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.
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 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.
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.
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.
@@Laito21 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
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
@@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.
I think transmogs are a positive addition overall to the game. However, I miss being able to tell how powerful an enemy player was just by their appearance.
That's the only issue I have with transmog. The fact that it revives old content is a blessing for the content, I loved running old raids with my guild back in the day. Maybe, to still tell is someone is powerful or not, there could be a restriction, making raid and pvp gear transmogable only, so if someone has the last set, or a nice transmog, you can say he's powerful. I wouldn't be bothered to wear miss matched gear if I was only equiped with random dungeon blues, and had to earn the transmogable gear to look nice.
I have long thought color of armor should be changeable. It would be color to make sets match but keep the overall appearance. That way the power level could be deduced and people would still look good (or not). Though… the vanilla aesthetic is kinda cool imo haha
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
@@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.
@@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.
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
Cataclysm was the start of the end and MoP was the ultimate killing blow. Cataclysm made talent trees stupid, MoP killed them. Cataclysm started with ridiculous race comboes that make no sense, MoP went all out by introducing Pandas and Monks, the most ridiculous race aesthetically and the most ridiculous class aesthetically up to that point. The huge and I mean HUGE plus that cataclysm does have is the fact that there's not only goblins, but also 10 player raiding drops the same gear that 25 player raiding does. It's much easier to find 9 other people that you vibe with than it is to find 24 other people. It's much easier to find 9 other people close to your own level of skill than it is to find 24 other people. 10 player raids that had (roughly) the same difficulty and same items that 25 player raids have was always a great design choice, while surely a nightmare to balance, it's just a lot more fun and enjoyable to play with a smaller group of people who you enjoy playing with, than a larger group of people with some people you enjoy playing with, others that you don't. I don't think cataclysm is the point where I'll stop playing WoW classic, I just know for a fact that I'm not gonna be playing MoP. Snapshotting gets removed? Talent trees become talent rows? Not to mention a bunch of abilities get removed from classes so that they can put them in said talent rows. Not to mention MoP is just an environment that I never found visually appealing. The Sha influence being the big bad is kinda cool, but everything being different shades of grey, black or white is visually not very appealing. The rest of the world is also way too colourful, obviously to create an extreme contrast between Sha influence and the rest of Pandaria, but it's way too over the top. And then MoP is riddled with "hihi funny silly" questlines that felt like it's been a year of bring your child to work day.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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 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.
@@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.
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.
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
At the point of Cata's release, the game as a whole had multiple "generations" of players that were cultivated by game design. The game design of Cata essentially put all of these generations at odds with the game design. People were used to dungeons that were a face roll. Yet the core demographic that hated the faceroll dungeons of Wrath's design should've loved Cata's dungeon design. However, even though they hated the design direction for dungeons in In Wrath (especially post 3.1), they didn't really realise that the dungeons per hour efficiency allowed very rapid gearing and catchup. Cata's dungeon design was a road block. Likewise, players who only knew of Wrath's zerg dungeon design were also at odds, just in a more direct manner. The content "outskilled" them a essentially shut them away from content that used to be designed for them. A very similar thing happened with the raids. Guilds that smashed through 3.0 raids and 10player versions of the later raids were unable to achieve meaningful progress in 4.0's raids, giving a sense of failure that they never had before (because the "harder" raids of TBC were not even attempted, it wasn't part of "their" content). Additionally, the level of difficulty at launch for Heroic Dungeons was compounded by the mana regen changes. Not one healer in my guild enjoyed 4.0 dungeons. It required raid level gearing before healers started to feel happy with mana regen, but by that time everyone was overgearing the dungeons and the difficulty that people wanted was no longer relevant. Which is an obvious side effect of the old gearing meta of dungeons only being there as a stepping stone for raiding. The lasting memory of 4.0 dungeons was to get past it as fast as possible. On a personal level, going in to Cata, this was the most hyped I ever was for an expansion. Deathwing, Twilight's Hammer and world updates were all things I wanted. Blizzard mishandled all of them. There wasn't a single character that wasn't ruined by the story and dialogue of Cata. Deathwing, Alexstraza, Thrall. When the only characters that were safe were the ones that were barely touched, that's a problem. Even the butchering of Yrel and Hellscream in WoD paled to Cata's character mishandling, and that was an incomplete expansion with out one real content patch. It took until Shadowlands before we had worse handling of characters en masse. Twilight's Hammer was also as foddery as fodder can get. "Leaders" of the cult would appear with no backstory in raids. Hell, speaking of raids, there wasn't even any story to instigate us heading in to Blackwing Descent. We went there because "Black Dragons". No story exists to direct us to story Nefarion. Shame because the story telling inside _that_ raid was awesome, far better tha Bation of Twilight, which *did* provide agency for players heading in there. Then there was the method of updating the old world. Tearing out the pages of pre-TBC lore ruined the feel of the good revamped stories. Why the hell would a new player feel any attachment to the line of corpses on the Darkshore beach? They never met any of them. Existing players knew them, they were part of our first experience. New players? Not at all. Plus, over time, even existing players will have an exponential decline in attachment as time from the original experience goes on. Its natural. But if rerolling a new character allows to re-experience those characters again, then it rekindles those attachments. Blizzard over extended themselves with the revamp. Many zones feeling incomplete or padded out with reusing pre-TBC stories again rather than expanding of the world building of a zone with new quests. Was the issue with the Furbold in Ashenvale caused by events of Cataclysm? Were they just never resolved in vanilla? As minor as these events were, they were still events, and our efforts during Vanilla felt wasted when the issues we resolved clearly weren't resolved. We were just farts in the wind. 1-60 needed attention by the time we reached Cata, but those stories should've remained as pre-TBC stories with additions and improved quest flow. All the effort in updating the world should've been applied to the 80-85 experience (which should've been 80-90). Seeing the updates to the world and the aftermath was crucial, but the game's story needed to show that journey, not overwrite it. Under utilising the "terrain phasing" tech that was being bragged about or just having a 1-60 version EK and Kalimdor with no flying and a separate 80-90 version with flying would've also made the new zones that were introduced actually feel like part of the world, either would've been a better way to handle things. That failed integration (the complaint was how the new zones felt isolated and tacked on) was also a criticism of Shadowland's levelling zones. Zones floating around on their own does not feel like a world. It feels like a lobby.
As a multiclass healer I loved the dificulty of 4.0 dungeons as the struggle felt amazing, at last game required great level of mana management and awareness. Made people recognize great healers and gave great sensation of accomplishment ehen finishing the hc dungeon succesfully. This made you network more and socialize with people and usually lead your group to play again together in the future. All and all it was golden experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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
@@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
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
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.
@@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.
The problem with Cata is that a lot of its new content is the new zones and the new leveling. But when you combine that with heirlooms that make all the content trivial and the flying everywhere that bypasses most of the geography it feels much smaller than it really is. Now, i do believe that the first patch and second patch raiding content is insanely good and contrary to most people i really enjoy the difficulty since it makes every gear upgrade and skills acquired feel like progression.
Yup, I was complaining to my best friend that the entire world felt way smaller than it use to. At first I thought it was because flying, but they actually shrunk the scale of the world.
The Ettin fight and Cho'Gall in BoT were great encounters on heroic imo. My guild cleared about half the first raid tier of content on heroic before burning out as people became disillusioned with how the game played.
@@b4rs629 Do people enjoy running for 10 mins for a quest? I tried Wotlk. I run in thunder blast for 20 mins for a quest. and had to go back that made me quit. retail is good enough
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.
@@CowmanUK 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.
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.
This is so nostalgic, glad someone feels a similar way, I would add that Cata is the last "Classic" expansion because of the lore, everything in Cata has been set up from early lore/Vanilla and WC3, unlike MOP which was a complete asspull, although I've heard the writers managed to salvage something out of the pandering to Chinese stereotypes
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.
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
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
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 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!
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.
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.
The first 2 weeks of the expansion for Heroics was amazing, it brought back CC, which Wrath got rid of. But people bitched, and boom, nerfed and bam, no more CC needed. Overall Cata was a very good expansion until the last raid tier which the raid was terrible, right after an amazing Tier 12 Firelands raid. And even the addition of LFR for that last tier was w/e as it didn't affect actual raiders for the most part. But again, the only real drawback for Cata for me (played since week 2 of classic through until Shadowlands when i finally quit, before Shadowlands came out) was that the last raid and especially last boss of the raid was garbage. And I know I always get a lot of hate for this, but I liked Cata far more than Wrath. Wrath was the only expansion that I liked so little I stopped playing 2 times during the expansion. And the story of it was one I looked forward to more than any expansion as I played through Warcraft 1-3 and I loved the lich king story. So the fact that it's my favorite story (because of warcraft and not WoW) and I still didn't like the expansion that much says a lot. Edit: This post was made 3 mins before you got to the raid content :)
Classic Andy here, I absolutely loved Cataclysm. I had a lot of fun, it wasn't boring leveling up, only took 5 levels, albeit those 5 levels still required tons of XP, the numbers weren't ridiculous and things felt mostly well balanced.
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.
@@rattlehead999 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.
It was actually the first expansion done right by blizzard however they still messed up with the gear big time. They fixed that last error finally in warlords of dreanor but by then they wer already way to far out of line with everything else. And that is also blizzards main problem, cataclysm was an expension off wrath of the lich king. It didn't do the things right that classic did nor what tbc did right, they only kept what wotlk did right in the game. Everything that made classic so great, everything that made tbc so great, it all had already been removed to never be seen again. They can still put in pvp tittles in retail and classic and everyone would love it and play pvp once again. But that also means they have to look into balancing in retail and then you see the game has never been made for pvp. Pvp was just a afterthought, just as so many things in the game, nothing gets a bigger picture, it just are a lot of lose ends.
Cata has been my favorite expansion for years now - it made leveling enjoyable w/o being meaningless, great PvP, and proper difficult heroics. Hyper underrated and I’m glad that all this talk is pointing to it coming back. ❤
no one talks about the best thing about Cata levelling - quest reward armor actually looked good and had whole sets you could put together in the same zone.
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
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!
People actually forget about the massive amount of job to make all the azeroth locations borders look nice. Flying in Azeroth was only introduced in Cata, and in pre-Cata Azeroth was full of holes, missing textures, rough texture borders with no transmission and so on. I’ve done some map editing and I’ve seen all of this xD
In some Wrath servers that still have the priest levitate bug, I usually visit those "between-zone" areas. Feels very strange to be outside the intended game. Kinda like you're breaking the 4th wall in-game and having a glimpse backstage.
"no idea why they would remove reforging" well if you did a little research you would find its because dual spec, someone who pvp and raided or was needing to change role for a fight or just respec would have to spends thousands of gold on reforging
I started playing in the BC Era and I never understood why everyone said "Cata was bad"... No it was'nt. Until Dragonsould it was amazing. Even the Dragonsoul Dungeons and Raid were fun! Its sad we cant get WoW like this nowadays. It was so immersive overall. It never felt like you get punished for playing the game like nowadays. It was such a fun game!
dragon soul was a fantastic raid, the problem was no guild (as far as i recall) beat spine on heroic until they finally dropped a nerf patch. so many guilds wasted weeks and weeks on that because it was overtuned. but overall cata raid mechanics and environment were great. firelands was a nice transition away from dragons and stuff
“Until Dragon Soul it was amazing” Errrrrrrr I remember playing it in a Heroic raiding guild, The daily quest content in Molten Front got really boring. I remember our raiders not wanting to do it on their alts because they hated it. MoP launch wasn’t much better, but at least the zones and lore was well done there. All the lore content was THRALL. People called him Green Jesus, it was lazy and overwhelming. Cata was rushed, people at the time complained it didn’t have an endgame and there was nothing to do (there wasn’t). Just Molten Front dailies, doing your weekly LFG Justice cap to buy BoEs to sell on the AH WOOP, and doing old zone questing achievements. Yayyyyy….
@HoloWitch I’d second this. I honestly don’t think the opinions of people who didn’t truly experience the expansion at live, as in clearing Heroic (now Mythic lmao) or getting top 5% of PvP arena participation, have validity due to exactly a lack of experience. If you just logged and did LFR, what difference is there between you and someone going back and levelling through it now? You don’t remember the changes, the state of it etc.
@HoloWitch I was raiding HC, I was raiding pretty much in WotLK and Cata. I was in the 9th german guild to ever front the LK, so pls don't tell me about beeing the casual audience they tried to catch, cause im clearly not. Cata was not as bad as its reputation. It released with tons of content, two raids, dungeons hard asf. And this was the reason people dislike it. It was not casual enough. After dungeons got nerfed it was allready to late and people left cause of gearing beeing to hard. So it is more like the opposite of YOUR statement.
@@platexproductions i felt like i had plenty to do in cata with just one main and an alt.. especially with the baradon hold and tol barad shit at the start. i dont pay attention to lore or give a shit about questing or leveling when a new xpac drops so i cant speak to that but i felt like cata was great, firelands was a blast even just doing trash runs with my guild pre-raid. arena pvp was also at its peak during this time and mop( tho i stopped playing in mop i watched arena players on twitch still). i stopped paying attention to retail post-wod to be fair but i can tell it went steadily downhill after every arena glad quit and now the scene is dead outside classic and awc content). personally would be stoked to play this but i dont think i have the time. maybe if i buy a level boost to 80 if they offer that but i hate giving blizz money for shit i feel they should have never added to the cash shop to begin with. feels hypocritical lmao
What killed cata= many things. 1. Shrinking raid sizes from 25 to 10. A lot of dps in major guilds were literally just cut out and many of those players just quit the game. Most classes capable of tanking/healing still just wanted to dps but many major guilds liked the idea of shrinking for having an easier controlled raid. 30/40% of the people quit because of lack in inclusivity. I remember being forced to tank (was fine) then many dps in our guild just logged in for raiding and realized they were never getting in after a month and just never came back. Some found new guilds but we were on a smaller server so there was no real choice. Literally 40% of the guild unsubbed a couple months in. 2. Balance from 10 and 25 was absolutely totally fucking fucked. Some of the worst balance I've ever seen ever. (it caused my guild at the start to disband). I could making a 5 hour video on it. 3. Outside of heroic 5mans there wasn't much to do except maybe pvp (5man were very overtuned compared to WotLK)(everyone complained and said they wanted dungeons to be more challenging, blizz delivered then everyone complained about the difficulty) Which is why Cata was one of the largest pvp expansions ever. Not everyone liked pvp though..... 4. For many long term WC3 players killing Arthas was just "the end" of the storyline from WC3 and lore wise many players didn't care much after that. (which is why LK/Arthas is still the most nostalgic shit ever from WoW) Story wise from WC3 WotLK was "the end" of the natural story.
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.
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.
Cataclysm wasnt bad and it still holds up today. The story line from silverpine to western plague lands is still some of the best writing i have experienced in wow. I also fondly remember running around tolbarad farming leprechaun gold aka pyrite and farming zin rokh while listening to disturbed. The problems i had were some of my all time favorite zones that had depth in classic were destroyed and simplified in cata. Duskwood was a massive step down it was efficient sure but it didnt have the absolute terror the original one had. Desolace lacked the depth and gritty darkness. Feralas lacked the primal nature. Tanaris lacked the mystery it once had. Still fun to level through but not as immersive. The problems really started at max level. Dungeons were hard you needed to cc mobs i remember being popular as lock as i could fear one mob, succ sap another, and banish. But if you lacked cc it was hard to get groups as a dps. I remember spending 2 hours once in deadmines to complete it was fun at the time but having to farm that over and over no thanks. Same thing with raiding 10 and 25 man now shared the same loot table so blizz buffed the difficulty of 10 man. What was once casual beer drinking runs became very hard over night. I remember it split my guild between those that could play and those that couldnt and those that couldnt left to form their own guild which disbanded and they quit because they couldnt keep up with the harder content. I miss some of those guys fun to talk to but not super coordinated. Not enough end game content outside of raid logging sure tmog is great but only having 5 levels and only 5 zones made it feel that much smaller. Should of made some of the zone revamps max level zones. Cut content was also another major issue. Im still salty today that the raid in vashjr was cut and we had to wait a decade to legion and then play a shaman to find out what happened. The war of the ancients raid would of been amazing but that was cut and turned into a 5 man. Firelands is the most overrated raid of the expansion. I played a lock during FL you couldnt see traps when you went into demon form on the dog boss, spider boss was just kill adds downstairs, rock boss was just killing adds, bird boss was once again you got it killing adds, demon boss was just moving every so slightly. Sure the fights were engaging if you were the one choosen to do the mechanics. The caster legendary caused too much drama in my guild and was too much of a boost. It sucked having to reclear firelands over and over for friends not for upgrades but just so they could do more dps on current progression content. Some of the first times i actually faked being sick not to have to raid never though id say that. Even toc with having 4 difficulties was at least quick with engaging bosses fl was a slog if you were aoeing adds. After playing every expansion id have to rank it in the very middle. Its not dumpster tier like wod, shadowlands and bfa. But its not god tier like bc, wotlk, mop, legion. I fondly remember playing with my demo lock, blood dk, and surv hunter. It was time well spent and i would do it again if i could go back.
First half of Cata was great, especially launch. I loved the actually challenging pre-nerf Heroics and launch tier. It's the latter half where it failed with Dragon Soul and introduction of LFR.
Dragon soul is still a very solid raid, it's infinitely better than trial of the crusader or the first tier of MoP. And yes LFR should have been a regular raid difficulty and it should have been like the 10 man Normal in WotLK.
I think where cata fails is in its sense of progression and lack of individuality. Before Cata, finally getting your felgaurd pet as a demo lock or earth shield as a resto shaman felt so satisfying. You'd look forward to breakpoints coming up with excitement, and most of that is taken away in Cata as once you hit level 10 you got all the big fun stuff. Moreover, you can't get too creative with your talents. You can't makeup some hipster like a 16/5/11 talent tree and see how it performs. Instead, you pick survival hunter and that's all your customization done with. You're just the same as every other person who's your spec. Then, when you get to the endgame. Everything became a little too homogenized. Everyone had interrupts, most classes had gap closers, and most classes had a long CC. This was especially annoying in arena. Even the class mechanics themselves became too similar. Paladins with combo points? Every healer with equal capability to AOE heal or single target heal? Nobody had an sort of unique identity. Finally, raid finder, but I don't think I need to beat a dead horse on that one since most people already know its flaws. Wow never really had a point where it became modernized. It was just a slow chipping away over time, and each person has their own breakpoint for when wow officially became "modern". For some it's MOP. Others, it's Cata. Hell, even others it's TBC. But one thing is for certain, as time went on people just got sick of the game. No game is going to be fun and fresh forever. It's just the nature of things.
I just leveled an Enhancement Shaman in WOTLK and waiting for those breakpoints in the leveling process was painfully awful. I had to get to level 50 or so before ANY of my talent points felt meaningful. It's bad design. Also "making up your own build" with the old talent trees wasn't really a thing. Almost no one ever did that. You go to Icy Veins and follow the build. Could you deviate a couple points? Sure, I guess. But no on does. The "freedom" of old talent trees is not a thing past like level 40, regardless of how much people want to say it is. Also, I don't think every class having proper tools to deal with things is a bad thing. This is what made it so that you CAN play any class without feeling like you're fucking useless or just holding your team back. Before Cata there were many specs you still just couldn't play in actual end game progression because they were abhorrently bad. Giving every class the tools to deal with most situations is key to making sure any class is playable.
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'
@@belstar1128 That's MoP. Cata was easier than TBC and Vanilla, and slightly easier than WotLK, because you got more items while leveling up, but the zones were made to be completed from 1-60, though TBC and WotLK are shorter than they were in their respective expansions. Cata is still threatening if you don't have heirlooms and/or aren't decked out in dungeon gear. Cata is also when low level dungeon gear became good and powerful, they didn't compensate for that.
@@rattlehead999 No it was way easier than even wrath. but it depended on your class since they didn't care about basic balance before max level. some classes where totally overpowered like paladin. but levelling a warrior was harder but still easy compared to wrath.
@@belstar1128 Maybe, I remember that you couldn't just grab a pack of 10 mobs and mow them down like in MoP. The problem is that if they make it harder, then leveling would take way too long and then they have to remake the items too, to have a spike in power every so often, instead of a linear progression.
One of the main reasons why reforging had to go was due to the reliant on ask mr robot and determining how players would have to reforge their entire gear on gaining any upgrade. This problem was mainly caused due to hit and expertise. With hit and expertise gone, there is no reason why it can't be brought back.
Personally I think everyone's fav expansion is based on their personal experience (guild, raiding, friends, etc) they had during that expansion. Cata was my favorite before everything got dumbed down with talents in MoP.
I think there are objective factors that make expansions worse but this is definitely a huge point. for most people Legion was amazing and whatnot, for me it was the addon where depression kicked my ass so hard I had breakdowns in the middle of bossfights so I remember it as the sadness addon xD it's all tainted by feeling generally horrible all the time. it was also the first addon where I struggled to find a guild with a functional community (made a mistake by leaving my wod guild because they struggled with members. so I had friends but we struggled to fill our mythic raids. I should have helped recruit instead of leaving)
I started playing WoW in 2005. And I remember Cata and MoP being this period of my WoW journey where I logged in the longest and played the most. In Cata, it was exploring, finding those hidden out of the way places added since flying was added for the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, checking out the new zones, and all the lore theories and future expansion speculations that me and my friends made. I also liked seeing Garrosh, this character whose journey I've seen throughout TBC and WotLK, get some character development and try and become a good Warchief. As someone who enjoys Chinese mythology, and whose favorite hero in Warcraft 3: TFT was the Pandaren Brewmaster, MoP just felt like it was made for me. At least at the beginning. My major complaint about MoP was that the character developement of Garrosh was tossed out the window. In Cataclysm, Garrosh tries to be more like Thrall, trying to be honorable. He literally killed one of his commanders cause the dude bombed an area full of civilians. He was pissed off when he saw what Sylvanas was doing with the plague and the Val'kyr. And then MoP was like: Ya know all that cool character developement? Yeeeaaah, we're ignoring all that. We're going to have him order bombings of civilians and become a tyrant. He's tossing honor out the window cause I mean, come on, why would an orc who was raised to think honor was more important above everything else, to the point that he felt he was honorless because of his father taking the demon blood and kicking off the first Warcraft rts game, care about honor? Honor is for losers. Garrosh is a WINNER. So murder all the civilians and be an ultimate racist. It was seeing Garrosh have all nuance and character developement stripped from him that lead to my ultimate decline in hours spent. Like, the further into MoP we got and the more terrible he became...the more and more I just stopped caring about WoW. I had been with Garrosh since the beginning, met him in Outland, helped him in Northrend, saw him grow as a character, only to see it all be ripped away in MoP. Here's this character I've been with since his introduction, whose whole thing was honor, and they turned him into an honorless scumbag simply because they needed a bad guy for the end of expansion? And I'm not saying he was perfect. He was still a Warmonger. But at least in Cata he TRIED to act with honor. Like, even though he started his wars with the Alliance, he didn't want to kill civilians because there was no honor in it. MoP just felt like a character assassination. Like Blizzard got bored with him and decided to just make everyone hate him because.....well....for no real reason.
I loved mop too but as someone who started playing in mid mop, I actually saw garrosh after stone mountains after it in orgrimmar and then i remembered him from earlier when I was max level and I was like what happened I thought he was scary but cool
Having recently played classic wrath to 80 and going for loremaster in retail, the cata revamp is a god send. People nostalgic for old world quests either dont remember or are conflating the fun they had with friends with the game ay they were doing. Go queat through both versions and tell me classic quests and zones are better. This sint talking about the combat or leveling experience, just the quest and zone content itself
I actually dug Cata. It has some fun zones, some cool dungeons, hard raids, and my lock was a step closer to the Mists of Pandaria pinnacle of class design.
In cata, you’re gonna see people who truly enjoy raiding and doing dungeons love this xpac. This first two raiding tiers are excellent and like other comments have mentioned, the heroics are engaging, challenging and provide meaningful upgrades leading into the raid
I remember a lot of people hated Cata when it first launched too since it was incredibly broken. We lost an entire raid (1/2 a raid tier) because of the sheer number of bugs and poorly tuned fights (especially on 10m) that were around at launch (yes Blizz said it was because they "didn't like the direction the art style was going" but that was just their excuse imo).
I remember the path to the spider boss in Firelands being bugged on patch day, but only on the german client (wasn't a problem for me since I changed to english when they started to translate NAMES) - so half of our raid had to switch language and download some stuff before we could go on - /general in raid was fun that day.
The criticism of Transmorg is that it hides what gear you are using. It hides your spec, it hides your gear level, it hides natural achievements such as: Killing Cthun, Having Full T3. its primarily a PVP thing but also a good analog for achievements and inspect (which you cant with your enermies). You still cannot understand that it dumbs down the game? No value into learning the different gear sets and weapons by heart. Coz everyone transmorgs and hides their true power / gear. You know what the solution to Transmorg could be? That gear and content didnt become completely irellevant with the next major patch. THIS.. is the issue plauging wow and the reason for so many of these extra systems like Transmorg. Imagine a world where T1, could be raided on Catalysm difficulty, granting as-close-as-possible-equal level gear when compared to previous patch top tier gear. People would farm the old world, just like they do for transmorg, only difference is that they actually WEAR it. And choose 1-2-3 sets that is "THEM". Instead of having a list of 9999 different items they can imitate at any time.
I absolutely loved Cata. It was such a fun time in WoW. I remember having two fully decked out characters with arena gear. Capping every week and doing Tol Barad dailies, shit was just fun. People hate on it for no reason.
I love cata but the hate is just, the announcement of 10 man raiding with the same loot as 25 split many guilds, but when the raid went live and people saw the difficulty of 10 man raiding so many guild simply broke after weeks of no progress, honestly I understand how people can hate it
@@stylesheetra9411 That's fair honestly, when you put it that way, tbf I didn't remember that and must've been unaware at the time as I was strictly a PVP player until Legion. But yeah that sounds ass so I understand now.
Cata regarding the world and quests isn't bad. Transmog was awesome. The class re-design was the worst part and this is when they started adding systems on systems. A lot of us liked the talent trees as they were in vanilla/tbc/wotlk.
@@juiicer well some of us like classes with no combo points but then GC went and said I think combo points = skill and changed things forever. For example ret pala, warlock. I don't like going jab jab jab punch sorry bro. It's not a horrific take it's not fun. It's bad design.
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.
Cata was the first time they experimented with classes, like the sprint that cost energy but has no cooldown for rogues. That shit was busted but fun af.
I remember Cata like it was yesterday (even though it was 2010-2012). There's some things about Cata, and most of the love/hate actually have little to almost nothing to do with mechanics changes/class changes, etc, etc... that's a red herring. On launch, Cata was pretty-well received... the raids were really good, the dungeons were good, the world quests were good, the "getting flamed by Deathwing" was fun... pretty much everything about Cata on launch was well-loved... if there was a hold-back or something that people as a whole didn't like was... well... gonna be honest hear... it was hard on casuals who didn't really know what they were doing. If you were considered a "good healer" in WotLK, you were in for a rude awakening in Cata if you just always spammed your most powerful heal, which you could do in WotLK. Whole raiding guilds were destroyed when a lot of players that thought they were good found out they weren't when some of the mechanics changed in Cata and you had to conserve mana, and make better calls... that's just one example... another is "needing to CC and not just pulling whole rooms"... that was another Cata-thing that wasn't needed in WotLK. Dungeons and raids got harder in Cata for those who couldn't make the adjustment from WotLK... I think this first issue was the starting of the downhill subs that happened during Cata... the more casual players who just mashed buttons = win in WotLK couldn't do that anymore in Cata and jumped ship. I'd say this change was the first "negative" thing about Cata, though it's all a matter of perspective of-course. The second, and probably longest-lasting "negative" impression of Cata... as usual, isn't about how Cata started, but how it ended. Unlike the opening raids of Cata, the final raid of Cata... Dragon Soul... was unimaginative, boring and schlock full of long repetitive RP's you couldn't skip. Worse, as with many expansions, the time between "final raid" and "next expansion" was pretty darn long... which always upsets people... but if you combine a long wait time with "stuck with a terrible, boring raid", it's a lot different than being stuck with something like ICC for a long time... ICC was always fun, Dragon Soul was not. So, people have a lasting memory of sitting around, waiting for the next expansion and only having DS as relative content... that left a long and sour taste in people's mouths and went a long way in erasing the memory of what was otherwise, a pretty solid expansion.
Great comment, watching some old Cata content in preparation for Cata classic and I think blizzard will address some of these comments, especially dragon soul lasting for felt like years, I really got into WoW during Cata ( and therefore very excited for classic ) and I agree DS was tough for the wrong reasons but overall the xpac was fun as hell and I think as we revisit it and get into pre patch we might see a Cata redemption arc
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 have extremely fond memories of Cataclysm. From the leveling (and getting to witness Deathwing setting fire to an entire zone) in really well-designed and fun zones, to working on the pretty challenging heroic dungeon achievements with my group, and the first few raids that were honestly really good. Plus, Deathwing was always my favorite Warcraft villain. I had to stop playing early in Firelands, so I would definitely play Cataclassic if they did release it, especially if they make some small improvements to it.
@@Soleryth Yeah I remember the fight being pretty lackluster. Even despite that he's still one of the coolest villains, I haven't played since MoP but he's the only MMO villain I can think of that actively wanders the world and would gank levelling players lol. Real villain energy right there
Cata was more or less the last days of 10 man raiding guilds. I'll always miss it for that. I knew so many raiders who never raided again once 10 man guilds died off when Mythic came in to the game. Compared to how the game has been since WoD I would take Cata any day easily. A lot of the classes were really fun to play and the end game loop and content was pretty damn solid overall.
Gold selling website interview out now: ruclips.net/video/b7ORIRgCXp8/видео.html
That game of thrones reference was pretty accurate. Never watched more than 2 episodes of that boring shiz
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.
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
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
@@Laito21 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
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
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.
I think transmogs are a positive addition overall to the game.
However, I miss being able to tell how powerful an enemy player was just by their appearance.
That's the only issue I have with transmog. The fact that it revives old content is a blessing for the content, I loved running old raids with my guild back in the day.
Maybe, to still tell is someone is powerful or not, there could be a restriction, making raid and pvp gear transmogable only, so if someone has the last set, or a nice transmog, you can say he's powerful.
I wouldn't be bothered to wear miss matched gear if I was only equiped with random dungeon blues, and had to earn the transmogable gear to look nice.
I have long thought color of armor should be changeable. It would be color to make sets match but keep the overall appearance. That way the power level could be deduced and people would still look good (or not).
Though… the vanilla aesthetic is kinda cool imo haha
should have an optional setting in-game. disable or enable other players transmog. simple ass fix imho, Or disable transmog in battlegrounds/arena
@@briggs5569 that’s a better idea
I think people should think twice before ganking someone personally.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Cataclysm was the start of the end and MoP was the ultimate killing blow.
Cataclysm made talent trees stupid, MoP killed them.
Cataclysm started with ridiculous race comboes that make no sense, MoP went all out by introducing Pandas and Monks, the most ridiculous race aesthetically and the most ridiculous class aesthetically up to that point.
The huge and I mean HUGE plus that cataclysm does have is the fact that there's not only goblins, but also 10 player raiding drops the same gear that 25 player raiding does.
It's much easier to find 9 other people that you vibe with than it is to find 24 other people. It's much easier to find 9 other people close to your own level of skill than it is to find 24 other people. 10 player raids that had (roughly) the same difficulty and same items that 25 player raids have was always a great design choice, while surely a nightmare to balance, it's just a lot more fun and enjoyable to play with a smaller group of people who you enjoy playing with, than a larger group of people with some people you enjoy playing with, others that you don't.
I don't think cataclysm is the point where I'll stop playing WoW classic, I just know for a fact that I'm not gonna be playing MoP. Snapshotting gets removed? Talent trees become talent rows? Not to mention a bunch of abilities get removed from classes so that they can put them in said talent rows.
Not to mention MoP is just an environment that I never found visually appealing. The Sha influence being the big bad is kinda cool, but everything being different shades of grey, black or white is visually not very appealing. The rest of the world is also way too colourful, obviously to create an extreme contrast between Sha influence and the rest of Pandaria, but it's way too over the top.
And then MoP is riddled with "hihi funny silly" questlines that felt like it's been a year of bring your child to work day.
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.
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?
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
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
Cata killed all wraith babys and disproved that classic content was hard.
I really appreciate the amount of effort that went into making this video. Great job!
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.
Put 10k hours into cata, retail and private servers combined, absolutely loved that expansion
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 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
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
@@definitelyhexed wow crazy man enjoy your pixels
@@rickroll9705
Do your own research, I don't care
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
At the point of Cata's release, the game as a whole had multiple "generations" of players that were cultivated by game design. The game design of Cata essentially put all of these generations at odds with the game design.
People were used to dungeons that were a face roll. Yet the core demographic that hated the faceroll dungeons of Wrath's design should've loved Cata's dungeon design. However, even though they hated the design direction for dungeons in In Wrath (especially post 3.1), they didn't really realise that the dungeons per hour efficiency allowed very rapid gearing and catchup. Cata's dungeon design was a road block. Likewise, players who only knew of Wrath's zerg dungeon design were also at odds, just in a more direct manner. The content "outskilled" them a essentially shut them away from content that used to be designed for them. A very similar thing happened with the raids. Guilds that smashed through 3.0 raids and 10player versions of the later raids were unable to achieve meaningful progress in 4.0's raids, giving a sense of failure that they never had before (because the "harder" raids of TBC were not even attempted, it wasn't part of "their" content).
Additionally, the level of difficulty at launch for Heroic Dungeons was compounded by the mana regen changes. Not one healer in my guild enjoyed 4.0 dungeons. It required raid level gearing before healers started to feel happy with mana regen, but by that time everyone was overgearing the dungeons and the difficulty that people wanted was no longer relevant. Which is an obvious side effect of the old gearing meta of dungeons only being there as a stepping stone for raiding. The lasting memory of 4.0 dungeons was to get past it as fast as possible.
On a personal level, going in to Cata, this was the most hyped I ever was for an expansion. Deathwing, Twilight's Hammer and world updates were all things I wanted. Blizzard mishandled all of them.
There wasn't a single character that wasn't ruined by the story and dialogue of Cata. Deathwing, Alexstraza, Thrall. When the only characters that were safe were the ones that were barely touched, that's a problem. Even the butchering of Yrel and Hellscream in WoD paled to Cata's character mishandling, and that was an incomplete expansion with out one real content patch. It took until Shadowlands before we had worse handling of characters en masse. Twilight's Hammer was also as foddery as fodder can get. "Leaders" of the cult would appear with no backstory in raids. Hell, speaking of raids, there wasn't even any story to instigate us heading in to Blackwing Descent. We went there because "Black Dragons". No story exists to direct us to story Nefarion. Shame because the story telling inside _that_ raid was awesome, far better tha Bation of Twilight, which *did* provide agency for players heading in there.
Then there was the method of updating the old world. Tearing out the pages of pre-TBC lore ruined the feel of the good revamped stories. Why the hell would a new player feel any attachment to the line of corpses on the Darkshore beach? They never met any of them. Existing players knew them, they were part of our first experience. New players? Not at all. Plus, over time, even existing players will have an exponential decline in attachment as time from the original experience goes on. Its natural. But if rerolling a new character allows to re-experience those characters again, then it rekindles those attachments.
Blizzard over extended themselves with the revamp. Many zones feeling incomplete or padded out with reusing pre-TBC stories again rather than expanding of the world building of a zone with new quests. Was the issue with the Furbold in Ashenvale caused by events of Cataclysm? Were they just never resolved in vanilla? As minor as these events were, they were still events, and our efforts during Vanilla felt wasted when the issues we resolved clearly weren't resolved. We were just farts in the wind.
1-60 needed attention by the time we reached Cata, but those stories should've remained as pre-TBC stories with additions and improved quest flow. All the effort in updating the world should've been applied to the 80-85 experience (which should've been 80-90). Seeing the updates to the world and the aftermath was crucial, but the game's story needed to show that journey, not overwrite it. Under utilising the "terrain phasing" tech that was being bragged about or just having a 1-60 version EK and Kalimdor with no flying and a separate 80-90 version with flying would've also made the new zones that were introduced actually feel like part of the world, either would've been a better way to handle things. That failed integration (the complaint was how the new zones felt isolated and tacked on) was also a criticism of Shadowland's levelling zones. Zones floating around on their own does not feel like a world. It feels like a lobby.
As a multiclass healer I loved the dificulty of 4.0 dungeons as the struggle felt amazing, at last game required great level of mana management and awareness. Made people recognize great healers and gave great sensation of accomplishment ehen finishing the hc dungeon succesfully. This made you network more and socialize with people and usually lead your group to play again together in the future. All and all it was golden experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
The problem with Cata is that a lot of its new content is the new zones and the new leveling. But when you combine that with heirlooms that make all the content trivial and the flying everywhere that bypasses most of the geography it feels much smaller than it really is. Now, i do believe that the first patch and second patch raiding content is insanely good and contrary to most people i really enjoy the difficulty since it makes every gear upgrade and skills acquired feel like progression.
Yup, I was complaining to my best friend that the entire world felt way smaller than it use to. At first I thought it was because flying, but they actually shrunk the scale of the world.
The Ettin fight and Cho'Gall in BoT were great encounters on heroic imo. My guild cleared about half the first raid tier of content on heroic before burning out as people became disillusioned with how the game played.
@@b4rs629 Do people enjoy running for 10 mins for a quest? I tried Wotlk. I run in thunder blast for 20 mins for a quest. and had to go back that made me quit. retail is good enough
I miss heroic dungeons being hard and actually having meaning to end game
And having dungeon tiers. Cats had new dungeons every tier.
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.
@@CowmanUK 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.
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.
This is so nostalgic, glad someone feels a similar way, I would add that Cata is the last "Classic" expansion because of the lore, everything in Cata has been set up from early lore/Vanilla and WC3, unlike MOP which was a complete asspull, although I've heard the writers managed to salvage something out of the pandering to Chinese stereotypes
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.
I loved Cata - Great expansion. I look forward to playing it in Classic & Hopefully w/ some minor changes to keep the community strong :D
I played near the end of Cata after having a long break and I absolutely loved leveling up my goblin. Fun times. :)
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
The first 2 weeks of the expansion for Heroics was amazing, it brought back CC, which Wrath got rid of. But people bitched, and boom, nerfed and bam, no more CC needed. Overall Cata was a very good expansion until the last raid tier which the raid was terrible, right after an amazing Tier 12 Firelands raid. And even the addition of LFR for that last tier was w/e as it didn't affect actual raiders for the most part. But again, the only real drawback for Cata for me (played since week 2 of classic through until Shadowlands when i finally quit, before Shadowlands came out) was that the last raid and especially last boss of the raid was garbage.
And I know I always get a lot of hate for this, but I liked Cata far more than Wrath. Wrath was the only expansion that I liked so little I stopped playing 2 times during the expansion. And the story of it was one I looked forward to more than any expansion as I played through Warcraft 1-3 and I loved the lich king story. So the fact that it's my favorite story (because of warcraft and not WoW) and I still didn't like the expansion that much says a lot.
Edit: This post was made 3 mins before you got to the raid content :)
Classic Andy here, I absolutely loved Cataclysm.
I had a lot of fun, it wasn't boring leveling up, only took 5 levels, albeit those 5 levels still required tons of XP, the numbers weren't ridiculous and things felt mostly well balanced.
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.
@@rattlehead999 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.
It was actually the first expansion done right by blizzard however they still messed up with the gear big time.
They fixed that last error finally in warlords of dreanor but by then they wer already way to far out of line with everything else.
And that is also blizzards main problem, cataclysm was an expension off wrath of the lich king.
It didn't do the things right that classic did nor what tbc did right, they only kept what wotlk did right in the game.
Everything that made classic so great, everything that made tbc so great, it all had already been removed to never be seen again.
They can still put in pvp tittles in retail and classic and everyone would love it and play pvp once again.
But that also means they have to look into balancing in retail and then you see the game has never been made for pvp.
Pvp was just a afterthought, just as so many things in the game, nothing gets a bigger picture, it just are a lot of lose ends.
Cata has been my favorite expansion for years now - it made leveling enjoyable w/o being meaningless, great PvP, and proper difficult heroics.
Hyper underrated and I’m glad that all this talk is pointing to it coming back. ❤
no one talks about the best thing about Cata levelling - quest reward armor actually looked good and had whole sets you could put together in the same zone.
@@rustyshackleford1465 Another good point, my dude. Also a lot of zones had cohesive stories w/o being overbearing.
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
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!
People actually forget about the massive amount of job to make all the azeroth locations borders look nice. Flying in Azeroth was only introduced in Cata, and in pre-Cata Azeroth was full of holes, missing textures, rough texture borders with no transmission and so on. I’ve done some map editing and I’ve seen all of this xD
In some Wrath servers that still have the priest levitate bug, I usually visit those "between-zone" areas. Feels very strange to be outside the intended game. Kinda like you're breaking the 4th wall in-game and having a glimpse backstage.
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
"no idea why they would remove reforging" well if you did a little research you would find its because dual spec, someone who pvp and raided or was needing to change role for a fight or just respec would have to spends thousands of gold on reforging
I started playing in the BC Era and I never understood why everyone said "Cata was bad"... No it was'nt. Until Dragonsould it was amazing. Even the Dragonsoul Dungeons and Raid were fun! Its sad we cant get WoW like this nowadays. It was so immersive overall. It never felt like you get punished for playing the game like nowadays. It was such a fun game!
dragon soul was a fantastic raid, the problem was no guild (as far as i recall) beat spine on heroic until they finally dropped a nerf patch. so many guilds wasted weeks and weeks on that because it was overtuned. but overall cata raid mechanics and environment were great. firelands was a nice transition away from dragons and stuff
“Until Dragon Soul it was amazing”
Errrrrrrr
I remember playing it in a Heroic raiding guild,
The daily quest content in Molten Front got really boring. I remember our raiders not wanting to do it on their alts because they hated it. MoP launch wasn’t much better, but at least the zones and lore was well done there. All the lore content was THRALL. People called him Green Jesus, it was lazy and overwhelming. Cata was rushed, people at the time complained it didn’t have an endgame and there was nothing to do (there wasn’t). Just Molten Front dailies, doing your weekly LFG Justice cap to buy BoEs to sell on the AH WOOP, and doing old zone questing achievements. Yayyyyy….
@HoloWitch I’d second this. I honestly don’t think the opinions of people who didn’t truly experience the expansion at live, as in clearing Heroic (now Mythic lmao) or getting top 5% of PvP arena participation, have validity due to exactly a lack of experience. If you just logged and did LFR, what difference is there between you and someone going back and levelling through it now? You don’t remember the changes, the state of it etc.
@HoloWitch I was raiding HC, I was raiding pretty much in WotLK and Cata.
I was in the 9th german guild to ever front the LK, so pls don't tell me about beeing the casual audience they tried to catch, cause im clearly not.
Cata was not as bad as its reputation. It released with tons of content, two raids, dungeons hard asf. And this was the reason people dislike it. It was not casual enough. After dungeons got nerfed it was allready to late and people left cause of gearing beeing to hard. So it is more like the opposite of YOUR statement.
@@platexproductions i felt like i had plenty to do in cata with just one main and an alt.. especially with the baradon hold and tol barad shit at the start. i dont pay attention to lore or give a shit about questing or leveling when a new xpac drops so i cant speak to that but i felt like cata was great, firelands was a blast even just doing trash runs with my guild pre-raid. arena pvp was also at its peak during this time and mop( tho i stopped playing in mop i watched arena players on twitch still). i stopped paying attention to retail post-wod to be fair but i can tell it went steadily downhill after every arena glad quit and now the scene is dead outside classic and awc content). personally would be stoked to play this but i dont think i have the time. maybe if i buy a level boost to 80 if they offer that but i hate giving blizz money for shit i feel they should have never added to the cash shop to begin with. feels hypocritical lmao
What killed cata= many things.
1. Shrinking raid sizes from 25 to 10. A lot of dps in major guilds were literally just cut out and many of those players just quit the game. Most classes capable of tanking/healing still just wanted to dps but many major guilds liked the idea of shrinking for having an easier controlled raid. 30/40% of the people quit because of lack in inclusivity. I remember being forced to tank (was fine) then many dps in our guild just logged in for raiding and realized they were never getting in after a month and just never came back. Some found new guilds but we were on a smaller server so there was no real choice. Literally 40% of the guild unsubbed a couple months in.
2. Balance from 10 and 25 was absolutely totally fucking fucked. Some of the worst balance I've ever seen ever. (it caused my guild at the start to disband). I could making a 5 hour video on it.
3. Outside of heroic 5mans there wasn't much to do except maybe pvp (5man were very overtuned compared to WotLK)(everyone complained and said they wanted dungeons to be more challenging, blizz delivered then everyone complained about the difficulty) Which is why Cata was one of the largest pvp expansions ever. Not everyone liked pvp though.....
4. For many long term WC3 players killing Arthas was just "the end" of the storyline from WC3 and lore wise many players didn't care much after that. (which is why LK/Arthas is still the most nostalgic shit ever from WoW) Story wise from WC3 WotLK was "the end" of the natural story.
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.
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.
Cataclysm wasnt bad and it still holds up today. The story line from silverpine to western plague lands is still some of the best writing i have experienced in wow. I also fondly remember running around tolbarad farming leprechaun gold aka pyrite and farming zin rokh while listening to disturbed. The problems i had were some of my all time favorite zones that had depth in classic were destroyed and simplified in cata. Duskwood was a massive step down it was efficient sure but it didnt have the absolute terror the original one had. Desolace lacked the depth and gritty darkness. Feralas lacked the primal nature. Tanaris lacked the mystery it once had. Still fun to level through but not as immersive.
The problems really started at max level. Dungeons were hard you needed to cc mobs i remember being popular as lock as i could fear one mob, succ sap another, and banish. But if you lacked cc it was hard to get groups as a dps. I remember spending 2 hours once in deadmines to complete it was fun at the time but having to farm that over and over no thanks. Same thing with raiding 10 and 25 man now shared the same loot table so blizz buffed the difficulty of 10 man. What was once casual beer drinking runs became very hard over night. I remember it split my guild between those that could play and those that couldnt and those that couldnt left to form their own guild which disbanded and they quit because they couldnt keep up with the harder content. I miss some of those guys fun to talk to but not super coordinated. Not enough end game content outside of raid logging sure tmog is great but only having 5 levels and only 5 zones made it feel that much smaller. Should of made some of the zone revamps max level zones.
Cut content was also another major issue. Im still salty today that the raid in vashjr was cut and we had to wait a decade to legion and then play a shaman to find out what happened. The war of the ancients raid would of been amazing but that was cut and turned into a 5 man. Firelands is the most overrated raid of the expansion. I played a lock during FL you couldnt see traps when you went into demon form on the dog boss, spider boss was just kill adds downstairs, rock boss was just killing adds, bird boss was once again you got it killing adds, demon boss was just moving every so slightly. Sure the fights were engaging if you were the one choosen to do the mechanics. The caster legendary caused too much drama in my guild and was too much of a boost. It sucked having to reclear firelands over and over for friends not for upgrades but just so they could do more dps on current progression content. Some of the first times i actually faked being sick not to have to raid never though id say that. Even toc with having 4 difficulties was at least quick with engaging bosses fl was a slog if you were aoeing adds.
After playing every expansion id have to rank it in the very middle. Its not dumpster tier like wod, shadowlands and bfa. But its not god tier like bc, wotlk, mop, legion. I fondly remember playing with my demo lock, blood dk, and surv hunter. It was time well spent and i would do it again if i could go back.
Great analysis man! Ive subscribed!
I'm personally excited for cata classic to come out. It was the retail version I played first when I was a young boy so now it's full of nostalgia.
First half of Cata was great, especially launch. I loved the actually challenging pre-nerf Heroics and launch tier. It's the latter half where it failed with Dragon Soul and introduction of LFR.
Dragon soul is still a very solid raid, it's infinitely better than trial of the crusader or the first tier of MoP. And yes LFR should have been a regular raid difficulty and it should have been like the 10 man Normal in WotLK.
@@rattlehead999 shouldve been deleted..
@@lanced2325 what should have been deleted?
I think where cata fails is in its sense of progression and lack of individuality.
Before Cata, finally getting your felgaurd pet as a demo lock or earth shield as a resto shaman felt so satisfying. You'd look forward to breakpoints coming up with excitement, and most of that is taken away in Cata as once you hit level 10 you got all the big fun stuff. Moreover, you can't get too creative with your talents. You can't makeup some hipster like a 16/5/11 talent tree and see how it performs. Instead, you pick survival hunter and that's all your customization done with. You're just the same as every other person who's your spec.
Then, when you get to the endgame. Everything became a little too homogenized. Everyone had interrupts, most classes had gap closers, and most classes had a long CC. This was especially annoying in arena. Even the class mechanics themselves became too similar. Paladins with combo points? Every healer with equal capability to AOE heal or single target heal? Nobody had an sort of unique identity.
Finally, raid finder, but I don't think I need to beat a dead horse on that one since most people already know its flaws.
Wow never really had a point where it became modernized. It was just a slow chipping away over time, and each person has their own breakpoint for when wow officially became "modern". For some it's MOP. Others, it's Cata. Hell, even others it's TBC. But one thing is for certain, as time went on people just got sick of the game. No game is going to be fun and fresh forever. It's just the nature of things.
I just leveled an Enhancement Shaman in WOTLK and waiting for those breakpoints in the leveling process was painfully awful. I had to get to level 50 or so before ANY of my talent points felt meaningful. It's bad design.
Also "making up your own build" with the old talent trees wasn't really a thing. Almost no one ever did that. You go to Icy Veins and follow the build. Could you deviate a couple points? Sure, I guess. But no on does. The "freedom" of old talent trees is not a thing past like level 40, regardless of how much people want to say it is.
Also, I don't think every class having proper tools to deal with things is a bad thing. This is what made it so that you CAN play any class without feeling like you're fucking useless or just holding your team back. Before Cata there were many specs you still just couldn't play in actual end game progression because they were abhorrently bad. Giving every class the tools to deal with most situations is key to making sure any class is playable.
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 😲🤩😛😛
Cata is awesome it fixed quest leveling for me, now you can read some nice stories and at least know WHY you need to collect heads of this creature.
It absolutely did, but haters gonna hate.
Yea too bad everything dies in one hit and you out level the zone after a few quests.
@@belstar1128 That's MoP.
Cata was easier than TBC and Vanilla, and slightly easier than WotLK, because you got more items while leveling up, but the zones were made to be completed from 1-60, though TBC and WotLK are shorter than they were in their respective expansions.
Cata is still threatening if you don't have heirlooms and/or aren't decked out in dungeon gear. Cata is also when low level dungeon gear became good and powerful, they didn't compensate for that.
@@rattlehead999 No it was way easier than even wrath. but it depended on your class since they didn't care about basic balance before max level. some classes where totally overpowered like paladin. but levelling a warrior was harder but still easy compared to wrath.
@@belstar1128 Maybe, I remember that you couldn't just grab a pack of 10 mobs and mow them down like in MoP.
The problem is that if they make it harder, then leveling would take way too long and then they have to remake the items too, to have a spike in power every so often, instead of a linear progression.
One of the main reasons why reforging had to go was due to the reliant on ask mr robot and determining how players would have to reforge their entire gear on gaining any upgrade.
This problem was mainly caused due to hit and expertise. With hit and expertise gone, there is no reason why it can't be brought back.
Personally I think everyone's fav expansion is based on their personal experience (guild, raiding, friends, etc) they had during that expansion. Cata was my favorite before everything got dumbed down with talents in MoP.
I also loved mop of cata and mop are my top two. The raiding is the best. And all i care about it raiding
yeah the guild leveling made it special
I think there are objective factors that make expansions worse but this is definitely a huge point. for most people Legion was amazing and whatnot, for me it was the addon where depression kicked my ass so hard I had breakdowns in the middle of bossfights so I remember it as the sadness addon xD it's all tainted by feeling generally horrible all the time. it was also the first addon where I struggled to find a guild with a functional community (made a mistake by leaving my wod guild because they struggled with members. so I had friends but we struggled to fill our mythic raids. I should have helped recruit instead of leaving)
I started playing WoW in 2005. And I remember Cata and MoP being this period of my WoW journey where I logged in the longest and played the most. In Cata, it was exploring, finding those hidden out of the way places added since flying was added for the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, checking out the new zones, and all the lore theories and future expansion speculations that me and my friends made. I also liked seeing Garrosh, this character whose journey I've seen throughout TBC and WotLK, get some character development and try and become a good Warchief.
As someone who enjoys Chinese mythology, and whose favorite hero in Warcraft 3: TFT was the Pandaren Brewmaster, MoP just felt like it was made for me. At least at the beginning. My major complaint about MoP was that the character developement of Garrosh was tossed out the window. In Cataclysm, Garrosh tries to be more like Thrall, trying to be honorable. He literally killed one of his commanders cause the dude bombed an area full of civilians. He was pissed off when he saw what Sylvanas was doing with the plague and the Val'kyr.
And then MoP was like: Ya know all that cool character developement? Yeeeaaah, we're ignoring all that. We're going to have him order bombings of civilians and become a tyrant. He's tossing honor out the window cause I mean, come on, why would an orc who was raised to think honor was more important above everything else, to the point that he felt he was honorless because of his father taking the demon blood and kicking off the first Warcraft rts game, care about honor? Honor is for losers. Garrosh is a WINNER. So murder all the civilians and be an ultimate racist.
It was seeing Garrosh have all nuance and character developement stripped from him that lead to my ultimate decline in hours spent. Like, the further into MoP we got and the more terrible he became...the more and more I just stopped caring about WoW. I had been with Garrosh since the beginning, met him in Outland, helped him in Northrend, saw him grow as a character, only to see it all be ripped away in MoP. Here's this character I've been with since his introduction, whose whole thing was honor, and they turned him into an honorless scumbag simply because they needed a bad guy for the end of expansion?
And I'm not saying he was perfect. He was still a Warmonger. But at least in Cata he TRIED to act with honor. Like, even though he started his wars with the Alliance, he didn't want to kill civilians because there was no honor in it. MoP just felt like a character assassination. Like Blizzard got bored with him and decided to just make everyone hate him because.....well....for no real reason.
I loved mop too but as someone who started playing in mid mop, I actually saw garrosh after stone mountains after it in orgrimmar and then i remembered him from earlier when I was max level and I was like what happened I thought he was scary but cool
Having recently played classic wrath to 80 and going for loremaster in retail, the cata revamp is a god send. People nostalgic for old world quests either dont remember or are conflating the fun they had with friends with the game ay they were doing.
Go queat through both versions and tell me classic quests and zones are better. This sint talking about the combat or leveling experience, just the quest and zone content itself
I actually dug Cata. It has some fun zones, some cool dungeons, hard raids, and my lock was a step closer to the Mists of Pandaria pinnacle of class design.
I miss my MoP demo lock so dearly :c
In cata, you’re gonna see people who truly enjoy raiding and doing dungeons love this xpac. This first two raiding tiers are excellent and like other comments have mentioned, the heroics are engaging, challenging and provide meaningful upgrades leading into the raid
The transmog issue came primarily from the pvp community since you could no longer tell how good a player was by their gear.
I remember a lot of people hated Cata when it first launched too since it was incredibly broken. We lost an entire raid (1/2 a raid tier) because of the sheer number of bugs and poorly tuned fights (especially on 10m) that were around at launch (yes Blizz said it was because they "didn't like the direction the art style was going" but that was just their excuse imo).
I remember the path to the spider boss in Firelands being bugged on patch day, but only on the german client (wasn't a problem for me since I changed to english when they started to translate NAMES) - so half of our raid had to switch language and download some stuff before we could go on - /general in raid was fun that day.
cata is actually really good in hindsight.
The criticism of Transmorg is that it hides what gear you are using.
It hides your spec, it hides your gear level, it hides natural achievements such as: Killing Cthun, Having Full T3.
its primarily a PVP thing but also a good analog for achievements and inspect (which you cant with your enermies).
You still cannot understand that it dumbs down the game? No value into learning the different gear sets and weapons by heart. Coz everyone transmorgs and hides their true power / gear.
You know what the solution to Transmorg could be? That gear and content didnt become completely irellevant with the next major patch. THIS.. is the issue plauging wow and the reason for so many of these extra systems like Transmorg. Imagine a world where T1, could be raided on Catalysm difficulty, granting as-close-as-possible-equal level gear when compared to previous patch top tier gear.
People would farm the old world, just like they do for transmorg, only difference is that they actually WEAR it. And choose 1-2-3 sets that is "THEM". Instead of having a list of 9999 different items they can imitate at any time.
I absolutely loved Cata. It was such a fun time in WoW. I remember having two fully decked out characters with arena gear. Capping every week and doing Tol Barad dailies, shit was just fun. People hate on it for no reason.
I love cata but the hate is just, the announcement of 10 man raiding with the same loot as 25 split many guilds, but when the raid went live and people saw the difficulty of 10 man raiding so many guild simply broke after weeks of no progress, honestly I understand how people can hate it
@@stylesheetra9411 That's fair honestly, when you put it that way, tbf I didn't remember that and must've been unaware at the time as I was strictly a PVP player until Legion. But yeah that sounds ass so I understand now.
Cata regarding the world and quests isn't bad. Transmog was awesome. The class re-design was the worst part and this is when they started adding systems on systems. A lot of us liked the talent trees as they were in vanilla/tbc/wotlk.
yes its fun to use talent points to increase your critical strike rating by 5% bruh wtf
This is a horrific take. The class design was the worst part? What are you huffin' cuh?
@@juiicer well some of us like classes with no combo points but then GC went and said I think combo points = skill and changed things forever. For example ret pala, warlock. I don't like going jab jab jab punch sorry bro. It's not a horrific take it's not fun. It's bad design.
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.
Cata was the first time they experimented with classes, like the sprint that cost energy but has no cooldown for rogues. That shit was busted but fun af.
bruh it was MoP
I remember Cata like it was yesterday (even though it was 2010-2012).
There's some things about Cata, and most of the love/hate actually have little to almost nothing to do with mechanics changes/class changes, etc, etc... that's a red herring.
On launch, Cata was pretty-well received... the raids were really good, the dungeons were good, the world quests were good, the "getting flamed by Deathwing" was fun... pretty much everything about Cata on launch was well-loved... if there was a hold-back or something that people as a whole didn't like was... well... gonna be honest hear... it was hard on casuals who didn't really know what they were doing.
If you were considered a "good healer" in WotLK, you were in for a rude awakening in Cata if you just always spammed your most powerful heal, which you could do in WotLK. Whole raiding guilds were destroyed when a lot of players that thought they were good found out they weren't when some of the mechanics changed in Cata and you had to conserve mana, and make better calls... that's just one example... another is "needing to CC and not just pulling whole rooms"... that was another Cata-thing that wasn't needed in WotLK. Dungeons and raids got harder in Cata for those who couldn't make the adjustment from WotLK... I think this first issue was the starting of the downhill subs that happened during Cata... the more casual players who just mashed buttons = win in WotLK couldn't do that anymore in Cata and jumped ship. I'd say this change was the first "negative" thing about Cata, though it's all a matter of perspective of-course.
The second, and probably longest-lasting "negative" impression of Cata... as usual, isn't about how Cata started, but how it ended. Unlike the opening raids of Cata, the final raid of Cata... Dragon Soul... was unimaginative, boring and schlock full of long repetitive RP's you couldn't skip. Worse, as with many expansions, the time between "final raid" and "next expansion" was pretty darn long... which always upsets people... but if you combine a long wait time with "stuck with a terrible, boring raid", it's a lot different than being stuck with something like ICC for a long time... ICC was always fun, Dragon Soul was not. So, people have a lasting memory of sitting around, waiting for the next expansion and only having DS as relative content... that left a long and sour taste in people's mouths and went a long way in erasing the memory of what was otherwise, a pretty solid expansion.
Great comment, watching some old Cata content in preparation for Cata classic and I think blizzard will address some of these comments, especially dragon soul lasting for felt like years, I really got into WoW during Cata ( and therefore very excited for classic ) and I agree DS was tough for the wrong reasons but overall the xpac was fun as hell and I think as we revisit it and get into pre patch we might see a Cata redemption arc
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 have extremely fond memories of Cataclysm. From the leveling (and getting to witness Deathwing setting fire to an entire zone) in really well-designed and fun zones, to working on the pretty challenging heroic dungeon achievements with my group, and the first few raids that were honestly really good. Plus, Deathwing was always my favorite Warcraft villain.
I had to stop playing early in Firelands, so I would definitely play Cataclassic if they did release it, especially if they make some small improvements to it.
I'd really like that they change the last raid, Deathwing is such a great villain, he deserves a better raid. His fights were underwhelming
@@Soleryth Yeah I remember the fight being pretty lackluster. Even despite that he's still one of the coolest villains, I haven't played since MoP but he's the only MMO villain I can think of that actively wanders the world and would gank levelling players lol. Real villain energy right there
3:59 Frost mage Mastery is % increase on frozen targets, The Icicle was changed in MoP patch 5.4.0
Anyways great video ❤
Cata was more or less the last days of 10 man raiding guilds. I'll always miss it for that. I knew so many raiders who never raided again once 10 man guilds died off when Mythic came in to the game. Compared to how the game has been since WoD I would take Cata any day easily. A lot of the classes were really fun to play and the end game loop and content was pretty damn solid overall.