Bro... fallacy aside, I'm not saying that I'm forced to watch, or anything like that, I'm making a statement of disappointment in relation to the content creation scenario, of which, most of the time, you don't know if the content is made by the person and directed by them, or if it is a reaction. The entire thumbnail and title is made to give the impression that Xaryu himself played the game, but, as we know, that wasn't the case. Relationships between people are much more than just "I don't like, I don't consume", because I LIKE wow and that's why I want to see it improve and even comment. Of your fallacious phrase, the only true part is the correlation between demand and production, because, if we don't watch, he will stop doing such things, but the problem to be solved is not "no more reaction", but rather, There won't be 90% react content lol, because the idea is to have content other than react and that content is the majority, do you understand now?@@xChinobi93
Yeah mastery and reforging were to of the best things they ever added I was so mad when reforging was scrapped like why remove my ability to min max or have any gear be viable to hit soft caps instead of hunting soft cap then optimizing from there
@@venumus1 Except no one would calcuate shit. You used dedicated websites that would read your character on armory and it would literally tell you exactly how to reforge and gem to get the maximum performance.
Yup hated that they removed it in wod and have yet neved reintroduced it. The reason for removing was also bad. They wanted to make it that when you get new piece of gear, it wouldnt have so many steps before you could equip it. But we still have gems/enchants etc. So actually having a system where you could use a piece you got that didnt necessarily have the bis 2nd stats was so good.
35:00 the only thing that's negative about that is - every player is now talked down to as if they are stupid, unskilled or mentally challenged for wanting to play the "easy mode" of raids - to separate those groups, blizzard is enforcing a difference and therefore allowing the playerbase data to socially make a class hierarchy - "I'ma mythic raider, I'm so much better than heroic raiders" "I'm a heroic raider I'm so much better than normal mode raiders" "I can't handle heroic raiding, I must be the worst person playing this game" = the "casuals" FEEL BAD for playing the game because now the game has a class system at endgame. vanilla didn't and tbf players are trying to implement it themselves with gearscore, requiring full Preraid BiS etc. but THEGAME itself wasn't structured for that to be the case... but in cata it is.
I think there's also more assholes playing nowadays, can't explain it, a lot of the shit I see looking at SoD reddit as well as wotlk / cata is just completely bonkers. You don't need 95%+ parses to complete a raid, just pople that have average gear, average skill, and are motivated to pay attention and succeed. I play in an Era guild and sure we completed the content fairly fast (guild is too hardcore for me even, too many raiding days for adults with jobs) but it's nowhere near as bad as other versions are. Maybe it's just because we're not in a hurry, not in competition anymore with anyone, and are less players on the cluster? Dunno.
@bencze465 It's not that there are more assholes, it's that there are more retail players, and they are much more anti-social than Classic ones, they play the game as if it was a solo experience forgetting there are other human beings behind every character they meet, this is the reason why I didn't bother playing Cataclysm Classic and Season of discovery, I just don't want to deal with those toxic players on top of the games not been my cup of tea, I rather stay with the boomers in Classic era and actually have fun clearing content casually.
Cata does not deserve the hate that it’s getting. I get for some it’s not their FAVORITE expansion, but it wasn’t a bad expansion. I feel like a lot of people hate it because the internet tells them to.
everyone has their own golden era for wow, if I wanted more difficult raiding content and less of the rpg element -- i'd play retail. i think the point many of us are making is classic is the big three, vanilla + tbc + wotlk. everything else is just the movement to retail. (i play both fyi)
42:50 You hit the nail on the head with the bad actors ruining the entire system. Rated bg's had infinite conquest points for playing the mode, while arena's were limited to 1250 per week. Meaning to full gear out a single character in arena took 6 weeks for arena's only. But in RBG's you could full gear out in a day. This meant that quite a number of guilds would hyper focus on bad acting to smash gearing alts for Tol Barad and their arena teams.
Why don't Blizzzard just make one server per expansion so that everyone could play starting from the expansion they like, progress, dungeons and raid in said expansion. Then eventually give you the possibility to progress to the next expansion realm when you are done with your current one ?
I totally agree, I missed BC which pisses me off and after ROTLK I’m quitting lol. Well maybe I’ll go classic or play hardcore for a month but yeah it feels like I’m playing on borrowed time lol
Not only do you dilute the playerbase a lot, there is also a difference between a fresh launch server that progresses with everyone starting from scratch, vs a server that is up for 4 years and you can join in. Fresh progression servers are much more appealing because you don't have to compete with an inflated economy and gatekeeping by veteran players
@Dangerous1939 I think you are wrong on all points. Not only it would not dilute the player base since it would address a different crowd, just like classic did, it would also attract new and old players by giving them the ability to reexplore content they haven't been able to yet. Veterans also make new players "models" to look at for when they will also be HL. And the aforementioned veterans will likely not stay long since they will have the ability to progress to the next expansion, thus reducing the risk of gatekeepers.
People treat it as if the first 3 expansions were all "Classic" and Cata was the outlier, but the truth is every expansion after Vanilla thoroughly changed the game. TBC introduced smaller raid sizes, more structured/streamlined questing in Outland which didn't promote the vastness of the world and exploration. Wotlk increased chraracter power significantly and honestly at this point, leveling with heirlooms is an efficiency battle versus leveling in Classic/TBC where especially as a melee class you were incentivized to go out across the world to find gear for your character so you could sucessfully level. In Wrath, you literally can level in greens the entire way with your heirlooms and class power, and doing the dungeons, inefficient quest chains with cool rewards just aren't worth doing. Wrath brought in mechanical/spec balance across classes and peaked in a raiding endgame atmosphere fully shifting the focus from leveling/exploration to endgame. Wrath also brought in LFG. Cata literally feels like wrath mechanically, but the reforging of the world and lack of content as well as not having the TBC/Wrath nostalgia from WC3 killed it tonally. Honestly speaking since Wrath we've never had an expansion that was tonally as awesome as TBC/Wrath. Cata takes the L but literally every expansion since Vanilla changed the game away from "Vanilla".
If I were to point to any one underlying feeling that made Cataclysm rough to me, it's that everything felt like the talent system change for the expansion. Everything was on rails. "You can't spec until you've finished your tree" was ridiculous and unnecessary. All the new quests required phasing and made it impossible for someone to join you in the world unless they were on your exact zone quest phase. The rigidity was frustrating. At least we got that initial heroic dungeon difficulty to look forward to. Initial Wrath had some amazing odd-spec moments that Cataclysm never had. The old shaman dual wield enhance caster spec where they were dual wielding spell power weapons (until they nerfed it into the ground). The shield block stacking protection DPS builds. Those were mostly gone by the time they introduced modern Wrath Classic since it was based on its last patch, but had no chance of existing in Cataclysm. The unexpected filler talents can sometimes shine in creative ways until someone uses them effectively and Blizzard nerfs them into the ground. They fixed that from being an issue starting in this expansion.
idk about you but i enchanted my melee Charactres with fiery weapon enchants with auction house gear. and for caster it wasnt that rough you just went Full spirit gear lolkek regen was insane on spirit in vanilla :D.
@@zeroresistance7203unless you were a warlock that needed stam int gear instead and the prices for those sky rocketed in the AH as if all spell casters were looking for "of the eagle" gear
the way i see it, the more expansions released.. the more of a casual solo grind it's become just as you said tbc came with small raids, wotlk came with RDF finger, cata came with more casual pvp/arena, ect ect. well put i enjoyed cata but i wont return to classic for cata, i will for WOD, and MIST as i didn't play this expansions at all. so it will be something new for me.
I was so confused when cata launched. I was leveling an alt in southern barrens, logged in, and there was a MASSIVE fissure and thousand needles was flooded lol
You have clearly not played WoW from launch and just jumped in later and know nothing about how the so called classic, TBC and Wrath originally were. And most likely you are a blind Blizzard fan boy that swallow any shit they serve you.
Problem as WoW progressed was the change of mentality to "everyone has to be a winner". Back in early WoW people struggled to do content or straight up couldn't do it and it was fine. I was one of them. I couldn't clear AQ40 but in a weird way it was cool. Striving to clear something that not many people could do. Failing to do it didn't matter. However it was awesome seeing people with gear on from content I hadn't been able to do (reason why I don't like Tmog). There was a clear distinction between bad players, average players and good players. It lead to good world building. The journey was fun not the destination. Then it got to a point where everyone had to be able to clear content (LFR), everyone could get epics easily, everyone had to be able to have a really cool looking character.The world felt more generic. Everyone was an overpowered god in the world. To be fair if it wasn't this way nowadays people would cry about it. Players have gotten soft which means the game has gotten soft.
I feel like this is the issue with everyone demanding to go 6/6 in a raid. In classic my guild couldn't even make it past bwl, but we didn't think it made the game worse. It made seeing people with gear in raids we couldn't do even cooler.
@@ivankovachev8835 You cant have losers now cause if you do people will scream and cry about it, even with classic i had a guild on my alt who literally would spam blizzard support that the raids are too hard and they should nerf them and if not they would unsub(they wouldnt) but its more when blizzard does give in to the crybabies they get criticized for it while its not entirely they fault they just give people what they want
@@Roxasdakings You couldn't have losers back then either, that's why they added LFD, that's why they added LFR, that's why they nerfed content when it didn't need nerfing. And people did unsub back in the day due to those reason, they actually did.
@@goldenmemes51where have they said that? Classic to me is vanilla 60 to naxx. Anything after starts incrementally changing the game. I lost interest at WotLk. Servers lost their identity. Layering killed it even further. I understand the reasoning but WoW has an identity crisis and an extremely divided player base.
I was an endgame player all the way from vanilla to MoP, the thing that made Cata the breakpoint was all the streamlining of gearing. It's where they completely removed experimentation with stats and gearing and just forced you in to what they thought you were supposed to have.
Cata had 2 big issues. 1. content pacing 2. It made the classic world inaccessible. Both those issues are resolved with a sped up Classic timeline, and the existence of Era. I think people will be surprised at how good it is considering the years of slander.
No you're wrong. The classic world being inaccessible wasn't the problem. It was the new world was terrible. People were willing to let go of the old world if the new one had been good. But they turned compelling stories like the Westfall Defias storyline into CSI Miami parody, Uldum was straight up ripped Indiana Jones, etc etc. Don't kid yourself and say ridiculous nonsense. You probably weren't there at the time if you think that was the issue. Cataclysm was horrific. Wrath was an expansion everyone played for the lore, and then we went from that to a terrible lore expansion with worse gameplay, and they got rid of the old style talent trees. So much shit changed. LFR, LFg, etc Cata was the first full expansion with them. You have no idea what you're talking about. It's not "2 big issues" you fool, it's like 20.
@@omarali262 the new world is terrible? Is way better than the old world people were just stuck in the old ways. The quests are way better and more enjoyable. LFG was introduced in Wrath and how's the gameplay of Cata worse than WOTLK? You have no idea what you talking about just hating. They got rid of the old talent trees cause most talents were passive abilities that didn't even make any sense. "Wrath was an expansion everyone played for the lore" hahaha I can literally name you 50 people who played wow since the beginning and have no clue about the lore. Myself included.
@@andrecardoso6941 I said first FULL expansion with LFG. It was only added in the last patch of wrath. The quests were not way better. They were less serious, forgettable, silly, and stupid. "I'm gonna punch that dragon in the face" You don't know what you're talking about, like the other guy. You want easy, fed to you, silly nonsense. The old talent tree system was the best they ever had and that's why they're trying to move back towards it in Dragonflight, because they admit their mistake.
Looking back at the expansions, it was Cata when they stopped feeling like expansions. Instead of adding to what the game already had they just kept giving us new systems instead of sticking to one and going with it. Its good to try new systems but since Cata to Shadowlands we had constant new systems on how we upgraded gear, multiple crafting systems and borrowed power, took them way to long to realise how poorly designed it all was.
My wife is probably more on the casual side of players. Xaryu, Metagoblin, are not casual players and its hard to understand their point of view so let me try. In classic, my wife refuses to raid Naxx because its too stressful. She does AQ 40 like once a month or so and MC/BWL every other week. She likes to go on random adventures with her friends, collect outfits to wear while in cities, explore areas, slowly level up alts and sometimes really get into bgs (she got to rank 11) The actual casual player does not look for challenging content. The actual casual player looks to make friends in the game to do random stuff with and hang out in a world that is filled with mystery. Cataclysm has no mystery Cataclysm rushes you through the leveling process Cataclysm (and retail) has a anti social level experience by design. Calaclysm end content is a major step up in difficulty. How exactly does that sound fun to a casual player? Leveling in classic, I always end up meeting people during the leveling journey that I add to my friends list. Days later I often see them again in a different zone or dungeon. Classic is social by design. Classic hardcore is even more social. Lastly, modern TBC, Wotlk, Cata players seem to be very ok with pay to win because they can't be bothered to earn anything. Yes, people always bought gold or carries etc. to some extend. It used to be like 5-10% (my perception) of the player base and was shunned / people kept quiet about it. I played last in phase 2 wrath and people were very open about buying gold / boosts/ carries etc. Like they can't be bothered just playing the video game and actually earn things. Lets not talk about the bots roaming free everywhere because blizz devs seem to not play their own game. How again does this sound fun?
I agree with the sentiment, however, I think the criticism that the lack of difficulty of leveling content had a large part to do with this is true. If everything is a breeze (and you can just queue for random dungeons) then why WOULD you make friends with other players? To a certain degree the challenge and having to rely on others is what gets people to socialize. I think some of MoP's design was to address the lack of casual content: pet battles, brawler's guild, rare mobs, special rare items to find of all kinds, revamped Darkmoon Faire, world bosses, all sorts of lore and little secrets, etc. Sadly, in MoP the leveling content became even easier and they pushed you through it even faster... so it didn't have a huge impact on socialization that it otherwise would have.
As a casual player myself who just spent 8 months on a cata Pserver, you're soooo wrong. I could write a really long response as to why you're wrong about everything but I won't. Play it for a week, get one character to max and if you and your wife hates it, then quit, but if your wife is really that casual, she's going to love it because you don't need to raid to have a good time and raids really aren't that much of a step up in difficulty. I would argue that ICC is just as difficult as firelands, maybe even harder than firelands. There's more mechanics in firelands but I don't think any of them are as tough as some ICC fights. Give it a try.
Cata has a lot of casual content at endgame, you can do old raids and Normal dungeons are fun. And if you like fashion, now you have transmog. You also have endgame open world activities. Due to the stat inflation of Cata, you can 5 man WotLK raids and 3 man TBC and Vanilla Raids. Old Dungeons can be done by 1-2 players. And you have archeology in Cata. Tons of casual content. Cata leveling is also much friendlier than pre-Cata, but at the same time it's NOT MoP leveling. May I ask what those adventures your wife goes on are like? What do they do? What activities? I just can't picture them. Do they just run around the world killing mobs? I also think she might like MoP, MoP had so much casual content it's mind boggling.
I could be wrong about RBGs, but I think over the time WoW had more and more players interested in doing content by themself rather than looking for a group and going through the process of "job application" that involved "socializing" but on a level of "send your CV (RBG rating prior) and we'll consider your application. And since I would say most of the playerbase were more focused on having a guild for raiding to avoid the same thing, then they didn't want to leave a guild in order to have a stable group for RBGs. And it went hand in hand imo, when less and less people wanted to go through the hassle of getting into RBG, getting into groups also became harder, because with the already small pool of player playing RBGs, there was not enough noobies to just roll through like in random BGs. It became a sweat-fest in eyes of people that wouldn't even want to take action in looking for arena partner to go even further and fit a role in a whole team. While for arenas you could just have one or two friends and start right away. My point is, even with an active raiding guild, most people didn't have 10 players that would actively look for pvp together at the same time and planned their time around it with raiding already taking 3-4 nights, so they stuck with arenas which later in the game proved as a fine place to get statstick trinkets even for raiding/M+. Loads of RBG teams were toxic too, or the "meta" could be using a certain class for a specific thing that the person disliked. Like rogues/hunters would be siting on one spot while the rest of the team was stuck in an endless cycle of team fights, because nobody focused a healer (giving a general example of teams below 2k) so rather than siting at a base for 15minutes in hopes that the team will win it for them, or get blamed for leaving, they just didn't bother with RBGs in general and played arenas. I know way too many people that were this way and I would say it was like this for the general playerbase that was not focused on pvp only. (key word is general playerbase, not all. I know exceptions ofc) and by the time there were comunity chats it was already too late and RBGs had little to no players. And like I said, this doesn't apply to everyone, but I would really say, majority of WoW players were NOT "pvp-only" and played other content too, which to them was accessable. They showed up for the raid nights, they farmed challenge modes or mythic+ and when other guildies didn't feel like going M+? they did some solo content, be it leveling, questing, dailies, world quests, mount farms etc, because tons of people play WoW with just their guilds for raiding, but don't have tons of friends outside of guilds, hence lower interest in "send us a job application for RBG to maybe get selected". Kinda sad, I liked RGBs a lot. What I would more be interested is why did solo queue arenas failed. On paper they sound really great and as for myself I enjoyed them a lot, but the queue time 20-30minutes is just insane.
That only happened because they made group content too hard. To get best gear, it should be 40man easy raids to make big social events that made WoW so popular in the first place. Mythic+ should be to get cooler and cooler cosmetics plus a couple seasonal glyphs, that way their isn't a huge gear gatekeep.
Also, the game became harder for new players to get into the game. RBG's were always liked more by casuals (compared to arenas), so making game harder for new players to join will lead to less casuals playing RBG's.
So, I started in Classic WOW because my PC could NEVER play NONE of the originals. I consider myself a big fan of WOW. I've watched hours on lore, I've played all the way up to Wrath and now I'm waiting on Cata. I've done almost every Alliance characters and 2 Horde characters since Classic. Learned multiple specs and I'll tell you right now. I'm PUMPED for Cata. Cannot wait to learn more about the world and explore the revamped world. I never got to experience it so for people like me, its going to be one helluva ride.
The thing with the Cataclysm zone revamp is it's objectively a better experience than the old vanilla zones. No weird breaks in quest chains, it flows more naturally, quests have a more interesting storyline. You'll really like it. I understand nostalgia is a hell of a drug but old vanilla zone questing was just bad.
@@voltagespc6097 That's what's special for me. I never played anything but Classic and up. Never got to play Vanilla back in the day because I never had a pc that was up to snuff. I had to learn EVERYTHING as a new player and I enjoyed just about everything. I do have a natural hatred for the Sands quest line. I didn't know what it did, but I tried my best and never finished it. It was one of the few quests that I never finished as a Mage. I didn't realize how much stuff I needed. I just did them because I wanted to finish every quest in the game, and I did until that point. Going to play both of the new races, too! I LOVE the goblins in the game, too lmao. Time is MONEY, Friend! I hope the voice lines are somewhat new. It's going to be a grand adventure for me! That, and flying around the main area for once >:D
Cata WoW was amazing. Cata will have a more active playerbase than wrath mark my words. The communities will be amazing since guilds are prio'd cause of spells like mass summon/res.
@@MimiPipoo I'm hoping so! I also adore Goblins lmao. Going to be my favorite horde character as soon as I get it, but most of my characters are Alliance. Might play a Hunter if I can get the hang of controlling my pet.
Mained a Prot Paladin for the first half of Cata, and rotated my druid between all three specs depending on my guilds needs (was gladly playing cat and topping charts) until we stopped raiding 3/4 through Dragon Soul. I absolutely loved pretty much everything about this expansion! I was mostly (90%) PvE by this time - I played alliance on a mostly horde server/battlegroup and PvP just wasn't fun. Arenas require having friends that play at the same times, and that was never something my "group" could accomplish - I never branched out and looked for others. RBG's were a great addition, though, giving tanks a place in PvP, - Would love to hear takes about why they failed to catch on as much as/more than arenas. I began branching out with alts and fell in love with both mage (FIRE) and warrior (Arms/Prot). My ability to enjoy PvP was reignited! Gearing all 4 characters simultaneously was rough, and my friends began leaving the game for various reasons. I've been around since Vanilla and have come and gone throughout the years (Skipped the back half of MoP, Legion and BFA, and briefly returned for the Dragonflight launch)
I loved the first 2 tiers of Cata, but was let down with Dragon Soul and I think it's because it was such a short raid and it was out for such a long time. I probably wouldn't have minded it nearly as much if they had new content 6 months after DS launched, but that raid was out for over a year IIRC. I had to have cleared it at least 30 times and with numerous specs/roles before being bored out of my gourd.
Everyone keeps saying this but I'd still like to try dragon soul since I never got the chance to experience it. Maybe they'll make it a bit better this time around?
@@ahetzel9054 it's not that it was a bad raid, but it's only 8 bosses and at the time, that was the current raid for over a year so it got stale after clearing it dozens of times. That, and many people were disappointed with the final Deathwing fight. For an end of expansion boss, people expected better, and I've got to say that out of every end of expansion boss fight, I liked Deathwing the least and I've played every one since the Lich King. I didn't hate it, it was just wasn't the best.
As a counterpoint to being able to see what content someone's done by looking at them, it's really tiring going into a raid in vanilla and seeing 20 Warriors with Lionheart helm, T2.5 shoulders, Edgemaster's, and Chromatic Boots. The chest and legs are obscured by their tabard, but pretty much everyone has those four items listed (Edgemaster's replaceable with AQ40 or ACLG depending on race/weapons) Once you are at the endgame, you will not change the way you look very much for a few classes. Transmog plus a toggle option for those who don't want to see it would solve a lot of woes.
How to fix transmog: Make transmog visibility a UI option. If I want to look cool I turn it on. If i want to be able to identify people's gear by sight, I turn it off.
Totally agree about returning to a more unified currency system across all expansions. They should just have 2 for PvE and 2 for PvP - a currency for top level gear at present and a currency for everything else. What's annoying is they've already done this multiple times and had several passes of condensing the number of currencies. Then, they immediately start adding more currencies the next patch. They never seem to learn the lessons of what saves them future work. Creating more technical debt for themselves almost seems like a fetish at this point.
I honestly can't wait for Cata. I have never seen a private server as packed as whitemane deathwing for cata. There is a lot of underlying hype for cata. Guilds were amazing during that xpac with the spells and passive bonuses they gave. I remember mass summoning a 40 man raid behind enemy lines or ressing everyone behind a tree and fighting back. Was a sick expasion for pvp and wpvp.
I think one thing that got skimmed over was there was a tonal shift between WoTLK and Cata. We went from the Lich King to Deadmines being full of freaking monkeys
Thats so dishonest that its kind of crazy lol. We went from The Lich King to Deathwing. Why you are comparing a end of expansion raid to a leveling dungeon????
@@Noriaela "The dungeon was updated to reflect current events and gained a Heroic mode for level 85 players. There are Goblin Teleporters scattered throughout the instance, usable only when the boss of the particular room they are located in is killed. Once unlocked, they can send players to either Ironclad Cove, the Mast Room, or the Goblin Foundry. The Goblin Transporter located at the beginning room with the quest givers only sends players further into the instance; it does not function as a destination point" We went from like the Forge of Souls or Utgarde Keepe all like massively lore relevant to LK and the titans and stuff and all these huge reveals and a lot of early cata hits those notes but there's also a big comedy element as well between all the old content worked.
@@darylsdog9521 Comparing a end of expansion raid to a "endgame" dungeon that is only endgame due to it being remade is not a valid comparison that makes any sense. Your argument could be applied to Vanilla into TBC. We went from fighting an old god to killing random trash mobs that have zero value on the world or the story.
Cata is where I parted ways with wow.. came back in BFA and the game was totally unrecognizable lol. A lot of my friends saw what Cata was bringing and quit while they were ahead - me personally I was just going with the flow. While I dont hate Cata, I do think it's pointless to have classic servers for literally every expansion just because certain people feel left out.. all that does is fragment the playerbase and leave everything feeling empty (aside from week 1 hype). Honestly its time to stop remaking old content and move the focus on to Plunderstorm/SOD style stuff that retains the games roots while bringing everyone together.
21:00 - The reason reforging sucked is Blizzard would deliberately make items with bad stats intending you to reforge it; and used that to indirectly stealth balance classes. For example, Paladins wanted mastery, it was twice as good as any other stat. But Blizzard would only put it on 2 pieces of BiS gear out of 14, thus screwing you over in order to limit you from Min/Maxing. Crit was also disminished with the damage bonus, yet everything now had crit. FEELSBADMAN
they got rid of reforging because blizzard believes that its "unfun" to have to do a bunch of shit to your upgrade piece before its an upgrade piece, and that it basically requires simming your character to figure out your best options. in unrelated news, we now are live talking with retail wow players and how you cant even tell what an upgrade is without simulcraft.
Spoiler Alert : Heroics will be faceroll same as early raids as game will be based on 4.3.4, priv servers like Apollo buffed them significantly and they were still somewhat meh.
@@Djupadalar You literally said you want to level 1-60 in a "new" world, this "new" world is the same on retail right now. Same quests same mobs. Dont play stupid yourself, I'm not an idiot. Cata was and is a terrible expansion, especially 4.3 aka Dragon Soul. Tho still not as bad as WoD because that shouldn't have ever been made at all.
I remember reforging all secondary stats to mastery to get that extra absorb shield up, once you got the porcelain crab from ToT all you needed to do was time the strikes and HC tanking got easy. I was really lucky to get Zin'rokh after like 2 days of archeology (had to reforge it, but it was still insanely good back then).
Make the dungeon finder have a feature similar to Mythic plus where you go through each one in order as your leveling so its more of a progression before end game progression. Gives people a taste of the end game for anyone who is leveling toons
and stop experience gains after doing dungeons twice, also double quest experience so people have varied gameplay instead of grinding same thing over and over. Also let people store experience for later so they don't out level a zone too fast if they don't want to.
I personally hated Cata back in the day because it completely changed my hunter class in a way that I absolutely hated as well as dumbed down the classes in general to make it way more mainstream friendly which I thought was absurd. So that's when I stopped playing wow permanently.
i played since id say 8 months before bc as a child didnt even hit max til wrath but joined a guild start of cata and prog raided/arena at 10, by the end i had cleared heroic as ranged,melee, healer and 6/8 on a feral tank. still great to think back on
I started back in OG vanilla and quit in WOD. Up to this day Cata is still my favourite expansion. It's there was a huge content draught but I didn't care at all since I am mostly a PvP player. 3v3 was so balanced and RBGs were amazing.
i only pvpd in cata and dragonflight im not a pvper recently ive been forcing myself to thats why dragonflight but the cata one i was the 3rd best holy paladin on the private server mana drain priests were my bane xD but yeah i agree cata was good also was kinda forced to try that one the private server too because by that time i had finished all raid content on my toons and geared sucks that it was during the Moltdown (crash of moltenwow)@@andrecardoso6941
I am looking forward to cata pvp, considering I didn't play the first two patches and with the addition of heroic+ to one of the best dungeon pools on the games history, it will hopefully be really fun, just hoping it won't interfere with retail or sod release dates.
The reason why I left Cata back in the day was because regular elites were changed to reg mobs, Hogger, etc, They also removed having to group on quests that requuired 2-3 people by having NPC's help you. I felt the lack of community was non existant & that started in WoTLK when the dungeon finder started. I also felt that people in the game started to turn elitist. So basically the whole community based gameplay just basically disappeared & it just got worst.
waiting 3 hours just to find a dungeon and having neckbeards gatekeep braindead content a 5 year old could do only to have someone dc or die and rage quit meaning it was all a waste of time is a sense of community? wow community is as bad as league and rdf the best thing wotlk added and anyone who denies it is wearing rose tinted goggles people are 20+ with jobs, kids and limited time nobody wants to waste hours just to find a deadmines group or wailing caverns after doing it 100s of times in past
That isn’t true, hogger and many other elites are still elites in cataclysm. Classes are a little stronger in cata though so maybe the elites don’t feel as strong.
Meanwhile every other comment above this one is "people just make up reasons to get mad at the new world, any quest would be better than collect 10 hooves" while completely ignoring the major reworks to the philosophy of making it a solo game rather than an MMO for leveling...
Cataclysm Season 1 RBG back in the days on eredar EU Step 1: Pack: owl + mage + rogue Step 2: Jump healer. use beam+ring+smokebomb on same spot. Get a dk to grip people in as a bonus step 3: ????? step 4: profit. easy 3-2-1 setup and there is basically no counterplay. loved it
I remember Cata leveling pre-nerfs was awesome. Especially if you start from lvl1 , it was SUCH A GOOD LEVELING EXPANSION, idk what people are talking about. Leveling in taca is just extremely focused on solo content.
Its just the people with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses who havent got enough of zhevra hoov farming. Imo leveling alts in cataclysm was the most enjoyable thing in wows history due to actually well paced questzones/heirlooms/new talents. I actually leveled most of my current characters to max then. only had 1 max level in wotlk but had like 7 in cata.
Leveling solo might've been fun, but I remember trying to join a friend with questing and perpetually having to deal with being phased from them. We'd have to start questing in a new zone to even see each other, which is rough if the person you're trying to play with is new. So many of the new quest chains were phase-locked.
Yup Cata has the best pre-expansion leveling to date. No other expansion ever did pre-expansion leveling content after it and the old world is overall much worse than the new world in Cata. They IMO missed their chance to squish the levels down to 60 and then make Outland be 30-40 and Northrend 40-50, so you can just do Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdom, or alternatively go to Outland and Northrend, but 50-60 would be in the original continents. Squishing down the levels down to 60 will also allow you to get a talent point every level, instead of every other level.
25:00 maybe it was just me, but Cata was 100% a raid logging expansion for me, especially at the end. I did everything i could accomplish (that is, clearing the raids on normal 10 man and finishing the end-game storylines before Dragon Soul even came out) on both my mains and i literally would only log in for those raid nights. I remember there being nothing to do, as I don't like PVP at all. Maybe I'm not remembering something but that's where I was with Cata.
Yeah it's a stupid argument, Wotlk also has got new horizontal progression, mainly achievements. But most wow players just enjoy the vertical progression the most, which is why every expansion is like a "raid logging expansion" for them (i include myself here)
World of Divisions. Divided player base on retail vs classic vs hardcore vs seasonal. Then divide by servers and factions, guilds, solo, classes, specs. It's an absolute mess what's happened to WoW.
It's insane that Blizzard thought WoW needed to be ''modernized.'' The number 1 MMO so far ahead of the competition copying the more modern unsuccessful MMOs to be worse and less fun, instead of just doing the thing that made them number 1.
I think part of the problem with RBG's, is the barrier to entry. I have raided every raid tier, I have raided in heroic prog guilds, Mythic prog guilds, etc. I have seen just about any form of Endgame PvE, and the barrier to entry there, isn't bad. But rated BG's? I have never once been able to even see the inside of an RBG. Would love to participate, even once. But have never been allowed into one. Arena's, doesn't take much to get into, get a buddy or two, and start queing arena's. Barrier to entry for Arena's is MUCH easier to overcome than Barrier to entry on RBG's.
Reforging was great i think it was a mistake to get rid of it because now its harder to make many options of gear that is viable across all specs and classes. With reforging it allowed you to turn gear that maybe you normally wouldnt wear over something else. To reforge it and make it at the very least decent or good.
Oh come off it. Sick and tired of this tired old excuse. This statement mightve ringed true a decade ago when we didnt have a way to play vanilla WoW without private servers but nowadays Blizz has released various servers up the wazoo that retains the old world. Its not that nostalgic anymore and nowadays veterans dont even care about the old world because 1. They ignore doing quests 2. They dungeon power spam, almost no different than doing rdf. I believe its finally time to stop with the nostalgia goggles and allow Cata content to breathe and exist
@@hunterfitch5951 How you feel makes no logical sense. You are still able to play vanilla WoW. What the hell is even your problem at this point? Thats what I dont get
Not true, by WotLK I was sick of the old world, and I started in the beginning of TBC. That said I thought I'd hate the new world, but ended up loving it back in the day.
@@ivankovachev8835 This was pretty much the whole point of the revamp back then. And I like to say the sentiment around it was well received. The longing for old world people only came later down during Mists or WoD when private servers started to hit the scene
To touch on why Arenas may be more popular than RBGs, I literally always just thought it came down to convenience. You can queue, find a game quickly, it's over quickly, plays matter. RBGs are awesome and I prefer them to Arenas, but they feel so inefficient to progress in especially when you're required to gather up a team of players first which can take ages. I just wish they'd add a solo queue system to RBGs like every other competitive game on the market.
While yes, RBGs require more people, most people will fill with guildies and then just pug one or two if they can't fill with their guild. I ran a pvp guild back in the day and we treated RBGs like raids where we had 2 days a week where we'd run them for about 2 hours. People generally showed up and we always had a few extra sign ups we'd have to turn away or put on the bench if someone could only come for one or two matches. So in short, just find a guild that runs RBGs. I'm not running my own guild this time around because I'm far more casual than I used to be and it's just too much work. Plus I really like raiding now too haha
The main reason the WoW began to feel bad in Cata was class homogenization. There was no real reason to play class x over y because they're effectively the same minus 2 negligible class specific abilities that bring no actual value.
Can you give specific examples? Looking at raidbuffs and who provides what, i cannot agree with that. Yes you had most buffs spread along 2-3 different speccs, but that also helped forming raid groups a lot because you are not dependant on one specific class or spec. But it still provided somewhat unique benefits to each spec/class.
Not true, classes played very differently from one another and had a different flow and rhythm. It's Vanilla to WotLK that most classes played very similarly. Especially the 1 button rotations of Vanilla and late-TBC.
This is the first time around playing Cata for me and so far I’m like ….this is amazing!!!! Like why did I want to play SoD? I’m still raid logging on SoD but I’m exploring Cata right now and to be honest the world changing isn’t at all as bad as people claimed lol. The changes that have been made so far that I can see have been nice improvements and they feel like natural. Orgimmar is now more modern more things. I totally get what the Dev’s were trying to give with that and they put a lot of time into these improvements bc they are….improvements. I know the Devs are trying really hard to do that with SoD but with that being a one off I really hope they can fix the issues in Cata soon. I have heard so much about the dungeons and raids and if what I have seen so far is an indicator of whats to come I just want them to get it right so that the negative things that have been said can potentially be laid to rest. Lol I’ve even heard a few hard core nay sayers about Cata say they are now gonna PVP…which is good news. It’s only pre-patch and i have so much to do already I love it!
The reason i quit wow for a long time in cata wasn't because of the game play or raiding and i don't think it was for others too. It did stop being classic for one reason. They maimedthe most important character in the game. The superstar character that kept millions of players logging in day after day for years. They destroyed Azeroth. There were changes in every game area zone. The world changed completely. Hed they made changes gradually over the whole expansion that would have been okay, but they did it overnight and Azeroth was no longer the home we knew snd loved.
People were willing to let go of the old world if the new one had been good. But they turned compelling stories like the Westfall Defias storyline into CSI Miami parody, Uldum was straight up ripped Indiana Jones, deadmine now full of monkeys, etc etc. Also leveling became so brain-dead easy that leveling was no longer fun, so fun was only after leveling, unlike before where fun was had from the start
Reforging is very good because it provide less frustrations when you have bad items. Maybe 40% is a bit less, 60% could be better. And for Transmog, maybe they could disable it when you enter in a dungeon/raid/bg. OR, maybe they should put transmog vision only for the owner, or even more, make an option to see all transmog or not
The original three were the golden age, but looking back, Cata and MoP were the silver age. Legion was the bronze age, and everything else is the dark ages.
Yea i don't agree with that . Legion is the platinum age. Best expansion or period of wow there is and anyone who puts it that low probably never played it the same amount of time you did other expansions etc. Legion was the prime of wow and everything after for sure was straight ass i will agree.
@@chazz3726only at the last patch. First patch of Legion was AWFUL. People don’t seem to remember limited Heirloom Talents and only 1 Legendary (maybe 2 if you were were an undead and don’t sleep)
@@chazz3726 While Legion was fun and I played every second of it, it did start the whole "hey we need systems that require massive timesinks and instill FOMO in our players" which completely ruined wow (the subsequent "ass" you're referring to).
@@chazz3726 I hate Legion and everyone I know quit in Legion lol the amount of grind and hours you had to put in the game was simply ridiculous. Not to mention if favoured people with no life. I heard in the last patch it became better but when I played it was just an awful expansion overall.
Xaryu, I really liked what you were saying about each expansion introducing new zones and separating the high level players from the low level players. That feeling of seeing those high level players with the epic gear and mounts really made the game that much more enticing and exciting. In Cataclysm, they introduce Archaeology. Do you think that profession was an attempt from Blizzard to bring the high level players back to the old world and make it seem more alive again? Curious on your thoughts. Great vid btw!
WoD was the peak of class design in my opinion and it had some sick raids. I think it would actually be really sick as a classic where they can fix the pacing of the expansion.
I wouldn’t mind a classic WoD, but add in the missing raid and make the end story make sense. WoD is still the best leveling experience of any expansion
the problem with reforging is if you are trying to hit a certain number of hit / expertise, and any more is useless, the math behind that is annoying or requires a third party. They want you to know if an upgrade is an upgrade without 3rd party assistance. Pros and cons like anything i guess. Made dual spec tricky if you shared gaer between the sets too.
@Laycossify it changed the core values of the game we had played from 2004 til cata launch, not saying it was bad just a lot of the player base felt like they had been slapped in the face
@@Laycossify for me, taking away 50% of my spells was the main reason to dislike it, and taking away the opportunity to "play" seriously and in my old way of switching forms (druid) in pvp. in cata, this was made useless, since you had no spells or talents in other forms, because "take away spells and talents" just awful...
@@SuperSonaldo7 People were willing to let go of the old world if the new one had been good. But they turned compelling stories like the Westfall Defias storyline into CSI Miami parody, Uldum was straight up ripped Indiana Jones, deadmine now full of monkeys, etc etc. Also cata ruined a new player's first few hours the most by making solo leveling so boring-brain-dead-easy, and ruined the rest of the leveling experience by making leveling too brain-dead easy
This guy probably wants Cata to be successful because he's going to make RUclips content on it. Cata was the expansion where the term "raid or die" was coined, there was NOTHING to do outside of raiding. And the raids were incredibly mediocre. Launch ones were decent, but Firelands and Dragon Soul are some of the worst raids in WoW's history. Cata will have an uptick of players on launch, and then nosedive off a cliff. By the end of Cata, I genuinely believe the playerbase will be so small that they won't be able to justify making a MoP Classic. Which is a shame, as MoP was actually a fine expansion.
PvP in cata wasn’t as bad as people say. Also just cause you didn’t do much outside of raiding doesn’t count as nothing to do without raiding. The raids too were different wouldn’t say they were the worst tho.
Saying that Firelands is one of the worst raids in the game tells me you hit a brick wall at some boss and your guild disbanded. Couse of no progression
RBG isn’t the main PvP route because it’s more difficult to put together 10 people of the same skill level & all communicating. & more difficult to put together a 10 player composition of the same skill level at that. And having to find 3 healers instead of 0-1 & a competent Flag Carrier/Target Caller/RBG Leader. & The games overall take longer for the amount of points you get compared to arenas, especially if you lose drawn out games. People go for the fastest Conquest/Arena Points farming route cuz time ya know. Tho I agree it’s extremely fun & wish it was the main PvP route
i saw a private server, that is currently on MOP, and they're working on Legion. They're literally having WOD be like a 1-2 week leveling experience then jumping straight to Legion lol. Seems like a decent idea as someone who's only long break in wow was from the end of WOD first raid, all the way till the argus patch of Legion. Looking forward to actually playing some legion since i really enjoyed that last little bit.
Either the Cata private server is wrong or they changed the difficulty of leveling because the beta seems relatively challenging. He even mentioned that in his stream recently as well.
Compared to other expansions the start in Cata is very rough. Heroics and raids in the first few weeks are hard for most people, especially when comparing it to wotlk starter content. Your damage and healing is like the same as with icc heroic gear, everything has just more hp and npcs + mechanics hit harder
I think the reason for reforge discontinue was raider's unhappiness with the the fact that you had to port back after something dropped. IDK how real that problem is, since you kinda had to anyway, with gems and chants.
It would have been an easy fix; what reforging did was allow you to change a percentage of secondary stats. So for example, let's image a "gold star, silver star" system. On your character sheet, each secondary stat has two empty stars next to it. You can click on them to make one a gold star and one a silver star; you can only have one of each and they can't be used on the same stat. By default, the game picks the "right" stats when you get access to it to prevent new players from missing it/not knowing what was optimal. This way, it would automatically adjust them by a set percentage. Tada! No extra work, or spending gold, or using reforgelite.
The thing that really ruined wow raiding for me was the multiple difficulties. The ilvl jump between tiers of content is just too large. When a new raid comes out, it completely invalidates 99.9% of the gear from the previous tiers that expansion. Now lets compare that to classic or even BC. There were reasons to run old content throughout the ENTIRE expansion. Multiple drops from MC that were still relevant in tier 3 content. This is what kept the world and guilds alive for me. There was always a reason to run old stuff with new players or alts, while still having something for more established characters. Compare that to dragonflight, you wouldn't be caught dead running the first tier of content for upgrades. I loved the first tier of cata raiding. I just didn't enjoy going back and re-clearing with an extra mechanic for slight upgrades.
Another side to this: I actually quit the game for awhile after wrath and came back during MOP. So part of me is considering trying it out to experience content I missed back in the day
Primarily PVE players HATE being forced to PvP in order to get transmog, gear, mounts, etc., and the same holds true with PvP players being forced to do PVE raids/dungeons to get their BIS and transmog gear, etc. I'm tired of the Devs thinking it would be fun to force people to do this. It is not "fun", it becomes a groanfest instead...to the point I have considered quitting WoW.
9:45 because its so fun to wait until level 40 to have a melee attack or dual wield as an enhance shammy whats the fun in the game if you dont get your class identity until halfway through your levelling journey.
Honestly think cata is going to be pretty fun when it releases the actual pve and pvp content added is great we don't have to worry about that content drought and I personally liked the quests of cata more with the worse part being that mobs are much easier to kill compared to vanilla wow but if they could just buff the open world enemies by x% I think it would be a great leveling experience as well. The only real downsides are dungeon finder, guild leveling, and the further homogenization of classes which really was a problem started in wrath
A solution to the transmog problem IMO would be to make it so it doesn't show your transmog for others except when people are inspecting you. Making it possible to see other players progression and still incentivising all the fun of transmog. Another solution could be a display option that you toggle, letting the player choose wether or not to view transmog on other players
I am 35 loved vanilla- mop. Fell off hard on wod mostly cause there was nothing to do and then legion felt like a completely new game with pure borrowed power
Totally agree with what you said at 4:30. I started playing in Cataclysm when I was younger so it's just going to be a massive nostalgia hit for me, can't wait.
24:05 - Idk I feel like FFXIV Ultimates solved this. Like, just have hard content that doesn't get significantly easier as time progresses? That scales you down? You now have a character profile frame, a title and a neat weapon you can choose.
Warlords of Draenor's biggest failing point was all the unfinished concepts that never got fleshed out. Things like selecting garrison locations, the capital cities, the unfinished islands, etc. They have the time now. Should we get to that point where Warlords Classic exists, that's exactly what they should do. We're still waiting on that underwater raid from Cataclysm. Make it so.
Over the years, the most common complaints about Cata (also cited by those who were discussing a potential Cat classic) had to do with gameplay changes, people who quit because of changes to dungeons, raids, and especially healing. Changing of the world terrain came next. I suspect the people who were complaining about LFR were the ones who enjoyed the harder gameplay.
It's so interesting how different Josh's and my opinions on topics are. Like for me the reforging was upper garbage because you needed an addon which calculated it perfectly, you wasted a lot of gold, you always had to reforge every item and often multiple items when you just got one new item. It was completely unneccsary and pure garbage. The same with talent trees. I like the 3 row talents and hate the old talent tree. Why? Because the old talent tree just acts like it gives you options. But it doesn't. Everyone still plays the exact same talent tree's because everyone comes to the same conclusions, everyone copies it from guides so why have that? With the 3 row talent tree you at least had multiple versatile and viable options without needing a silly guide. And no I'm not a retail andy only. I play WoW from 2004 on, I cleared naxx classic, owned gressil, thunderfury and full t3 with my rogue, wrote pve and pvp guides myself in classic and tbc. Same btw. counts also for pruning. I like having less abilities because there are so many silly unnecccsary abilities which isn't needed or could be combined. And no I'm not a clicker. When I used to play arena seriously I had 74 hotkeys and I still use 50~. That's btw. why I liked cata and MoP so much because they were the middle ground of the amount of abilities.
Just started retail for first time. Lfg dungeon spam to 60. Swapped to cata with chrome to get the old dungeons but besides that the zones were absolutely empty. Found my way to dragon isles at 60 and am still a bit lost with the currency stuff. 60+ dungeons remind me of playing Diablo 3. Groups just start as fast as possible. There ain’t no waiting for anyone. You die no rez and they don’t wait for you to come back your basically forgotten and feel like you aren’t even needed. I get excited when a group mate says hi at the beginning wtf happen
The problem with WoW inherently is that it's structured like it's supposed to have an expiration date. Unlike Runescape that can survive decades on smaller, constant content releases, WoW has to keep adding expansions that invalidate all previous content every time. I want a definitive version of WoW that feels like I "came back" to the game rather than "got left behind". There are some private servers that achieve this feeling because I know they won't cash grab for the "next big thing" and killing off the content I'm currently enjoying, even if I take a long break. I don't know, I guess what I'm saying is that I want to play WoW, but with more inspiration from other successful MMOs. For instance, I hate using the Auction House in WoW. The Grand Exchange in Runecape is so much better. You can actually post buy orders and it matches you with the person who is currently selling that item for the lowest above your asking price. Because peope can't see all the auctions, cancelling and undercutting is not as common, so the price isn't needlessly driven through the ground. And there's no time limit that costs money. I hate that posting stuff on the AH costs money instead of just taking a cut of the sale like in RS.
SoD is classic+ and I hope they keep it going somehow. It was always retarded to replay through all the expansions and end up exactly where the desire for classic came from. Definition of insanity.
Transmog is the only reason I play retail now, it's the best thing they added for me, but I agree on the prestige aspect but I just don't care anymore about the prestige I rather look the way I want all the time.
Cata is a flawed gem. My biggest issues: 1) As stated, leveling content was not tuned for the increase in player power. Adjusting this would fix all the issues, and means other forms of leveling like questing and bgs become viable options. When you put five overpowered players in a dungeon, it becomes so much faster than everything else. More difficult dungeons when leveling would also ease people into the difficulty increase at max level. 2) Less relevant content with each patch. We went from the best heroic dungeons on launch to being shoved into two troll dungeons... 4.3 pigeonholed players into three dungeons. The first raiding tier was the best opening tier the game had ever seen by a country mile... Firelands is a banger but the tier could really have used the water counterpart. If they found a way to keep the previous tiers relevant (even by simply increasing the ilvl of gear that drops), they would be ADDING more with each patch. 3) Dragon Soul was a letdown. Re-used location (which was also where two of the new dungeons took place in), re-used assets, etc. Some fights weren't that memorable, especially compared to the other tiers. The two deathwing fights sound great on paper, but the execution wasn't there. 4) No world content with 4.3. This really would have helped with the drought and with new players/alts being able to catch up. Fixing the difficulty of leveling content and keeping previous tiers of dungeons/raids relevant is very easy to do. If they wanted to turn Cata from a divisive expansion to one of the most loved, they would need to: make a water counterpart to Firelands, rework Dragon Soul, and add world content with 4.3. Imagine if they had world content like Timeless Isle.
The post-Cata classic will be good for the people that never got to play those expansions because they quit. I certainly wouldn't pay for Warlords of Draenor but if it's free with my Vanilla sub I'll certainly give it a try.
WoD without the content draught is amazing, but it will be very short. WoD is maximum quality, with minimum quantity, though technically there are more raid bosses in WoD than Cata.
wow content creator is like 30% content creator and 70% content watcher
That's what happens when the game has hardly any content
bro im tired of clicking videos and just the guy react, lfmao @@Saiku
@@flix1179don’t click it then lol
Until you get to asmons size where it becomes 5% content creator and 95% stolen content.
Bro... fallacy aside, I'm not saying that I'm forced to watch, or anything like that, I'm making a statement of disappointment in relation to the content creation scenario, of which, most of the time, you don't know if the content is made by the person and directed by them, or if it is a reaction. The entire thumbnail and title is made to give the impression that Xaryu himself played the game, but, as we know, that wasn't the case.
Relationships between people are much more than just "I don't like, I don't consume", because I LIKE wow and that's why I want to see it improve and even comment.
Of your fallacious phrase, the only true part is the correlation between demand and production, because, if we don't watch, he will stop doing such things, but the problem to be solved is not "no more reaction", but rather, There won't be 90% react content lol, because the idea is to have content other than react and that content is the majority, do you understand now?@@xChinobi93
Reforging was a sick ass mechanic. I LOVED calculating hitting hit and haste caps for my shadowpriest.
Yeah mastery and reforging were to of the best things they ever added I was so mad when reforging was scrapped like why remove my ability to min max or have any gear be viable to hit soft caps instead of hunting soft cap then optimizing from there
Agreed, reforging was super fun
Just another thing to do with an addon ;p@@jonnovak6856
@@venumus1 Except no one would calcuate shit. You used dedicated websites that would read your character on armory and it would literally tell you exactly how to reforge and gem to get the maximum performance.
@@placeholdername3206 yeah dno, never used that autocalculate stuff and still managed to raid heroic just fine.
Reforging was soo good to get rid of all the extra hit you eventually don't need
That feeling when you reforged to exactly 17.00%, oh baby
Yup hated that they removed it in wod and have yet neved reintroduced it. The reason for removing was also bad. They wanted to make it that when you get new piece of gear, it wouldnt have so many steps before you could equip it. But we still have gems/enchants etc. So actually having a system where you could use a piece you got that didnt necessarily have the bis 2nd stats was so good.
now nobody wants a reforged version after the warcraft III reforged
@@bigmacfromaos6508 BADUMTS
35:00 the only thing that's negative about that is - every player is now talked down to as if they are stupid, unskilled or mentally challenged for wanting to play the "easy mode" of raids - to separate those groups, blizzard is enforcing a difference and therefore allowing the playerbase data to socially make a class hierarchy - "I'ma mythic raider, I'm so much better than heroic raiders" "I'm a heroic raider I'm so much better than normal mode raiders" "I can't handle heroic raiding, I must be the worst person playing this game" = the "casuals" FEEL BAD for playing the game because now the game has a class system at endgame. vanilla didn't and tbf players are trying to implement it themselves with gearscore, requiring full Preraid BiS etc. but THEGAME itself wasn't structured for that to be the case... but in cata it is.
I think there's also more assholes playing nowadays, can't explain it, a lot of the shit I see looking at SoD reddit as well as wotlk / cata is just completely bonkers. You don't need 95%+ parses to complete a raid, just pople that have average gear, average skill, and are motivated to pay attention and succeed. I play in an Era guild and sure we completed the content fairly fast (guild is too hardcore for me even, too many raiding days for adults with jobs) but it's nowhere near as bad as other versions are. Maybe it's just because we're not in a hurry, not in competition anymore with anyone, and are less players on the cluster? Dunno.
@bencze465
It's not that there are more assholes, it's that there are more retail players, and they are much more anti-social than Classic ones, they play the game as if it was a solo experience forgetting there are other human beings behind every character they meet, this is the reason why I didn't bother playing Cataclysm Classic and Season of discovery, I just don't want to deal with those toxic players on top of the games not been my cup of tea, I rather stay with the boomers in Classic era and actually have fun clearing content casually.
Cata does not deserve the hate that it’s getting. I get for some it’s not their FAVORITE expansion, but it wasn’t a bad expansion. I feel like a lot of people hate it because the internet tells them to.
agreed, its my fave, cause i started with cata
Imo the best WoW ever was was in Cata and MoP. It was the absolute sweet spot for how the game felt to play. Not before and not after those expacs.
everyone has their own golden era for wow, if I wanted more difficult raiding content and less of the rpg element -- i'd play retail. i think the point many of us are making is classic is the big three, vanilla + tbc + wotlk. everything else is just the movement to retail. (i play both fyi)
facts!
I'm in the beta and having a good time bugs and all.
42:50 You hit the nail on the head with the bad actors ruining the entire system. Rated bg's had infinite conquest points for playing the mode, while arena's were limited to 1250 per week.
Meaning to full gear out a single character in arena took 6 weeks for arena's only.
But in RBG's you could full gear out in a day. This meant that quite a number of guilds would hyper focus on bad acting to smash gearing alts for Tol Barad and their arena teams.
I could have sworn conquest was capped every week even back then. You just had a higher cap if you did rbgs.
Why don't Blizzzard just make one server per expansion so that everyone could play starting from the expansion they like, progress, dungeons and raid in said expansion. Then eventually give you the possibility to progress to the next expansion realm when you are done with your current one ?
I'm guessing they dont want to dilute the playerbase
they cant even maintain playerbase on one expac nevermind them all
p servers literally outlasted every expansion the "real game"
I totally agree, I missed BC which pisses me off and after ROTLK I’m quitting lol. Well maybe I’ll go classic or play hardcore for a month but yeah it feels like I’m playing on borrowed time lol
Not only do you dilute the playerbase a lot, there is also a difference between a fresh launch server that progresses with everyone starting from scratch, vs a server that is up for 4 years and you can join in.
Fresh progression servers are much more appealing because you don't have to compete with an inflated economy and gatekeeping by veteran players
@Dangerous1939 I think you are wrong on all points. Not only it would not dilute the player base since it would address a different crowd, just like classic did, it would also attract new and old players by giving them the ability to reexplore content they haven't been able to yet. Veterans also make new players "models" to look at for when they will also be HL. And the aforementioned veterans will likely not stay long since they will have the ability to progress to the next expansion, thus reducing the risk of gatekeepers.
People treat it as if the first 3 expansions were all "Classic" and Cata was the outlier, but the truth is every expansion after Vanilla thoroughly changed the game. TBC introduced smaller raid sizes, more structured/streamlined questing in Outland which didn't promote the vastness of the world and exploration. Wotlk increased chraracter power significantly and honestly at this point, leveling with heirlooms is an efficiency battle versus leveling in Classic/TBC where especially as a melee class you were incentivized to go out across the world to find gear for your character so you could sucessfully level. In Wrath, you literally can level in greens the entire way with your heirlooms and class power, and doing the dungeons, inefficient quest chains with cool rewards just aren't worth doing. Wrath brought in mechanical/spec balance across classes and peaked in a raiding endgame atmosphere fully shifting the focus from leveling/exploration to endgame. Wrath also brought in LFG. Cata literally feels like wrath mechanically, but the reforging of the world and lack of content as well as not having the TBC/Wrath nostalgia from WC3 killed it tonally. Honestly speaking since Wrath we've never had an expansion that was tonally as awesome as TBC/Wrath. Cata takes the L but literally every expansion since Vanilla changed the game away from "Vanilla".
If I were to point to any one underlying feeling that made Cataclysm rough to me, it's that everything felt like the talent system change for the expansion. Everything was on rails. "You can't spec until you've finished your tree" was ridiculous and unnecessary. All the new quests required phasing and made it impossible for someone to join you in the world unless they were on your exact zone quest phase. The rigidity was frustrating. At least we got that initial heroic dungeon difficulty to look forward to.
Initial Wrath had some amazing odd-spec moments that Cataclysm never had. The old shaman dual wield enhance caster spec where they were dual wielding spell power weapons (until they nerfed it into the ground). The shield block stacking protection DPS builds. Those were mostly gone by the time they introduced modern Wrath Classic since it was based on its last patch, but had no chance of existing in Cataclysm. The unexpected filler talents can sometimes shine in creative ways until someone uses them effectively and Blizzard nerfs them into the ground. They fixed that from being an issue starting in this expansion.
idk about you but i enchanted my melee Charactres with fiery weapon enchants with auction house gear.
and for caster it wasnt that rough you just went Full spirit gear lolkek regen was insane on spirit in vanilla :D.
@@zeroresistance7203unless you were a warlock that needed stam int gear instead and the prices for those sky rocketed in the AH as if all spell casters were looking for "of the eagle" gear
They make that distinction because its when the old world was changed
the way i see it, the more expansions released.. the more of a casual solo grind it's become just as you said tbc came with small raids, wotlk came with RDF finger, cata came with more casual pvp/arena, ect ect. well put i enjoyed cata but i wont return to classic for cata, i will for WOD, and MIST as i didn't play this expansions at all. so it will be something new for me.
all these classic Andy's know perfectly well that they'll be playing this til their eyes pop out
I was so confused when cata launched. I was leveling an alt in southern barrens, logged in, and there was a MASSIVE fissure and thousand needles was flooded lol
I hated every bit of this.
Then Deathwing flies by and roasts your ass haha.
@@WatchingFromWork6636sorry you don't enjoy having fun 🤣
@@ahetzel9054 nothing about Cata was fun.
@@WatchingFromWork6636Boomer
It’s hilarious how people who don’t like Cata can’t just not like Cata. They’re like the vegans of wow
Best comment
now its the non binarys@@CasuallyEfficient
@@CasuallyEfficient Doubt you ever actually meet either
100% right for me i had good memories with cata and friends in this time, all wad hyped etc Played entire expansion..And all left in MoP
You have clearly not played WoW from launch and just jumped in later and know nothing about how the so called classic, TBC and Wrath originally were.
And most likely you are a blind Blizzard fan boy that swallow any shit they serve you.
Problem as WoW progressed was the change of mentality to "everyone has to be a winner". Back in early WoW people struggled to do content or straight up couldn't do it and it was fine. I was one of them. I couldn't clear AQ40 but in a weird way it was cool. Striving to clear something that not many people could do. Failing to do it didn't matter. However it was awesome seeing people with gear on from content I hadn't been able to do (reason why I don't like Tmog). There was a clear distinction between bad players, average players and good players. It lead to good world building. The journey was fun not the destination. Then it got to a point where everyone had to be able to clear content (LFR), everyone could get epics easily, everyone had to be able to have a really cool looking character.The world felt more generic. Everyone was an overpowered god in the world. To be fair if it wasn't this way nowadays people would cry about it. Players have gotten soft which means the game has gotten soft.
That is how 99.99% of games have become over time sadly.
I feel like this is the issue with everyone demanding to go 6/6 in a raid. In classic my guild couldn't even make it past bwl, but we didn't think it made the game worse. It made seeing people with gear in raids we couldn't do even cooler.
@@marcussundholm8727 Exactly, but sadly modern game design dictates that everyone is a winner or everyine is a loser, but nothing in-between...
@@ivankovachev8835 You cant have losers now cause if you do people will scream and cry about it, even with classic i had a guild on my alt who literally would spam blizzard support that the raids are too hard and they should nerf them and if not they would unsub(they wouldnt) but its more when blizzard does give in to the crybabies they get criticized for it while its not entirely they fault they just give people what they want
@@Roxasdakings You couldn't have losers back then either, that's why they added LFD, that's why they added LFR, that's why they nerfed content when it didn't need nerfing.
And people did unsub back in the day due to those reason, they actually did.
Cant wait for classic Dragonflight.
BFA is what I'm waiting for
They’re stopping at mop
@@goldenmemes51where have they said that? Classic to me is vanilla 60 to naxx. Anything after starts incrementally changing the game. I lost interest at WotLk. Servers lost their identity. Layering killed it even further. I understand the reasoning but WoW has an identity crisis and an extremely divided player base.
Vanilla is the most unbalanced dog warrior favouriting expansion with copium dad gamers being attached to it@@imunfathomable
can't wait for Classic Wrat... oh wait they did that already, so i gues doing classic cata is fine right?
I was an endgame player all the way from vanilla to MoP, the thing that made Cata the breakpoint was all the streamlining of gearing. It's where they completely removed experimentation with stats and gearing and just forced you in to what they thought you were supposed to have.
Cata had 2 big issues. 1. content pacing 2. It made the classic world inaccessible.
Both those issues are resolved with a sped up Classic timeline, and the existence of Era. I think people will be surprised at how good it is considering the years of slander.
No you're wrong. The classic world being inaccessible wasn't the problem. It was the new world was terrible.
People were willing to let go of the old world if the new one had been good.
But they turned compelling stories like the Westfall Defias storyline into CSI Miami parody, Uldum was straight up ripped Indiana Jones, etc etc.
Don't kid yourself and say ridiculous nonsense. You probably weren't there at the time if you think that was the issue.
Cataclysm was horrific.
Wrath was an expansion everyone played for the lore, and then we went from that to a terrible lore expansion with worse gameplay, and they got rid of the old style talent trees.
So much shit changed. LFR, LFg, etc Cata was the first full expansion with them.
You have no idea what you're talking about. It's not "2 big issues" you fool, it's like 20.
@@omarali262 the new world is terrible? Is way better than the old world people were just stuck in the old ways. The quests are way better and more enjoyable. LFG was introduced in Wrath and how's the gameplay of Cata worse than WOTLK? You have no idea what you talking about just hating. They got rid of the old talent trees cause most talents were passive abilities that didn't even make any sense.
"Wrath was an expansion everyone played for the lore" hahaha I can literally name you 50 people who played wow since the beginning and have no clue about the lore. Myself included.
@@omarali262lmao, you are so mad. Everybody laugh at this clown.
actual pepega@@omarali262
@@andrecardoso6941 I said first FULL expansion with LFG. It was only added in the last patch of wrath.
The quests were not way better.
They were less serious, forgettable, silly, and stupid.
"I'm gonna punch that dragon in the face"
You don't know what you're talking about, like the other guy. You want easy, fed to you, silly nonsense.
The old talent tree system was the best they ever had and that's why they're trying to move back towards it in Dragonflight, because they admit their mistake.
Looking back at the expansions, it was Cata when they stopped feeling like expansions. Instead of adding to what the game already had they just kept giving us new systems instead of sticking to one and going with it. Its good to try new systems but since Cata to Shadowlands we had constant new systems on how we upgraded gear, multiple crafting systems and borrowed power, took them way to long to realise how poorly designed it all was.
My wife is probably more on the casual side of players. Xaryu, Metagoblin, are not casual players and its hard to understand their point of view so let me try.
In classic, my wife refuses to raid Naxx because its too stressful. She does AQ 40 like once a month or so and MC/BWL every other week.
She likes to go on random adventures with her friends, collect outfits to wear while in cities, explore areas, slowly level up alts and sometimes really get into bgs (she got to rank 11)
The actual casual player does not look for challenging content.
The actual casual player looks to make friends in the game to do random stuff with and hang out in a world that is filled with mystery.
Cataclysm has no mystery
Cataclysm rushes you through the leveling process
Cataclysm (and retail) has a anti social level experience by design.
Calaclysm end content is a major step up in difficulty.
How exactly does that sound fun to a casual player?
Leveling in classic, I always end up meeting people during the leveling journey that I add to my friends list.
Days later I often see them again in a different zone or dungeon.
Classic is social by design.
Classic hardcore is even more social.
Lastly, modern TBC, Wotlk, Cata players seem to be very ok with pay to win because they can't be bothered to earn anything.
Yes, people always bought gold or carries etc. to some extend. It used to be like 5-10% (my perception) of the player base and was shunned / people kept quiet about it.
I played last in phase 2 wrath and people were very open about buying gold / boosts/ carries etc.
Like they can't be bothered just playing the video game and actually earn things.
Lets not talk about the bots roaming free everywhere because blizz devs seem to not play their own game.
How again does this sound fun?
I agree with the sentiment, however, I think the criticism that the lack of difficulty of leveling content had a large part to do with this is true. If everything is a breeze (and you can just queue for random dungeons) then why WOULD you make friends with other players? To a certain degree the challenge and having to rely on others is what gets people to socialize. I think some of MoP's design was to address the lack of casual content: pet battles, brawler's guild, rare mobs, special rare items to find of all kinds, revamped Darkmoon Faire, world bosses, all sorts of lore and little secrets, etc. Sadly, in MoP the leveling content became even easier and they pushed you through it even faster... so it didn't have a huge impact on socialization that it otherwise would have.
As a casual player myself who just spent 8 months on a cata Pserver, you're soooo wrong. I could write a really long response as to why you're wrong about everything but I won't. Play it for a week, get one character to max and if you and your wife hates it, then quit, but if your wife is really that casual, she's going to love it because you don't need to raid to have a good time and raids really aren't that much of a step up in difficulty. I would argue that ICC is just as difficult as firelands, maybe even harder than firelands. There's more mechanics in firelands but I don't think any of them are as tough as some ICC fights.
Give it a try.
Cata has a lot of casual content at endgame, you can do old raids and Normal dungeons are fun. And if you like fashion, now you have transmog. You also have endgame open world activities. Due to the stat inflation of Cata, you can 5 man WotLK raids and 3 man TBC and Vanilla Raids. Old Dungeons can be done by 1-2 players. And you have archeology in Cata. Tons of casual content. Cata leveling is also much friendlier than pre-Cata, but at the same time it's NOT MoP leveling.
May I ask what those adventures your wife goes on are like? What do they do? What activities? I just can't picture them. Do they just run around the world killing mobs?
I also think she might like MoP, MoP had so much casual content it's mind boggling.
@@ahetzel9054 you are proving his point how the leveling process becomes so boring that fun is after leveling. Before, fun was had the entire time
I could be wrong about RBGs, but I think over the time WoW had more and more players interested in doing content by themself rather than looking for a group and going through the process of "job application" that involved "socializing" but on a level of "send your CV (RBG rating prior) and we'll consider your application. And since I would say most of the playerbase were more focused on having a guild for raiding to avoid the same thing, then they didn't want to leave a guild in order to have a stable group for RBGs. And it went hand in hand imo, when less and less people wanted to go through the hassle of getting into RBG, getting into groups also became harder, because with the already small pool of player playing RBGs, there was not enough noobies to just roll through like in random BGs. It became a sweat-fest in eyes of people that wouldn't even want to take action in looking for arena partner to go even further and fit a role in a whole team. While for arenas you could just have one or two friends and start right away. My point is, even with an active raiding guild, most people didn't have 10 players that would actively look for pvp together at the same time and planned their time around it with raiding already taking 3-4 nights, so they stuck with arenas which later in the game proved as a fine place to get statstick trinkets even for raiding/M+.
Loads of RBG teams were toxic too, or the "meta" could be using a certain class for a specific thing that the person disliked. Like rogues/hunters would be siting on one spot while the rest of the team was stuck in an endless cycle of team fights, because nobody focused a healer (giving a general example of teams below 2k) so rather than siting at a base for 15minutes in hopes that the team will win it for them, or get blamed for leaving, they just didn't bother with RBGs in general and played arenas.
I know way too many people that were this way and I would say it was like this for the general playerbase that was not focused on pvp only. (key word is general playerbase, not all. I know exceptions ofc) and by the time there were comunity chats it was already too late and RBGs had little to no players.
And like I said, this doesn't apply to everyone, but I would really say, majority of WoW players were NOT "pvp-only" and played other content too, which to them was accessable. They showed up for the raid nights, they farmed challenge modes or mythic+ and when other guildies didn't feel like going M+? they did some solo content, be it leveling, questing, dailies, world quests, mount farms etc, because tons of people play WoW with just their guilds for raiding, but don't have tons of friends outside of guilds, hence lower interest in "send us a job application for RBG to maybe get selected".
Kinda sad, I liked RGBs a lot. What I would more be interested is why did solo queue arenas failed. On paper they sound really great and as for myself I enjoyed them a lot, but the queue time 20-30minutes is just insane.
Solo queue rbgs are coming now. That's why they're testing battleground blitz 8v8
That only happened because they made group content too hard. To get best gear, it should be 40man easy raids to make big social events that made WoW so popular in the first place. Mythic+ should be to get cooler and cooler cosmetics plus a couple seasonal glyphs, that way their isn't a huge gear gatekeep.
Also, the game became harder for new players to get into the game. RBG's were always liked more by casuals (compared to arenas), so making game harder for new players to join will lead to less casuals playing RBG's.
So, I started in Classic WOW because my PC could NEVER play NONE of the originals. I consider myself a big fan of WOW. I've watched hours on lore, I've played all the way up to Wrath and now I'm waiting on Cata. I've done almost every Alliance characters and 2 Horde characters since Classic. Learned multiple specs and I'll tell you right now. I'm PUMPED for Cata. Cannot wait to learn more about the world and explore the revamped world. I never got to experience it so for people like me, its going to be one helluva ride.
The thing with the Cataclysm zone revamp is it's objectively a better experience than the old vanilla zones. No weird breaks in quest chains, it flows more naturally, quests have a more interesting storyline. You'll really like it. I understand nostalgia is a hell of a drug but old vanilla zone questing was just bad.
@@voltagespc6097 That's what's special for me. I never played anything but Classic and up. Never got to play Vanilla back in the day because I never had a pc that was up to snuff. I had to learn EVERYTHING as a new player and I enjoyed just about everything. I do have a natural hatred for the Sands quest line. I didn't know what it did, but I tried my best and never finished it. It was one of the few quests that I never finished as a Mage. I didn't realize how much stuff I needed. I just did them because I wanted to finish every quest in the game, and I did until that point. Going to play both of the new races, too! I LOVE the goblins in the game, too lmao. Time is MONEY, Friend! I hope the voice lines are somewhat new. It's going to be a grand adventure for me! That, and flying around the main area for once >:D
Cata WoW was amazing. Cata will have a more active playerbase than wrath mark my words. The communities will be amazing since guilds are prio'd cause of spells like mass summon/res.
@@MimiPipoo I'm hoping so! I also adore Goblins lmao. Going to be my favorite horde character as soon as I get it, but most of my characters are Alliance. Might play a Hunter if I can get the hang of controlling my pet.
Mained a Prot Paladin for the first half of Cata, and rotated my druid between all three specs depending on my guilds needs (was gladly playing cat and topping charts) until we stopped raiding 3/4 through Dragon Soul. I absolutely loved pretty much everything about this expansion! I was mostly (90%) PvE by this time - I played alliance on a mostly horde server/battlegroup and PvP just wasn't fun. Arenas require having friends that play at the same times, and that was never something my "group" could accomplish - I never branched out and looked for others. RBG's were a great addition, though, giving tanks a place in PvP, - Would love to hear takes about why they failed to catch on as much as/more than arenas. I began branching out with alts and fell in love with both mage (FIRE) and warrior (Arms/Prot). My ability to enjoy PvP was reignited! Gearing all 4 characters simultaneously was rough, and my friends began leaving the game for various reasons. I've been around since Vanilla and have come and gone throughout the years (Skipped the back half of MoP, Legion and BFA, and briefly returned for the Dragonflight launch)
I loved the first 2 tiers of Cata, but was let down with Dragon Soul and I think it's because it was such a short raid and it was out for such a long time. I probably wouldn't have minded it nearly as much if they had new content 6 months after DS launched, but that raid was out for over a year IIRC. I had to have cleared it at least 30 times and with numerous specs/roles before being bored out of my gourd.
Everyone keeps saying this but I'd still like to try dragon soul since I never got the chance to experience it. Maybe they'll make it a bit better this time around?
@@ahetzel9054 it's not that it was a bad raid, but it's only 8 bosses and at the time, that was the current raid for over a year so it got stale after clearing it dozens of times. That, and many people were disappointed with the final Deathwing fight. For an end of expansion boss, people expected better, and I've got to say that out of every end of expansion boss fight, I liked Deathwing the least and I've played every one since the Lich King. I didn't hate it, it was just wasn't the best.
@@soulsharts Right, would've preferred to fight the giant ass dragon. Not a tentacle monster.
I absolutely loved RBGS too. Our team was so tight and had so much fun.
reforging is 40%, not half.
As a counterpoint to being able to see what content someone's done by looking at them, it's really tiring going into a raid in vanilla and seeing 20 Warriors with Lionheart helm, T2.5 shoulders, Edgemaster's, and Chromatic Boots. The chest and legs are obscured by their tabard, but pretty much everyone has those four items listed (Edgemaster's replaceable with AQ40 or ACLG depending on race/weapons)
Once you are at the endgame, you will not change the way you look very much for a few classes. Transmog plus a toggle option for those who don't want to see it would solve a lot of woes.
How to fix transmog: Make transmog visibility a UI option. If I want to look cool I turn it on. If i want to be able to identify people's gear by sight, I turn it off.
The best solution to make everyone get what they want
Totally agree about returning to a more unified currency system across all expansions. They should just have 2 for PvE and 2 for PvP - a currency for top level gear at present and a currency for everything else. What's annoying is they've already done this multiple times and had several passes of condensing the number of currencies. Then, they immediately start adding more currencies the next patch. They never seem to learn the lessons of what saves them future work. Creating more technical debt for themselves almost seems like a fetish at this point.
I was 18 when cata released. So naturally life got in the way. I can’t wait to give the expansion a look
about the same here I started in cata i had just graduated high school and finally had my own computer
It has noticeable differences, but also has great aspects in it to make it enjoyable. Hope you have a blast!
Cata did some things good. Like giving hunter focus instead of mana.
The summary of how most feel is that Cata made leveling brain-dead-boring and made raids too hard, but made pvp more fun.
I honestly can't wait for Cata. I have never seen a private server as packed as whitemane deathwing for cata. There is a lot of underlying hype for cata. Guilds were amazing during that xpac with the spells and passive bonuses they gave. I remember mass summoning a 40 man raid behind enemy lines or ressing everyone behind a tree and fighting back. Was a sick expasion for pvp and wpvp.
not to forget wpvp scuffles at tol barad was gold.
I think one thing that got skimmed over was there was a tonal shift between WoTLK and Cata. We went from the Lich King to Deadmines being full of freaking monkeys
This. The atmosphere and ambience of WoW totally changed when Cata released.
Thats so dishonest that its kind of crazy lol. We went from The Lich King to Deathwing. Why you are comparing a end of expansion raid to a leveling dungeon????
@@Noriaeladeadmines is an endgame dungeon in cata…
@@Noriaela "The dungeon was updated to reflect current events and gained a Heroic mode for level 85 players. There are Goblin Teleporters scattered throughout the instance, usable only when the boss of the particular room they are located in is killed. Once unlocked, they can send players to either Ironclad Cove, the Mast Room, or the Goblin Foundry. The Goblin Transporter located at the beginning room with the quest givers only sends players further into the instance; it does not function as a destination point"
We went from like the Forge of Souls or Utgarde Keepe all like massively lore relevant to LK and the titans and stuff and all these huge reveals and a lot of early cata hits those notes but there's also a big comedy element as well between all the old content worked.
@@darylsdog9521 Comparing a end of expansion raid to a "endgame" dungeon that is only endgame due to it being remade is not a valid comparison that makes any sense.
Your argument could be applied to Vanilla into TBC. We went from fighting an old god to killing random trash mobs that have zero value on the world or the story.
The biggest problem with reforging was hit rating. Most people would end up defaulting to reforge to hit rating so they could hit cap.
Cata is where I parted ways with wow.. came back in BFA and the game was totally unrecognizable lol. A lot of my friends saw what Cata was bringing and quit while they were ahead - me personally I was just going with the flow.
While I dont hate Cata, I do think it's pointless to have classic servers for literally every expansion just because certain people feel left out.. all that does is fragment the playerbase and leave everything feeling empty (aside from week 1 hype). Honestly its time to stop remaking old content and move the focus on to Plunderstorm/SOD style stuff that retains the games roots while bringing everyone together.
21:00 - The reason reforging sucked is Blizzard would deliberately make items with bad stats intending you to reforge it; and used that to indirectly stealth balance classes. For example, Paladins wanted mastery, it was twice as good as any other stat. But Blizzard would only put it on 2 pieces of BiS gear out of 14, thus screwing you over in order to limit you from Min/Maxing. Crit was also disminished with the damage bonus, yet everything now had crit. FEELSBADMAN
Druids will control cata
they got rid of reforging because blizzard believes that its "unfun" to have to do a bunch of shit to your upgrade piece before its an upgrade piece, and that it basically requires simming your character to figure out your best options.
in unrelated news, we now are live talking with retail wow players and how you cant even tell what an upgrade is without simulcraft.
So damn hyped for Cataclysm. The renewed zones, goblins, class changes, actually hard heroics etc 😍
Spoiler Alert : Heroics will be faceroll same as early raids as game will be based on 4.3.4, priv servers like Apollo buffed them significantly and they were still somewhat meh.
@@Lambda322 Ok!👍🏻 will be super fun either way. What I’m looking forward the most is leveling 1-60 in the new world anyways 😍
@@Djupadalar What stops you from going to retail and doing that right now? Quests/zones are exactly the same
@@Lambda322 What makes you think I want to play retail?
Cataclysm and retail are miles apart. Don’t play stupid just because you don’t like it :)
@@Djupadalar You literally said you want to level 1-60 in a "new" world, this "new" world is the same on retail right now. Same quests same mobs. Dont play stupid yourself, I'm not an idiot. Cata was and is a terrible expansion, especially 4.3 aka Dragon Soul. Tho still not as bad as WoD because that shouldn't have ever been made at all.
Cata is gonna be where classic realm populations drop by 50% and then they’ll work on classic plus which is based on SOD
Doubt it, probably after MoP tho
His first mistake was playing prot warrior instead of blood dk in cata
hands down the best tank in Cata
@@Feeder44 playing blood dk was the only reason I was able to clear heroic spine. No other tank could do it the way blood dk could.
Blood DK is gonna be lit!
It is! And yet I can't decide what I will play (probably Prot Paladin at this point) - I already have a Blood DK for the group, was my first recruit.
I remember reforging all secondary stats to mastery to get that extra absorb shield up, once you got the porcelain crab from ToT all you needed to do was time the strikes and HC tanking got easy. I was really lucky to get Zin'rokh after like 2 days of archeology (had to reforge it, but it was still insanely good back then).
Make the dungeon finder have a feature similar to Mythic plus where you go through each one in order as your leveling so its more of a progression before end game progression. Gives people a taste of the end game for anyone who is leveling toons
and stop experience gains after doing dungeons twice, also double quest experience so people have varied gameplay instead of grinding same thing over and over.
Also let people store experience for later so they don't out level a zone too fast if they don't want to.
I vote for starting vanilla completely over every few years!!!
1 button rotation lets goooo!
Would be nice, but they should milk it and release classic in 2027 if cata comesout this year or 2025
I personally hated Cata back in the day because it completely changed my hunter class in a way that I absolutely hated as well as dumbed down the classes in general to make it way more mainstream friendly which I thought was absurd. So that's when I stopped playing wow permanently.
cata is my home
probably have more hours in cata then all others combined
i played since id say 8 months before bc as a child didnt even hit max til wrath but joined a guild start of cata and prog raided/arena at 10, by the end i had cleared heroic as ranged,melee, healer and 6/8 on a feral tank. still great to think back on
I started back in OG vanilla and quit in WOD. Up to this day Cata is still my favourite expansion. It's there was a huge content draught but I didn't care at all since I am mostly a PvP player. 3v3 was so balanced and RBGs were amazing.
i only pvpd in cata and dragonflight im not a pvper recently ive been forcing myself to thats why dragonflight but the cata one i was the 3rd best holy paladin on the private server mana drain priests were my bane xD but yeah i agree cata was good also was kinda forced to try that one the private server too because by that time i had finished all raid content on my toons and geared sucks that it was during the Moltdown (crash of moltenwow)@@andrecardoso6941
I am looking forward to cata pvp, considering I didn't play the first two patches and with the addition of heroic+ to one of the best dungeon pools on the games history, it will hopefully be really fun, just hoping it won't interfere with retail or sod release dates.
The reason why I left Cata back in the day was because regular elites were changed to reg mobs, Hogger, etc, They also removed having to group on quests that requuired 2-3 people by having NPC's help you. I felt the lack of community was non existant & that started in WoTLK when the dungeon finder started. I also felt that people in the game started to turn elitist. So basically the whole community based gameplay just basically disappeared & it just got worst.
waiting 3 hours just to find a dungeon and having neckbeards gatekeep braindead content a 5 year old could do only to have someone dc or die and rage quit meaning it was all a waste of time is a sense of community? wow community is as bad as league and rdf the best thing wotlk added and anyone who denies it is wearing rose tinted goggles
people are 20+ with jobs, kids and limited time nobody wants to waste hours just to find a deadmines group or wailing caverns after doing it 100s of times in past
That isn’t true, hogger and many other elites are still elites in cataclysm.
Classes are a little stronger in cata though so maybe the elites don’t feel as strong.
Meanwhile every other comment above this one is "people just make up reasons to get mad at the new world, any quest would be better than collect 10 hooves" while completely ignoring the major reworks to the philosophy of making it a solo game rather than an MMO for leveling...
@@RadarFinsR ya Cata had better pvp and ruined pve, except for high level raids.
Cataclysm Season 1 RBG back in the days on eredar EU
Step 1: Pack: owl + mage + rogue
Step 2: Jump healer. use beam+ring+smokebomb on same spot. Get a dk to grip people in as a bonus
step 3: ?????
step 4: profit.
easy 3-2-1 setup and there is basically no counterplay.
loved it
Step 0: Queue Rammstein - Du hast
I remember Cata leveling pre-nerfs was awesome. Especially if you start from lvl1 , it was SUCH A GOOD LEVELING EXPANSION, idk what people are talking about. Leveling in taca is just extremely focused on solo content.
Its just the people with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses who havent got enough of zhevra hoov farming. Imo leveling alts in cataclysm was the most enjoyable thing in wows history due to actually well paced questzones/heirlooms/new talents. I actually leveled most of my current characters to max then. only had 1 max level in wotlk but had like 7 in cata.
Leveling solo might've been fun, but I remember trying to join a friend with questing and perpetually having to deal with being phased from them. We'd have to start questing in a new zone to even see each other, which is rough if the person you're trying to play with is new. So many of the new quest chains were phase-locked.
@@Kauhmbou I do agree, Hyjal has ALOT of phasing. The 1-80 zones are somewhat chill.
Yup Cata has the best pre-expansion leveling to date. No other expansion ever did pre-expansion leveling content after it and the old world is overall much worse than the new world in Cata.
They IMO missed their chance to squish the levels down to 60 and then make Outland be 30-40 and Northrend 40-50, so you can just do Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdom, or alternatively go to Outland and Northrend, but 50-60 would be in the original continents. Squishing down the levels down to 60 will also allow you to get a talent point every level, instead of every other level.
@@ivankovachev8835 that is the best idea
25:00 maybe it was just me, but Cata was 100% a raid logging expansion for me, especially at the end. I did everything i could accomplish (that is, clearing the raids on normal 10 man and finishing the end-game storylines before Dragon Soul even came out) on both my mains and i literally would only log in for those raid nights. I remember there being nothing to do, as I don't like PVP at all. Maybe I'm not remembering something but that's where I was with Cata.
Yeah it's a stupid argument, Wotlk also has got new horizontal progression, mainly achievements. But most wow players just enjoy the vertical progression the most, which is why every expansion is like a "raid logging expansion" for them (i include myself here)
Cata destroyed all the Zones... menethil harbor still under water to this day...
Cata may be my most played expansion, lol
RBG's were so fucking amazing
World of Divisions. Divided player base on retail vs classic vs hardcore vs seasonal. Then divide by servers and factions, guilds, solo, classes, specs. It's an absolute mess what's happened to WoW.
It's insane that Blizzard thought WoW needed to be ''modernized.'' The number 1 MMO so far ahead of the competition copying the more modern unsuccessful MMOs to be worse and less fun, instead of just doing the thing that made them number 1.
I will die on this hill: Cata PvP was the peak of wow PvP until 4.3 with double legendary RLS. But 4.0 - 4.2 were absolutely amazing.
What class do you main? Curious haha
S2/S3 TBC & S9/S10 Cata is peak pvp fr
@@guledm349at the time, I mained shadow priest and resto druid
@@samisosa800 TBC if warriors had no RNG mace stun haha.
Cata leading into MoP and the entirety of MoP was peak pvp WoD is an honorable mention idgaf what anyone says about PVE in WoD but the PvP was sick
I think part of the problem with RBG's, is the barrier to entry. I have raided every raid tier, I have raided in heroic prog guilds, Mythic prog guilds, etc. I have seen just about any form of Endgame PvE, and the barrier to entry there, isn't bad. But rated BG's? I have never once been able to even see the inside of an RBG. Would love to participate, even once. But have never been allowed into one. Arena's, doesn't take much to get into, get a buddy or two, and start queing arena's. Barrier to entry for Arena's is MUCH easier to overcome than Barrier to entry on RBG's.
It deleted what we loved about old WoW. But with that it created an opportunity for classic.
Not really, the opportunity would have existed regardless
who cares about the old world. Since TBC launched the old world died.
Who are “we”?
I enjoyed it back in 2010 and I will probably enjoy it in 2024 as well. One of the best expansion
@@Djupadalar if you look at player attrition in WoW history cata lead to one of the biggest losses of WoW players.
@@arcadialive4265 That didn’t answer my question at all. But thanks!
Reforging was great i think it was a mistake to get rid of it because now its harder to make many options of gear that is viable across all specs and classes. With reforging it allowed you to turn gear that maybe you normally wouldnt wear over something else. To reforge it and make it at the very least decent or good.
My only issue with Cata was the destruction of the old world which everyone grew to love
Oh come off it. Sick and tired of this tired old excuse. This statement mightve ringed true a decade ago when we didnt have a way to play vanilla WoW without private servers but nowadays Blizz has released various servers up the wazoo that retains the old world. Its not that nostalgic anymore and nowadays veterans dont even care about the old world because 1. They ignore doing quests 2. They dungeon power spam, almost no different than doing rdf.
I believe its finally time to stop with the nostalgia goggles and allow Cata content to breathe and exist
@@atelierbagur3831Oh so my point is invalid and I should "come off it" because, in your opinion, too much time has passed? Don't tell me how to feel.
@@hunterfitch5951 How you feel makes no logical sense. You are still able to play vanilla WoW. What the hell is even your problem at this point? Thats what I dont get
Not true, by WotLK I was sick of the old world, and I started in the beginning of TBC. That said I thought I'd hate the new world, but ended up loving it back in the day.
@@ivankovachev8835 This was pretty much the whole point of the revamp back then. And I like to say the sentiment around it was well received. The longing for old world people only came later down during Mists or WoD when private servers started to hit the scene
To touch on why Arenas may be more popular than RBGs, I literally always just thought it came down to convenience. You can queue, find a game quickly, it's over quickly, plays matter. RBGs are awesome and I prefer them to Arenas, but they feel so inefficient to progress in especially when you're required to gather up a team of players first which can take ages. I just wish they'd add a solo queue system to RBGs like every other competitive game on the market.
While yes, RBGs require more people, most people will fill with guildies and then just pug one or two if they can't fill with their guild. I ran a pvp guild back in the day and we treated RBGs like raids where we had 2 days a week where we'd run them for about 2 hours. People generally showed up and we always had a few extra sign ups we'd have to turn away or put on the bench if someone could only come for one or two matches. So in short, just find a guild that runs RBGs. I'm not running my own guild this time around because I'm far more casual than I used to be and it's just too much work. Plus I really like raiding now too haha
The main reason the WoW began to feel bad in Cata was class homogenization. There was no real reason to play class x over y because they're effectively the same minus 2 negligible class specific abilities that bring no actual value.
Can you give specific examples?
Looking at raidbuffs and who provides what, i cannot agree with that. Yes you had most buffs spread along 2-3 different speccs, but that also helped forming raid groups a lot because you are not dependant on one specific class or spec. But it still provided somewhat unique benefits to each spec/class.
Not true, classes played very differently from one another and had a different flow and rhythm. It's Vanilla to WotLK that most classes played very similarly. Especially the 1 button rotations of Vanilla and late-TBC.
This is the first time around playing Cata for me and so far I’m like ….this is amazing!!!! Like why did I want to play SoD? I’m still raid logging on SoD but I’m exploring Cata right now and to be honest the world changing isn’t at all as bad as people claimed lol. The changes that have been made so far that I can see have been nice improvements and they feel like natural. Orgimmar is now more modern more things. I totally get what the Dev’s were trying to give with that and they put a lot of time into these improvements bc they are….improvements. I know the Devs are trying really hard to do that with SoD but with that being a one off I really hope they can fix the issues in Cata soon. I have heard so much about the dungeons and raids and if what I have seen so far is an indicator of whats to come I just want them to get it right so that the negative things that have been said can potentially be laid to rest. Lol I’ve even heard a few hard core nay sayers about Cata say they are now gonna PVP…which is good news. It’s only pre-patch and i have so much to do already I love it!
The reason i quit wow for a long time in cata wasn't because of the game play or raiding and i don't think it was for others too. It did stop being classic for one reason. They maimedthe most important character in the game. The superstar character that kept millions of players logging in day after day for years. They destroyed Azeroth. There were changes in every game area zone. The world changed completely. Hed they made changes gradually over the whole expansion that would have been okay, but they did it overnight and Azeroth was no longer the home we knew snd loved.
People were willing to let go of the old world if the new one had been good.
But they turned compelling stories like the Westfall Defias storyline into CSI Miami parody, Uldum was straight up ripped Indiana Jones, deadmine now full of monkeys, etc etc.
Also leveling became so brain-dead easy that leveling was no longer fun, so fun was only after leveling, unlike before where fun was had from the start
Reforging is very good because it provide less frustrations when you have bad items. Maybe 40% is a bit less, 60% could be better.
And for Transmog, maybe they could disable it when you enter in a dungeon/raid/bg. OR, maybe they should put transmog vision only for the owner, or even more, make an option to see all transmog or not
The original three were the golden age, but looking back, Cata and MoP were the silver age. Legion was the bronze age, and everything else is the dark ages.
Yea i don't agree with that . Legion is the platinum age. Best expansion or period of wow there is and anyone who puts it that low probably never played it the same amount of time you did other expansions etc. Legion was the prime of wow and everything after for sure was straight ass i will agree.
@@chazz3726only at the last patch. First patch of Legion was AWFUL. People don’t seem to remember limited Heirloom Talents and only 1 Legendary (maybe 2 if you were were an undead and don’t sleep)
@@chazz3726 While Legion was fun and I played every second of it, it did start the whole "hey we need systems that require massive timesinks and instill FOMO in our players" which completely ruined wow (the subsequent "ass" you're referring to).
Time gated mission table is not peak wow, sorry@@chazz3726
@@chazz3726 I hate Legion and everyone I know quit in Legion lol the amount of grind and hours you had to put in the game was simply ridiculous. Not to mention if favoured people with no life. I heard in the last patch it became better but when I played it was just an awful expansion overall.
Xaryu, I really liked what you were saying about each expansion introducing new zones and separating the high level players from the low level players. That feeling of seeing those high level players with the epic gear and mounts really made the game that much more enticing and exciting. In Cataclysm, they introduce Archaeology. Do you think that profession was an attempt from Blizzard to bring the high level players back to the old world and make it seem more alive again? Curious on your thoughts. Great vid btw!
Continuing Classic WoW into Cata is such a weird decision.
WoD was the peak of class design in my opinion and it had some sick raids. I think it would actually be really sick as a classic where they can fix the pacing of the expansion.
I wouldn’t mind a classic WoD, but add in the missing raid and make the end story make sense. WoD is still the best leveling experience of any expansion
i'm so mad at YT that we can't see the dislikes on comments rn
you skip wad and go straight to legion so that one guy from the stay safe video can get his transmog for his fel guard for the corrupted ashbringer
tbc was the end of classic
the problem with reforging is if you are trying to hit a certain number of hit / expertise, and any more is useless, the math behind that is annoying or requires a third party. They want you to know if an upgrade is an upgrade without 3rd party assistance. Pros and cons like anything i guess. Made dual spec tricky if you shared gaer between the sets too.
Classic WoW is Vanilla, TBC, Wrath. Cata was shit.
Why?
@Laycossify it changed the core values of the game we had played from 2004 til cata launch, not saying it was bad just a lot of the player base felt like they had been slapped in the face
@@Laycossify for me, taking away 50% of my spells was the main reason to dislike it, and taking away the opportunity to "play" seriously and in my old way of switching forms (druid) in pvp. in cata, this was made useless, since you had no spells or talents in other forms, because "take away spells and talents"
just awful...
cata was the best exp .dream on nuubs you now have to work harder and use your brain in cata is very hard for nuubs likwe you
@@SuperSonaldo7
People were willing to let go of the old world if the new one had been good.
But they turned compelling stories like the Westfall Defias storyline into CSI Miami parody, Uldum was straight up ripped Indiana Jones, deadmine now full of monkeys, etc etc.
Also cata ruined a new player's first few hours the most by making solo leveling so boring-brain-dead-easy, and ruined the rest of the leveling experience by making leveling too brain-dead easy
Mop had the best class design
This guy probably wants Cata to be successful because he's going to make RUclips content on it. Cata was the expansion where the term "raid or die" was coined, there was NOTHING to do outside of raiding. And the raids were incredibly mediocre. Launch ones were decent, but Firelands and Dragon Soul are some of the worst raids in WoW's history. Cata will have an uptick of players on launch, and then nosedive off a cliff. By the end of Cata, I genuinely believe the playerbase will be so small that they won't be able to justify making a MoP Classic. Which is a shame, as MoP was actually a fine expansion.
PvP in cata wasn’t as bad as people say. Also just cause you didn’t do much outside of raiding doesn’t count as nothing to do without raiding. The raids too were different wouldn’t say they were the worst tho.
This guy probably wants Cata to be unsuccessful so he can squeeze his balls with glee as his opinions are validated
Both raiding/dungeons and pvp is way better than in wrath.... its just not classic anymore
It’s funny you say this because we saw this same sentiment for tbc and wotlk haha
Saying that Firelands is one of the worst raids in the game tells me you hit a brick wall at some boss and your guild disbanded. Couse of no progression
RBG isn’t the main PvP route because it’s more difficult to put together 10 people of the same skill level & all communicating. & more difficult to put together a 10 player composition of the same skill level at that. And having to find 3 healers instead of 0-1 & a competent Flag Carrier/Target Caller/RBG Leader. & The games overall take longer for the amount of points you get compared to arenas, especially if you lose drawn out games. People go for the fastest Conquest/Arena Points farming route cuz time ya know.
Tho I agree it’s extremely fun & wish it was the main PvP route
i saw a private server, that is currently on MOP, and they're working on Legion. They're literally having WOD be like a 1-2 week leveling experience then jumping straight to Legion lol. Seems like a decent idea as someone who's only long break in wow was from the end of WOD first raid, all the way till the argus patch of Legion. Looking forward to actually playing some legion since i really enjoyed that last little bit.
Either the Cata private server is wrong or they changed the difficulty of leveling because the beta seems relatively challenging. He even mentioned that in his stream recently as well.
Compared to other expansions the start in Cata is very rough. Heroics and raids in the first few weeks are hard for most people, especially when comparing it to wotlk starter content. Your damage and healing is like the same as with icc heroic gear, everything has just more hp and npcs + mechanics hit harder
personally I dont believe cataclysm was the "beginning of the end" for World of Warcraft, that came with the release of MoP, at least for me.
I think the reason for reforge discontinue was raider's unhappiness with the the fact that you had to port back after something dropped. IDK how real that problem is, since you kinda had to anyway, with gems and chants.
It would have been an easy fix; what reforging did was allow you to change a percentage of secondary stats. So for example, let's image a "gold star, silver star" system. On your character sheet, each secondary stat has two empty stars next to it. You can click on them to make one a gold star and one a silver star; you can only have one of each and they can't be used on the same stat. By default, the game picks the "right" stats when you get access to it to prevent new players from missing it/not knowing what was optimal. This way, it would automatically adjust them by a set percentage. Tada! No extra work, or spending gold, or using reforgelite.
@@naejimbathey could also just make a toy or a mount with a vendor, but blizz be blizz sometimes, even at their peak
The thing that really ruined wow raiding for me was the multiple difficulties. The ilvl jump between tiers of content is just too large. When a new raid comes out, it completely invalidates 99.9% of the gear from the previous tiers that expansion.
Now lets compare that to classic or even BC. There were reasons to run old content throughout the ENTIRE expansion. Multiple drops from MC that were still relevant in tier 3 content. This is what kept the world and guilds alive for me. There was always a reason to run old stuff with new players or alts, while still having something for more established characters.
Compare that to dragonflight, you wouldn't be caught dead running the first tier of content for upgrades.
I loved the first tier of cata raiding. I just didn't enjoy going back and re-clearing with an extra mechanic for slight upgrades.
valdraken was missing from cata where horde and ally mix , people were stuck in their own capital city, dalaran was ok ish but better now
Another side to this:
I actually quit the game for awhile after wrath and came back during MOP. So part of me is considering trying it out to experience content I missed back in the day
Primarily PVE players HATE being forced to PvP in order to get transmog, gear, mounts, etc., and the same holds true with PvP players being forced to do PVE raids/dungeons to get their BIS and transmog gear, etc. I'm tired of the Devs thinking it would be fun to force people to do this. It is not "fun", it becomes a groanfest instead...to the point I have considered quitting WoW.
9:45 because its so fun to wait until level 40 to have a melee attack or dual wield as an enhance shammy whats the fun in the game if you dont get your class identity until halfway through your levelling journey.
Honestly think cata is going to be pretty fun when it releases the actual pve and pvp content added is great we don't have to worry about that content drought and I personally liked the quests of cata more with the worse part being that mobs are much easier to kill compared to vanilla wow but if they could just buff the open world enemies by x% I think it would be a great leveling experience as well. The only real downsides are dungeon finder, guild leveling, and the further homogenization of classes which really was a problem started in wrath
A solution to the transmog problem IMO would be to make it so it doesn't show your transmog for others except when people are inspecting you. Making it possible to see other players progression and still incentivising all the fun of transmog. Another solution could be a display option that you toggle, letting the player choose wether or not to view transmog on other players
Honestly what I love about retail is the fact I don't have to care anymore about annoying stats like hit or exercise rating
Leap of faith is probably my favorite ability of all time . Hope we get it in SoD .
With MoP remix coming out, I highly doubt they will do MoP classic now.
As someone who started playing WoW in DF. I’m super excited for Cata !
All 20 year old classic players love Cata. Everyone who was old enough to actually play WoW before it don't.
I am 35 loved vanilla- mop. Fell off hard on wod mostly cause there was nothing to do and then legion felt like a completely new game with pure borrowed power
Nope. Started early vanilla, TBC made me quit. Came back for cata/mop and loved it. I am more of a pvp player tho (love RBGs!).
Totally agree with what you said at 4:30. I started playing in Cataclysm when I was younger so it's just going to be a massive nostalgia hit for me, can't wait.
24:05 - Idk I feel like FFXIV Ultimates solved this. Like, just have hard content that doesn't get significantly easier as time progresses? That scales you down? You now have a character profile frame, a title and a neat weapon you can choose.
Warlords of Draenor's biggest failing point was all the unfinished concepts that never got fleshed out. Things like selecting garrison locations, the capital cities, the unfinished islands, etc. They have the time now. Should we get to that point where Warlords Classic exists, that's exactly what they should do.
We're still waiting on that underwater raid from Cataclysm. Make it so.
Over the years, the most common complaints about Cata (also cited by those who were discussing a potential Cat classic) had to do with gameplay changes, people who quit because of changes to dungeons, raids, and especially healing. Changing of the world terrain came next. I suspect the people who were complaining about LFR were the ones who enjoyed the harder gameplay.
It's so interesting how different Josh's and my opinions on topics are. Like for me the reforging was upper garbage because you needed an addon which calculated it perfectly, you wasted a lot of gold, you always had to reforge every item and often multiple items when you just got one new item. It was completely unneccsary and pure garbage. The same with talent trees. I like the 3 row talents and hate the old talent tree. Why? Because the old talent tree just acts like it gives you options. But it doesn't. Everyone still plays the exact same talent tree's because everyone comes to the same conclusions, everyone copies it from guides so why have that? With the 3 row talent tree you at least had multiple versatile and viable options without needing a silly guide. And no I'm not a retail andy only. I play WoW from 2004 on, I cleared naxx classic, owned gressil, thunderfury and full t3 with my rogue, wrote pve and pvp guides myself in classic and tbc. Same btw. counts also for pruning. I like having less abilities because there are so many silly unnecccsary abilities which isn't needed or could be combined. And no I'm not a clicker. When I used to play arena seriously I had 74 hotkeys and I still use 50~. That's btw. why I liked cata and MoP so much because they were the middle ground of the amount of abilities.
Just started retail for first time. Lfg dungeon spam to 60. Swapped to cata with chrome to get the old dungeons but besides that the zones were absolutely empty. Found my way to dragon isles at 60 and am still a bit lost with the currency stuff. 60+ dungeons remind me of playing Diablo 3. Groups just start as fast as possible. There ain’t no waiting for anyone. You die no rez and they don’t wait for you to come back your basically forgotten and feel like you aren’t even needed. I get excited when a group mate says hi at the beginning wtf happen
The problem with WoW inherently is that it's structured like it's supposed to have an expiration date. Unlike Runescape that can survive decades on smaller, constant content releases, WoW has to keep adding expansions that invalidate all previous content every time. I want a definitive version of WoW that feels like I "came back" to the game rather than "got left behind". There are some private servers that achieve this feeling because I know they won't cash grab for the "next big thing" and killing off the content I'm currently enjoying, even if I take a long break.
I don't know, I guess what I'm saying is that I want to play WoW, but with more inspiration from other successful MMOs. For instance, I hate using the Auction House in WoW. The Grand Exchange in Runecape is so much better. You can actually post buy orders and it matches you with the person who is currently selling that item for the lowest above your asking price. Because peope can't see all the auctions, cancelling and undercutting is not as common, so the price isn't needlessly driven through the ground. And there's no time limit that costs money. I hate that posting stuff on the AH costs money instead of just taking a cut of the sale like in RS.
Reforging was a great system. I was sad that it was taken away because it wasn't broken.
SoD is classic+ and I hope they keep it going somehow. It was always retarded to replay through all the expansions and end up exactly where the desire for classic came from. Definition of insanity.
Transmog is the only reason I play retail now, it's the best thing they added for me, but I agree on the prestige aspect but I just don't care anymore about the prestige I rather look the way I want all the time.
Cata is a flawed gem. My biggest issues: 1) As stated, leveling content was not tuned for the increase in player power. Adjusting this would fix all the issues, and means other forms of leveling like questing and bgs become viable options. When you put five overpowered players in a dungeon, it becomes so much faster than everything else. More difficult dungeons when leveling would also ease people into the difficulty increase at max level.
2) Less relevant content with each patch. We went from the best heroic dungeons on launch to being shoved into two troll dungeons... 4.3 pigeonholed players into three dungeons. The first raiding tier was the best opening tier the game had ever seen by a country mile... Firelands is a banger but the tier could really have used the water counterpart. If they found a way to keep the previous tiers relevant (even by simply increasing the ilvl of gear that drops), they would be ADDING more with each patch.
3) Dragon Soul was a letdown. Re-used location (which was also where two of the new dungeons took place in), re-used assets, etc. Some fights weren't that memorable, especially compared to the other tiers. The two deathwing fights sound great on paper, but the execution wasn't there.
4) No world content with 4.3. This really would have helped with the drought and with new players/alts being able to catch up.
Fixing the difficulty of leveling content and keeping previous tiers of dungeons/raids relevant is very easy to do. If they wanted to turn Cata from a divisive expansion to one of the most loved, they would need to: make a water counterpart to Firelands, rework Dragon Soul, and add world content with 4.3. Imagine if they had world content like Timeless Isle.
The post-Cata classic will be good for the people that never got to play those expansions because they quit. I certainly wouldn't pay for Warlords of Draenor but if it's free with my Vanilla sub I'll certainly give it a try.
wod was the perfect expansion for logging in once a week to raid, it literally had no other content lol
the raids were very good too
WoD without the content draught is amazing, but it will be very short. WoD is maximum quality, with minimum quantity, though technically there are more raid bosses in WoD than Cata.