Cataclysm still feels like the largest expansion content wise. I know it feels different to everyone who played it back then because there was no real end-game. But the early game got really fleshed out.
You mean destroyed. The eradicated so much of it in favor of shallowly written hot takes and attempts to be funny and removed a ton of what made the world feel familiar. The streamlining was nice, not going to lie, no longer having to go all over the world for basic things was good but I'd have rather kept that aspect and all of my old world locations and quests.
one of the problems with the revamped early game was that you could just skip over the entire thing by using LFG which was what the majority of people did and even if you tried to go through the world organically you would just out level the zone you're in much too quickly.
@@palladiamorsdeus And the old world was a masterclass of subtlety in writing? Cata made 1-60 massively more enjoyable, diverse and convenient for everyone, zones had actual stories and dynamic characters whose plot you follow throughout the zone, it introduced a huge amount of quest types so you aren't killing 30 of something with poor drop rates to mask the grind behind leveling. You can get nostalgic about a specific quest or a zone but it was a massive improvement overall
Massively understating how impactful the changes to healing were in Cata. Healing hard content at launch was incredibly intense, you had so little mana that every single cast felt like a life-or-death decision. Playing a healer in Cata was by far the most I have ever enjoyed WoW gameplay.
1000%. I was off-spec healing, and each time I had to step up to heal I gained more and more respect for our healing team. Eventually I essentially became main spec healing (Resto Shaman) because fights were so intense we needed all the heals we could get and Dragon Soul truly burned me out.
Hi all, just to note part 2 will be out tomorrow EDIT: It'll be Friday boys sorry want to get my thoughts about the layering stuff out tonight Enjoy :)
just a veeeerry small correction at about 8:35, cause I remember starting in cata as a hunter: Aggression wasn't removed at Cata's launch. It might've been around MoP or WoD, but I know in cata it was an option for my pets. Other than that this is great! I'm just being nitpicky.
Correction: at :19 you say Druids got their Eclipse mechanic for the first time, but that mechanic was added in WotLK, it just was reworked in Cata and given a bar.
The only boss I remember by name from that raid, other than the two deathwing encounters, is Ultraxion. And he was the easiest of all the bosses. He was a free heroic kill for almost any raiding guild who had thumbs
Dungeons were awesome, especially heroics in the beginning, until people started complaining it was too difficult and that it needed nerfs. Personally I liked Dragon Soul in the beginning when I first did it on Heroic, but it got boring after we got to spine heroic.
Back in Cata, my guild wore itself out to get realm first level 20 guild. We then had the entire guild fall from the sky in Stormwind and do a mass rez, because that was the level 20 perk.
One of the things I heavily disliked, as a lore geek at the time, was how the quests were a lot of pop culture reference and fourth wall breaking. Many places and their stories progressed, but not in any natural way. Playing Classic again feels more like the world taking itself and its lore seriously. I wouldn't have minded the changes (I was looking forward to them) that Cata brought about, if they had done a proper job of progressing the world forward. Mechanically, it may be better, but it just felt awful having all those zones made "fun" of, when you were trying to immerse yourself. There were some cool upgrades, though. Western Plaguelands is a personal favorite, as I enjoyed how Lordaeron's fall and the attempts at bringing it back actually progressed there, but that's about it. I also enjoyed some of the new areas that Cata brought with it. Endgame content is a whole other discussion as to whether that was better or not, but for me, narrative is key to setting up "why" we fight the villains in the dungeons/raids. Having a strong narrative makes for a better climax at that content, and reaching that endgame boss. For me in that regard, Cataclysm failed to deliver. Thematically and story-wise, in my opinion, WotLK was the peak. They have the means to better deliver stories now, but as long as they don't take the lore and story of WoW seriously, neither shall I.
@Brant Hall it was, but they were much more subtle/few and far between, while the Cata revamp basically made entire zones into very obvious pop culture references, the most cringe examples being redridge mountains, westfall (yikes), silverpine... the quest staff was more concerned with making jokes rather than really giving us an idea how the world was different
I see simillar stuff happening to a lot of long-running franchises nowadays, breaking the fourth wall and losing the high fantasy feel they used to have... As a huge Magic: the Gathering nerd and I've always loved the story and original atmosphere of different planes... what do we get now? A plane with pirates, vampires and dinosaurs mashed togehter, a plane that is in fact Disneyland, and, coming in few days, a plane which is essentially one giant meme, more than half of flavor texts are funny punchlines and they even made real Godzilla appear on cards FFS!
@Brant Hall Yeah, but it wasn't so on the nose. Having to be a quest giver and dealing with three kinds of WoW player stereotypes, getting pointed out that quest givers have been standing in the same spot for years or that mobs respawn and that millions of other players also did this quest, so Yowler, son of Yowler, son of Yowler, son of Yowler, etc. is the 900th descendant of this npc. These are just a few examples. I never felt that classic yanked me out of the experience. Personally, I have had trouble immersing myself in the world of warcraft after Cataclysm. It's not like I disliked everything about Cataclysm, but it definitely started the decline of my investment in the franchise.
Wotlk and cataclysm is where I started playing WoW. Even though I had my issues at the time with it there was no doubt to me that Firelands was my most favorite raid in the xpact, I could never forget ragnoros's speech as you entered the instance.
@@Vihara2 wotlk was my favorite expansion but it was the beginning of the end of wow as we knew it. I verified this creating two identical characters in wotlk and vanilla private servers with a level 1 to 5. Mage in wotlk didn't even require drinking to recharge Mana lol which made alchemy useless before level 60 raiding
Cataclysm was the beginning of what WoW is now imo... They started messing around with the way classes played too much and it felt like a different game not WoW.
@Lebhrux I dont have problems with best builds. tldr:talents now are limiting your character rather than allowing it to ,,personalize". But right now your talents dont allow you to adjust them to your gameplay. What talents now are doing is limiting your champion so he wont be best in everything. You have aoe boss? pick this You have single target boss? pick this You farm? pick this Or on other example: I played a long time ago on fun server with 255 lvl cap. You could pick all talent points. Except like 2 or 3 classes, most classes didn't become OP. Becouse mages had to use concrete school (except frostfire bolt), rouges were still limited by energy etc. Now imagine this situation happens now, you would literally become bonkers with all talents. You would perform great in AoE, single target, cleave and everything.
Indeed I only played upto wrath cuz my PC died and I was just able to get another so I was playing pservers. Well I started on a cata one the other day and I like it but I don't. Really only thing I like is the revamp and my pala got holy shock at 10 lmao. Other than that as you said it don't feel like wow
Cata, the beginning of the end. I liked the intro raids..... transmog was cool.... I liked tol'barad. Really though it was the first time I was left with a wow xpac that I really didnt enjoy much, was the first time I unsubscribed from wow, was the first time most of my friends unsubscribed, and sadly it's an experience that would be repeated again and again as the years have gone on. Surprisingly, MoP is one of the only xpacs I've really liked in recent years.
What about Legion? From what I've heard, MoP and Legion were still better than Cata/WoD/BfA, but I stopped subbing during Firelands and only came back occasionally for one month at a time, so I can't make my own judgement.
I enjoyed Cata too, but that's because I decidedly went casual. I think the drop off from WotLK was due to many people, myself included, "finishing" the game...being able to raid every instance and killing the big baddie. I started in the middle of BC and Kara was the only do-able raid for my noob guild and self, so I was determined to "see it all" in WotLK...and i did; and it was exhausting. BC = noob, just learning how to play. WotLK = serious business. exhausting. Cata = casual pve, serious pvp. MoP = got into the beta and leveled to max, realized i was gonna have to grind out the same levels on 3 maybe 4 toons to do the same things i've been doing and said NOPE. never understood the hate for the pandas as the zones were beautiful...just didn't want to level grind, just to daily quest grind, just to dungeon grind, just to LFR grind, just to raid grind.
How dare you release part 1 on its own! Im in quarantine i demand content! Jokes aside, all this legacy server talk has made me question whether they'll ever go all the way and release every expansion eventually. Cataclysm is the only expansion I never played and I would love to actually try it. Great video
I think if they decide to do TBC servers, they'll probably continue to WotLK and stop there. I don't think there would be enough demand for Blizzard to justify the resources it would take to make Cata servers.
Yep, me too. It was the first expansion that dropped while I was full on with the game. Initially delighted with open world flying, and the dungeons, I slowly lost interest, and by the time the expansion was done, so was I.
tbf, WoD was the beginning of the end, Cata was the beginning of "Modern WoW", not necessarily worse than classic - WOTLK but very different, requires much more skill but is less grindy and takes less effort. Pick your side I guess
Will E Thanks so much for the awesome content. Everytime we start inching closer to the next classic expac I always come back and watch this series. One of my favortites
I liked Vash’Jir. Felt like it has the best aesthetic and story of any of the new zones. It actually felt like you were lost and stranded, and by the end (where the Naga capture Neptulon) it actually felt like the world was in danger. Can’t say the same for the other zones. Uldum was a comedy zone, Deepholm was exceptionally boring, and Twilight Highlands was another comedy zone with the dwarves until FINALLY there’s a Deathwing moment that just comes out of nowhere at the end. Hyjal was decent but didn’t feel like anything of significance was happening until the Firelands patch.
The neutering of talents coupled with their BS reasoning was another big one for me. Not to mention COMPLETELY CHANGING my holy paladins playstyle. And I wasn't a huge fan of holy power or being a palarogue either. I did rather like hunters running off of energy, tho'.
@@palladiamorsdeus because wrath holy paladin was so fun, spam one spell. Cata holy paladin was strong spec. People are just afraid of change, why I have no idea.
I always thought the same, but now that's classic is out, I'm glad we can't level in original vanilla in retail. Leveling is such an unmeaningful, faceroll mess of an experience that it doesn't do justice to what it was really like, and so I'm glad we have to go to classic to play as it was intended.
@@goran77ish there's a multitude of reasons why pallies are having Holy power Baseline. Holy paladin using them like they have in cataclysm is one of them.
To this day, I’ve never done the worsen, goblin, or panda run quest intro stories in the 12 years I’ve been playing this game. Hell I doubt many people even know Baradin Hold exists since it was so forgettable.
The truth is, every expansion has something good, and something bad, even vanilla had lots of problems. But people seems to like to focus in certain aspects, sometimes they do because they want to reinforce certain ideas or beliefs.... usualy, people that are not happy with the current state of the game like to point and complain about Cata because they THINK is the turning point of the game... but the reality is that, the game had started to become "more casual" since WotLK. I can, just from the top of my mind, tell you that vanilla had a lot of people complain how hard to access the raid content was, how the loot from the dungeons and quest was terrible, how the raid loot was so scarce, how terrible unbalance most specs were... lots of the changes that happened ever since vanilla, happened in response to players complains TBC added lots of "welfare" epics.... not only the dungeon loot was so much better then vanilla dungeon loot, heroics had lots of epics that in some cases, were BiS, i mean, Magister Terrace was straight up a catch up mechanism for people needing gear... reps sold gear, both epic, and later one, some blue semi-pvp gear... TBC also added dailys (tho daily content exist since vanilla realy) but most people consider TBC daily content ...good daily content ... Isle of Quel'Danas is the best example. WotLK added the LFG tool... something people had been crying for... not everybody had tank friends... or healers... or had the luck to coincide with them... and when you can only play for 1 or 2 hours a day, you want a tool that let you find groups quickly... More importantly to me is the addition to the quest tracker... tracking quest objetives in your map and mini-map was, according to many many people, the thing that "dumbed down" the game the most... BUT... QUESTY addon existed since vanilla... lots of people used that addon to find where they had to go with or without reading the quest... Blizzard just adopted it... i too think it was a bad idea... but i can't just blame Blizzard for making obvious something that half of the players were already using. Don't believe me? check the most downloaded addons for Classic WoW... You'll be surprised how many of the so called "classic enthusiasts" mod the game till is so closed to retail... I could keep going on and on.... but the point is, Cata was not a bad expansion... if it was, then by definition every expansion was bad, because each one added something people did not like, or had just content that was too hard, or too boring etc.
Blah blah blah, "The expansion that started the decline of WoW wasn't THAT bad, guys! Honest!" Yes. It was. Not the worst, but there's a very good reason the game permanently lost an entire third of its playerbase during that time period. The fallacy in your...argument, if you can even call it that, is that the other expansion had fewer things that people didn't like and were more willing to put up with, while Cata had more things people DIDN'T like and weren't willing to put up with.
Actualy, if you wanna talk about fallacies, you just used the biggest one : Cata lost 1/3 of its player base cuz bad expansion. While many people did quit because they didn't like the changes, like talents for example, the reality, is that it was a massive coincidence of factors that made the drop in the playerbase be that big. Let me explain this to you: I started to play wow in 2004 along 9 other friends. For the time Cata ended, most have left the game. Some left during TBC, others did durin WotLK and finaly 3 or 4 quit during Cata, even tho, they all come back here and there and play tru the new expansions for a couple months... Now... did they quit cuz "bad expansions"? No.... the reality is noone did quit because of the quality of the content, but real life reazons... mostly... with the exception of 1 of them that quit because he started playing more FF 14, everybody else quit because either got a job, or a family, or just ended up having no time to dedicate to an mmo. MMOs are too demanding, and sometimes, 1 hour a day dosent realy let u progress in the game much, if at all, and thus, people just don't feel motivated to keep paying 15 dlls a month to not be able to play. You see.... most people that started in 2004 were fans of the franchise. Me and my friends being the best example, havin playing wc2 and 3, and hell, some did play the very 1st one! In other words, our age range is right where, after 7 or so years of wow, you end up at a point in your life that you find yourself loaded with responsabilities. Besides the age factor, there are other reazons, like the one i touched up: competition. Lots of brand new mmos and mobas, some with amazing visuals, like FF14, and nowadays we have Blade and Soul, Black Desert, etc... some people realy like them visuals you know? :) So yeah "bad expansion" is not realy the reazon why everybody left. That's what internet trolls and people that are angry at the game because 1 or 2 changes that realy bothers them were made, yells in an attempt to convince others to think like they do.
I enjoyed all of the new zones, especially Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, and Deepholm. I raided pretty steadily that expansion (starting with tanking Bastion of Twilight when I was still in blues and greens and beating Cho'gall). I liked the dungeons, especially Grim Batol and Halls of Origination. I enjoyed archaeology even though it could be frustrating at times.
I really enjoyed Cataclysm, that said I only played the first half of it. I enjoyed seeing end-game blues be a thing and epics required some effort to get rather than how incredibly easy it was to get epics in WotLK. The heroic dungeons weren't braindead easy, least when I played, so that was nice. And overall the Cata zones, dungeons, and raids had a really cool aesthetic and I enjoyed all of them. Tol Barad was cool, it was really zerg-y, but it caused me to PvP more than I have in any expansion. The Molten Front is probably one of the best takes on dailies ever put in the game. Cata was definitely the last time I can remember truly enjoying WoW rather than "well, I still have sub time so I guess I oughta play...". That said from what I hear the later parts of Cata were absolutely horrid, but I wasn't playing at the time so I unno.
Cata was the beginning of the end. To me, Wotlk was pinnacle. Cata began the needless simplification of the game. Wrath had it all, including exciting lore, pvp and great raids. Classes were in a good place too.
I disagree. Wrath was a very mixed bag of very bad and very good. The 5 man heroics were way too easy and raids oscillated from terrible (naxx, toc) to great (ulduar, icc). Classes were in a good place in Wrath, but for the most part, were in an even better place in Cata. Some of the simplifications made in Cata I'll agree that were unnecessary, but weren't game breaking, as far as I'm concerned. For me, early Cata was the pinnacle. It fixed the issues with difficulty, while keeping the things that made Wrath good (how classes played, mostly).
Classes were not in a good place in WotLK. The vast majority of the classes play the same in Cata as they did in WotLK, just more polished and smoother. WotLK class design was a bunch of random ideas glued together with duct tape, while Cata took those same ideas (and added minor new stuff on top), and actually crafted well designed classes that functioned properly. Arms Warr: Basically same spells and idea in both WotLK and Cata. In WotLK it's a clunky mess that's barely playable on any fight with movement, in Cata, only receiving minor changes, that same base rotation is suddenly one of the best and smoothest Dps specs in the game. And similair arguments can be made for most of the specs in the game. The two big exceptions are Paladins and Hunters, the only two classes that got massive reworks going into Cata. Holy Power was not needed, and it didn't do anything except make Paladins annoying to play. Hunter as a class died when they lost their manabar, and I have a stong hate for the modern "45 yards melee hitbox" design for Hunters. These two changes were the first in a looooong list of Blizzard trying to fix what wasn't broken, and in the process ending up with an inferior product.
@@Melodeath00 100% disagree i started in cata and played Holy pally. I loved the class style of h pally so much i quit playing them after mop cause they took away holy power i thought it was a fantastic addition and another thing on top that could really separate an average player from a great player. Im playong wotlk classic right now playing holy pally cause thats what i want to play if cata classic comes out. But im a really good healer but playing this version of h pally out side of cd useage nothing separates a good holy pally from an average on. When you only have 3 spells to heal it hard to trully shine in content so easy H dungeons where 10xharder then any boss ive had to fight in naxx
My int spellpower prot paladin died in cata due to the stat change. Also, on my server there were several horde guilds that camped hyjal killing all alliance npcs in the zone for the first year of the game. You literally could not quest in that zone as alliance. The change to the talent trees were needed, but forcing a min in one tree before unlocking the other options was a mistake.
The reason why I loved Cataclysm was because it was the time I played level stop content the most. I liked to play at level 60/70/80 and do the old content. And it was possible to overgear the upcoming expansions because the gear didn't scale with level. So I could farm tier 2/tier 2,5 gear oder tier 6 gear and completely trash any enemy in the upcoming zones. Same went for Mists of Pandaria if I remember correctly, but I played endgame raids more often there. I loved the cataclysm holy Paladin and blood DK. Cataclysm was also the expansion where Blizzard introduced the vengeance mechanic for tanks (I know they introduced it already in the prepatch). Tanks got more attack power the more damage they tanked. It was pretty broken but also so much fun to raid faction cities with only blood DKs. And I remember falling in love with fury and arms warrior in Cataclysm. :D What was ridiculous in Cata was the powerscaling of items. The very first item I got was already better than my ICC heroic gear piece. It was insane going from 20k to 30k HP DPS-class to a about 100k HP DPS-class. The numbers just exploded. But I never disliked it personaly. Numbers never meant a thing to me because I always see them in relation to the enemies health bar...but still it was ridiculous. xD
I liked Cata and really loved that time in my life. I always feel that WotLK was the last "Classic" WoW expansion and Cata did so much to change everything it really hammered that in and killed the feel of the game in many ways. Ever since Cata the game was different, it wasn't the same. Catas modernization came at the price of the death of the old game and old world quite literally.
That intro was amazing! Great video. I loved Cataclysm, up until the end. The last patch really sucked. Otherwise it was great! WoTLK was my favourite though.
Cataclysm was without a doubt, my favourite expansion. All these cool concepts and stuff going on that people were legitimately invested in. Deathwing was all you needed in a villain, a big angry fucking dragon. Not this convoluted Sylvanas/Nzoth bullshit
I LOVED Cata. Everyone harps on it for LFR and Dragon Soul, but that was at the very end. Tier 11 and Firelands were my favorite times in WoW. Amazing raids, the world rework made leveling way more exciting and fun. Talent change was very welcomed too.
i went from bc to cataclysm and had the best time in cata the dungeons were such a new thing for me with the bosses changing they went from tank andd spank to having their own ways to be defeated was a good change up made it more challenging
Archaeology was definitely made with fishing patience in mind. Personally I loved it, really cool lore, toys and an amazing 2-hander. Definitely appreciate when Blizzard used to put in activities for people who just want to chill.
Problem for me was Cata was the beginning of the end for me, was the start the game started to take everyclass and start to make each role the exact same just with different names for spells. In order to balance classes they simplifed them and took away each's idenity by everyone having everything. There was less of a need for a balanced group of raids with everyone contributing. It only got worse each expansion after. And LFR was the single worst thing ever brought into the game. I hear people complain about dungeon finder in WoTLK but for the most part dungeons werent super hard and getting replacements was fairly easy. But LFR where everyone was a bunch of idiots who didnt need to understand the content or could just afk right after the fight to then ninja the gear was insanely frustrating. I still enjoyed the expansion overall but that was mainly from PVP being fairly fun
I dont really get why people hated the old world rewamp. Finally the zones were dynamic and the quest where progressive. Great change after so many years of leveling in the same zones.
Levelling was considerably easier, and the quests and zone progression in general felt too on rails (which is a bit funny, since WoW has always been considered a theme park MMO). Don't get me wrong, I see the benefits of both approaches (classic vs cata), but neither is without flaws.
Because they ruined the look and feel of some old zones, like Darkshore which was a nice peaceful zone with a good town and hub. Now it's just a rainy hellhole. They could have done it in a more subtle way.
Damn was that Ansgar? ToloDK's warrior? I'm kinda surprised I remember that, he used to do very frequent "game vlogs" through cataclysm. It was cool to see him here. 3:29
I used to play on Aerie Peak EU. I remember queueing to get on the server in wrath - then when cata dropped it was nearly impossible to click the flight trainer was Azeroth flying on launch. It's low pop these days, no king rules forever indeed.
Cata also gave tanks CTC or "combined table coverage" as their new defense rating, and the only way to find this out was to run the CTC script as a macro. Once you had your CTC optimal you just stam stacked gear.
Cata changed almost everything about wow including all the things people enjoyed and loved about wow. Hard to keep subs when u change the world and classes so much if feels like a different game.
"When you change classes"???? Seriously? At what point Cataclysm "changed" classes to a bad stage??? Let me remind you that before Cataclysm, you could get a one shot by a 1 second cast of Chaos Bolt... Oh, and let's not forget the fact that before Cataclysm, DKs didn't have a clear role or roles. And don't get me wrong, I think Wotlk is still a bit better than Cataclysm, but atleast to me, in overall, Cata isn't bad.
@@josedavidmunozmartinez4722 balance and class identity are different. Soul shards no longer being something warlocks farm. Rogues had major core abilities removed or tied directly to 1 spec. A ton of flavor abilities where completely removed. I tried to play cata and i stopped because the characters i played didnt feel upgraded or progressed. They felt completely changed. I think cata was when there stopped being 10 classes and instead you had each spec became its own class.
@@squey4523 Did we play the same game? The vast majority of classes had the same core gameplay and ideas as their WotLK counterparts, while being A LOT smoother and functionally better, WHILE adding new stuff. With the exception of Paladins and Hunters (who got reworked for no reason, those two classes were probably the 2 best designed classes of WotLK), and DKs getting "semi-reworked" with each spec getting a clear role, nobody lost any rotational spells going into Cata. In fact, all classes got new spells, with Cata being the last expansion to give new baseline spells to the classes... Rogue = Basically the same, although this shouldn't surprise anybody, as Rogue has historically been the least changed of all the classes. Somebody playing Rogue in Classic, would still recognize the WoD version instantly... Priest = Shadow gameplay was identical + Mind Spike for low hp adds, Disc was objectively improved (WotLK bubblespam was degenerate as fuck), and Holy was basically the same Shaman = WotLK gameplay + new Cata spells. Warr = Arms went from being the most clunky spec in the game in WotLK, to the smoothest and best spec in Cata, while having the same spells and base rotation (and spreading Rend with Thunder Clap was amaaaaazing). Fury, while getting a rework, still had the same base gameplay as its WotLK counterpart, with Raging Blow replacing Whirlwind in the rotation. Turning Heroic Strike/Cleave into an instant attack with 3 sec CD was objectively better gameplay than the "on next attack" mechanic the spells used to have from Classic-WotLK. Locks = Same base gameplay with minor changes. Cata Demo with original Hand of Gul'Dan was amazing. Also, I've never ever met a Warlock who actually liked farming soulshards. Druids = Feral and Resto was basically the same with minor changes. Boomkin was improved massively with the addition of Starsurge. Mage = Did actually receive some changes to all its specs, but that's a good thing, because WotLK Mage was dogshit, a relic from a bygone era of Classic/TBC 1 button spam rotations. Alter Time was great, "new Combustion" (RIP) was great, the first signs of PvE Frost were great. Arcane, despite being a 2 button spec, actually became somewhat interesting because of the mana minigame brought about by their Mastery, and caused huuuuuge skillgaps within the Mage playerbase in its heydays of t11 and t12 with the Sinestra trinket.
I might get a lot of crap for this, but cataclysm was my favorite expansion. I've started in BC, as a casual player (because my PC at the time could not really handle WoW that well). But in Cata, when I got a better PC, joined a guild and actually became social in game, I've started taking this game seriously and I was raiding at a fairly competent level. I guess it's my favorite because most of the friends I've made in cata I'm still friends with today. Even am a "god parent" to one of their kids.
Cata was not a bad expansion... The problem Is that cata DELETED the old content. Thats why people hate It. If devs had left the old content accesible, noone would had flinched an eye.
Cataclysm was a bad expansion but it wasn't the worst. The problem was that it was the beginning of the end, it took place right after two major lore viillains went down and introduced a villain not as many people knew about, on top of completely destroying the old world. I am to this day mad about the destruction of Southshore. They also started dumbing down talents while passing out bullshit excuses for it and began homogenizing the different roles. My paladin healer became something COMPLETELY different in Cata and I didn't enjoy it, nor appreciate them fucking with something I had been using for six years at that point.
The bones of Cataclysm were there. I really enjoyed the first few months of it. The problem was: Blizzard doubled down on every mistake that they made in wrath.
Looking back on it, Cataclysm wasn't a bad expansion, but the killer for me was the talent changes. Class changes irritated me too, especially hunters no longer using mana. But man, the talent changes were *unforgivable.* The game just felt dumbed down, and it played that way, too. I came back for Panda Mists, and I played a handful of hours in Legion. Even came back for a few more hours in BFA. Just wasn't the same. Classic, however. Goddamn, that brought it all back for me. It's been awhile since I logged in (moved across the country, switched jobs, etc), but I do miss Classic. I hope they bring back BC, too. Haven't left a comment in awhile, but I'm glad to see your channel doing well, Willie. I'm one of your first couple hundred subs, so it's neat to see the channel chugging along!
You know, back then I thought the world would develop further and not that we have now 10 years of cataclysm while the original world only lasted about 5 years. I had no problem with the revamp, because I thought finally.. and had expectations that this would happen again. Even though I like the going from zone to zone from Classic much more than only questing through one zone after another.
It's been a long, long time since I've been that excited to see a video pop up in my feed. This series (in fact, all of your videos) have been absolutely stellar! Cataclysm is a special one for me. I love my Worgen DK, and I remember this expansion turning me very much into a dragon fanboy. I'm hyped for part 2 and beyond!
I still never done any quests in the revamp azeroth or start zones for goblin and worgen... and I played every expansion 50+ days /played. Had every class max lvl after wotlk and if I wanted alt I got boosted by friends
The big mistake they did with Cata was modifying the old world which took an enormous amount of work. If fixing 3D wasn't enough (they wanted to implement flying in vanilla zones, after all), they went down with re-shaping many areas, removing content and adding new one. Instead, they could have been happy with ADDING content (quest hubs and the like) were it made sense and thus refine/complete unfinished questlines, stories, etc. This would have helped with making the original areas feel polished and provide consistent xp while leveling through them.
Cata didnt feel like the WoW of Vanilla, TBC, and LK. Its hard to nail why, but the classes didnt feel the same, the world itself felt more cartoony and less fantasy, the mystery areas like Gilneas and Hyjal was a let down, questing was not longer real content, and LFR + LFD just made it feel like it became a single player game.
It was faster paced than Vanilla and TBC (neither a bad thing nor a good thing, necessarily). It was similar to Wrath in pace and class design (some exceptions may apply), but it more challenging than Wrath, which was good. I think I understand what you mean by the world feeling more cartoony, the pop culture references and jokey stuff it had were more in your face than the ones in the old games. Questing hadn't been real content since Wrath. Except the levels new to any particular expansion that is, which I think holds true to this day. Dungeon finder was added in Wrath, and in Cata (at least at the start), it was actually much better than in Wrath and any subsequent expansion, because the heroics were actually hard, and you couldn't really afford to not talk at all. LFR is possibly the worst thing ever added to the game, thankfully it was added in the last patch of Cata.
Cataclysm just ruined PvP for me. Healers became virtually unkillable 1v1. They took away Arena Rating requirements to buy gear, making it so that anybody could buy any piece of PvP gear without even being in an Arena team. This took away the very incentive casuals had to do PvP together to unlock new pieces of gear, which lead to the apparition of people spamming the /trade channel saying they look for a mate to win a couple v2 matches to get to the Arena Points cap for the week. Complete BS. Damage was multiplied by two, but healthpools were multiplied by 4, making fights last horribly long. My mage's Pyroblast was hitting about as hard at the end of LK with 90k HP. On top of that, every pure DPS class got new defensive/self healing CDs, forcing you to go all out to secure a kill even when a fucking Rogue or Warrior was at 20% life. Mana became irrelevant. Healers got a shitload of instant healing spells and were almost impossible to get OOM, making it an absolute nightmare to play against. And they started taking away core Class mechanics that nobody complained about for no reason at all. Warlock lost Soul Shards, Mages lost Fire/Frost wards (which were insanely funny when specced) and the original Blastwave, Hunters lost ammo, mana and Mongoose Bite ... And I won't even comment on leveling. How to ruin great aspects of a beautiful game for no fucking reason at all.
Lol are you sure you're talking about Cata? It was the most balanced pvp expansion. Mortal Strike, venoms and other skills got the healing debuff nerfed because healers were easier to kill. Healers were unkillable in wotlk. Arenas could last over 20 minutes before any healer run out of mana. Paladins were fucking tanks with their sacred shield empowered by sp. Also hard counters weren't as bad as previous expansions.
@@sergiogonzales330 Seriously, Cata the most balanced expansion ... That's why the first 2v2 on the ladder of my battlegroup in S11 was double blood DK, and Warriors were in over half R1 teams in S9. And I won't even mention bloody ferals or retarded ololol burst demonology warlocks with their 15 imps. Have you seen "Cataclysm real gameplay" vid on RUclips ? It was quite popular back then ... Healers were better in LK ? Definitely not in PvP, and in Cata they took away warlocks' Drain Mana to make those shitting v2 matches last even longer. Most balanced WoW ever was was S7-S8, that's why AT was based 3.3.2. Every single class and spec could get R1 back then. Although, to be fair, Cata wasn't that unbalanced, was quite enjoyable to play in that regard, and was certainly less unbalanced than the first two seasons of LK. It just had shit PvP gameplay, which just got worse with MoP and WoD (I stopped retail there). I mean just go watch a mage 85 PvP vid and then a mage 80 PvP vid. The damage output is similar, while HP pools got multiplied by over 4. Cata was the advent of slowpaced PvP.
I remember having to get 2200 rating in cata to get my upgraded weapon/shoulders/whatever. Even with bigger healthpools, a lot of classes had high base dmg even outside of cd's. 1v1ing healers were possible, the win condition just wasnt necessarily outplaying, but attrition and cooldown management. Honestly never minded the more health/survivability, it only made 2v2 a nightmare against some comps. Mana was never irrelevant, there were comps dedicated to wearing u down. Casters didnt have endless mana pools either. didnt warlock still have soul shards as a spender? Either way, demonology warlock was hella fun back in cata. Theres a reason pretty much every single comp was viable at 2700+ rating in cata. Shit was the best it was ever gonna get.
@@Phailox Warlocks SS were taken out in Cata prepatch (which was one of the major non sense changes btw). "Theres a reason pretty much every single comp was viable at 2700+ rating in cata"-Definitely not every single comp, much less every single spec. I haven't seen a single non subtetly rogue in all of Cata for example. In S7-S8 every single class and spec could get to R1 though. "1v1ing healers were possible" - Maybe with a rogue. If you could win a 1v1 attrition fight against a healer in Cata, then said healer was either shit or you had to talk 30 minutes to kill healers. "I remember having to get 2200 rating in cata to get my upgraded weapon/shoulders/whatever." -- Yeah there was this Heroic recolored PvP gear, I remember that too. But that's for the top 5% of the playerbase, while all the rest of the gear had 0 requirements or whatsoever, leading to a massive influx of casual and bringing down most of the social aspect of Arenas at lower rankings.
Super Baranowicz I remember walking around in wotlk, thinking I was cool with my 1800 sword, until someone else came by with the 2200 variant :(. Highest I got was 2k
Cata was the first expansion I played end game content (yes I’m a cata kid) I remember the huge lightning guy fight was super hard. After playing classic I feel like I would have appreciated it much more if I new the lore
People are bashing Dragonsoul, but honestly, it had some of the best fights imho. Some of the bosses gave you the freedom to alter your raid strategy, like choosing and ooze to kill on Yor'sahj or standing in the middle on Hagara's totem phase. Heroic modes were also vastly different from their normal counterparts, adding either an extra phase or requiring entirely different tactics(well i guess back then it was the norm, but still...). LFR(as much as i hated it) first month was total anarchy and awesome drama generator - people ninjalooting left and right, hunters rolling everything, groups of guildies votekicking some random lads just for giggles, being stuck on The Spine for over 2 hours etc, etc. Good times :-) Sure, the last boss was meh, some of the trash was extremely annoying(them fking purple dragons man) and visuals were very bland, but overall i'd say it was a decent raid.
I can't stress how big of a mistake it was to "revamp" the vanilla areas. It's as if someone bulldozed my childhood home. If your favorite video game is Mario Bros, you can dust off the old cartridge, plug it in, and re-live that beloved game. Blizzard robbed players of the ability to be able to do that with WoW. Want to relive the Barrens that you loved in 2005? TOO BAD, YOU CAN'T. IT'S GONE. RUINED FOREVER. BULLDOZED. The game has been going downhill ever since WOTLK.
That's not to mention the fact that the changes implemented in Cata were all bad. Yep, I said it... ALL. All of the new changes were bad. It was the great dumbing-down patch. Arrows, mana, talents, stats, threat, etc all got removed. Any aspect of the game that may have required an IQ over 85 to manage got removed. Adding guild levels sounds great in theory, but in practice it just meant that guild spam bots flooded every single channel, and players just gravitated away from the idea of guilding with friends or others that they enjoyed actually playing with. Instead they just migrated to a max-level guild for the perks. The consequences were ultra-massive guilds in which nobody even knew or cared about each other. "/g I need help with a quest," *crickets*.
@@captainthrall I disagree with most everything. Arrows didn't add any depth to the game, nor did it require any IQ to manage. I'm fine either way, whether they had kept them or removed them, but I'm not gonna lose my shit over fucking arrows. Mana was made irrelevant for classes that didn't need to use it, with some exceptions. Hunters, for example, make much more sense with focus. Talents were not dumbed down. Just removing some of them, especially the very simple ones, doesn't make the system any more or less complicated. In terms of the choices you had to make, it felt more or less the same as before to me. The thing that bothered me is that having a talent point each level felt... right, and that went away with having one every 2 levels instead. I'll agree on stats, the removals were unnecessary. Again, not something I'd lose my shit over., though. Threat had not been a factor in Wrath either. I don't know anyone that, having the choice between a max lvl random guild and a low(er) level guild with his friends, chose to go with the random guild. If such a person exists, it says more about them than it does about the game. I'll agree that the guild spam and the guilds created with the sole purpose to benefit from the perks and nothing else, were annoying.
I HATED the dumbing down of the talent tree that happened. That made me quit playing Wow as much, and is what got me to come back to play Classic. To me, it was a stupid overhomogenization that was simply put in to help "casual" players who didn't want to research or work to be able to "match up" better with other better players who DID know what they were doing.
I love these videos. The nostalgia is amazing. I think the drops between Cata to present could just be the fact that people grew up and gained adult lives. You attribute it to the MOBA genre which I think is true. WoW is just a game great for kids with a shit ton of free time but as an adult it's rather shit. Having to plan your fun around 9 - 19 other people around the nation is taxing and at the begin of an expansion (esp. Cata) that could mean spending 3 hours wiping on the first 2 raid bosses. MOBAs are great for their immediacy. Click a button and you're in with 9 other players on an even field. In WoW, there is no pick up and play feature. Even if you get someone, they need to be leveled and geared which can take days before you can progress. And god forbid if a main tank doesn't show up.
@@WillEmmo Lies and deceptions =( . Jk, take your time man. I really liked some changes with Cata but boi did it change alot tho, some stuff for the worse....lfr... Looking forward to ur part 2.
Most expansions are like, 30% good changes, 30% bad changes, 40% middling changes. Cataclysm was 50% AMAZING changes, 50% TERRIBLE changes and this mix created some strange perceptions and memories of cataclysm though cataclysm servers are starting to get really popular in the Private server scene which rarely strays from vanilla/BC/Wrath era.
Im curious what was the 50% horrible things they did in cata. I loved cata the only issues i have with cata was dragon soul was way to long the talent changes that came with dragon soul and lfr but out side of the dragon soul patch i thought it was almost perfect
Wotlk was so focused with an obvious end point of beating h the lych King. Cata was weird - the end zones were not great. We didn't know that things would get far far worse after tho.
My only issue with this Xpac was the Deathwing fight. The best part was how hard Heroic Dungeons were coming out of Wrath. Certain heroic boss mechanics could one shot you if you didn't use a cool down or got hit my something that was meant to be avoided. Trash mobs needed to be CCed or they would slam your face into the ground. People started whining that they were too hard so they got nerfed.
As much as I disliked Cata at the time it was DEFINITELY better than anything that came after it. But the later expansions also don't have the stigma of destroying the old world. Well parts of Legion do that ((Hur durrr, da nightwatch is bad!)) but not to that same extent.
The end of the road for me. I played Cataclysm for a week, hen gave up and left the game. Too much had changed, especially when Garrosh was made Warchief. That moment was the first time I wished I could transfer all of my Horde Characters over to the Alliance.
yeah its true it looked amazing and beautiful but what was the point if nobody was outside in that world doing anything. The server where i played everyone was just sitting in the city next to their banks and pressing LFG or LFR, the world itself was dead
controversial opinion: Cataclysm was very enjoyable in the beginning and end of the expansion itself, even though it finalized the changes from Wotlk that ended the Vanilla/TBC style that made the game great in the first place, which hurt the game in each future expansion.
@@palladiamorsdeus I'd rather quest in a zone for a bit than get half a level in the barrens, run to stonetalon for a few bars, run to tarren mill to grind for 2 levels, back to barrens for 1 level, and on and on for 8 days worth of /played to make any progress. The game isnt stuck in 2004 which I dont understand is anything but a good thing. Vanilla wow is an incredible game and the world building and history of those original zones is unmatched, but sorry it's outdated, blizzard didnt put in all the time and money to revamp them for no reason.
This might be the most hype expac. Despite the content drought later on, the fact that it totally revamped the whole game was really cool. A lot of the old world had storylines related to the cataclysm which really made deathwing seem like a threat. It’s unfortunate the end game didn’t really do much to flesh out his character and man that final raid was terrible. Also Vashjir was fucking dope.
Ehh...Classic did not have all that many intriguing stories and I say that as someone who is currently leveling through classic, unless you also mean TBC and Wrath in which case I agree mostly. I think it is more a case of emotional dissonance as Cataclysm had a far greater case of very serious quests set right beside quests which you were not supposed to take serious at all. A great example is the revamped Badlands to me. Badlands is home to what i consider one of the greatest questlines Blizzard ever did for a zone, helping the red dragon Rheastrasza experiment on black dragon eggs to try and remove the corruption from them, succeeding and ultimately giving her life and the life of one of her unhatched children to throw Deathwing of the trail. It was a quest which had ramifications down the line (Wrathion comes from that one uncorrupted egg), showcased some distinctly more extreme and morally grey actions that the Red Flight was willing to do for the greater good and that final letter Rheastrasza left in which she asks you to care for her final egg is just heartbreaking (the fact that Blizzard allows you to sell that egg is just disgusting in my opinion). It was a great questline, but right alongside it in the same zone you have the questline with three idiots talking about where they were when the cataclysm struck and going into ever more insane tall tales. Hilarious on its own, but when you are in the middle of a serious storyline concerning the fate of the future black dragonflight...less so. On a lesser note that Blizzard decided to have a shoutout to The Lost Vikings in the middle of Rheastrasza's questline was also pretty meh.
Cata is a big mixed bag for me. I kind of liked the talent tree options, plus the changes of how classes played. I honestly hated how they completely destroyed almost everything Vanilla. Is this the expansion that gave Druids Symbiosis? Or was it WoD? Either way, that spell was the most fun I've had using on multiple different classes with different specs, as it changed radically with class specs. It was so much fun to use. I really wish they kept it in.
Cataclysm had amazing questing-lore, amazing 5 man dungeons and and impressive first tier + Ragnaros from second tier which was an amazing fight. Ont the other hand, it also had a mediocre second tier (save Ragnaros as i said) and and an awfull last tier (Dragon Soul which instead of being the greatest raid ever was a major dissapointment), and LFR the thing that almost killed the game.
I'd say Firelands had a few more good fights. Alysrazor and the... leg dude, in particular. The main problem with that raid (tier) is that it didn't have a lot of bosses. Personally, I liked Dragon Soul, but disliked more or less everything else about that patch.
The question is, will they do Cata legacy servers after they do Wrath? I'm not sure there would be as much demand for this expac as there is the previous ones.
Had 10 days on my subscription when they revealed the new race. I quit the same day, a bunch of monk pandas named jack black... no thanks, just kill the dark feel to the lore of the game.
To be fair, Cata was pretty solid. I deeply disliked it at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t that bad. My problem was multi-fold. The old zones - our homes - had been destroyed. That’s a bad feeling. Some areas looked great, but I had strong nostalgia for the earlier zones. Talents were jacked - perhaps an improvement in some ways, but a pretty big change. I was a paladin, but also had a max-alt mage. No more pom-pyro (even the chance to try it) was sucky. All this made me dislike it. But, Firelands was a great zone/story, and what I saw of the raid was cool. Dragon Soul wasn’t a bad raid either, and I liked LFR a LOT, being a non-raider by that time. Transmog likewise brought me back from other mmos. Plenty of good, some bad. If they did a Cata Classic, though, I’d try it out to see it a bit, but would want to keep my main in Wrath (hoping, of course, that they allow us to keep copies of our characters locked to certain expansions).
I still feel that Cataclysm was the point where I started to dislike WoW. I guess I'm one of those people that don't really like change, especially something as drastic as what Cata did to the original lands. That being said, something I've been wanting Blizzard to implement in the game was a way to use the caverns of time to go back and play on the original lands if you choose to. I think it would have been cool to do a long quest and obtain a magical item that would let you transition from the past to the future wherever you were. Imagine you were in the destroyed Barrens and you wanted to get across one of the large chasms. Use the magical item, teleport back to when barrens was flat, run across the field, and port back to the future and now you're on the other side of the chasm. Or another example, you come across a quest giver that is looking for the skin of a creature that no longer exists in the future. You port back to the past, kill the creature and bring the skin to the quest giver in the future. Which is another thing I didn't like about Cata... they changed so much about the original lands, but I never felt the need to actually explore them because the quests were all low level. They should have kept the world exactly the way it was, then you'd go complete a quest which would set the dragon's release in motion and the world would forever change for YOU. And now you can explore the new changed worlds, fighting stronger mobs of what you originally had no problem killing in the past. For instance, let's say the boars in the barrens have suddenly mutated because of the way the lands erupted, now suddenly you're fighting stronger versions of them. This also means that a new player would still be able to explore the original worlds, and when they reached the point where they did the quest and would release the dragon, then they would enter the destroyed lands as well. Of course, if you wanted to help out a new player, just use your magical item, transport to the past, and you can play with other people that have yet to experience the changes. Anyways, I'm rambling and I'm sure no one bothered to even read all of this. I just figured I'd get it off my chest.
I think the biggest issue with Cataclysm was the way the world was redesigned to sort of funnel players to endgame. This lead to a lot of content that wasn't raids or PVP withering on the vine. Not that I can blame Blizzard too much since they were obviously trying to compete with MOBAs and PVP/raids were the closest thing to that in terms of experience, but it removed a lot of the fun of exploring the world organically.
Lol I am the paladin on the frostwyrm in the have group will summon video. What the fuck this is some amazing nostalgia. Me and two of my friends saw a for the horde group being formed and stranglethorn is a pretty common place for horde and alliance while being close to stormwind and that's how it happened lol. ruclips.net/video/QiUKq0MBBEg/видео.html Liam we're finally famous bro.
>making leveling alts super attractive due to heirlooms added in wotlk >having icc as the main raid for 364 days >people are super bored and level a shitton of alts and classes they wanted. >make dungeon grinding with a heal or tank much more efficient than leveling >take a huge proportion of your dev team to revamp the old leveling content to the point the actual new content gets significantly smaller >have almost nobody play it really since everybody playing for the last 3 years has all the alts he wants yea blizzard great one. you really thought that trough. >having not changed anyting of it substantially even though deathwing has been dead longer than the old zones ever existed. great way to revamp the zones based around a dragon that has been dead for more than the last eight years. they really dont give a shit and you can tell.
Vashj is by far the best designed zone in wow history. Period. The seahorse was a bit clunky, i'll concede that. The over stylization, writing, story arc, the sense of thalassophobia when looking into the deep. I played until Legion and to that point, no zone impressed me more than Vashj. I know, it's a love hate thing. I love it more than hate it. A lot more.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
"He's a dragon, that's nice. And sometimes he does a drive by and sets you on fire."
stealth like
Cataclysm still feels like the largest expansion content wise. I know it feels different to everyone who played it back then because there was no real end-game. But the early game got really fleshed out.
Didn’t play cata or mop so imma make a worgen monk to see what I missed out on.
You mean destroyed. The eradicated so much of it in favor of shallowly written hot takes and attempts to be funny and removed a ton of what made the world feel familiar. The streamlining was nice, not going to lie, no longer having to go all over the world for basic things was good but I'd have rather kept that aspect and all of my old world locations and quests.
one of the problems with the revamped early game was that you could just skip over the entire thing by using LFG which was what the majority of people did and even if you tried to go through the world organically you would just out level the zone you're in much too quickly.
But the early game got really fucked up. The cata revamped zones just sucked ass.
@@palladiamorsdeus And the old world was a masterclass of subtlety in writing?
Cata made 1-60 massively more enjoyable, diverse and convenient for everyone, zones had actual stories and dynamic characters whose plot you follow throughout the zone, it introduced a huge amount of quest types so you aren't killing 30 of something with poor drop rates to mask the grind behind leveling.
You can get nostalgic about a specific quest or a zone but it was a massive improvement overall
Massively understating how impactful the changes to healing were in Cata. Healing hard content at launch was incredibly intense, you had so little mana that every single cast felt like a life-or-death decision. Playing a healer in Cata was by far the most I have ever enjoyed WoW gameplay.
1000%. I was off-spec healing, and each time I had to step up to heal I gained more and more respect for our healing team. Eventually I essentially became main spec healing (Resto Shaman) because fights were so intense we needed all the heals we could get and Dragon Soul truly burned me out.
I LOVED Cataclysm. Especially the changes they made to old Azeroth and hunters. Focus instead of mana was a genius addition.
Hi all, just to note part 2 will be out tomorrow
EDIT:
It'll be Friday boys sorry want to get my thoughts about the layering stuff out tonight
Enjoy :)
just a veeeerry small correction at about 8:35, cause I remember starting in cata as a hunter: Aggression wasn't removed at Cata's launch. It might've been around MoP or WoD, but I know in cata it was an option for my pets. Other than that this is great! I'm just being nitpicky.
"How did Cataclysm change WoW?"
- In a very, VERY bad way
Correction: at :19 you say Druids got their Eclipse mechanic for the first time, but that mechanic was added in WotLK, it just was reworked in Cata and given a bar.
Cata's dungeons and first 2 raid tiers were really good, Dragonsoul on the other hand was utter gash.
The only boss I remember by name from that raid, other than the two deathwing encounters, is Ultraxion. And he was the easiest of all the bosses. He was a free heroic kill for almost any raiding guild who had thumbs
Hated the raids; loved the 5mans
Couldn't agree more on dragon soul. I really hated it.
Dungeons were awesome, especially heroics in the beginning, until people started complaining it was too difficult and that it needed nerfs. Personally I liked Dragon Soul in the beginning when I first did it on Heroic, but it got boring after we got to spine heroic.
You guys are forgetting one thing, firelands, it'll always be one of my favorite raids in wow, especially the alysrazor fight
Back in Cata, my guild wore itself out to get realm first level 20 guild. We then had the entire guild fall from the sky in Stormwind and do a mass rez, because that was the level 20 perk.
One of the things I heavily disliked, as a lore geek at the time, was how the quests were a lot of pop culture reference and fourth wall breaking. Many places and their stories progressed, but not in any natural way. Playing Classic again feels more like the world taking itself and its lore seriously. I wouldn't have minded the changes (I was looking forward to them) that Cata brought about, if they had done a proper job of progressing the world forward. Mechanically, it may be better, but it just felt awful having all those zones made "fun" of, when you were trying to immerse yourself.
There were some cool upgrades, though. Western Plaguelands is a personal favorite, as I enjoyed how Lordaeron's fall and the attempts at bringing it back actually progressed there, but that's about it. I also enjoyed some of the new areas that Cata brought with it.
Endgame content is a whole other discussion as to whether that was better or not, but for me, narrative is key to setting up "why" we fight the villains in the dungeons/raids. Having a strong narrative makes for a better climax at that content, and reaching that endgame boss. For me in that regard, Cataclysm failed to deliver.
Thematically and story-wise, in my opinion, WotLK was the peak. They have the means to better deliver stories now, but as long as they don't take the lore and story of WoW seriously, neither shall I.
@Brant Hall it was, but they were much more subtle/few and far between, while the Cata revamp basically made entire zones into very obvious pop culture references, the most cringe examples being redridge mountains, westfall (yikes), silverpine... the quest staff was more concerned with making jokes rather than really giving us an idea how the world was different
Interesting to see it from that way actually! That's for sure a difference perspective than I had
I see simillar stuff happening to a lot of long-running franchises nowadays, breaking the fourth wall and losing the high fantasy feel they used to have...
As a huge Magic: the Gathering nerd and I've always loved the story and original atmosphere of different planes... what do we get now? A plane with pirates, vampires and dinosaurs mashed togehter, a plane that is in fact Disneyland, and, coming in few days, a plane which is essentially one giant meme, more than half of flavor texts are funny punchlines and they even made real Godzilla appear on cards FFS!
@Brant Hall yeah, it is probably inevitable... but still kinda sad to watch so many awesome worlds lose their soul in the process :(
@Brant Hall Yeah, but it wasn't so on the nose. Having to be a quest giver and dealing with three kinds of WoW player stereotypes, getting pointed out that quest givers have been standing in the same spot for years or that mobs respawn and that millions of other players also did this quest, so Yowler, son of Yowler, son of Yowler, son of Yowler, etc. is the 900th descendant of this npc. These are just a few examples. I never felt that classic yanked me out of the experience.
Personally, I have had trouble immersing myself in the world of warcraft after Cataclysm. It's not like I disliked everything about Cataclysm, but it definitely started the decline of my investment in the franchise.
Wotlk and cataclysm is where I started playing WoW. Even though I had my issues at the time with it there was no doubt to me that Firelands was my most favorite raid in the xpact, I could never forget ragnoros's speech as you entered the instance.
What do you think about Classic? I started wow when 1.3.12 came out which is what classic is based off of
@@timothygibney159 it was very different than what I was used to back in Wotlk but I like it.
How did Cataclysm Change World of Warcraft?
OH BOI HERE WE GO.....
It changed it from a good game into a bad one, big change yeah!
@@Vihara2 wotlk was my favorite expansion but it was the beginning of the end of wow as we knew it. I verified this creating two identical characters in wotlk and vanilla private servers with a level 1 to 5. Mage in wotlk didn't even require drinking to recharge Mana lol which made alchemy useless before level 60 raiding
it made it shit
@@timothygibney159 wow might as well be a single player game for me now. It starts with classic and ends at the death of the lich king.
@@natelynch4622 thank God for wow classic
Cataclysm was the beginning of what WoW is now imo... They started messing around with the way classes played too much and it felt like a different game not WoW.
they changed talent trees and how they work
and they removed a lot of stats
That was first thing, that started to detroyin the RPG in MMORPG
@Lebhrux I dont have problems with best builds.
tldr:talents now are limiting your character rather than allowing it to ,,personalize".
But right now your talents dont allow you to adjust them to your gameplay.
What talents now are doing is limiting your champion so he wont be best in everything.
You have aoe boss? pick this
You have single target boss? pick this
You farm? pick this
Or on other example:
I played a long time ago on fun server with 255 lvl cap. You could pick all talent points. Except like 2 or 3 classes, most classes didn't become OP. Becouse mages had to use concrete school (except frostfire bolt), rouges were still limited by energy etc.
Now imagine this situation happens now, you would literally become bonkers with all talents. You would perform great in AoE, single target, cleave and everything.
To me, how the classes played in Cata felt like an evolution of Wrath. I think WoD was really the first step to what we have today.
I agree. Blizzard was aiming for 'balance' - there's no such thing and acheiving it would be boring.
Indeed I only played upto wrath cuz my PC died and I was just able to get another so I was playing pservers. Well I started on a cata one the other day and I like it but I don't. Really only thing I like is the revamp and my pala got holy shock at 10 lmao. Other than that as you said it don't feel like wow
Cata was the end for me too. I pretty much quit after Cata.
Cata, the beginning of the end. I liked the intro raids..... transmog was cool.... I liked tol'barad. Really though it was the first time I was left with a wow xpac that I really didnt enjoy much, was the first time I unsubscribed from wow, was the first time most of my friends unsubscribed, and sadly it's an experience that would be repeated again and again as the years have gone on. Surprisingly, MoP is one of the only xpacs I've really liked in recent years.
I always think Mop is recent years too but when you think about it that shit was 6-8 years ago.
What about Legion? From what I've heard, MoP and Legion were still better than Cata/WoD/BfA, but I stopped subbing during Firelands and only came back occasionally for one month at a time, so I can't make my own judgement.
Said it perfectly yourself,the beginning of the end.
I enjoyed Cata too, but that's because I decidedly went casual. I think the drop off from WotLK was due to many people, myself included, "finishing" the game...being able to raid every instance and killing the big baddie. I started in the middle of BC and Kara was the only do-able raid for my noob guild and self, so I was determined to "see it all" in WotLK...and i did; and it was exhausting.
BC = noob, just learning how to play.
WotLK = serious business. exhausting.
Cata = casual pve, serious pvp.
MoP = got into the beta and leveled to max, realized i was gonna have to grind out the same levels on 3 maybe 4 toons to do the same things i've been doing and said NOPE. never understood the hate for the pandas as the zones were beautiful...just didn't want to level grind, just to daily quest grind, just to dungeon grind, just to LFR grind, just to raid grind.
How dare you release part 1 on its own! Im in quarantine i demand content! Jokes aside, all this legacy server talk has made me question whether they'll ever go all the way and release every expansion eventually. Cataclysm is the only expansion I never played and I would love to actually try it. Great video
I think if they decide to do TBC servers, they'll probably continue to WotLK and stop there. I don't think there would be enough demand for Blizzard to justify the resources it would take to make Cata servers.
The beginning of the end of Wow for me.
Yep, me too. It was the first expansion that dropped while I was full on with the game. Initially delighted with open world flying, and the dungeons, I slowly lost interest, and by the time the expansion was done, so was I.
tbf, WoD was the beginning of the end, Cata was the beginning of "Modern WoW", not necessarily worse than classic - WOTLK but very different, requires much more skill but is less grindy and takes less effort. Pick your side I guess
Same for me
Will E Thanks so much for the awesome content. Everytime we start inching closer to the next classic expac I always come back and watch this series. One of my favortites
I liked Vash’Jir. Felt like it has the best aesthetic and story of any of the new zones. It actually felt like you were lost and stranded, and by the end (where the Naga capture Neptulon) it actually felt like the world was in danger. Can’t say the same for the other zones. Uldum was a comedy zone, Deepholm was exceptionally boring, and Twilight Highlands was another comedy zone with the dwarves until FINALLY there’s a Deathwing moment that just comes out of nowhere at the end. Hyjal was decent but didn’t feel like anything of significance was happening until the Firelands patch.
It was awful, as a shaman I would plant my totems before a fight and they would fall down to the ocean floor out of range of me and the mobs...
my primary issue with cata was the loss of the old world. imo they shouldve made it available via cavern of time.
The neutering of talents coupled with their BS reasoning was another big one for me. Not to mention COMPLETELY CHANGING my holy paladins playstyle. And I wasn't a huge fan of holy power or being a palarogue either. I did rather like hunters running off of energy, tho'.
@@palladiamorsdeus i still dont like holy power. i want my wrath pally back.
@@palladiamorsdeus because wrath holy paladin was so fun, spam one spell. Cata holy paladin was strong spec.
People are just afraid of change, why I have no idea.
I always thought the same, but now that's classic is out, I'm glad we can't level in original vanilla in retail. Leveling is such an unmeaningful, faceroll mess of an experience that it doesn't do justice to what it was really like, and so I'm glad we have to go to classic to play as it was intended.
@@goran77ish there's a multitude of reasons why pallies are having Holy power Baseline. Holy paladin using them like they have in cataclysm is one of them.
I love that Mount Hyjal music at the start of the video... it’s probably my favorite piece of zone music in all of WoW. It’s just fantastic!
To this day, I’ve never done the worsen, goblin, or panda run quest intro stories in the 12 years I’ve been playing this game. Hell I doubt many people even know Baradin Hold exists since it was so forgettable.
The truth is, every expansion has something good, and something bad, even vanilla had lots of problems. But people seems to like to focus in certain aspects, sometimes they do because they want to reinforce certain ideas or beliefs.... usualy, people that are not happy with the current state of the game like to point and complain about Cata because they THINK is the turning point of the game... but the reality is that, the game had started to become "more casual" since WotLK.
I can, just from the top of my mind, tell you that vanilla had a lot of people complain how hard to access the raid content was, how the loot from the dungeons and quest was terrible, how the raid loot was so scarce, how terrible unbalance most specs were... lots of the changes that happened ever since vanilla, happened in response to players complains
TBC added lots of "welfare" epics.... not only the dungeon loot was so much better then vanilla dungeon loot, heroics had lots of epics that in some cases, were BiS, i mean, Magister Terrace was straight up a catch up mechanism for people needing gear... reps sold gear, both epic, and later one, some blue semi-pvp gear... TBC also added dailys (tho daily content exist since vanilla realy) but most people consider TBC daily content ...good daily content ... Isle of Quel'Danas is the best example.
WotLK added the LFG tool... something people had been crying for... not everybody had tank friends... or healers... or had the luck to coincide with them... and when you can only play for 1 or 2 hours a day, you want a tool that let you find groups quickly... More importantly to me is the addition to the quest tracker... tracking quest objetives in your map and mini-map was, according to many many people, the thing that "dumbed down" the game the most... BUT... QUESTY addon existed since vanilla... lots of people used that addon to find where they had to go with or without reading the quest... Blizzard just adopted it... i too think it was a bad idea... but i can't just blame Blizzard for making obvious something that half of the players were already using. Don't believe me? check the most downloaded addons for Classic WoW... You'll be surprised how many of the so called "classic enthusiasts" mod the game till is so closed to retail...
I could keep going on and on.... but the point is, Cata was not a bad expansion... if it was, then by definition every expansion was bad, because each one added something people did not like, or had just content that was too hard, or too boring etc.
Blah blah blah, "The expansion that started the decline of WoW wasn't THAT bad, guys! Honest!" Yes. It was. Not the worst, but there's a very good reason the game permanently lost an entire third of its playerbase during that time period. The fallacy in your...argument, if you can even call it that, is that the other expansion had fewer things that people didn't like and were more willing to put up with, while Cata had more things people DIDN'T like and weren't willing to put up with.
Actualy, if you wanna talk about fallacies, you just used the biggest one : Cata lost 1/3 of its player base cuz bad expansion.
While many people did quit because they didn't like the changes, like talents for example, the reality, is that it was a massive coincidence of factors that made the drop in the playerbase be that big.
Let me explain this to you: I started to play wow in 2004 along 9 other friends. For the time Cata ended, most have left the game. Some left during TBC, others did durin WotLK and finaly 3 or 4 quit during Cata, even tho, they all come back here and there and play tru the new expansions for a couple months...
Now... did they quit cuz "bad expansions"? No.... the reality is noone did quit because of the quality of the content, but real life reazons... mostly... with the exception of 1 of them that quit because he started playing more FF 14, everybody else quit because either got a job, or a family, or just ended up having no time to dedicate to an mmo. MMOs are too demanding, and sometimes, 1 hour a day dosent realy let u progress in the game much, if at all, and thus, people just don't feel motivated to keep paying 15 dlls a month to not be able to play.
You see.... most people that started in 2004 were fans of the franchise. Me and my friends being the best example, havin playing wc2 and 3, and hell, some did play the very 1st one! In other words, our age range is right where, after 7 or so years of wow, you end up at a point in your life that you find yourself loaded with responsabilities.
Besides the age factor, there are other reazons, like the one i touched up: competition. Lots of brand new mmos and mobas, some with amazing visuals, like FF14, and nowadays we have Blade and Soul, Black Desert, etc... some people realy like them visuals you know? :)
So yeah "bad expansion" is not realy the reazon why everybody left. That's what internet trolls and people that are angry at the game because 1 or 2 changes that realy bothers them were made, yells in an attempt to convince others to think like they do.
I enjoyed all of the new zones, especially Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, and Deepholm. I raided pretty steadily that expansion (starting with tanking Bastion of Twilight when I was still in blues and greens and beating Cho'gall). I liked the dungeons, especially Grim Batol and Halls of Origination. I enjoyed archaeology even though it could be frustrating at times.
Vashir was so bad that the next time Blizzard made an underwater zone they made sure to drain out the water.
Loved the start of Cata. Had a lot of fun playing pre nerf heroics. Also was the expansion I played a lot of PVP as a Holy Paladin which was very OP.
I really enjoyed Cataclysm, that said I only played the first half of it. I enjoyed seeing end-game blues be a thing and epics required some effort to get rather than how incredibly easy it was to get epics in WotLK. The heroic dungeons weren't braindead easy, least when I played, so that was nice. And overall the Cata zones, dungeons, and raids had a really cool aesthetic and I enjoyed all of them. Tol Barad was cool, it was really zerg-y, but it caused me to PvP more than I have in any expansion. The Molten Front is probably one of the best takes on dailies ever put in the game. Cata was definitely the last time I can remember truly enjoying WoW rather than "well, I still have sub time so I guess I oughta play...". That said from what I hear the later parts of Cata were absolutely horrid, but I wasn't playing at the time so I unno.
Cata was the beginning of the end. To me, Wotlk was pinnacle. Cata began the needless simplification of the game. Wrath had it all, including exciting lore, pvp and great raids. Classes were in a good place too.
I disagree. Wrath was a very mixed bag of very bad and very good. The 5 man heroics were way too easy and raids oscillated from terrible (naxx, toc) to great (ulduar, icc).
Classes were in a good place in Wrath, but for the most part, were in an even better place in Cata.
Some of the simplifications made in Cata I'll agree that were unnecessary, but weren't game breaking, as far as I'm concerned.
For me, early Cata was the pinnacle. It fixed the issues with difficulty, while keeping the things that made Wrath good (how classes played, mostly).
i mean mists had the most complex classes.
Classes were not in a good place in WotLK. The vast majority of the classes play the same in Cata as they did in WotLK, just more polished and smoother. WotLK class design was a bunch of random ideas glued together with duct tape, while Cata took those same ideas (and added minor new stuff on top), and actually crafted well designed classes that functioned
properly.
Arms Warr: Basically same spells and idea in both WotLK and Cata. In WotLK it's a clunky mess that's barely playable on any fight with movement, in Cata, only receiving minor changes, that same base rotation is suddenly one of the best and smoothest Dps specs in the game. And similair arguments can be made for most of the specs in the game.
The two big exceptions are Paladins and Hunters, the only two classes that got massive reworks going into Cata. Holy Power was not needed, and it didn't do anything except make Paladins annoying to play. Hunter as a class died when they lost their manabar, and I have a stong hate for the modern "45 yards melee hitbox" design for Hunters.
These two changes were the first in a looooong list of Blizzard trying to fix what wasn't broken, and in the process ending up with an inferior product.
@@erichall090909 Cata and MoP are the objective peak of classdesign.
@@Melodeath00 100% disagree i started in cata and played Holy pally. I loved the class style of h pally so much i quit playing them after mop cause they took away holy power i thought it was a fantastic addition and another thing on top that could really separate an average player from a great player. Im playong wotlk classic right now playing holy pally cause thats what i want to play if cata classic comes out. But im a really good healer but playing this version of h pally out side of cd useage nothing separates a good holy pally from an average on. When you only have 3 spells to heal it hard to trully shine in content so easy H dungeons where 10xharder then any boss ive had to fight in naxx
My int spellpower prot paladin died in cata due to the stat change. Also, on my server there were several horde guilds that camped hyjal killing all alliance npcs in the zone for the first year of the game. You literally could not quest in that zone as alliance. The change to the talent trees were needed, but forcing a min in one tree before unlocking the other options was a mistake.
The reason why I loved Cataclysm was because it was the time I played level stop content the most. I liked to play at level 60/70/80 and do the old content. And it was possible to overgear the upcoming expansions because the gear didn't scale with level. So I could farm tier 2/tier 2,5 gear oder tier 6 gear and completely trash any enemy in the upcoming zones. Same went for Mists of Pandaria if I remember correctly, but I played endgame raids more often there. I loved the cataclysm holy Paladin and blood DK. Cataclysm was also the expansion where Blizzard introduced the vengeance mechanic for tanks (I know they introduced it already in the prepatch). Tanks got more attack power the more damage they tanked. It was pretty broken but also so much fun to raid faction cities with only blood DKs. And I remember falling in love with fury and arms warrior in Cataclysm. :D
What was ridiculous in Cata was the powerscaling of items. The very first item I got was already better than my ICC heroic gear piece. It was insane going from 20k to 30k HP DPS-class to a about 100k HP DPS-class. The numbers just exploded. But I never disliked it personaly. Numbers never meant a thing to me because I always see them in relation to the enemies health bar...but still it was ridiculous. xD
I liked Cata and really loved that time in my life. I always feel that WotLK was the last "Classic" WoW expansion and Cata did so much to change everything it really hammered that in and killed the feel of the game in many ways. Ever since Cata the game was different, it wasn't the same. Catas modernization came at the price of the death of the old game and old world quite literally.
How did cata feel so much different compared to wotlk not taking them changing some of the zones in the world into account.
That intro was amazing! Great video. I loved Cataclysm, up until the end. The last patch really sucked. Otherwise it was great! WoTLK was my favourite though.
Weird question but, since cata changed the layout of Azeroth, what happened for players who didn’t buy the expansion right away back then.
It still changed for them. They just couldn't play the new cata zones.
Cataclysm was without a doubt, my favourite expansion. All these cool concepts and stuff going on that people were legitimately invested in. Deathwing was all you needed in a villain, a big angry fucking dragon. Not this convoluted Sylvanas/Nzoth bullshit
I LOVED Cata. Everyone harps on it for LFR and Dragon Soul, but that was at the very end. Tier 11 and Firelands were my favorite times in WoW. Amazing raids, the world rework made leveling way more exciting and fun. Talent change was very welcomed too.
Great video as always dude!
i went from bc to cataclysm and had the best time in cata the dungeons were such a new thing for me with the bosses changing they went from tank andd spank to having their own ways to be defeated was a good change up made it more challenging
this is when i stopped playing ... momories
I would love to see videos like this for also all expansions that came after.
great video
Archaeology was definitely made with fishing patience in mind. Personally I loved it, really cool lore, toys and an amazing 2-hander. Definitely appreciate when Blizzard used to put in activities for people who just want to chill.
Problem for me was Cata was the beginning of the end for me, was the start the game started to take everyclass and start to make each role the exact same just with different names for spells. In order to balance classes they simplifed them and took away each's idenity by everyone having everything. There was less of a need for a balanced group of raids with everyone contributing. It only got worse each expansion after. And LFR was the single worst thing ever brought into the game. I hear people complain about dungeon finder in WoTLK but for the most part dungeons werent super hard and getting replacements was fairly easy. But LFR where everyone was a bunch of idiots who didnt need to understand the content or could just afk right after the fight to then ninja the gear was insanely frustrating. I still enjoyed the expansion overall but that was mainly from PVP being fairly fun
I dont really get why people hated the old world rewamp. Finally the zones were dynamic and the quest where progressive. Great change after so many years of leveling in the same zones.
Levelling was considerably easier, and the quests and zone progression in general felt too on rails (which is a bit funny, since WoW has always been considered a theme park MMO).
Don't get me wrong, I see the benefits of both approaches (classic vs cata), but neither is without flaws.
Because they ruined the look and feel of some old zones, like Darkshore which was a nice peaceful zone with a good town and hub. Now it's just a rainy hellhole. They could have done it in a more subtle way.
@@Liofa73 Ever heard the saying "life is change"?
Damn was that Ansgar? ToloDK's warrior? I'm kinda surprised I remember that, he used to do very frequent "game vlogs" through cataclysm. It was cool to see him here. 3:29
I used to play on Aerie Peak EU. I remember queueing to get on the server in wrath - then when cata dropped it was nearly impossible to click the flight trainer was Azeroth flying on launch. It's low pop these days, no king rules forever indeed.
Cata also gave tanks CTC or "combined table coverage" as their new defense rating, and the only way to find this out was to run the CTC script as a macro. Once you had your CTC optimal you just stam stacked gear.
Cata changed almost everything about wow including all the things people enjoyed and loved about wow. Hard to keep subs when u change the world and classes so much if feels like a different game.
"When you change classes"???? Seriously? At what point Cataclysm "changed" classes to a bad stage??? Let me remind you that before Cataclysm, you could get a one shot by a 1 second cast of Chaos Bolt... Oh, and let's not forget the fact that before Cataclysm, DKs didn't have a clear role or roles. And don't get me wrong, I think Wotlk is still a bit better than Cataclysm, but atleast to me, in overall, Cata isn't bad.
@@josedavidmunozmartinez4722 balance and class identity are different. Soul shards no longer being something warlocks farm. Rogues had major core abilities removed or tied directly to 1 spec. A ton of flavor abilities where completely removed. I tried to play cata and i stopped because the characters i played didnt feel upgraded or progressed. They felt completely changed. I think cata was when there stopped being 10 classes and instead you had each spec became its own class.
@@squey4523 Did we play the same game? The vast majority of classes had the same core gameplay and ideas as their WotLK counterparts, while being A LOT smoother and functionally better, WHILE adding new stuff.
With the exception of Paladins and Hunters (who got reworked for no reason, those two classes were probably the 2 best designed classes of WotLK), and DKs getting "semi-reworked" with each spec getting a clear role, nobody lost any rotational spells going into Cata. In fact, all classes got new spells, with Cata being the last expansion to give new baseline spells to the classes...
Rogue = Basically the same, although this shouldn't surprise anybody, as Rogue has historically been the least changed of all the classes. Somebody playing Rogue in Classic, would still recognize the WoD version instantly...
Priest = Shadow gameplay was identical + Mind Spike for low hp adds, Disc was objectively improved (WotLK bubblespam was degenerate as fuck), and Holy was basically the same
Shaman = WotLK gameplay + new Cata spells.
Warr = Arms went from being the most clunky spec in the game in WotLK, to the smoothest and best spec in Cata, while having the same spells and base rotation (and spreading Rend with Thunder Clap was amaaaaazing). Fury, while getting a rework, still had the same base gameplay as its WotLK counterpart, with Raging Blow replacing Whirlwind in the rotation. Turning Heroic Strike/Cleave into an instant attack with 3 sec CD was objectively better gameplay than the "on next attack" mechanic the spells used to have from Classic-WotLK.
Locks = Same base gameplay with minor changes. Cata Demo with original Hand of Gul'Dan was amazing. Also, I've never ever met a Warlock who actually liked farming soulshards.
Druids = Feral and Resto was basically the same with minor changes. Boomkin was improved massively with the addition of Starsurge.
Mage = Did actually receive some changes to all its specs, but that's a good thing, because WotLK Mage was dogshit, a relic from a bygone era of Classic/TBC 1 button spam rotations. Alter Time was great, "new Combustion" (RIP) was great, the first signs of PvE Frost were great. Arcane, despite being a 2 button spec, actually became somewhat interesting because of the mana minigame brought about by their Mastery, and caused huuuuuge skillgaps within the Mage playerbase in its heydays of t11 and t12 with the Sinestra trinket.
I might get a lot of crap for this, but cataclysm was my favorite expansion. I've started in BC, as a casual player (because my PC at the time could not really handle WoW that well). But in Cata, when I got a better PC, joined a guild and actually became social in game, I've started taking this game seriously and I was raiding at a fairly competent level. I guess it's my favorite because most of the friends I've made in cata I'm still friends with today. Even am a "god parent" to one of their kids.
Cata was not a bad expansion... The problem Is that cata DELETED the old content. Thats why people hate It. If devs had left the old content accesible, noone would had flinched an eye.
Cataclysm was a bad expansion but it wasn't the worst. The problem was that it was the beginning of the end, it took place right after two major lore viillains went down and introduced a villain not as many people knew about, on top of completely destroying the old world. I am to this day mad about the destruction of Southshore. They also started dumbing down talents while passing out bullshit excuses for it and began homogenizing the different roles. My paladin healer became something COMPLETELY different in Cata and I didn't enjoy it, nor appreciate them fucking with something I had been using for six years at that point.
The bones of Cataclysm were there. I really enjoyed the first few months of it. The problem was: Blizzard doubled down on every mistake that they made in wrath.
Loving the intro music!
Looking back on it, Cataclysm wasn't a bad expansion, but the killer for me was the talent changes. Class changes irritated me too, especially hunters no longer using mana. But man, the talent changes were *unforgivable.* The game just felt dumbed down, and it played that way, too.
I came back for Panda Mists, and I played a handful of hours in Legion. Even came back for a few more hours in BFA. Just wasn't the same.
Classic, however. Goddamn, that brought it all back for me. It's been awhile since I logged in (moved across the country, switched jobs, etc), but I do miss Classic. I hope they bring back BC, too.
Haven't left a comment in awhile, but I'm glad to see your channel doing well, Willie. I'm one of your first couple hundred subs, so it's neat to see the channel chugging along!
You know, back then I thought the world would develop further and not that we have now 10 years of cataclysm while the original world only lasted about 5 years. I had no problem with the revamp, because I thought finally.. and had expectations that this would happen again. Even though I like the going from zone to zone from Classic much more than only questing through one zone after another.
It's been a long, long time since I've been that excited to see a video pop up in my feed. This series (in fact, all of your videos) have been absolutely stellar!
Cataclysm is a special one for me. I love my Worgen DK, and I remember this expansion turning me very much into a dragon fanboy. I'm hyped for part 2 and beyond!
I still never done any quests in the revamp azeroth or start zones for goblin and worgen... and I played every expansion 50+ days /played. Had every class max lvl after wotlk and if I wanted alt I got boosted by friends
The big mistake they did with Cata was modifying the old world which took an enormous amount of work. If fixing 3D wasn't enough (they wanted to implement flying in vanilla zones, after all), they went down with re-shaping many areas, removing content and adding new one. Instead, they could have been happy with ADDING content (quest hubs and the like) were it made sense and thus refine/complete unfinished questlines, stories, etc. This would have helped with making the original areas feel polished and provide consistent xp while leveling through them.
Cata didnt feel like the WoW of Vanilla, TBC, and LK. Its hard to nail why, but the classes didnt feel the same, the world itself felt more cartoony and less fantasy, the mystery areas like Gilneas and Hyjal was a let down, questing was not longer real content, and LFR + LFD just made it feel like it became a single player game.
It was faster paced than Vanilla and TBC (neither a bad thing nor a good thing, necessarily). It was similar to Wrath in pace and class design (some exceptions may apply), but it more challenging than Wrath, which was good.
I think I understand what you mean by the world feeling more cartoony, the pop culture references and jokey stuff it had were more in your face than the ones in the old games.
Questing hadn't been real content since Wrath. Except the levels new to any particular expansion that is, which I think holds true to this day.
Dungeon finder was added in Wrath, and in Cata (at least at the start), it was actually much better than in Wrath and any subsequent expansion, because the heroics were actually hard, and you couldn't really afford to not talk at all. LFR is possibly the worst thing ever added to the game, thankfully it was added in the last patch of Cata.
xalian17 LFD came in wrath. LFR only existed in Dragon Soul in Cata.
Clepto 🤦🏻♀️
the thing is
Cata feels different from wotlk and old wow but still feels classic enough to feel different to mop wod and so on
This Expansion was by far the best in my opinion. The PVP, PVE and just general revamp was awesome!
I hope they make a cata classic server as well! 🤞
Cataclysm just ruined PvP for me. Healers became virtually unkillable 1v1. They took away Arena Rating requirements to buy gear, making it so that anybody could buy any piece of PvP gear without even being in an Arena team. This took away the very incentive casuals had to do PvP together to unlock new pieces of gear, which lead to the apparition of people spamming the /trade channel saying they look for a mate to win a couple v2 matches to get to the Arena Points cap for the week. Complete BS.
Damage was multiplied by two, but healthpools were multiplied by 4, making fights last horribly long. My mage's Pyroblast was hitting about as hard at the end of LK with 90k HP. On top of that, every pure DPS class got new defensive/self healing CDs, forcing you to go all out to secure a kill even when a fucking Rogue or Warrior was at 20% life. Mana became irrelevant. Healers got a shitload of instant healing spells and were almost impossible to get OOM, making it an absolute nightmare to play against.
And they started taking away core Class mechanics that nobody complained about for no reason at all. Warlock lost Soul Shards, Mages lost Fire/Frost wards (which were insanely funny when specced) and the original Blastwave, Hunters lost ammo, mana and Mongoose Bite ... And I won't even comment on leveling. How to ruin great aspects of a beautiful game for no fucking reason at all.
Lol are you sure you're talking about Cata? It was the most balanced pvp expansion.
Mortal Strike, venoms and other skills got the healing debuff nerfed because healers were easier to kill.
Healers were unkillable in wotlk. Arenas could last over 20 minutes before any healer run out of mana. Paladins were fucking tanks with their sacred shield empowered by sp.
Also hard counters weren't as bad as previous expansions.
@@sergiogonzales330 Seriously, Cata the most balanced expansion ... That's why the first 2v2 on the ladder of my battlegroup in S11 was double blood DK, and Warriors were in over half R1 teams in S9. And I won't even mention bloody ferals or retarded ololol burst demonology warlocks with their 15 imps. Have you seen "Cataclysm real gameplay" vid on RUclips ? It was quite popular back then ... Healers were better in LK ? Definitely not in PvP, and in Cata they took away warlocks' Drain Mana to make those shitting v2 matches last even longer.
Most balanced WoW ever was was S7-S8, that's why AT was based 3.3.2. Every single class and spec could get R1 back then. Although, to be fair, Cata wasn't that unbalanced, was quite enjoyable to play in that regard, and was certainly less unbalanced than the first two seasons of LK. It just had shit PvP gameplay, which just got worse with MoP and WoD (I stopped retail there). I mean just go watch a mage 85 PvP vid and then a mage 80 PvP vid. The damage output is similar, while HP pools got multiplied by over 4. Cata was the advent of slowpaced PvP.
I remember having to get 2200 rating in cata to get my upgraded weapon/shoulders/whatever.
Even with bigger healthpools, a lot of classes had high base dmg even outside of cd's. 1v1ing healers were possible, the win condition just wasnt necessarily outplaying, but attrition and cooldown management. Honestly never minded the more health/survivability, it only made 2v2 a nightmare against some comps.
Mana was never irrelevant, there were comps dedicated to wearing u down. Casters didnt have endless mana pools either.
didnt warlock still have soul shards as a spender? Either way, demonology warlock was hella fun back in cata.
Theres a reason pretty much every single comp was viable at 2700+ rating in cata. Shit was the best it was ever gonna get.
@@Phailox Warlocks SS were taken out in Cata prepatch (which was one of the major non sense changes btw).
"Theres a reason pretty much every single comp was viable at 2700+ rating in cata"-Definitely not every single comp, much less every single spec. I haven't seen a single non subtetly rogue in all of Cata for example. In S7-S8 every single class and spec could get to R1 though.
"1v1ing healers were possible" - Maybe with a rogue. If you could win a 1v1 attrition fight against a healer in Cata, then said healer was either shit or you had to talk 30 minutes to kill healers.
"I remember having to get 2200 rating in cata to get my upgraded weapon/shoulders/whatever." -- Yeah there was this Heroic recolored PvP gear, I remember that too. But that's for the top 5% of the playerbase, while all the rest of the gear had 0 requirements or whatsoever, leading to a massive influx of casual and bringing down most of the social aspect of Arenas at lower rankings.
Super Baranowicz I remember walking around in wotlk, thinking I was cool with my 1800 sword, until someone else came by with the 2200 variant :(. Highest I got was 2k
Cata was the first expansion I played end game content (yes I’m a cata kid) I remember the huge lightning guy fight was super hard. After playing classic I feel like I would have appreciated it much more if I new the lore
@7:46
That's the 2nd bullet that ended wows misery after LFR Implementation.
Such a good video especially explaining the stats and talents
A lot of people shit on this expansion but watching this video made me realize I actually had a really time playing this expansion
A really what time?
People are bashing Dragonsoul, but honestly, it had some of the best fights imho. Some of the bosses gave you the freedom to alter your raid strategy, like choosing and ooze to kill on Yor'sahj or standing in the middle on Hagara's totem phase. Heroic modes were also vastly different from their normal counterparts, adding either an extra phase or requiring entirely different tactics(well i guess back then it was the norm, but still...). LFR(as much as i hated it) first month was total anarchy and awesome drama generator - people ninjalooting left and right, hunters rolling everything, groups of guildies votekicking some random lads just for giggles, being stuck on The Spine for over 2 hours etc, etc. Good times :-)
Sure, the last boss was meh, some of the trash was extremely annoying(them fking purple dragons man) and visuals were very bland, but overall i'd say it was a decent raid.
First thing I raged back in launch was the destruction of loch modan
I can't stress how big of a mistake it was to "revamp" the vanilla areas. It's as if someone bulldozed my childhood home. If your favorite video game is Mario Bros, you can dust off the old cartridge, plug it in, and re-live that beloved game. Blizzard robbed players of the ability to be able to do that with WoW. Want to relive the Barrens that you loved in 2005? TOO BAD, YOU CAN'T. IT'S GONE. RUINED FOREVER. BULLDOZED.
The game has been going downhill ever since WOTLK.
That's not to mention the fact that the changes implemented in Cata were all bad. Yep, I said it... ALL. All of the new changes were bad. It was the great dumbing-down patch. Arrows, mana, talents, stats, threat, etc all got removed. Any aspect of the game that may have required an IQ over 85 to manage got removed.
Adding guild levels sounds great in theory, but in practice it just meant that guild spam bots flooded every single channel, and players just gravitated away from the idea of guilding with friends or others that they enjoyed actually playing with. Instead they just migrated to a max-level guild for the perks. The consequences were ultra-massive guilds in which nobody even knew or cared about each other. "/g I need help with a quest," *crickets*.
@@captainthrall I disagree with most everything. Arrows didn't add any depth to the game, nor did it require any IQ to manage. I'm fine either way, whether they had kept them or removed them, but I'm not gonna lose my shit over fucking arrows.
Mana was made irrelevant for classes that didn't need to use it, with some exceptions. Hunters, for example, make much more sense with focus.
Talents were not dumbed down. Just removing some of them, especially the very simple ones, doesn't make the system any more or less complicated. In terms of the choices you had to make, it felt more or less the same as before to me. The thing that bothered me is that having a talent point each level felt... right, and that went away with having one every 2 levels instead.
I'll agree on stats, the removals were unnecessary. Again, not something I'd lose my shit over., though.
Threat had not been a factor in Wrath either.
I don't know anyone that, having the choice between a max lvl random guild and a low(er) level guild with his friends, chose to go with the random guild. If such a person exists, it says more about them than it does about the game. I'll agree that the guild spam and the guilds created with the sole purpose to benefit from the perks and nothing else, were annoying.
I HATED the dumbing down of the talent tree that happened. That made me quit playing Wow as much, and is what got me to come back to play Classic. To me, it was a stupid overhomogenization that was simply put in to help "casual" players who didn't want to research or work to be able to "match up" better with other better players who DID know what they were doing.
I love these videos. The nostalgia is amazing. I think the drops between Cata to present could just be the fact that people grew up and gained adult lives. You attribute it to the MOBA genre which I think is true. WoW is just a game great for kids with a shit ton of free time but as an adult it's rather shit. Having to plan your fun around 9 - 19 other people around the nation is taxing and at the begin of an expansion (esp. Cata) that could mean spending 3 hours wiping on the first 2 raid bosses. MOBAs are great for their immediacy. Click a button and you're in with 9 other players on an even field. In WoW, there is no pick up and play feature. Even if you get someone, they need to be leveled and geared which can take days before you can progress. And god forbid if a main tank doesn't show up.
i liked cata but i was way more casual back then i enjoyed the revamped azeroth south stv was pretty cool
Whens part 2! I want to see more :D
Tomorrow!
@@WillEmmo Lies and deceptions =( . Jk, take your time man.
I really liked some changes with Cata but boi did it change alot tho, some stuff for the worse....lfr...
Looking forward to ur part 2.
Most expansions are like, 30% good changes, 30% bad changes, 40% middling changes. Cataclysm was 50% AMAZING changes, 50% TERRIBLE changes and this mix created some strange perceptions and memories of cataclysm though cataclysm servers are starting to get really popular in the Private server scene which rarely strays from vanilla/BC/Wrath era.
Im curious what was the 50% horrible things they did in cata. I loved cata the only issues i have with cata was dragon soul was way to long the talent changes that came with dragon soul and lfr but out side of the dragon soul patch i thought it was almost perfect
Wotlk was so focused with an obvious end point of beating h the lych King. Cata was weird - the end zones were not great. We didn't know that things would get far far worse after tho.
What is the beginning song thonk
My only issue with this Xpac was the Deathwing fight. The best part was how hard Heroic Dungeons were coming out of Wrath. Certain heroic boss mechanics could one shot you if you didn't use a cool down or got hit my something that was meant to be avoided. Trash mobs needed to be CCed or they would slam your face into the ground. People started whining that they were too hard so they got nerfed.
i never played cata or mop but they seem and look way better then modern expacs up from wod
As much as I disliked Cata at the time it was DEFINITELY better than anything that came after it. But the later expansions also don't have the stigma of destroying the old world. Well parts of Legion do that ((Hur durrr, da nightwatch is bad!)) but not to that same extent.
The end of the road for me. I played Cataclysm for a week, hen gave up and left the game. Too much had changed, especially when Garrosh was made Warchief. That moment was the first time I wished I could transfer all of my Horde Characters over to the Alliance.
The underwater zone is equivalent to super Mario bros underwater levels. No one has nostalgia for those levels.
yeah its true it looked amazing and beautiful but what was the point if nobody was outside in that world doing anything. The server where i played everyone was just sitting in the city next to their banks and pressing LFG or LFR, the world itself was dead
i didn't mind the revamped zones, in fact some were amazing... Org was so sick too
controversial opinion: Cataclysm was very enjoyable in the beginning and end of the expansion itself, even though it finalized the changes from Wotlk that ended the Vanilla/TBC style that made the game great in the first place, which hurt the game in each future expansion.
Cata killed the wow we knew and loved.
And replaced it with something actually good.
@@justbuildgunpla1315 *Prepare thy Popcorn for the show*
@@justbuildgunpla1315 you forgot to add "extremely unpopular opinion:"
@@justbuildgunpla1315 Not hardly. But eh, you're allowed to be a troll.
@@palladiamorsdeus I'd rather quest in a zone for a bit than get half a level in the barrens, run to stonetalon for a few bars, run to tarren mill to grind for 2 levels, back to barrens for 1 level, and on and on for 8 days worth of /played to make any progress. The game isnt stuck in 2004 which I dont understand is anything but a good thing.
Vanilla wow is an incredible game and the world building and history of those original zones is unmatched, but sorry it's outdated, blizzard didnt put in all the time and money to revamp them for no reason.
This might be the most hype expac. Despite the content drought later on, the fact that it totally revamped the whole game was really cool.
A lot of the old world had storylines related to the cataclysm which really made deathwing seem like a threat. It’s unfortunate the end game didn’t really do much to flesh out his character and man that final raid was terrible.
Also Vashjir was fucking dope.
My problem with the revamp was that they changed the quests from being intriguing stories to jokey and memey bullshit which cheapened the feel imo
Ehh...Classic did not have all that many intriguing stories and I say that as someone who is currently leveling through classic, unless you also mean TBC and Wrath in which case I agree mostly. I think it is more a case of emotional dissonance as Cataclysm had a far greater case of very serious quests set right beside quests which you were not supposed to take serious at all.
A great example is the revamped Badlands to me. Badlands is home to what i consider one of the greatest questlines Blizzard ever did for a zone, helping the red dragon Rheastrasza experiment on black dragon eggs to try and remove the corruption from them, succeeding and ultimately giving her life and the life of one of her unhatched children to throw Deathwing of the trail. It was a quest which had ramifications down the line (Wrathion comes from that one uncorrupted egg), showcased some distinctly more extreme and morally grey actions that the Red Flight was willing to do for the greater good and that final letter Rheastrasza left in which she asks you to care for her final egg is just heartbreaking (the fact that Blizzard allows you to sell that egg is just disgusting in my opinion).
It was a great questline, but right alongside it in the same zone you have the questline with three idiots talking about where they were when the cataclysm struck and going into ever more insane tall tales. Hilarious on its own, but when you are in the middle of a serious storyline concerning the fate of the future black dragonflight...less so.
On a lesser note that Blizzard decided to have a shoutout to The Lost Vikings in the middle of Rheastrasza's questline was also pretty meh.
As Nyhm sang it in his song, the cataclysm was the end of the world (of warcraft).
i love these trips down memory lane as a longtime, vanilla Wow player!
Cata is a big mixed bag for me. I kind of liked the talent tree options, plus the changes of how classes played.
I honestly hated how they completely destroyed almost everything Vanilla.
Is this the expansion that gave Druids Symbiosis? Or was it WoD?
Either way, that spell was the most fun I've had using on multiple different classes with different specs, as it changed radically with class specs. It was so much fun to use. I really wish they kept it in.
Cataclysm had amazing questing-lore, amazing 5 man dungeons and and impressive first tier + Ragnaros from second tier which was an amazing fight. Ont the other hand, it also had a mediocre second tier (save Ragnaros as i said) and and an awfull last tier (Dragon Soul which instead of being the greatest raid ever was a major dissapointment), and LFR the thing that almost killed the game.
I'd say Firelands had a few more good fights. Alysrazor and the... leg dude, in particular. The main problem with that raid (tier) is that it didn't have a lot of bosses.
Personally, I liked Dragon Soul, but disliked more or less everything else about that patch.
The question is, will they do Cata legacy servers after they do Wrath? I'm not sure there would be as much demand for this expac as there is the previous ones.
I don't think so, but maybe. I think Cata would be as far as they go though, assuming they do that.
Maybe they skip Cata and do a Mop Classic after Wrath?
I want return in cataclysm, the old graphycs and without pandaren🥰🥰
Had 10 days on my subscription when they revealed the new race.
I quit the same day, a bunch of monk pandas named jack black... no thanks, just kill the dark feel to the lore of the game.
Best PvP exp. out there hands down. Closely followed by MoP
Cataclysm was an amazing expansion that doesnt get enough credit for what it did right
To be fair, Cata was pretty solid. I deeply disliked it at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t that bad. My problem was multi-fold. The old zones - our homes - had been destroyed. That’s a bad feeling. Some areas looked great, but I had strong nostalgia for the earlier zones. Talents were jacked - perhaps an improvement in some ways, but a pretty big change. I was a paladin, but also had a max-alt mage. No more pom-pyro (even the chance to try it) was sucky. All this made me dislike it. But, Firelands was a great zone/story, and what I saw of the raid was cool. Dragon Soul wasn’t a bad raid either, and I liked LFR a LOT, being a non-raider by that time. Transmog likewise brought me back from other mmos. Plenty of good, some bad. If they did a Cata Classic, though, I’d try it out to see it a bit, but would want to keep my main in Wrath (hoping, of course, that they allow us to keep copies of our characters locked to certain expansions).
I still feel that Cataclysm was the point where I started to dislike WoW. I guess I'm one of those people that don't really like change, especially something as drastic as what Cata did to the original lands. That being said, something I've been wanting Blizzard to implement in the game was a way to use the caverns of time to go back and play on the original lands if you choose to.
I think it would have been cool to do a long quest and obtain a magical item that would let you transition from the past to the future wherever you were. Imagine you were in the destroyed Barrens and you wanted to get across one of the large chasms. Use the magical item, teleport back to when barrens was flat, run across the field, and port back to the future and now you're on the other side of the chasm. Or another example, you come across a quest giver that is looking for the skin of a creature that no longer exists in the future. You port back to the past, kill the creature and bring the skin to the quest giver in the future.
Which is another thing I didn't like about Cata... they changed so much about the original lands, but I never felt the need to actually explore them because the quests were all low level. They should have kept the world exactly the way it was, then you'd go complete a quest which would set the dragon's release in motion and the world would forever change for YOU. And now you can explore the new changed worlds, fighting stronger mobs of what you originally had no problem killing in the past. For instance, let's say the boars in the barrens have suddenly mutated because of the way the lands erupted, now suddenly you're fighting stronger versions of them.
This also means that a new player would still be able to explore the original worlds, and when they reached the point where they did the quest and would release the dragon, then they would enter the destroyed lands as well. Of course, if you wanted to help out a new player, just use your magical item, transport to the past, and you can play with other people that have yet to experience the changes.
Anyways, I'm rambling and I'm sure no one bothered to even read all of this. I just figured I'd get it off my chest.
You liked Cata... sick
if they make the old world / new world so that you can toggle it on/off that would make people who dont like the new quests able to do old quests
You can imagine my confusion when my paladin felt a bit different to play when the game updated
cata and mop were good expansions for pvp
I think the biggest issue with Cataclysm was the way the world was redesigned to sort of funnel players to endgame. This lead to a lot of content that wasn't raids or PVP withering on the vine. Not that I can blame Blizzard too much since they were obviously trying to compete with MOBAs and PVP/raids were the closest thing to that in terms of experience, but it removed a lot of the fun of exploring the world organically.
I grinded out archaelogy so quickly, just had to have that raptor mount ^^
Lol I am the paladin on the frostwyrm in the have group will summon video. What the fuck this is some amazing nostalgia. Me and two of my friends saw a for the horde group being formed and stranglethorn is a pretty common place for horde and alliance while being close to stormwind and that's how it happened lol. ruclips.net/video/QiUKq0MBBEg/видео.html Liam we're finally famous bro.
>making leveling alts super attractive due to heirlooms added in wotlk
>having icc as the main raid for 364 days
>people are super bored and level a shitton of alts and classes they wanted.
>make dungeon grinding with a heal or tank much more efficient than leveling
>take a huge proportion of your dev team to revamp the old leveling content to the point the actual new content gets significantly smaller
>have almost nobody play it really since everybody playing for the last 3 years has all the alts he wants
yea blizzard great one. you really thought that trough.
>having not changed anyting of it substantially even though deathwing has been dead longer than the old zones ever existed.
great way to revamp the zones based around a dragon that has been dead for more than the last eight years.
they really dont give a shit and you can tell.
the only problem i think i had was the loss of a talent point every level and the move to the new ability every other level
Vashj is by far the best designed zone in wow history. Period. The seahorse was a bit clunky, i'll concede that. The over stylization, writing, story arc, the sense of thalassophobia when looking into the deep. I played until Legion and to that point, no zone impressed me more than Vashj. I know, it's a love hate thing. I love it more than hate it. A lot more.