentration - no, it did not. It was so dumbed down that most insta-kills became a gentle tickle and DPS reqs were very low. It became a loot pinata. In fact, I would say it "trained" people wrong given the amount of people I met attempting normal after running LFR a few times and not understanding about pushing a button or fire being deadly.
I'm all for people seeing the story and Blizzard should have implemented a story mode for raid bosses in some way a long time ago, but this did nothing for raiders outside of one more thing to farm while sucking the life out of the will to raid. Later, in MoP, we would go back to the multi-level system and it would be the last time I truly ran with a set raid group.
Ironically, up to the inclusion of LFR, there was a really good VP system in Cata that allowed non-raiders to get most of the raid gear. VP collection had been changed to be weekly instead of daily - you could do all seven heroic 5 mans as a non-raider all on one day or spread across several, there wasn't a "daily dungeon" you had to complete in order to not feel like you were falling behind. Then Blizz became obsessed with time played on a monthly sub game which then led to a good deal of the systems that drove people away later on.
All the convenience really made the game smaller to me. It took away the feeling of progression on a raid when it was extremely doable and I had already done it on LFR. The 'need' for the cross-server stuff really ripped out the heart of the community that was very much still there during Cata. Going into SW and seeing a bunch of random people or being phased from my own guild during the MoP pre-patch and on made you really feel alone. At Cata launch, LFD was Battlegroup and it wasn't unheard of to see someone more than once in a 5 man if you ran them frequently. At the time, we didn't have actual battletags, and by the time we had that ability, LFD just flung whoever in there.
It feels like Blizzard was so desperate for their world to look highly populated and for people to feel like they could do whatever they wanted as fast as possible, it tore apart the core community and took away the anchor for many players. I liked the front part of Cata despite it being deeply flawed, a buggy mess at times (lol blind dragon in T11 ftw), ass backward on re-introducing difficulty into 5mans and no way to restore the old world after the revamp. DS is really where I feel like it began to fall apart and when my server began to feel like it was dying.
I also see it rarely mentioned but during T12, Blizz offered a deal where if you pledged to stay subbed to WoW for a year you got D3 for free (another mess), a special horsie flying mount, and access to the Beta (I think there may have been a boost). You could pay by the month if you wanted. Players were so upset over DS, LFR and the state of the game that Blizzard was willing to refund if possible but remember that it locked you in for a year otherwise, thus inflating numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the drop off towards the front half of MoP was these special subs just running out.
Cata introduced too many changes in one shot. To take one: Cata supposed 10 man and 25 man raiding were equivalent, and hence awarded the same loot. This was stupid. The 2 raiding formats pose inherently different challenges (eg, player spreading when dmg chains, harder on 25 man; covering all buffs, harder on 10 man), such that 10 and 25 man could never realistically achieve balance. Take another: LFR was let loose. And the list of badly conceived changes that Cata unleashed goes on.
Cata was a significant step down and back for WoW. It exposed a particular inertia that had infected the Blizzard game development team: for some weird reason, they were very reluctant to meaningfully address their errors.
The problem with Cataclysm is that following Vanilla and TBC was already hard. WotLK, while having some problems, is also very fondly remembered. Cataclysm came out and it was the first middling expansion. There hadn't been others to compare it to yet, so it got a lot of hate. Now that we've had trash like WoD and SL, it puts it into perspective that most of it was good. That being said, I don't think anything in Cata held people like the mechanics in WotLK or even its next expansion MoP with Timeless Isle
Hot take but I think Wotlk was the beginning of the end. Everything was spoon fed from that expansion onwards. But I’m old and most people won’t agree. Vanilla and BC were just on another level. And NO, you did not experience vanilla and BC if you played classic… I’m sorry, it was a completely different experience from then and now.
Almost every single issue with cata was just a reverberation from a mechanic added in THC or wrath. A lot of people seem more aware of it now than they did back in 2010
I haven’t seen any content creator talk about classic difficulty from the POV of every classic expansion being on the last patch, class balance wise. This has had a profound effect on every stage of classic and has made it notably easier. Why can’t blizzard do progressive balance patches along with the content patches?
i started the game in late TBC, but Cata was the expac what really sucked me into the world and made me addicted
I appreciate what WillE is trying to do but as someone who is legitimately wanting to try Cata for the first time I'd prefer to see videos talking about Cata's positives. Not trying to down play it's negatives. It kinda reframes the conversation from 'Cata wasn't that bad!' to 'Cata was good, and here's what you'll be missing if you skip it'.
That's funny, seeing excerpts of totalbiscuit's wipe a thon videos really took me back in time. Had the most fun I've ever had playing WoW during the cata beta, dungeons & raids were much harder there vs their release versions that consequently got nerfed. Dragon soul was a pretty good raid compared to the avg raid in WoW history, most of people's complaints are towards reused models & zone so you'll probably enjoy the raid if you don't care immensely about those things.
I had a fantastic time leveling alts in Cata! I think this time around, given the quicker release schedule for patches and availability and popularity of old school classic wow, Cata’s going to be a much more refreshing experience versus a contentious pariah of an expansion
I was shocked at how much worse the leveling experience was. There was nothing to explore, the questing was all super linear, I just felt super railroaded into playing _exactly_ how they wanted me to play.
All of the wonky non-linear randomness was gone and the only thing left was the single most formulaic RPG I've ever played in my life: Retail WoW.
Cataclysm was not nearly as good as prior expansions, but it wasn't as bad as later expansions though. I had fun with Cataclysm personally. The PvP was really damn good and the PvE wasn't as horrible as people make it out to be. Even Dragon Soul wasn't as bad; the only thing I hated about the raid was Deathwing.
I am playing Wotlk and I just can't find a single point where Wotlk is better than Cataclysm... I've compared literally every single aspect of it and Cataclysm just smashes it to the ground. And hey, I'm not saying I'm not liking Wotlk (because I am very much enjoying it) but again, I haven't found a single part where it is better than Cata.
People love to hate on Cata. Is basicaly a meme. The expansion was not bad. Certainly had some not-amazing aspects, such as the lack of the promised underwater raid, and well, the introduction of LFR. But the leveling experience was amazing, the heroic dungeons were so good! (pre-nerf) then the twilight dungeons omg, well of eternity, i almost can't believe we got such a great piece of lore! The raids were good too: Bastion, BWD, Throne, Firelands! ...Dragon Soul was disapointing, yeah, but thats 1 out of 5 raids.
Even archeology was good. I did enjoy doing it because it was relaxing content... flying zone to zone, just chilling to the wow music. That is something i had been missing for a while back then. Sure, nowadays is stale but hey, back then, it even gave me cool rewards!
@josedavidmunozmartinez4722 Because you are moron, if you were back there, you would know. For your wow is just some mobile game, because it is now. Back then, that game had story, passion in it. Not just financial focus.
Cata is made for people like yo u that "can't see".
@@josejuanandrade4439 Exactly. People complain at reused assets in Dragon Soul a lot too but like...Blizzard does that for everything? And the low amount of bosses but also not everyone wants to spend 4 hours on a raid.
@@josedavidmunozmartinez4722 Because there isn't one. Wotlk as an expansion got carried by Arthas and Arthas only. If you slap Wotlk's story onto Cata's class design, badge currency system, new leveling zones, new race/class combinations, raids and PVP you would have a 10 times better expansion than what Wotlk is.
Hell, Cata did more with the old world than wotlk ever did. 80 to 85 leveling was done in Kalimdor and Eastern kingdoms, the raids were in Kalimdor and Eastern kingdoms and Archaeology took you across Kalimdor and Eastern kingdoms once again. Shattering the continents was a small price to pay when seen from that perspective.
Cata my first end-game expansion. I started in Wrath, but never made it to endgame. I'm very excited to get stuck back into Cata, I want to get clears on all the raids I missed as I only raided Firelands and Dragonsoul, plus maybe finally getting Heroic Madness down as my guild got stonewalled on Spine.
very similar for me i did a bit endgame in wrath but really got into all endgame meta pvp and pve in cata so i have nothing but praise and enjoyed the harder dungeons as a tank it was so much fun but i can see why other hate it .
@@callukcraft I loved tanking the Cata launch heroics - I used to just queue solo to do them long before the satchel was a thing. Back when we could invite for LFD groups, I'd pick up extra gold to come tank the final boss (typically H GB) for groups that had been trapped in a wipe fest due to a bad tank. I also liked joining groups in progress - helping people complete these was a good experience. I rarely had a group that failed, even at launch but I will straight up say a handful of the bosses were simply overturned either in damage or the sheer amount of interrupts needed to deal with them. Sometimes I'd get groups that simply did not have the DPS, like for the boss in HoO (hall of lights I think).
We also still had server communities back then and I would be asked by other guilds to come help them learn the 5 mans because I had a rep of both being one of the best tanks and liking to help teach. Some of my best experiences in those launch ones were groups I taught - typically we had only 1-4 wipes for an entire clear, including H SC and H GB. Just talking to people helps greatly. I still remember the RP groups from WrA I'd get randomly - they were a lot of fun and did well.
Was not a fan of the troll ones though, grateful when they took those out of the main LFD rotation.
Lol, thinking about this, I remember the pain of doing LFD with my Mage. I ran as frost and I can say that the tank really made or broke a lot of these. Too many tanked with wrong gear, refused to listen to anything, used the wrong abilities, etc. I often ended up being the tank with the healer just dumping everything on me for those ones. My Resto Shammy could at least keep a poor tank up, my Mage just had to tank. Thankfully, she had gear.
The sad part is that people wouldn't learn - they'd just claim it was too hard or that people were mean, or that they were kicked all the time without reason. There's a poor mentality that you shouldn't have to do anything because it's a game/hobby but in life you need to practice/learn to get good at something no matter what it is. I taught myself to crochet last spring but I watched a lot of videos, dedicated a lot of time to it, and can now make more complicated patterns. I didn't just randomly know how to do it. I didn't randomly know how to play my classes in WoW as soon as I picked them - I practiced, failed at times, asked people, and read things.
For some reason, learning in a video game is looked down upon and as a whole, with game companies catering more and more to this mindset, I think games as a whole are really suffering.
Sorry, didn't mean this reply to get so long, just a pet peeve of mine in general. I think people chase the dopamine hits with easy activities, missing out on the deeply satisfying ones that come from successfully completing and understanding something they find difficult. I think they did do the difficulty spike in Cata backwards but I still loved the launch heroics.
How they don’t announce anything and we can just move on with out life 😢
At the end of wrath, every class/spec gameplay had reached the limits of what it could do since we had 100% crit, 100% arp, 50% haste with every spell having the casting speed of a gcd, 0 concerns about healer's mana and dps optimization to the extreme.
Now , if you calm down for a second and think about it, how could the wotlk specs progress further than what they already were? Answer is: They couldn't. Blizzard reached the limit of their past class design philosophy. From classic until wrath, class design had been a linear upwards trending line with improvements on a pre-existing structure but no change to said structure. With wrath, that structure could no longer support any more additions so they had to either completely re-build it or start supporting it from the ground up and that's what they did.
If we didn't have the class/spec changes we had in cata and instead the classic/tbc/wrath talent/class system with new additions, every spec would be a nightmare to play.
Not completely rebuilding class/spec gameplay in cata was one of the reasons we had a pruning in word and an overhaul in legion.
It's the end of the end for Blizzard.
for real this time.
Cata is going to be a complete ghost town since season of discovery was announced (it was going to be a ghost town regardless because its a shit expansion hahaah)
Cata did some cool stuff - its not for me - but i know why people like it. Hindsight it wasnt too bad - i think my big gripe is a business point more than a game point but Transmog was bad for the game imo and thats the only really bad thing - games evolve and change daily, something that was for you may not be for you tomorrow - its just how life works - transmog though: (Big explanation warning)
Removing recognizable chads / special items was bad - especially since the cool things that are special and recognizable require you to be in that specific season to transmog to them (Namely Seasonal event items) which also caused stagnation and lack of development of new items because theres no reason to make a new Xmas shirt when people are only able to Xmog to it on Xmas - Or no reason to make unique sets for each and every zone and level bracket and ending up with the "Its just a re-colour of the dungeon gear / Covenant gear" from shadowlands -
This is blizzard we're talking about not SQEX - and even SQEX has the same problem - all crafting gear is just NPC gear thats been shown off from the launch of expansion - it lasts 2 years and theres little to no new gear for anyone outside of seasonal events or new raids dropping and if you dont raid well too bad, and PvP only gets a single new set once every other season which lasts 2 whole patches.
Transmog / Glamouring makes for lazy artists and just supports Cash shop domination of new assets - it doesnt cause it but it most definitely gives blizz a reason to not care about in game items when they can sell you a whole set for $20 that you're gonna Xmog to -
why? because it looks better than the items you just got from raid AND you dont have to wait X weeks for a CHANCE to have the items - which is also a reason why Xmog is good - you can fix a set thats incomplete but it makes for bigger issues than it solves. I can deal with my shoulder pads being green and my other armor being blue if it means the armour looks better than cash shop armour.
All it does is allow blizz to sell more to us via cash shop for classic rather than putting that time into developing classic+ assets and content (Which honestly would make them more money - if whales are only 1% of the game on classic then classic+ would make more money than cash shop but because their investments are into cash shop its just gonna be pushed into that - Starting to think i should make my own videos with how long my rants are and just disclaimer it that youre allowed to disagree with me and i encourage it because hopefully someone who knows more than both parties can figure out a happy middle ground for both of us
Been playing Classic ever since it got released. Haven't been playing Retail much at all. Did get to max level in both Shadowlands and Dragonflight, but there is just nothing appealing with retail for me anymore. I've figured the reason why I love Classic is because it's slow, chill and easy, make it very social-first. There is no APM spamfest like on Retail. You have to traverse the world in a much greater extent, and while travsering you are more likely to spend time communicating with guildies etc.
Vanilla and TBC is mostly the same. TBC does follow the same logic as pretty much every WoW expansion where all players are shuffled off into a new continent, leaving pretty much everything from the old world irrelevant. But at least TBC keeps pretty much all the slow, chill and easyness from Vanilla. Making it still a much more relaxed and social experience.
WotLK is where it started to remove from all of this. The Dungeon Finder, having access to far more powerful talents early, especially when combined with the removal of pretty much every elite quest during levelling made it so that levelling becomes a solo experience for the most part. Whereas in Vanilla and TBC you had lots of quest-chains etc. that required grouping and socialisation.
When we remove Dungeon Finder, I wouldn't say WotLK is bad by any means. But this is where the game started to remove itself from Vanilla. With the release of Icecrown and all the new 5-man dungeons, WotLK also became the first expansion where we started to get content patches that rendered pretty much everything previously released within the same expansion irrelevant.
Cataclysm is a massive step in the wrong direction, at least for me personally. Not only do we have Dungeon Finder, we also get Raid Finder. The new talent system makes levelling even worse. With Cataclysm the revamped Azeroth gives you a much more dumbed-down version of questing. You just walk aimlessly from quest-hub to quest-hub, nothing requires attention or a group to complete. It all feels terrible compared to Vanilla.
All these quality of life improvements, dungeon finder, raid finder and everything makes the game much more "efficient", which removes a lot from the social aspect of the game. Cataclysm is also a massive step up in terms of boss mechanics and design. The game requires a lot more attention from you as a player. Removing from the relaxed and chill experience of Vanilla.
If they remove the dungeon nerf I will be all over Cata classic. Cata Heroics were to this day the best non-raid content put in WoW.
WoD Mythics were also awesome and Mega Dungeons on the patch of their release are amazing.
Cata was the beginning of Retail WoW, lvling didnt matter anymore, raid difficulty went through the roof.
And the overall seasonal model of playing the game killed any last vibe.
AND OFC THERE WAS LFR AND DRAGONSOUL LMAO
I think Cata had a lot of positives, but imo, especially with hindsight, I think there were more negatives than positives. Transmog is one of the few things that cata brought that I think was overwhelmingly positive for the game, but I also think the world revamp was overwhelmingly negative (and only ages worse every year imo.)
There's some Cata stuff that could be ironed out with classic, though, so.. I'm hoping it's not so bad.
There's no way there's more negatives than positives. Cata was great overall. It had a few flaws that can be fixed this time for sure.
To me, transmogs are like "why get max level gear? i can just stand around in my better looking transmogs"
well i thinke would more lean on nobles take on cata questing from alpha testing. that was how much more funn it was to vocie and act out quest for people that love lore. hey you do you. if you find reading a wall off text. hey worst real lore part off cata was red cone. no ide about about lore in wow after leigon. Wod to legion full game thrones kill people. bring dead back BFA. just makes fell plaing out this book 1 step at the time. that gone be shit storye that makes no seanse at all.
live hotfix, be able play game not done updating. not wating on blizzard try fix boss wensday if it fail need wait next wensday. so transmog, bring the player not the class. easy rep fram, pet battle. makeing easyer to get raid on small server. streamling the hit and exspertisted cap befor blizzard removed it. dbm not real needing more raid timer. insted have extra addone just for boss mechaning. making more filler content for people not raiding. makeing new shit people that altoholiker.
for my part thinke transmog was probly the worst ting that cata did for wow. not making the levling q fun to do. hate vanili q when i was 11 years old was shure hell not gone be reading
if thinke cate gave game shit then good. probly no ide what cate gave you
what i found the worst about cata was all dead end in questing that either got removed. and haveing to wipe jumping off the spine not beacuse die fighting boss. fail at kill the scale.
i would say that legion had way more loong term negtive ting put in to that game. real disrepicted player that invest many hours in too the game. leiong did respect my time so i did respect it. just most mmo to day dispecting your time and wallet. Cata and mop are probly the gold age for casule player that want hard content. not want hit head in brick wall slow progress artifacetd wepones, random legos, boss tune 90% bracked. liked get new player in help them get good.
Remeber when dragon soul patch was 10 months -,-
It’s not all down to the game itself. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of people had played the game so much that it probably affected their real lives drastically by this point, so lots of the attrition in Cata was down to the expo being the straw that broke the camels back, leading many to quit for good until classic came out. The game then attracted a new generation of players and diverged in content and player base from there.
Totally agree on that, imagine grinding from classic up to wrath, what was this like 4 years of gear mouse wheel ? People moved on with their lives
this is such a braindead take lmao i love it
I've made this same argument. Perhaps Blizzard knew that they needed to attract new blood to the game, and that's why they started the streamlining and the removal of RPG elements in Wrath. They had pushed the game as far as the could as an RPG.
I still have my original Cata box from GameStop..oh the memories I loved that xpac
I started with vanilla, and its still by far the game I look back upon the most fondly, but there is no doubt about one thing: Cataclysm was the first expansion where I genuinely had a lot of fun playing a healer in dungeons, and in general I thought the new dungeons almost all turned out fantastic. Hell, even achievements, which I usually hate, added some fun additional challenges and made those dungeons really replayable. I also liked being able to reforge items, I thought the PVP/arena was very solid in cata, and I liked all the new 80-85 zones quite a bit. But just like everybody else I really did not enjoy the last big patch (the caverns of time dungeons were a joke, and deathwing was meh) and felt disappointed about the weak finale.
You're telling me ScotteJaye DIDNT sponsor this video??? 😂
I liked the new races, new combinations (my gnome priest was adorable), the model and graphic overhaul, the LFD finder added maps for the older dungeons even the non-reworked ones, the choice of questing or dungeon leveling was a fun idea. The main profession dailies were fun to do. I think this is when they had the toy collections tab? I remember the final raid when you're on the airship chasing deathwing I was blown away how great it looked.
I did not like some zones turning into theme parks like Redridge was Rambo, First blood Part two, Uldum was Indiana jones complete with Nazi like soldiers. I used to say I didn't like the talent tree revamp, but now I realize MoP did that.
The theme park zones were the best part of the revamp imo. New Stonetalon will always be my favorite zone. That and new Ashenvale. They really push the feeling of Horde domination which I adore
@@scarletcrusader5431stonetalon was WoW-specific lore, whereas what he mentioned was real life references made in to complete quest lines.. the overwhelming 4th wall breaking can be a bit much lol anyhow i agree with both of u
@H41030v3rki110ny0u oh fair I thought he had meant zones felt like theme park rides.
@@scarletcrusader5431To be fair I cited those two movies specifically.
@dotmadhack obviously. I just thought you had thought those zones were like those movies. I'm very aware of what they were referencing and I love them for it. I think the dude who originally responded didn't know what your were saying
The reason Cata gets even more negative reputation is because a lot of the problems started in wrath, but the Lich King narrative causes them to have rose colored glasses for wotlk. So then all the problems that were actually caused by wrath are lumped onto cata.
I like your content Wille, this this xpac deserves everything negative it receives because it fundamentally changed the game
To be fair, those changes started in Wrath. But I get why people say Cata because it's like they saw how many people joined in Wrath, and decided to push the changes into over drive.
First tier seems cool, second tier seems fantastic. Looking forward to the PvP, I'm not sure, but I'd hazard a guess that Cata PvP is a bit less "solved" than Wrath is, so it'll be fun to figure out. Gonna be a hard maybe for me.
Cata's reputation is unfair, imo. I look forward to Cata Classic & MoP Classic.
You can say its not "classic" but i'd argue any xpac we havent visited in a decade+ could be considered "Classic", even if said expansion did start to shift the game. IMO the game started to feel like how Retail does around WoD/Legion. There was ton of good things added in Cata & MoP.
Myself & some friends are quite excited to play Cata & hopefully MoP again, especially as they were the height of PvP. (especially MoP specifically), while also being fun for raiding.
P.S - Class design, while fun & good in vanilla-wrath, IMPROVES in Cata/MoP, theres more depth added in, more cool combo's you are capable of, & (in PVP specifically) more outplays you can do, its just fun.
I'd also argue that the component of classes starting to "feel a bit similar to eachother" is a bit niche, and is already present in WoTLK currently. But even if its true, it doesn't outweigh the fact that class designs still become more fleshed out, indepth, & fluent in Cata/MoP for the most part.
Again, WoD's shift in class design & the start of pruning, then Legion's reinforcement in pruning is when Class Design truly started going downhill, imo. But Cata/MoP were the height of class design with Wrath being close behind.
it would be funny if they announced cata at blizzcon and the crowd is completely silent or booing lmao
WoW ended with the death of the lich king, period.
WoW's classic part ended with the Death of Deathwing. Deathwing is a WC2 character, Cata also brought back Nelfarion, Onyxia, Ragnaros, was the only expansion to add/revamp Vanilla leveling content(1-60 back in the day). It was a huge love letter to all WC2, WC3 and Vanilla WoW fans. Sadly it had cut content and LFR was a poor replacement for WotLK 10 Man Normal.
@@rattlehead999you keep trying to push this, and it's not working.
@@anannoyedpanda How am I wrong?
I don't think Cataclysm was bad in of itself, as Deathwing's story is a good one. But when there's too many expansions, the fundamentals begin to change. It also doesn't help that the talent tree, which worked in its original format, was changed.
After WOTLK, WoW should've just expanded laterally.
it had to change to balance that shit
Honestly not looking forward to cata i hope they do something other than cata give us something else anything but cata again; im assuming you were there when it was current it was just a drag
I liked this video. However one thing with class homogenization I felt was overlooked was the introduction of Time Warp for Mages and what that meant for Shamans as a class. Cataclysm because an expansion where shamans didn't really have a class identity other than "we can't recruit x class so we have a shaman to cover" which I fell now a days would mean Shamans just get shafted. My experience in cataclysm was always "why do we need a shaman when we have X class?" which made it feel especially bad for me.
I just hate that you have to have a shaman in the group. It limits options when you are planning on forming groups and you sometimes have to even kick a guild member out of your 10 man group just to get a pug shaman in. That is bad design in my eyes. I understand totally why they would give bloodlust to other classes too, its just way too powerful of a cooldown.
I don't agree mainly because would you rather have class diviersity in a raid group or stack a billion mages and warlocks? I think each class should bring something special to the raid and Shamans did bring something special, totems and bloodlust. That was the shaman gimmik, we helped the rest of the raid. When that got taken away we had no reason to be in the raid group and that feels bad.@@rufipufi
As someone who raided as Resto/Enhance in Cata, the passing of heroism to Mages wasn't that big of a deal. If we're discussing niches, the changes made to Holy Pally's and allowing other healers to be good at AoE healing helped to erode the niche of the Shaman more than just the heroism.
That being said, Shamans still had a good deal of utility and I was never shafted from a group on my Shaman. Enhance, when you understood it, was a power house - we did high DPS to the point of accidentally stripping threat. Resto had deep healing as mastery and that coupled with crit made us remarkable healers. All specs had access to totems for utility and life saving measures for the raid.
For the infamous Spine fight, I could pretty much one heal normal as Resto not just because of my totem but because if I slightly tweaked my play style, my class was built to handle the debuffs. I liked healing Spine because it was interesting and actually used the way my class worked.
Overall, while Shamans got a bad rap at launch for being "weak", with a little bit of gear we were far from being undesirable. MoP would do far more for class homogenization yet it is often brought up fondly by people for gameplay.
I did not have this experience when raiding in Cata, I could never find a place to raid as an enhance shaman. I actually had to pay for a dragon soul clear for my enhance shaman because I could not get into any groups. Yes I did LFR but I wanted to do normal and heroic. However my main crowning achievement was doing Firelord, albiet it was when Dragon Soul was out so it wasn't when it was current content.@@Amoreyna
It's a world of warcraft but the world was not well thought compared against the earlier expansions. Blizzard should've better designed the open world. Cata was very bad. I got to level 62 and quit
Not gonna lie, pretty much every time I've been in Forge of Souls I've been "Where Rebuke Blizz? Pally needs interrupt. 😭"
The more me and my guild talk about cata the more we realize how great it was. Had half go from not wanting to play to most are waiting pretty eagerly for it to come
tbh i actually view Wrath more negatively now than i did back in the day as I started to see all the things i didn't like "in cata" actually came in during wrath, like split raid size and difficulties, bosses having like 4 different loot tables, the whole gearing structure was totally ruined imo. Long ass boss fights in ICC, like why is Sindra, Putricide and LK so long? Prog on them is just annoying, let us blast for 3mins, nobody wants a 12 minute fight with multiple intermission phases, argh! Vanilla and TBC were just so simple and pure and as i played through classic the last 3 years it's solidified my opinion that Vanilla and TBC were the golden years 100%.
Being a healer or tank was boring until Cata. Truly felt like a chore to switch when u were needed or just wanted to get ur dailies done. U get so many good utility/abilities introduced and every class feels unique in their roles. I loved Cata it was amazing and I am dying to make a worgen again! I didnt make a rogue in classics for this very reason so PLEASE give us Cata.
Cata healing is amazing
Cataclysm strikes a good balance between it staying classic but with a bit of a boost in all of its aspects. For instance, class rotations are now dynamic (mages used to press 2 buttons in vanilla and TBC) but not to the point retail is when you are literally a super sayan. Quests are revamped with good drop rates and even more variety than wrath. So, on the downside, my major issue is that the world doesn't really feel that it underwent a cataclysm. It might have been a tech limitation back then but I don't think that the world changes were too striking. Also, Northerend should have been hit too, especially Dragonblight.
I think cata will be looked at different on re-release. If dragon soul wasn't such a letdown. it'd simply just be a straight improvement from wotlk in all areas. The first half of the expansion is literally perfect.
Cataclysm PVP was some of the most fun I ever played as a Hunter. I still have the Season 9 PVP Elite set on my retail character that I haven't logged into in 5 years haha.
Cataclysm was the pinnacle of wow pvp. Best balance, more viable team comps with mana not being as problematic,pvp gear ACTUALLY BEING BIS FOR PVPERS, cc re works, etc..
Only time I ever seriously PvP'ed. Resto Shaman was pretty fun and dynamic.
Pvp was good,I’ll give you that
Speaking of gear upgrades. In cata items get very streamlined. I personally hate it, bit minus for me. Vanilla/tbc gearing is the best.
Uh, I personally wouldn't call TBC/Vanilla good, depending on what class you were playing. Some classes/specs could get away with crafted gear for long periods in TBC. Others were seeking out weird items to be able to do their roles.
A lot of the gear had terrible itemization - I remember struggling in OG TBC while leveling as a Pally tank and getting plate that was terrible for a warrior, never mind me at the time. A lot of stuff I got simply wasn't usable and I was chasing certain bosses for that one piece (not that I minded this, I like the endpoint instead of the constant variations of the modern loot tables).
If anything, I would say that Wrath was where streamlining really began for gearing and in Cata some things were removed, like Armor Pen because a good chunk of the player base did not understand it. But in Wrath, we would walk around with so much extra on our gear, like hit, due to power creep, that ICC bosses were designed with this in mind which in turn lead to spiky encounters, healing wise.
Cata introduced reforging, allowing for us to dump surplus stats into more useful things, while eliminating redundant or archaic stats. Not only did you get tier gear for your class/spec, you could customize it. I really despise the current game model of gearing, not to mention the years of TF/WF before this but there were definite problems pre-Cata with gearing. I think I have a soft spot for Cata as it allowed me control, including making gear more useful, and I didn't need to use an addon/website to figure things out. Plus, it added mastery which depending on your class/spec was either really good or meh.
I came back for WOTLK back in the day and I hated the tank and spank overall philosophy, when Cata came I wasn't expecting anything but I had a lot more fun with it. I'm leveling in classic WOTLK specifically for cata
The issue with Spine of Deathwing wasn't so much that it was harder than Madness, it was that it was artificially more difficult. Mechanically it was actually easier, you just needed to class stack like crazy to have the required burst for the tendons, and enough healing CDs to let everyone live through the insane throughput requirements.
I think a lot of players have a problem with fights that require class stacking. It's a horrible feeling to have a raid leader or officers in your guild tell you that because of the class or spec you play you won't have a raid spot unless you change to something else. I get that it happens and it's not always intentional but I think it's a poor design on a fight when even more casual guilds will class stack to progress through content the same way guilds chasing world firsts do.
I loved the Cata talents, getting that signature ability at level 10 felt great. Once I rolled a human paladin and was dying to murlocs in Elywn forest, I hit lvl 10 picked Protection and got Avenger's shield - suddenly i'm tanking all the murlocs in the zone! If anything I just want Cata out to level different specs through the re-made zones.
its a road to hell. In Vanilla You were Paladin, in Cataclyms at lvl 10 you are Protection Paladin, and class kit only went worse from that point
@@TheFroztfire Pretty much. I think the signature spells at lvl 10 were a poor move. AS used to come at around lvl 45 talent wise, with HotR being an end of tree one. I learned how to tank without AS, which I think is a good thing. Frost Mages used to get their elemental pet at the bottom of their tree and it had a short duration originally. In Cata it is just handed over at lvl 10 like a hunter pet.
I think there's a lot of of loss when iconic class abilities are just given at low levels in an effort to make it easier.
@@Amoreyna in case of rogues for example, in classic to wotlk you slowly got your dmg spenders, you had time to learn what they do. With Cata Assa, you just got envenom at 10 and never used anything else
Looking foward for Cata, but i wish they stop there.
In my opinion cataclysm is great but was unfortunate to be release in 2011... because in these years 2011 - 12 was a start and rise in popularity for games like League of Legends, CS:GO and so on... so the players got option to start playing a game and jump straight in to the action where dopamine kicks in. This is why cataclysm "was not popular" ppl were not willing to level up their characters for hours to get in to the end game where WoW starts to be fun and instead just choose play another game where they can instantly play. Same things we can see today with tiktok, instagram, youtube shorts... Attention span is the cause today and it began about the year i mentioned with all these "Straight in to the action" games
Minecraft craze started in those days too sub numbers were way more reflective of the increased competition in the online game space than anything cata did.