I Played Cataclysm for 100 Hours to See If It’s as Bad as Everyone Says
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- Опубликовано: 27 апр 2023
- Finally after 6 and a half weeks my cataclysm review is complete. I have played the expansion over 100 hours to experience the leveling, endgame content like heroic dungeons, raids and pvp and all of the other features added in cataclysm like reforging and transmog. Is the expansion as bad as everyone makes out? Let's find out!
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That game of thrones reference was pretty accurate. Never watched more than 2 episodes of that boring shiz
I mean your whole channel is dedicated to WoW. I highly doubt your opinion is going to be unbiased. Might was well come out and just say heres what i think about this new part of the game. But that doesnt help generate those fractions of a penny per view.
Cata isn't bad. I'd actually argue it holds up fairly well compared to the modern game. The problem Classic players have with it is that the destruction of the old world symbolically marks the end of "Classic" WoW. Not to mention that, and people are discovering this with Wrath, each expansion becomes more and more endgame focused, and removes more and more of the RPG elements from the game.
For me cata isn't really just endgame though because there's so much to do in cata! So many awesome new mounts to get, so many hunter pets to farm, level 80 twinks are just an absolute blast, transmog will make running through old raids huge again, goblins and worgen! Freakin loved cata, even if you don't raid I feel like there is a ton to do. The pvp is also absolutely amazing.
it had nostalgia value, but it was objectively not very fun to play pre cata areas, maybe there are people that like running around a lot, I for one dont.
@@daben7145 eh. One persons aimless wandering is another persons exploration and immersion.
It’s the loss of RPG for me. HC has really refreshed that.
I can’t wait for classic cata
Cata dungeons at launch were really nuts. Though I don't think it'd capture that same feeling again since players already know the strats and there are so many resources out for those who don't know.
True, though it'll be fun fighting in relatively crap gear again. Half the challenge was the throughput required to push through phases on certain bosses.
I’ve forgotten all the strats but you’re right it would be easy to find them. The end game dungeons were fun. I agree.
Yea but….people said this about wrath end game content as well. Take a look at the amount of people actually clearing hard mode wrath content though.
still 10 times harder than wotlk dungeons
"triage" healing was ballsack. No one wanted to play a healer in the start.
Nothing will ever beat the first month of Cata before the raids released. The heroics were some of the most challenging content seen. It was awesome.
Heroics were perfectly balanced before the nerfs. People were just used to endstage Wrath Heroics with LFD tool and no tank.
I’ll say having to slow down and cc trash was really annoying. Gave me flashbacks of Vanilla where you definitely had to, to some extent. The raids were kinda fun but it wasn’t my favorite expac for sure. Wrath and Legion were.
I guarantee that won't be the case this time around, especially if you are used to retail m+ like 20+s. Players are just WAY better now and the way people play is also
Agreed. They were so fun. It was like the perfect difficulty for a heroic. Also, as a healer, I enjoyed how mana was a bit of an issue at times
HOLY FUCK i completely forgot how hard the hc dungeons were
WoW thank you for the nostalgia, Metagoblin - I rarely think back to my Cata-time, but seeing this video, many fond memories emerged. I was always one of those guys who heavily twinked and Cata was a hell lot of fun with Lv81 twinks. They were absolutely insane. Just looking at some druid talents rn and I remember the healing mushrooms... THEY WERE INSANE. Also like, most of the talent trees just look so polished and nice. I also agree with what you say about transmog, reforging and co. I really missed reforging afterwards.. Haha.
My main beef with the Cataclysm leveling part can be summed up by saying that Ashenvale has been perpetually on fire and Westfall has had a tornado in it for nearly 13 years now. The vanilla zones were designed so that the status quo makes sense in near perpetuity, while the Cataclysm zones took the idea of "look! things are changing!" too far.
I totally agree that a lot of the changes don't make sense when looked at from a long term perspective. There's no reason a lot of the damage wouldn't have been repaired by now. Some of the changes make a lot of sense like Thousand Needles, since you can't really just undo an entire ocean poaring into an area or places like Silverpine Forest where the changes were mostly to incorporate a new race into the world. There's no reason places like Darkshore or Ashenvale or Westfall wouldn't have been mostly rebuilt by now.
@@Noobie2k7 Yeah. I actually liked the Cataclysm Thousand Needles when I played through it once almost 10 years ago, and on the whole the zones aren't bad from a quality perspective. It's the lore side of things that bothers me. As a questing enjoyer, I would love to see another full "old world" update on the scale of Cataclysm. Sadly the game is more endgame oriented than ever, so that is never going to happen. Vanilla+ private servers are where I get my fix now.
I'm sure they had plans to "mend" the world, it's just everyone bitched about the world changing and wanting old world back that they felt it'd do more harm to change anything anymore.
Agree that these didnt make sense but its not a big problem unlike the trivialization o lf the entire game is... I no longer play a game i wished i could play forever but it was slowly taken away from me. Its made for the lowest common denominator and it gas nothing to offer to someone who isnt a dumb child.
Oh and lets not forget the average gamer is now 35years old. Not 12... But blizzard doesnt get it... Or they get that despite being 30+ a lot of these people are idiots. People who developmentally never moved past age 12... But as stats show, that pool of players is roughly 1-2milion. A far call from the 12milion active players in the days of vanila-tbc when the game was growing.
As an altoholic, Cataclysm was amazing. Hitting level 10 and getting a dope ability that made your spec actually feel impactful made leveling 100x more enjoyable.
THIS!!! I had so much fun leveling every class for the sake of it!! Every class still had something really cool and unique about them, and the leveling itself was great, either for those who wanted to quest or just powerlevel throug LFG with heirlooms.
Also u actually had to farm some gold to learn those Spells from the class trainer because they were not cheap xD
I like that kinda of stuff in Mmos
@@igorgolden21 You didn't though. Cata is when trainers stopped training abilities and they started appearing in your spellbook at certain levels automatically.
@Fierystorm Nope, that isn't correct. In Cata you still had to go to trainers for new abilities but you no longer had multiple ranks. Once you go the ability, you'd never have to rank it up. Not paying class trainers for abilities, and getting them automatically in your spell book, happened in MoP
Great analysis man! Ive subscribed!
I really enjoyed Cata. It's Heroic difficulty at launch was one of the only times in WoW's history where you had to actually use CC and think about each pull. I loved that.
Zul Aman and Gurub remakes are still my favorite heroic dungeons to this day
I loved it too, the worst part of that was it was the community demanding more challenging content and then when given it they just complained that it wasn't a faceroll while leveling any more 🙃
@@MephyFaust 100% Proof that players shouldn't always be given what they want. If they'd stuck with it people would have learned and improved and felt better for mastering it down the line.
Heroic Firelands was torture
@@hektorgiacomelli7161 yes. Yes it was. Regular firelands wasn't even easy
This is such a huge video. Wish more creators went out and actually showed the content instead of bashing it for anecdotal reasons
I agree, so many content creators just read out loud some text from wowhead or reddit and put some WoW videos on it
Think for myself instead of just parroting what everyone else says? No!!!!!
If they did that, there wouldn't be much to hate about any of the expansions.
@@Alexander-zm9jd To be fair as a content creator you have a choice to copy stuff off wowhead and put out 20 videos a month or create original content and maybe do 3 or 4. That' makes a huge difference to your channel. Most viewers are quite happy to watch you read out the patch notes, so you are heavily incentivized to do that. The only real way around it is to do what someone like Bellular does and get a team to help you pump out original content.
His private server experience is not at all indicative of the live Cata experience, because player interactions/content is experienced at the macro level; this is trying to recreate that experience on the micro level, but it's nothing more than a simulation. Things like big lulls in content leading to loss of interest, sustained imbalance issues over years of patches, and general lack of replay value (all things that Cata suffered from) are virtually impossible to witness by taking a 'snapshot' view of the landscape on a private server.
Cata and MoP were honestly my two favourites during retail.
Tru after MoP the downride begins
Big agree. MoP was a blast
Timeless Isle was fucking GOAT.
and everything to do with the Thunder King was amazing writing.
Sadly MoP did simplify a lot of the dungeons, and gutted what was left of the talent trees.
But still, very very fun. PvP as a Prot Warrior was incredible in MoP too.
@@rustyshackleford1465 MoP talent trees were a vast improvement, Classic is live right now and proves how rose-tinted the love of the old trees are. You didn’t have choices, you did whatever a guide told you was best and never changed it. Mists you switched per the situation, it had ACTUAL depth. People just liked the satisfaction of getting a point to spend when you level up.
@@platexproductions you have to be joking, no i never did go by any guides when pre-MoP trees were a thing.
I was a kid and played whatever sounded the most cool.
I got a bunch of mounts from the loot bag that they added for tanks and healers during Cata, including both the blue and green protodrakes, the white bear, and Rivendare’s Deathcharger, if I’m not mistaken. It was a great way to get mounts that you might otherwise have to grind out.
I also got the white bear from a cata bag, been using it in rotation since, not that I've played more than one subs worth of each expansion since legion, lmao.
awesome video! as someone who never had the chance to play cata, this definitely shifted my point of view about it. most compelling to me was the continuation of classic, expanding the world and fulfilling some of the wishes from vanilla. im someone who dreams of classic+, and that is unchanged I certainly still would rather see blizz build off of classic and expand that world "horizontally", but this makes me interested in a possible cata classic
Great video, I’m looking forward to potentially moving on to Cata after wrath! Would love to see more Cata content on the channel
I played near the end of Cata after having a long break and I absolutely loved leveling up my goblin. Fun times. :)
Cata is my fave xpac they ever did. The raiding was wonderful, pvp was extremely balanced. They introduced new things like rbgs and what not. They revamped a old stale world by literally having a flying dragon destroy the world. It was bad ass as fuck
I've actually been playing through the Vanilla zones in Retail in a masochistic journey to make a perfect character, and a lot of the quests just get shifted slightly instead of outright removed; for every "Mankrik continues his quillboar genocide" or "John J. Keeshan as John Rambo" sequel line, there's areas like Duskwood that just got a quick once-over to make sure the quests made sense and the zone itself had an actual connected story.
I really appreciate the amount of effort that went into making this video. Great job!
My fav memory from Cata was as Prot War tank on Magmaw. Because of the Thunderclap+Rend combo, I just solo tanked all the little parasite adds and healed myself with Victory Rush whenever one would die. Topped the DPS chart by miles while rest of the raid just focused on the boss.
Hehe how different we can be. I just didnt like the feel of warrior with rage normalization and ragegain from abilities:)
The thunderclap and rend talent, I think it was called Blood and Thunder, was absolutely amazing. Being a prot warrior at that time was putting me at the top of the DPS charts simply from that lol. It's no mystery why they nerfed it.
Or killing all the adds at BoT entrance with well placed and spread out combustion as a Fire Mage, or on bgs, so much fun in just trying to get the biggest ignite possible!
noob question incoming, but how can i get the text centered on my character to display when being damaged/healed, like at 2:47 ?
I prefer the Old World layout prior to Cata and actually enjoyed the D&D style large adventure making you travel around and enjoy the sightseeing. Cataclysm's low leveling zones, while most hold up extremely well to this day (espescially for leveling alts due to low downtime, same with TBC zones) they lost the mystique where a lvl 40 quest might take you back to some random dude in a hidden higher level corner of a level 20 or 30 zone. Zones became railroaded through one-and-done, and one of the big hitches comes in here:
As in Classic, for the most part, you didn't do massive potentially permanently zone-altering (in scope and logic) quests, not seeing any phasing changes makes sense. However, in the revamped Cata zones, there are several ones where you do world altering things on the scale of the Stonetalon Tactical Nuke but... Nothing actually changes in world state. Ashenvale, Darkshore, Duskwood and Barrens in particular suffer from this in several segments. Felwood and Winterspring catastrophically so, aswell as most of the Plaguelands and Blasted Lands. Compare that to Vashj'ir, Uldum, Twilight Highlands or ESPESCIALLY Mount Hyjal, and you see what I mean very quickly.
Now, alot of this was obviously tech limitation due to server strain, but it still hurts the experience severely to have this dissonance. Ontop of that some zones were left pretty much unchanged at all other than level adjustments and removal of several group quests, Dustwallow comes to mind (my fav WoW swamp to this day) and infamously, Silithus still remaining unfinished and locked in 2005 questing wise.
Adding onto this, another issue with Cata leveling is that so many of the zones become about Deathwing and the Cataclysm. Hearing the same story over and over of the big bad is repetitive and loses a lot of uniqueness each zone used to provide. Stories about the Defias, Kurzen, Centaur, or Goblins instead become stories about deathwing and elementals or whatever.
@@atorrance and Deathwing, a giant dragon, doesn't actually do anything other than set a zone on fire every other month! He could just waltz to any major city and flatten it single-handedly and just doesn't because ????
Cata is also when Blizz started to do the thing where each new villain has to be bigger and badder than the last which doesn't work in an MMO and just made the story dumb
@@pokemonduck I think cata gives the "bad guy has to be bigger and badder" vibes because of the scope of its changes, but it REALLY did not set a trend yet. Deathwing was a WC2 villain they brought back because this was still the time when WoW didn't use new ideas for end bosses, and he was ultimately just a minion of a greater force. A greater force which we had already kind of jumped the shark on since we had defeated two old gods already.
Remember also that after Deathwing our next two final bosses were an orc old god minion and a dude we had already defeated in TBC *and* WC3. It isn't really until Legion where the spectacle creep sets in and starts being truly cosmic and ridiculous in scale.
Especially*
Moron.
yea it was so much fun to run around like crazy to deliver one quest that most people were getting boosts to level up their characters lol
I'll say this before i get into it, I loved dungeons in Cata, the methodical feel of heroics where every class had to use their tools to CC, reduce damage, ect was really cool and was a hard but good change of pace from speedrunning everything. I would love for Blizz to introduce something like this in modern WOW in addition to what they have, but I don't really see it working
It was a welcome change to go back to that classic mentality, after wotlk which was mostly brainless aoe spamming everything down
I loved it
well, we do this in modern wow. we’re just good enough to do it during the pull now. with AoE stops and CC. we just don’t need to do it before the pull anymore.
Ya sure, if you want to kill your game.
Tremendous video ! Thank you !!
Super late to the party, but as a paladin MT, I enjoyed how the ability to swap some of one stat for another made it super easy to reach avoidence cap and practically solo the heroic dungeons. Makes me nostalgic for when I used to duo heroic dungeons for guild members to farm them gear.
So great for hitting things like the hit cap, or how SV Hunters want a VERY specific amount of haste so their rotation lines up. I miss reforging.
Honestly. Great vid. I first started playing in cata didn't last long cause I was just a kid so I didn't figure out much of what I was doing but looking at this video made me realize how much I missed out and how me trying to play classic to maybe reignite that first experience was just a cope. Can't wait for cata release this time with some awareness. Hopefully the community won't ruin it.
Ironically id say that today, Cata’s insane difficulty spike from Wrath will, if anything, be a hotly desired point for classic players. I fondly remember dying a LOT but getting the satisfaction of that sweet, sweet dungeon or raid boss kill
Going to have to disagree here. If anything, I think classic players as a whole weren’t ready for harder challenges. Just look at Ulduar. A lot of people not even raiding cause of how difficult the fights are.
I think of course the launch will be large like normal, but people will fall off when they realize dungeons are hard
@Matt Cole isnt it more so that the player base for Wrath is smaller and therefore there are less players looking to push content? Guess it could be a combination of both.
@@kratos13254 agree 100%
Yeah, I gotta agree with Matt as well. I enjoy Classic for how easy and chill it is. Classic Andy's like to talk about difficulty but as soon as actually hard content got released (Ulduar), they went back to vanilla era realms. Classic needs time investment and is very good game in it's own way, but by no present day metric it is a hard game.
Cataclysm will be rough for these players.
@@kratos13254 Depends on if they launch pre-nerf or post-nerf dungeons.
Thanks for this well balanced review. I think what splits the opinion is that in Cataclysm some aspects were improved eg. classes, raids but other aspects eg. levelling experience were ruined. I’m enjoying the Wrath version of classic as the levelling still has some challenge combined with some new quality of life benefits.
cata's leveling was better, but the old questlines being removed is what really hurt, seeing "bandits" instead of defias really broke my heart, not being able to experience old dead mines again etc
wow players were basically begging blizzard to revamp old world then had an absolute tantrum when they did
@@hurpdurpueruhur I think they meant make zones that were useless and had no quests like Azshara useful not destroy the Barrens the best zone the horde had. Even through WoTLK Barrens being such a favorite zone there were always people there bantering. After Cata it was just a new dead empty lame zone.
Ah yes the old questlines to kill 10000 mobs for 4 eyeballs really hurt.
@@Sports5561 Not all of them were like that. You don't have to swing fully to the other side. Barrens quest removal was dumb, so it separating into two different zones. Change could be done more conservatively.
@@PimpofChaos cope. wow had 4 quests. 1: go into a dungeon and stab this person. 2: kill 5000 bears because somehow only 6 have hearts. 3: run halfway across the world 5 times to talk to some npcs you'll never hear about again 4: bring this item to this person 5 feet from me.
My memories of low lvl BG's in cata are all about getting one-shot by players with heirloom gear. Every single bg I felt I didnt have the smallest impact, because that was first character and so I could not have heirloom gear
I loved the heirloom gear grind. They used to be a big thing. I get back on after a few years and I'm buying every piece with gold from just doing starting missions. Got too obsessed with making new characters but I still enjoyed the time being OP for a little while. Thankfully I can relive any time, mostly the starter zones and 10-20 zones. Ghostlands was great, especially back in the day. Dead Scar was actually frightening.
Yea heirloom gear was a huge mistake that should have never been added. i can imagine many new players quitting over this
Great content. Love it
It's one of my favorite expansions. I liked how the world changed and the stories of the areas progressed, the focus on the war of alliance vs horde is cool too. Just not a big fan of Dragon Soul, but that's it.
Its ironically more fun to lvl through cata timewalking in DF than it was to lvl during cata, mostly because the mobs are slightly harder.
Dungeons took at least 20 mins back then, tw takes 10 mins per dungeon, even in the cata round.
@@robertomariani626I think they may have meant timewalking campaigns, AKA Chromie Time?
Cataclysm and MoP were the best PvP times i had with this game and reforging was so cool, man. No clue if it was the most optimal build, but putting everything on haste and casting
ye cata pvp was best. I loved being globaled by the Vial trinket alone without any Counterplay.
I totally agree with you, after that they made Holy Priest spec so bad for all expansions that were made after.
MoP had the best version of Unholy DK miss playing that
Having Cata and mop and PvP in one sentence is a disgrace.
@@TheRoudyzor i bet you never play it haha every good pvp player say that. So you are a classic gimp or just clueless
The hunter focus/mana thing made me laugh. On one hand you have a hunter conjuring arcane shots and fire and ice, using mana. On the other you have a dude with a bow who makes that stuff happen by just focusing really hard- but you can't have beef with that because other classes and pets use focus to make magic happen too
banger vid, but read your name as "meat goblin" the second (not first) time round and had a chuckle. keep it up!
It's hard to say, but I know for a fact when I think of vanilla leveling vs cataclysm leveling, the one that makes me sick to my stomach is cataclysm. Could be because I beat those zones to death, but I also beat classic zones to death too. It was amazingly refreshing to go back to classic, but I still have no desire to try cata again.
You're 40 years old, move on
@@ian999ify Not even close buddy. Enjoy your shitty expansion.
That was a really good look at Cataclysm. I have said for a while that after ICC, I'm done with classic, but I forgot how good Cataclysm actually was. There have been a few videos I've seen like this recently that are making me really start to look forward to it.
I enjoyed up to and including Pandaria. Then it started to deteriorate as a game.
@@fuzzlewit9 I started playing around end of Cataclysm/beginning of Pandaria and it was the most absolute fun game that I ever experienced, it's because I got to experience the best of both expansions, where I got through most of Cataclysm leveling (missed one of the new zones that I later redid as an alt) and then the really great story and visuals in Pandaria.
Crazy to think that it would all go downhill from there. Hell, I just didn't play Classic, not because I don't have any nostalgia to it, I still would've played it if it was a normal company's game/remake, but because I didn't want to give my money to Blizzard anymore after Warlords of Draenor and BFA and many outside of games fiascos that only seem to pile up nowadays.
Good video 👍 I liked and subbed
Looking forward to it. Hoping the best for Tol-Barad.
My only issue with Cataclysm is every class felt like they were being "universalized". Pally tanks now needed the exact same gear as other tanks, DPS classes now all wanted the EXACT same gear. (not that it wasn't like this before, but there was a little more room for player expression)
A thing we need to consider is that "player expression" is a thing of the past for 99.9999999% of the population, since the vast (and I mean VAST) majority of people will just follow Icy Veins' guides and go for the meta.
So while this may be something to really consider in the past, it's a non-factor nowadays. We definitely need a more "balanced" focus game (not to the extent Retail has gone), but to at least prevent class stacking (we don't want another 15 Unholy DKs raid meta).
@@laranjo5999 its why I stopped playing the "meta" in most games. I just don't find it fun when I play a game (any game) with hundreds of different things you can do but only choosing 1 or 2 things all the time because its "the meta". So annoying. Private servers ftw.
Icicles were introduced at the end of MoP (5.4 or 5.3 I believe). Iirc the old mastery simply increased your shatter dmg by x%.
cant wait for this honestly. I hate the icicle change they did to frost mages in mop it ruined what the spec was all about
What addon are you using there to make your spells glow on your action bars like that? I have been searching for one like that.
What a great video. This really captured how I felt about Cataclysm and reminded me of why I'm drawn to play it. I'm 28 and now and Cataclysm was half my life ago now. Great memories though, thanks heaps for this!
I really liked how totems worked in cata. Having a few presets was nice. Now it just feels like using any other ability.
Cata was the ONLY time they nailed totems IMO. Fixing the scaling issues was a godsend on things like Searing Totem, they made it so ANY fire totem will give the Ele SP buff, and they removed things that were clunky like ele needing to use Fire Nova. I remember always switching a few totems around based on dungeon comp which feels nice with so many buffs being doubled by something else. The only thing missing from Ele is the Lava Burst resets aren't instant cast. All around great expansion for Shamans.
What a great video. There is so much doom and gloom over cata. I'm personally really excited to play it again
Classic cata is gonna be sooo good
As long as they fix the content drought itll be so damn good
We won't get classic Cata
@@Thecultofwrestling we absolutely will
same here. for me i dont care how bad/good cata and mop were i just want to play them one more time. I think they both were great in their own ways. the end of cata imo was not so great though
Damn i wish i found this channel earlier!!! I just started playing wow classic and vids like this gets me so hyped up to play.
Awesome video. What cata server did you play on?? Can't seem to find a good private server
I think he’s playing beta
@@Hileronbeta wasn't even here when this video was uploaded man.
Honestly i had a great time playing through cata. Was the first time i leveled damn near every class to max because i enjoyed the new world questing experience so much.
Same bro. Before Cata I only played my Hunter, Priest, & Paladin & was slowly starting new classes. I then deleted my mage & druid that I was leveling at the time to make Goblin mage & Troll druid.
I loved Cata very much, all the way up to Firelands before they added Dragon Soul.
Dungeons were amazing, raids were amazing! Even before all the nerfs
That's it. Outside of ultra lame item designs on launch, the game was pretty cool until probably the worst final expansion raid.
@@Zerradable only the overpowered trinkets made that season cringe, otherwise perfect expansion
I'm pretty new to WoW and just started playing classic. What server is cataclysm on? i thought it was either classic or wotlk or retail?
This was an amazing synopsis of the expansion. Very good high and low points.
Cata was one of the last expansions I liked until Legion. PVP was fun and the raids were on point. I think you’re right that the content drought at the end was the killer for a lot of people including myself. Great video man keep it up!
Biggest problem with Cataclysm boils down to three things. 1. The quest zones were very, very on rails. 2. The story assumed that throwing legendary lore characters at us constantly would make it feel "epic", it was instead cringe. 3. A lot of classes and specs basically stayed exactly the same despite the talent changes, and lot of players just got bored as a result and quit even before Dragon Soul arrived.
Great Video!
Cata dungeons on launch were amazing. Was so much fun working through them with my guild.
The bonus satchel that was shown for a moment in one clip of the video actually encouraged a lot of tanks joining the heroic dungeonfinder, because it had a chance to contain old mounts. I don't know if wotlk already has it, but I remember farming the satchel back then. It's sad that at some point they changed it only gold and buff materials.
duh? we already do this in WOTLK!
Probably done close to 1k crates and gotten 0 mounts
did over 1000 heroics... never got shit.. worthless
@@MrOranj wow crazy man enjoy your pixels
@@rickroll9705
Do your own research, I don't care
I miss heroic dungeons being hard and actually having meaning to end game
And having dungeon tiers. Cats had new dungeons every tier.
Cata was also the first expansion where they went hard on ilvl tiers. They were a thing back in wotlk but they became much more pronounced in cata. In previous expansions you still had to clear the lower level raids to get to the higher level one. I think this is the point where most people feel classic lost its charm as resetting every season is kind of a bummer.
What addon gives you a health globe for your HP at 9:00 ?
Cata was my favorite expansion followed closely by MoP. It all just felt like it meshed together really well for my play experience, personally. The DW raid was fun for me and hunting for Gurthalak was my mission after I was finally geared enough to join a normal raid. As a solo player it felt like a major accomplishment to get to that point while playing at my own pace and enjoying the game. Professions seemed to matter more as well. I would LOVE for Blizzard to release Classic Cata servers. I’d play them pretty much non stop.
I loved the heroic dungeon difficulty. It wasn't shared experience, but for once it felt like there was some challenge and tactics rather than just brainless thing you had to do.
and this is why people quit cata. mobs were hard or harder then actual bosses. you had to know your spells and rotations
Another critical component here was the type of difficulty. It wasn't just that you needed the correct tactics, but that you needed to execute it within excruciatingly small time windows. Many, many instant kill mechanics with intense reaction time requirements.
@@HallyVee and thats bad? it was actually perfect. the only thing i agree is, the dungeons was what made people quit. like i said back in cata and say to this day, skilled players loved it. vanilla hated it.
@@gamerbodkonian it was bad for the grandmas and girlfriends who couldn't play anymore (and the even more rare folks like myself who prefer the vanilla/eq style). The game, like most others, gradually morphed into an action game. Bad for us, good for you.
@@HallyVee as someone who started in cata, the dungeons really weren't that bad even on HC level and at that point you could already google what the problem was or just ask 'hey what's this one-shot mechanic here I don't want to wipe on it'. People would just tell me what to do. Rarely did I get a vote kick.
The good thing was finally having alternate ways to level up. You could just do gathering, archaeology and fishing while queuing for low level BGs and dungeons and your XP bar would go up. That plus groups running old content for transmogs made it a pretty cool expansion for players who don't care much for hardcore raiding.
The bad thing, as many people mentioned already, is the old zones revamp being treated like an expansion scenario. The narrative design changes radically from zones having a few problems to resolve, sometimes some "main" quest chains ending in a dungeon or raid or smaller self-contained stories, to a main quest chain in each zone leading to the next. As a result it feels pretty on rail and since even minors fetch quests are integrated to the main plot of each area you get less margin to chose which ones you should do or skip. It's too curated for an MMORPG as sometimes you just want to form a small group with randos and farm a spot for XP while chatting. It really starts to feel like a "single player MMO" which imho started with LK and phasing. But it also changes the narrative feel of the zones as being stuck in that particular chain of event.
All in all this leads to what I described earlier, once you've completed a zone with a character you're inclined to skip it next time until you end up leveling alts by doing everything BUT questing.
Re: Reforge removal. It was taken out because it existed in the first place to help with reaching hit/expertise caps as well as balancing dodge/parry and similar. With most of those cases of stat caps or incentives to balance stats being removed, it was seen as just becoming pointless busywork.
I loved Cata - Great expansion. I look forward to playing it in Classic & Hopefully w/ some minor changes to keep the community strong :D
Yo what did you decide about those post shave sink water sales?
How did you play fresh cata? was it a private server? If so, which one was it?
I loved cataclysm! Had some of the most fun with the expansion. Firelands is still one of my favorite raids.
Might be a minority in that. The first phase of raiding was pretty phenomenal. But Firelands and Dragonsoul were awfully disappointing. I recall so many people leaving after P1.
@@Bl00dMalicePerhaps you are in the minority there.
@@Trainwheel_Time Commentary and historical stats have said otherwise.
@@Bl00dMalice To each their own. I personally really enjoyed fighting Ragnaros again and the idea of the Firelands was really enjoyable to take part in.
I only truly came into my own in WoW during cata. I was a total noob for the duration of BC and Wrath and only really learned the game during Cata. It was without a doubt my favourite expansion. I specifically pvp and it has never felt as balanced as it did in Cata.
Cata has always been my fav xpac :) had a blast playing it and would love to play it again, would probably not go back to retail if they release classic cata :)
I honestly only have good memories of cataclysm such a fun game lmao the guild perks were amazing and the first full set heirlooms was awesome to level characters it was easier than wrath because you could fight like 5 mobs at a time solo and live but it made leveling so much more fun and the revamped zones had so many new quests and cool pieces of gear to get when the ones prevamp barley had any gear worth getting
Thanks for covering my favorite xpac of all time, I've played all of them and Cata is still the one I've enjoyed the most, classes are so fun man.
Early Cata was peak WoW and I will die on this hill. Heroics actually being challenging to complete was nice compared to Wrath heroics being a joke. Classes being for more races was really nice and i didnt mind the zone revamp. Mid to late Cata was definitely a slog but Cata got so much undeserved hate
Cata was peak WoW for me as well but I didn't start playing till 3.3.3
Yes! I remember the heroics were touching close to TBC heroics. Hunters getting focus was a big deal for me. People begged for it on the forums for a long time.
I maxed a hunter this xpac because leveling as survival was the funnest leveling experience I ever had. Playing pally tanks when avengers shield was nuts is a close 2nd
I started playing with cata
And let's say having an undead hunter is nice
I was around 10, when i tried Vanilla wow back in the day, and didnt find the game enjoyable through vanilla, TBC or Wrath, since English isn't my first language. So Cata was by far my best experience with the game. I played the game daily, and the game became more enjoyable as i got older and understood the game more! If they make a Classic Cata, then i will have to play it!
I experienced gaining gaming-sentience in Cataclysm, and I have such good memories of it! I'm glad that is actually true and not just my nostalgia trying to convince me, and everyone who trash talks cata I talk to, that cata was awesome.
I remember the pre-patch for Cata. a friend and I traveled to the new areas to see what was up and I was so enamored with the aesthetics of the world and I was so excited to play through it again. And I remember how disappointed I was with the new quests in those zones which felt much more linear like they were created out of a template or something.
Yep it was bad overall.
Most quests pre cata are just spend an hour killing bears/boars/spiders/murlocs for terrible drop rates, cata quests at least added a bit more story and way more mechanics
@@JJJBunney001 right? Kill 10 of those, collect 10 of these, bring back that dude’s head. How immersive ..
@@wantanamera thats true lmao idk why people complain about quest in Vanilla most ppl buy boost buz leveling is fucking ass the most fun i had questing in wow was cata and jade forest MOP
I felt the opposite. Cata leveling was so fun that it was the first xpac that I took the time to level each class to max level. The gear from the quests is much better and the flow of leveling through the zones improves dramatically in cata
24:19 To this day i still watch this video from time to time and puts a smile on my face. I used to play with my friends in Cata (they are all gone). Things like this and the "Wowtube era" (bunch of badass youtubers making wow content) made the expansion one of the best for me (and i'm a vanilla veteran). Cataclysm will always be special for me.
Dude, Tol Barad!
The pvp was a big fuckin deal 🔥
now they are on twitch, hiding behind those absolutely insufferable mods that shield them from valid criticism.
@@GuiltyNoticer Thats everywhere now, mods or not. Even YT channel owners can shadow ban you from their channels. Everyone just wants to live in their bubbles and echo chambers now.
I loved Cata. Especially the challenge of heroic dungeons. You actually had to be smart, use CC, etc. Made it really rewarding
Raids also were brought to a whole new level in terms of depth and complexity and difficulty.
But it did lack an equivalent of WotLK's 10 man Normal difficult. LFR was not it.
Also the class design was peak class design until SL/DL. Same with the PVP.
And we got tiered dungeons every patch had new dungeons.
@@sagexalcen4708 IDK, people don't remember even what they nerfed, but I played on a progressive Cata private server a few years ago, and the nerf to the dungeons wasn't hard, it was a slight nerf on some bosses, most bosses remained untouched.
@@badass6300 It was in 4.0.6. I remember playing through the original actually and I do remember some dungeons it was barely notable but in others (looking at Grim Batol and Ozruk the Pugbreaker as ones that really stood out) they were pretty noticible back at the time. Now, I can't speak from a healer's perspective but my I did have a prot pala and a mage.....I remember feeling it for sure, especially on the tankadin.
Actually I remember before that Ghostcrawler telling people “learn to play the game, and stop asking for nerfs.” That took some brass ones. It was great.
I play a shaman and a druid boomie in wrath but am thinking of playing hunter or mage what should I choose I do have heirloom gear for the mage
one of the thematic set back for transmog for online game is being able to look at a character and be able to know the basis of their setup. I think that is very important.
Quality of life changes and "improving" the player's experience is always a trade off. In classic you have to find ways to get around elements of the game that some ppl might not consider fun, which drives up dedication and identification with the game and increases interaction with other players, like chatting or a duel when the respawn timer of a quest mob is just a little too long. It adds to the richness of the game and is the reason the hardcore challenge is currently so popular in classic WoW.
Ya Quality of Life is a delicate balance. Looking back I feel like blizzard was forced to add these Quality of Life features over time to accommodate the casual player base that now had lives to the point that turned the game into what it is today. I feel like Raid finder was that decline.
My guild broke up in Cataclysm and I was left without a guild going into Mists & due to working nightshift I couldn't commit my self to a raiding guild anymore.
The same system I despised in Cata was the same system letting my experience some Mists raid content & basically lasted until the end of Warlords where I moved servers to join a friends guilds and got to raid Heroic & Mythic content. Then that same server I moved to eventually died and I just gave up on finding another guild. I tried coming back each expansion, but without a guild and no will power to level on yet another server for the 3rd or 4rth time I just called it quits. + As a mount collector... I missed out on so many mounts and achievements during legion-now I don't even wanna bother obtaining anymore. During my time in BFA... I saw more bots than I did actual people.
The problem with what you're saying is yes, players dynamically interacting is basically the point of the mmo genre but it's not sustainable. A few weeks or months after whatever is popular dies down or people advance past it, zones are dead. As you progress to mid game player counts are spread so thin that you hardly see anyone to do these things with.
Is the barrels fun to run for the 3rd or 4th time? It can be. Is it fun when you don't see a single other person and have to grind the same mobs for hours for quest drops? No, that sucks
Cata is my favorite expansion of the game. Had loads of fun of how difficult the dungeons were when it first came out.
bruh heroic 5 man za and zg the first time was cancer lmao. It became fun when you out geared it tho
Cata was a great expansion that introduced many QoL improvements, had vastly better class design, some of the most fun dungeons after the snoozefest that were Wrath dungeons, and the rework of class core ability level requirements so that you could have fun earlier in the leveling experience. Cata imo is the expansion where WoW reached the height of it's polish, but it wasn't perfect of course and had it's own problems still. There are some pretty big reasons why Cata was not as well received as previous expansions and I think a large part of that was actually Wraths fault, ironically enough.
Many hardcore WoW fans had just been through three iterations of the game and were finally starting to feel the first pangs of burnout, and by this point in the game, the content cycle, and what kind of content we had to look forward to, had become extremely predictable. The burnout was also exasperated by the next big problem, which was that while questing had been streamlined to be much more narratively focused and improved imo, the overall narrative of Cata was much weaker than Wrath, and that was to be expected. Wrath was the narrative peak of WoW and nothing has ever come close to recapturing that magic. F's in the chat for Shadowlands desecrating the most beloved story in WoW. Anyways, Cata's narrative never stood a chance and that made people a bit less interested in the raids compared to Wrath. The raid themes were not bad by any means, but they were simply not as interesting as Wrath or even BC for that matter. Firelands was the only raid that could measure up to the previous expansions imo.
Another major issue with Cata was that many of its QoL and new player experience improvements would have a massive impact on the game going forward and ultimately fracture the community into the retail gamers and classic enjoyers we know today. Dungeon Finder was added near the end of Wrath as a way to quickly find other people to party up with and run dungeons. This was a massive QoL improvement and saved a crazy amount of time now that you didn't have to spam chat for hours or fly out to the dungeon to summon people. It was very well received at the time because it lacked one very impactful element that would be added shortly after in Cata. Dungeon Finder was strictly limited to grouping you with other players from your server. Cata would go on to develop this feature further by linking servers together into larger "Battle Groups". This allowed for faster queue times as you had access to a much larger pool of players.
The consequences of doing this however, would irreversibly damage server identity and the sense of community within the game. Prior to Cata, each server was relatively self regulating because it had a strong sense of community and that made it difficult to erase the individual players reputation, for better or for worse. There were social consequences for misbehaving through ninja looting, griefing, chatting ect. If you acted like a clown too much, people would stop playing with you and you would have little choice but to except your fate as one of the clowns, pay for a name change, or transfer to a different server. With the introduction of cross-server Dungeon Finder, the clownmen were now free to act as shitty as they wanted with almost no consequences because they would be partied together with people that can't really retaliate against them in a meaningful way. This feature would go on to create the retail dungeon finder environment we know today, where five players complete the content in silence because there is no reason to socially invest in what are effectively nameless players you will never see again, and because dungeons become trivialized very quickly, making most communication unnecessary.
The rework of Vanilla WoW zones wasn't a bad change in of itself. Blizzard had just created the streamlined quest system that they still use to this day, and they were eager to update their Vanilla zones with the new tech, which already aging like bananas at this point. This was undoubtedly a great improvement for new players just getting into the game at the time. The problem is that the vast majority of the player base was still made up of terminally addicted WoW fanatics that had been playing since the beginning, so the true cataclysm was all the nostalgia that would be lost with the update. With Classic WoW being about 10 years away at the time, there was no chance of you ever getting to experience it again without a joining a private server.
I think the final blow to Cata was simply the massive untapped potential everyone saw in the game at the time. Cata had really cool zones with strong themes that lent themselves very well to the dungeons in their respective area. This expansion had some of my favorite dungeons and it was really disappointing to see how weak the raids were in comparison. Halls of Origination looked amazing, but we got Throne of Four Winds instead, which was even less visually interesting than Vortex Pinnacle, the dungeon it was themed after. Blackwing Descent, which was a sort of throwback raid that had great boss fights, but was also visually boring. Bastion of Twilight, which wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. Dragon Soul, the big crescendo of the expansion, being mostly an asset flip, which is very strange way to cap off the expansion. And then we had Firelands, which was the only really visually, and narratively interesting raid imo. Throne of Tides, Halls of Origination, and Stonecore were easily the most interesting dungeons and were also located in the most interesting zones, and yet they remained unused as raid themes. With cata having significantly less dungeons and raids compared to Wrath as a consequence of Blizzard revamping the Vanilla zones, it really magnified the dissatisfaction of the player base, knowing that they received less quality content in exchange for getting the nostalgic zones they loved paved over and buried.
The TLDR here is that Cata was a great expansion in many ways, but while their heart was in the right place, Blizzard made a few critical errors in judgement while the odds were already stacked against them because of player burn out and the expansion coming after the absolute narrative peak of WoW. While plenty of the disappointment of Cata was justified, there were a few elements I think I can safely say caused the population to be a bit more harsh on the expansion than was probably deserved. Cata was definitely not a bad expansion and I actually look forward to playing it again in Classic.
Dude you are a legit wow historian and one cant simply describe that time better than you did. Much respect
I am impressed. Bravo, sir.
The mixing of players and the consequential loss of server identity hurts the most.
Until about 2 months ago I knew only Cata and WoD private servers that retained this social aspect of the game.
You would play and be like "Ahh there is this Mindbug guy spamming weird shit again"
(I am actually impressed that I remember this dude's name after all the years). You would meet well known faces in rBGs and it felt good.
Now on retail I can't tell you a single name of any other player who is not in guild..
I love the game but everyone has become so... distant and it kinda breaks my heart.
it was a trash heap. It did so little right, so much wrong and turned Wow into a shit show mtx fest
3:59 Frost mage Mastery is % increase on frozen targets, The Icicle was changed in MoP patch 5.4.0
Anyways great video ❤
I absolutely loved Cata. I did start playing in TBC and then Wrath but Cata was my first expansion where I did end game activities like raiding. There was always tons of things to do and even though DS was my first raid, I absolutely loved it. Awesome video, thank you.
Nope. It was garbage, and ruined the game.
@@glentor3 Okay, Vanilla junkie.
@@glentor3 "I, I, my, I, my, I" those are all indications of personal enjoyment. Your opinion of the game is completely irrelevant here. They weren't making any definitive statements about the game experience for every player. Seem like the kind of asshole to show up to a fish fry where everyone is having a good time and loudly declaring "fish are icky and it tastes like shit." Nobody asked, and nobody cares.
kids literally saying what is the best verison of the game when they werent shitters at it LMFAO
I loved cataclysm, I never understood the hate it got. I was always casual so just being able to jump in and get my honor and justice gear on an alt then go on to do the things I actually wanted to do which was hang out with people was perfect.
Ahhh I remember another reason I hated it. It turned once wonderful great Ogrimmar where I knew where basically every single vendor was and could get there in a minute into this big elevator don't you wish you had flying dalaran style lag fest and it was that bad even empty.
>inb4 poor upgrade herdooo
I shouldn't have to get a new computer to go to town that is now worse and many vendors just gone.
The problem with catacylsm is that so much of the budget went to the leveling experience that they had to cut corners and content on end game. We lost an entire raid tier that was scrapped, which resulted in the story line of one zone going nowhere and concluding offscreen. A further problem is that the final raid tier was not very good and people complained it was a lot of reused assets with an underwhelming series of bosses.
@@s0515033 true! But I also remember a lot of people complained about the leveling experience back then taking way too long and being hard for you to have alts. I was a student back then with tons of free time and I could barely keep up with 2 chars. Most weeks I had to ditch one of them. I also spent most of my time doing arenas but still.
@@s0515033 The raid tier (and whole endgame tbh) was scrapped because the first tier failed due Blizz not balancing 10 man raiding well after announcing that it would have same loot as 25 man (so a lot of guild split),
10 man raid required the same amount of interrupts of 25, it was impossible for most guild and killed the whole endgame
great video!
I played Vanilla through Cata before quitting my first time. Cata was pretty cool to start. There was a lot to do and revisit out the gate. I loved the heroic dungeons. I liked the challenge, particularly with my then core group where it was just us learning the encounters. What eventually killed it for me was my guild (a self marketed casual/semi-prog guild) tried to split and make 2 raid teams. We had enough bodies that would show up and "be on the list" in case someone needed to drop out for whatever reason (rarely happened). I was one of the main tanks and was asked/told to help start the second group. The problem was that while the second group had a small handful of the core raiders in it to try to kick start it, no one else was up to task. No one knew the strats. No one prepared. Few were properly geared. They showed up and expected to get loot. Can't have a successful 10man when only 3-4 are prepared and know what's going on. I quickly grew tired of footing the repair bills dying/being rezzed over and over all night each night to fail at clearing what was once farmed content. Our server was small-ish, didn't feel like paying to transfer somewhere and socially start all over again, so I quit.
I leveled my rogue from 12 to max doing nothing but pvp in cata. It was the most fun I've had in wow.
Imagine having a Time Machine and you go back to play Cata
I started playing WoW back in the days during what I call the "Late Lich King era" - the majority of the realm population was leveling 2nd,3rd, or 4th,5th classes, the raid guilds that were worth the title had icc 25 on farm mode and so on.
I started with a Mage and boy oh boy...you know what it was like to lvl a caster back through classic, bc and wotlk.
Was it fun? Yes, yes of course the quest were great (not all eh... "Bring me four hyena eyes. - hours later, "THOSE ANIMALS DON'T HAVE EYES! WHAT SORCERY IS THIS!"), the stories, the landscapes.
But, it often felt... how to put it, like walking through molasses, it was kinda exhausting at times - fighting a single enemy, use your cds, use every tool in the book, barely survie and kill it, sit down and regen, rinse and repeat, oh well a second one aggroed - back to the graveyard...(slight exaggeration but you get what I mean).
So Cataclysm was naturally the first expansion I experienced from day one and it was AWESOME!
The new regions with their story arcs - Uldum, Harrison Jones? A blast! And a well deserved hommage to Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford.
Deepholm - A truly beautiful area with outstanding design and great story.
Vashir? Many hated the underwater region, I Loved it, it was something new. And beautiful too, always loved the Nagas in general.
Hyjall great story arcs, a load of varied landscapes from lush forrests to ashen wastelands.
And fuck was it hard at the beginning, getting roflstomped by enemies front, right and centre every so often but it felt different compared to the earlier settings because the changes made, made it less frustrating to end up nose down.
And the dungeons? Awesome.
Oh by Thralls big Hammer, we wiped, we were getting our asses handed to us by the dozen and then some but we made it. Never had so much fun in Dungeons before and after as in Cata.
The world changed, the history progressed, the gameplay changes made the whole ordeal more accessible by a LOT! Stats and Ratings became way easier to understand, skill/talent choices mattered and were fun and sometimes changed the way how you had to play a certain class and it was, like the glyph system a flexible system change it on the fly for the cost of some sparkling dust.
Cata ultimately made the game hook me for years to come and brought me a lot of joy and fun.
Cata lvling still feels like one of the best experiences imo.
Every talent point you spend on the tree feels impactful and it reflects on how powerful your character feels.
The mobs couldve been a bit more dangerous and the xp from the heirlooms couldve been a toggle button/npc instead of twink items that scale with you, but other than that it feels great.
Put 10k hours into cata, retail and private servers combined, absolutely loved that expansion
honestly, I could see myself going fully into cata classic as the main version i play, especially with the changes youve proposed
I don't understand, do they plan to catch up with the retail in classic?... where are they going to stop?
Cata was when Istarted wow so its Vanilla for me and after playing Classic up to Wotlk I feel Cata is the BEST form of Wow I have played. I am all for the charm of Classic but I feel like Cata fixed alot of the bs parts of the game like the endless pointless time sinks and things become more seemless with out lossing the difficulty. Classic was amazing Tbc not as much Wotlk is fun but Cata is when Blizzard fixed alot of the the bad designed areas of the game...The balance is the best in my exp. I love PVP and its in some of its best form as well...Transmog makes old contenet worth doing as well as reforging brings new levels of complication wich is alot better then just chasing 3 stats...People dont like changes so they new shit scared people but if cata didnt switch things up then wow would have died cant keep the SAME game going for 20 years so.....Cata classic FTW'
Perfect explanation.
Similar story mate, I fully agree! Bring on cata classic blizz 😲🤩😛😛
I've always considered Cataclysm to be my favorite expansion. And while I know it's not going to be the same as it was, I'm excited to go through it again. It was my favorite because it's the first time I really got into raiding and I had tons of fun. I doubt I'll jump into raiding again but I'd love to play through the leveling and heroic dungeons again.
I enjoyed it a lot too. I did like the old talent tree better but there was so many QoL updates it was hard to complain too much. Had a lot of fun with Hyjal dailies and Deathwing is one of the cooler villains of the franchise (even if his boss fight wasn't all that great). Like, the main villain randomly roaming the world and killing you while you're out questing was pretty novel at the time, too.
My favorite expansion so far.
That beer meme, litteral laugh out loud 🤣
Will wrath characters transfer to cat realms? How's that work?
I never understood the hate for cata. 4.0 - 4.2 to me, is PEAK wow. Some very good memories during that time.
my fav wow cata 4.3 i love playing hunter
@@fascrinskill-player2771 hunter was so much fun in cata and mop both! Can't wait!
@@fascrinskill-player2771 4.3 mm hunter is the best the spec has been in my opinion
I didn't even KNOW there was hate for cata, I mean, raids were great as always.
I guess there's just too many people who can't differentiate between a game being good and their life situation being good and just want that time in their life back when they had less responsibility and more time to play...
??? I remember very well massive post about how the game was "harder" than before, specially healing, healers going oom, dungeons being hard IF it was a pug, premade were fine ofc (actually I think this is where all this "just run premade heroic/mythic groups" started, all that elitism. Anyway, people did quit for all these and many other reasons, Cata was bad, admit it.
Cata killed all wraith babys and disproved that classic content was hard.
I started playing retail midway MoP, and I am kinda shocked that they used to release multiple raids at expansion launch (~18:00). I legit had to look it up, because I couldn't believe it lol