World of Warcraft Cataclysm... 8 Years Later: The Beginning Of WoW's Decline [1/2]
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
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Cataclysm marked a turning point in World of Warcraft's history. For the first time ever, subscribers began to decline. Today we'll investigate how the expansions launch accomplished much, but was ultimately deeply flawed.
![World of Warcraft: Cataclysm... 8 Years Later - The Best, Worst & Legacy of Cata [2/2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HYniXgckUSk/mqdefault.jpg)
![World of Warcraft: Cataclysm... 8 Years Later - The Best, Worst & Legacy of Cata [2/2]](/img/tr.png)
The previous series starts here: ruclips.net/video/ZI6y4So6vRU/видео.html
BellularGaming the zone revamp was shit it killed world PvP overnight no more epic battles at crossroads which is sad they should never have allowed flying in the old world either,that time running around or on ground mounts got you to learn your class and rotations not like now.wrath was the best expansion by a mile sadly it's been all down hill since then
Don't forget. It was an expansion where the Alliance were literally hamstringed into helping horde leader. Man the hate for the Great Pickle get huge. Seriously, spot light NPC's are just damn awful in WoW, and they should stop pushing them.
I'm probably in the minority, and given how long queue times were back then I wouldn't be surprised, but I still much prefer dungeons that require you to take your time and do your job well for fear of death over Mythic style speed runs. Every MMO these days seems to struggle from the same system atm in dungeons. A well-geared tank will load into a dungeon, run through a massive stretch of mobs and pull everything in sight, and just basically expect the healer and DPS to be able to deal with it and "keep up." For newer, undergeared characters, especially healers, this can lead to a LOT of headache and annoyance, trying to find a balance between learning and doing their job properly, and keeping the overly cocky tanks happy since there are very few tanks in general, and you kinda rely on them sticking around. The whole speed-run system and mentality have ruined dungeons for me in pretty well almost every MMO across the board, and I would personally prefer it if it wasn't even an option, and you HAD to take your time and use your CCs effectively like back in Cata. What's the point in classes having extra CC skills and talents if you straight up ignore them 90% of the time. It's less about strategy and more about gear score these days, which feels far less gratifying in my opinion. You didn't "overcome a challenge," you chain pulled entire rooms with no fear of failure and basically spammed buttons until everything died. Fun times. (And if they are an option for people who prefer it, and I know a lot of people do, I still think you should have the choice and be just as well rewarded for doing more STRATEGIC modes of dungeons)
Same here, I prefer smaller (2-4 monsters per regular engagement) fights, but with a much more delicate procedure and sequence. Mass pulling is probably considered more "fun" because of all the numbers that's been popping up and the AoE visual effects, and maybe to make players feel powerful that they can take on this type of audacious move.
I remember barley managing to clear grim botall by the skin of our teeth, it was great. In fact I loved the entire expansion up until dragon soul was released, even if they did Nerf the dungeons. Let heroic be well heroic
Wow, really well said. Posting so I can refer folks to this tidbit.
Maybe on your realm but on mine there wasn't so much deep thought. Also ppl forget that dungeons were more or less a small task to do and come Cata it was a massive difficulty change. Massive difficulty spikes aren't fun.
Have you tried doing a high M+ key, I'm sure it is much more challenging than some heroic dungeon from BC, Wotlk
I’ve played every expansion and honestly cata was one of my favourites
It corrected lots of bad decisions from WotLK - the real "Beginning Of WoW's Decline", if you even think that way. However in doing so, it lost a lot of its casual audience, because heroic content was hard again, and could not regain other players who didn't like stuff such as LFR, having to run content on multiple difficulties, etcetra. But these were all things invented in WotLK. If you compare those two expansions, the fact of the matter is - Cata had better starting zones, better dungeons and better raids. So of course Cata was better, no discussion. It was just the expansion where too many people had to face the fact it was neither classic wow, nor WotLK faceroll anymore.
The biggest sin, in my opinion, was to make the world feel "small" - even more so than WotLK: at least visually, Northrend was stunning, and flying made you even see the beauty of it all a bit more, rather than to just get quickly to your farming spot or whatever. And this seems to be one of the biggest gripes "old school players" like me seem to have with retail. So I still would not say i loved that expansion. But at least I do not hate it as much as I do WotLK for the things it did.
captmcneil I could not stand raids and dungeons in WOTLK. Everything was just wrangled up and AOE down. Bosses were pretty much loot piñatas.
Agreed, Cata had some issues, but in terms of content, it was awesome. I hope we get a classic run.
I have enjoyed post wotlk expansions like pandaria and legion. I believe that is the incapacity of some people to adapt to new changes. I always felt that classic and bc were more about spending time farming that actually improve skill .
As one of the patient, learned tanks in Cata, I can honestly say that my favorite part of Cata was heroic dungeons. I loved that in heroics, you couldn't really ever ignore mechanics, even if you were geared to the teeth.
Still cant fly in Silvermoon
Good! I hope that never changes.
Silvermoon is in Outland so
@@buttsmcgee50
So what? You can fly in Outland can't you? Also it is not in Outland it is in Eversong Forest which is a zone added in BC along with Outland but itself being at the northern end of the Eastern Kingdom
You can glitch out of the world if you fly at silvermoon. They designed the city before planning flying mounts.
@@buttsmcgee50 no, it's in the Eversong Woods xD
I loved Cataclysm, the revamp to the old zones was needed in my opinion but the one “issue” I have with it (its more of an annoyance) is that now when you level a new character you’re basically starting in Cataclysm, going back in time to outland/northrend, coming back to cataclysm again/Pandaria etc. New players must find it a bit confusing.
I agree. I have this issue (annoyance) with the allied races. All of them are like "The *insert faction* helped us with the legion, go adventure the world" and you're going back in time to stuff that the void elves for example didn't even exist for at the time. I think a new revamp is in order, heal some of the world from the cataclysm, make the quest a little more relivent to current time, e.g. horde vs alliance war clean up.
Cata's dungeons were really fun. I started playing in Wrath, so I never played anything older, but I really appreciated the increased difficulty and thinking required for Cata's dungeons.
To this day, Cata's heroics remain as one of my fondest memories of wow. They were hard, yes, but also very satisfying.
It's such a shame that the playerbase as a whole didn't like it :/
too many baddies I suppose.. I started with Cata pvp, and soon moved to tanking raids. Loved it all. Never thought to myself, "geez this is hard" I knew it was tough, but that's what made it fun, guess us 90s gamers are built different and don't need their hands held through everything..
we did....
Oh man! TotalBiscuit's beta playthroughs were the shit! They were so good that I remember going back and re-watching them years after they were released. Shame he quit shortly thereafter...
volimNestea haha i remember his video on the naga underwater instance and got so hyped about cata
This.
He quit when Blizzard caved and downgraded the difficulty of the dungeons for the whining scrubs. He even made a video announcing it.
Revenant I remember. It was one of those fanmail videos with the troll dancing on the mailbox.
They were actually the videos that introduced me to him.. And through time, he introduced me to atleast 70% of the gaming Channels i watch today
Volin Total biscut from WCRadio was becoming jaded and toxic. Then him and his cult dumped on " casual' players as if being casual and enjoying a game as ya know...A GAME is a bad thing? oO
So happy to see someone appreciating the great parts of Cataclysm. The return to difficult, non speed run dungeons was fantastic (for guilds). The 10 man Heroic content was amazing too!
i love these videos where you talk about how past expansions played out, i started play WoW in March last year so i never really got to experience these expansions (apart from the odd couple days on my sisters account) keep up the great work with these videos!
G. H That's because they all hit naxx. Lights hope is coming out with a fresh realm early june
Urukosh ! Sounds like you didn't cancel it correctly, because I've never run into that problem, nor have my friends who ran with Audible. Also, you're posting this as a reply to a thread that has nothing to do with Audible, so that's pretty neat.
As to private servers, I'd say don't bother, if you never played earlier versions of WoW - those are designed for those with rose-tinted glasses. I won't say "Don't try them" but know that they're far grindier and while some people love that, the QoL in today's just wasn't there, then. Finding groups for any content is a slog, health and mana regeneration is abysmally slow while just out in the world doing PvE content, to the point you end up drinking/eating between mob pulls. Don't get me wrong, I love old WoW, but then I have my rose-tinted glasses nearby for those just-in-case-I-need-a-reminder periods.
Those days were painful mate. Back then just to have an epic drops meant alot back in vanilla and BC. Today epics are easy to obtain. Anyway enjoy the game .
@@rimonshamon8607 dude even "legendaries" are common now
Imo WoW's decline started the moment they nerfed hc dungeons in Cataclysm. The launch content of Cataclysm was amazing.
And the sub number decline started when they didn't do it fast enough.
103% agree.
The launch content was probably the most fun I've ever had in WoW. Those heroics just kept me coming back over and over. They were so good!
I remember when being a mage meant you had utility over a normal dps class. Now having utility doesn't matter, you just need aoe damage. I miss those days.
People have to remember that yes MMO's are a different beast but old games fall in popularity even with the spectacular content, the older players from Launch (23-25 Year olds in 2004) were really feeling the lack of time for the full game (They were 29-31in 2010) and new players were just not coming in, they were going into MOBA or other games without a subscription. Online interaction in consoles and online PC games was increasing so you didn't have to play a MMO if you were a 14 year old gamer that wanted a social game.
The RTS suffered a similar thing after WC III, you had some top ones like C&C generals and the rest and BFME II (Total war franchise not withstanding) but the landscape changed and the potential RTS kids just played MOBA games, a tendency started by WC III by lowering the amount of normal units and giving the heroes more prominence.
Lots of the dropoff in Cata was because games were shifiting far away from the 2002-2004 era. The other expansions made that worse due to the content and mistakes of course.
Isn't it funny? They revamped the world in 2010 with cata because the world was 6 years old to this date. Now, 8 years ago, the revamped world is from the perspective of time on life servers older than the "old world". So, it's about time to revamp again and include bc and wrath blizzard lol
NextIZF3 I think the revamp will happen after BfA tbh
Cata leveling actually still holds up pretty well, unlikely vanilla leveling. I'm not sure they'll do another full revamp like this. I think the patch 7.3.5 changes are all the "revamp" we're gonna get for now.
@Allasar I agree Vanilla is all about nostalgia and how there was literally no game like it before (an entire continent in one seamless area with no load times between zones). It was a time when the majority of the players at the time were in high school or college. Where we had hours and more hours to kill on an MMO. To go back to that grind now would be horrible. I prefer the much more casual version WoW has become. The game grew with its player base that may have stuck with the game this whole time.
Nobody who currently plays retail is going to fully quit to play classic. If they were going to FULLY quit modern for classic, they would have done it for a private server by now.
TheWeaaboo - The discussion wasn't about how hard it was, but about the design of the quests themselves. I'll agree that it could stand do be harder, especially now after newer expansions made it even easier. In regards to leveling from 84 to 85, he was referring how long it took, not how hard it was.
I liked WoW more when dungeons were harder. You should have too CC and learn the dungeon to be successful,.. it makes it feel rewarding and less of a grind.
While I agree the content is more fulfilling like that. It's a serious problem when mixed with LFG and dungeon grinding for points or something like that. When you tie it to a grind. People just want to max out their points for the day and move on. The dungeon experience isn't what brought them there. If it isn't an easy in and out. They'll get angry because it's then just a waist of time for them.
It used to be that I thought that was wrong of the players to have that attitude. Since then I can see why it was a problem from the beginning. Turning dungeons in to a fast food run just to keep geared people from abandoning them. Ideally they'd find someway to make the experience the draw. Rather than some arbitrary "daily quota".
Normals would have been fine for that. And actually, people started to outgear and outplay BC heroics pretty quickly as well. It was a learning experience sure ... but making everything easy, including heroics and tourist mode raids … that just increased the gap between progress raiders and the rest of the players, leading to issues within the community, recruiting issues for the progress guilds and less player retention, because when the majority of players does not get the right tools to join the progress raiders ... you will end up with them burning out regardless ... or better, because of all the boring grind.
Challenge modes in MoP-WoD and Mythic+ in Legion-BFA are harder then any of the "hard" dungeon's in Vanilla, TBC or Cata.
I agree, it is more fun if there is a challenge, but you should get decent gear for doing it too. All the heroics dropped were blues... BLUES! While doing a few arenas a week got you epics, no matter what rating you were. So the heroic dungeons were completely pointless, you could go afk in a BG for 20 minutes and get equivalent gear.
This, nowadays people focus more on eficient levelling rather than having fun, that's why utgarde pinnacle insta queues in lfg while pit of saron's queue lasts like 2 hours while queueing as tank
WotLK, forever the golden age of WoW.
hey look its a weaboo that thinks casual is still an edgy insult
REEEEEE VANILLA
The only one who thinks that are mouthbreathing Wrathbabies. TBC, on the other hand, actually was the golden age of WoW. TBC was a better version of vanilla, speaking in terms of game mechanics, class design and gear itemization. There was something for everyone without making shit ultracasual like WotLK did. PvP wasn't completely retarded like in WotLK. There's so much about TBC that makes it infinitely better than Wrath, which was a hot piece of shit that 12-year olds circlejerked around because they could finally do big boy content thanks to LFD, the casualized heroics and badge gear, and of course, "MUH ARTHAS IS BEST CHAR XDDDDDDDDDDD"
Cata>>>Wotlk
leland take your meds kid
turbulent times on youtube *video starts to buffer and not start back up*
RossBlackBlood BRACE BRACE BRACE BRACE
"If you chain pulled, you died. Hell, if you pulled without CC'ing, you'd often die. If people messed up interrupts on some bosses, you'd die. If the tank didn't use their defenses right, you'd die."
I miss this :(
if you ever respond to this. I'd love to have you in my guild. We've all be playing since launch. The games still fun it's just alot harder. Hope you're still playing, or to hear your opinion.
Cataclysm ruined South Shore, one of my favourite little towns since launch... a sorrowful tear still rolls down my cheek every time I fly over what is now a craphole. Would be nice if the Alliance cleaned the place up again in BfA, but not holding my breath
Sentiments like this are exactly what caused the decline. Cataclysm destroying a lot of the zones really made many players feel like they lost their homes away from home. People don't even realize that it was the players who truly loved and appreciated the care that the devs put into the game that kept the most important aspect alive: Community.
Cata gets more hate than it deserves
No... no it doesn't.
Yeah it was nowhere near WoD in terms of being bad.
Not really, mop had more hate than deserve it, wod had not enough hate
Cata was fucking lit, most fun I've had in an expansion.
get out
You forgot about the talent redesign that (in my opinion) took away, the enjoyment of being able to build your class exactly how you wanted, despite the cookie-cutter specs on the internet.
Oh yeah! That was huge for me! Suddenly, with the changes, you are forced to play a character the way they tell you to rather than being able to experiment and explore different combinations on your own. Some would be considered bad choices by other, but they were choices I would often make not for maximum DPS, but just for fun. Remember the Shockadin?
Rageborne It's odd that this video doesn't take note of this, and your comment isn't getting more likes. I'm playing on vanilla server and most people I ask say the reason they stopped playing retail was the perk system.
Yeah, I mean going back and playing Classic you know right off the bat what spec is the one to pick. But at the time, the internet was still a rough place to find guides. Unless you went out and bought a leveling guide book, most people just took whatever talents they wanted. Those talents were almost never bad, unless you were just stupid about it. You could pick weird combinations that theoretically would play well together, and given some practice they ended up working a lot. Being half spec'd in two trees at the same time was a legitimate strategy. They had cookie-cutter min/max specs for sure, but plenty of people were running unique specs and competing still.
cata talents were fine. The complete rework they did in MoP on the other hand... I still don't like it
A lot of the cookie-cutter specs were not optimal for every raid or dungeon encounter anyway. During BC I was constantly respecing based on content I was playing. Finding those nuances was fun too. And with 5-man heroics being tougher than basically the whole raid tier 1 and tier 2 content of vanilla … you kind of wanted to experiment in those 5-mans as well.
Can we get some Cata love in the comments? It was a good expansion! Literally joining up with the other aspects, tearing out Deathwing’s SPINE and forcing him into the maelstrom. Also don’t forget the bone-fish Hunter tier set or the toilet priest set!
I loved Cataclysm and I still love it. I had my best times playing Cataclysm...
It’s funny though. Despite all that happened I still absolutely loved cataclysm. One of my favourite times of the game ever. Especially the early difficulty of the dungeons. I was so excited to get to use polymorph again. Especially in the sky dungeon place with the anti magic zones. Very tricksy stuff.
I can put this in a simple list
1: WOTLK started a lot of problems, people were already struggling to clear some dungeons with Dungeon Finder Occulus and ICC 5mans, but cataclysm made 'heroics hard', I.E. they punished players for ignorance, which is fine, there is nothing wrong with learning a fight, however with Dungeon Finder resulted in people just getting kicked en masse, queues lasting hours on top of hours as tanks were rare, and you were incentvizied to farm these hard heroics repetitively, so queue queue queue, so people joined queues and most of the time never cleared them, thus never got their badges, it would be fine if it was like pre-dungeon finder where people simply wanted the gear from the dungeons themselves, but instead they were running them repeatedly
2: Forced cookie cutter talents, while MOP gutted the talent system outright, Cataclysm got the ball rolling by forcing players to invest all their points into one spec before they could choose talents in another, on top of this, we were reduced to 1 talent per 3 levels, rather then 1 per level
3: The leveling experience was streamlined, now you might think "isn't this a good thing" well, no, it did what its purpose was, it allowed for end game raiders to have a larger pool of newbros to recruit from at the end game, but in reality, people were hitting level 85 and had no idea how to play their class because you were simply facerolling to end game, really though, the leveling experience to me is the biggest flaw in cataclysm, the revamped, BC/WOTLK style zone quest chain style of questing, rather then hub/farming style leveling made players get bored, I miss when as an adventurer, I got a quest, and I had to actually find my objective, the objectives were semi-threatening, that immersed me in the world, but from Cata onward you pretty much play the oblivion/skyrim style game of "follow the dots" ad nauseum until you hit end game, and then you just farmed queues all day long.
This is why people miss vanilla, sure the modern game is more mechanically advanced, the core gameplay designs are lackluster and designed entirely around end game raids, leveling is streamlined to get people into raids, the expansion is designed to funnel people into raids, and the gearing system is designed to keep people farming raids every-single-week, meanwhile any sense of metagame outside of raids from cataclysm onward merely became a mindless faceroll and repetitious daily quest grind
Launch Cata was the absolute peak of WoW for me. The dungeons were the absolute best part for me. So difficult, so much strategy and learning. The game did not forgive mediocrity, and it actually helped me learn the basics of how to self-improve. Just to be clear, I was a healer without a guild at the launch. The few times the dungeons worked out, they were so good and fun that it made up for all the frustration for me.
great video but this video just showed me how much we have lost. I miss reforging, pvp like wintergrasp, class design, 5v5 arena...some of the most fun I've had in this game during those times...legion was great for content and all but class design just ruined it for me. When your classes feel like watered down versions of previous expansions with the most powerful weapons on azeroth, you know something is up.
What cata did great was intact classes. You didn't just let the chicken play with the keybord binded on frostbolt or shadowbolt
For me the decline started at WOTLK: I know how so many people love it, but thats when the homoginsation of classes began and the decline of real class differentiation.
I played shadowpriest all through tbc and loved being a utility class, I also had an enhancement shaman alt for exactly the same reason, but that was taken away in favour of just flat damage instead.
Daniel Smith I never played that early but are you going to be playing a Vanilla server with the new BfA expansion?
Not sure if it's been confirmed to be released at the same time, only that they're working on it and "humans are involved," meaning that it's in the actual process. I...didn't consider the buying the expansion part. I bet you anything that yes, you'd have to buy the expansion. :/
Classic is a long long way off, Id expect close to 2 years away. It's not their main focus and they'll have a smaller team dealing with it and its much harder to go back and sort server infrastructure to work the game code, than build everything from the ground up, which they dont have the option for now.
Regarding classic, I probably wont go to it seriously, even though I feel like its more suited to me. Friends made in live game and the amount of dedication to my live characters puts me off just dropping it for a perpetual gameplay stuck in the same expansion forever.
Wow has changed, not always for the better - but I still play and thats because it changes, it keeps going, it adds fresh and new things. I still like to get nostalgic about my TBC shadowpriest though :)
All past expansions are free now. You only have to pay for the last expansion if you want to play content from that expansion.
Thats what you get for playing the 2 worst classes in the game
When Activision began to meddle
Activision was still part of vivendi at the time and even after their release from vivendi they can not meddle in blizzard (legally binding contracts). If they did someone would have told by now. Yet silence.
I really enjoyed early Cata dungeons that presented somewhat of a challenge. As much as I enjoyed Wrath, it did become an aoe zerg fest. They should have really stuck to their guns with that one... if players cannot fail, how can they improve?
People hate on cata but now that we look back cata was actually a good xpac
Speak for yourself it was shiiiiiit
At the very least it had a lot of new content (not only for high levels)
@@Vihara2 it was way better than that panda prune shitfest
This sure takes me back.
I haven't played in a couple of years now, but the transition from WotLK end to the start of Cata was genuinely some of the most fun/time I had spent playing WoW (maybe second to mid-late Burning Crusade/early WotLK).
I certainly remember people taking issue with the early difficulty, but my Guild and I adored it, it's unfortunate what it eventually became though (i.e back to chain pulling speedruns).
Cataclysm was my second favorite expansion right behind Wrath. I can see why some people would call the lore of the expansion "fragmented," but I just generally enjoyed the overall mood of the expansion, and I don't remember having that much difficulty with the dungeons. I liked the Valor and Justice systems for progression in the end-game part of Cataclysm, but the overall image was good too. It wasn't for everyone, but the roughly four years or so of Cataclysm and Wrath of the Lich King were the glory days of WoW for me (even though I still enjoy it a lot now).
Cata was a fun expansion for me. Yea the lost of the old zones and items is a bummer but it added a lot of things I really enjoy
Plus the new zones for the most part are A LOT better (especially on the horde side). Splitting up the Barren waste land (pun) into two zones made it Actually on par with other zones in terms of size to content ratio and the new Silverpine made leveling an Undead really engaging
Doubledasher As someone who has played off and on since Vanilla I thought the revamp was great as well.
Slightly off topic but I miss the Forsaken’s old identity. Their towns and their culture used to be that of a forgotten people living in the shadows, lurking and decaying away slowly...now they’re like cheesy skeleton-villians, especially because of how Sylvannas is acting in BfA. I miss the charm that intrigued me when I made my very character, an Undead Warlock, some 12 years ago. :(
Yeah it was like same as human zones but the destroyed version, always gave the feel what undeads actually are.
The zones were more streamlined, but alliance side suffered from being rushed and overfilled with memes and bad humor. They completely got their big moments cut from the game and half the plot left on the floor due to time constraints.
It felt half done playing alliance in the revamped zones for the most part.
tommenno which zones do you mean in particular? Because I have actually recently made two alliance toons with a friend and I can agree with that, we skipped over Redridge because of the stupid Rambo quest line, we ended up doing Burning Steppes a bit later on and realised that John Keeshan prick was there too. I hate pop culture references in this game, it just really annoys me and doesn't need to be in the game. I think this is why I also detest the Halls/Trial of Valor in Legion. Cant blizzard just think up their own shit? Haha
I will always remember being burned by Deathwing whilst our questing and wondering wtf happened
I went in almost every day super excited to do more in the game all the way through the end of Wrath.
I took 7 months off in Cata, 6 in MoP, a year in WoD, and 6 months in Legion. That should say enough.
A really *huge* problem with Cataclysm raiding was that the new "equal" 10/25 system destroyed a ton of large raiding guilds (mine included) - because why rely on 24 other people showing up on time and not screwing up when you could rely on only the (perceived) "elite" 9 of those players instead ?
Add to this that those large raiding guilds had people to talk to and play with online at almost all times while the 10 player guilds didn't, and you can easily see how this lead to further problems. The server identity and group identity that those large, stable raiding guilds had provided was also gone once those guilds imploded . . .
Cata made me stop playing mop sealed the deal
They butchered paladins ogrimmar and plenty more stuff that my brain Made me forget in Order to protect my sanity...
only fun thing i remember was slicing through ppl on my FROST DK and playing 2's with 2 enh shamans which was booth really fun
Yes... auras going away was a big blow to paladin identity and if you look at comparisons between original Orgrimmar and Post-Cata Org, it's laughable that they thought it was a good idea.
I absolutely LOVED healing in Cataclysm. I think it was the expansion I healed the most, it was so much fun. Especially in the beginning, and nope, I didn't run heroics with my guild, I ran them in LFD pugs. For me, the idea of not keeping everyone topped up during an entire fight but starting off that way and using half of the HP as a buffer to conserve mana was awesome. Overhealing back then was a CRIME, mana was such a dealbreaker. I got so used to managing my mana, I switched off to tanking in Legion because of all the overheal spamming people do to get HPS numbers up, it made healing boring.
It made for much more engaging play for healers - except for Holy Pallies because they were entirely OP, but I digress.
I remember many people would quit mid-dungeon but those who had played in TBC would stay and persevere, because they knew what hard dungeons were (I was one of 20 people in my server who pugged heroics back then). That's how the term "Wrath babies" came up, people who started WoW during Wrath were used to easy content.
HOWEVER... Wrath babies were the people who made WoW become the single greatest MMO in the industry, and so the hard heroics really were a bad decision financially and PR-wise. Hindsight is 20/20, but if Blizz had instead come up with Mythic dungeons back then, maybe WoW would've kept at least part of the subs it hemorrhaged back then.
Group finder and cross-realm shards were the beginning of WoW's decline.
During MOP or WOD I can't remember which, I was asking around in my guild if anyone wanted to join me for going through a bunch of vanilla raids for transmog gear. Had someone call me a moron in chat, they apparently didn't think vanilla had any raids because they didn't appear in LFR.
You forgot to mention the WoW Fashion-Renaissaince with Transmog being added with Cataclysm. And looking good is (lets be honest) the most important part of WoW since then
I'm still mad at how they handled Uldum.
"You know that mysterious door that's always been in Tanaris? Well, there's nothing in it. Here's a new passageway we made out of thin air to get you to Uldum."
The decline began already with wotlk...it just got compounded and -catalysed- (no pun intended) with cataclysm.
People still dont get it...It was TBC that built the reputation and attraction that later resulted in wotlks mass subcribe.
But what they got was something different...wotlk was so rushed it was mindboggling, nothing felt like it should have and this just built up for the entire expansion until cataclysm hit and people realised it wasnt going to change.
Then they started homogenising, changing the core gameplay, removed talent trees (a frickin core rpg element in any rpg game) and making raids smaller.
Everything that had been WoW was now changing and naturally alot of people left.
I found your channel quite recently and initially I was sceptical about how interested I'd be in this kind of content - I'm glad I watched because since then I've been on a Bellular-Spree. Fantastic videos, really interesting and engaging topics delivered masterfully. Thoroughly enjoy your work, keep it up.
I loved cata, pvp there was awesome!!
Cataclysm holds my favourite times playing WoW. I miss the challenge and class/player involvement - CC'ing in heroics and managing bosses intricately. Mana pools - I played a paladin healer and was raiding in our server + factions top raiding guild. Bastion of Twilight, Firelands.. Dragonsoul, it all felt so damn immersive, and I loved it!
Don't get me wrong, the immersion in Legion is great but I feel it is a completely different type of immersion - I find myself playing more for the lore, secrets, collectibles and individual immersion, rather than the group/community immersion that WotLK and Cata really held for me.
~ TL:DR - WoW now-days feels a lot more individually immersive/less community or group immersive. I personally preferred the cataclysm style, difficulty and progression though I really appreciate the lore-immersion of more modern wow.
Anyway, love your vids Bellular! Keep it up man! Peace!
Cataclysm wasn't all that bad. It's just that the last raid was terrible and lasted too long.
The end of WOTLK and start of Cata kind of spelled the doom of WoW for me.
-LFR and LFD
-Heirlooms
-World revamp
-Declining difficulty
-Flying everywhere
All this compiled with today's problems of having too many raid/dungeon difficulties, mission tables being forced on us, class design being stripped down and made uninteresting and dull, and conveniences of being able to portal everywhere/mass rez/repair mounts really has made the game lose its sense of epicness and adventure and challenge.
it would have been alright if not for flooding thousand needles
The harder dungeon difficulty basically tore my guild apart, because no one wanted to run any dungeon that didn't have me (holy paladin. Everyone hated Grim Batol, but Lost City of Tol'vir was the hated one for me because of that one boss with the phoenix) or this one shaman healer. Every other healer got shafted. They weren't considered "good enough" and they had to try to gear up on their own and couldn't handle the difficulty and quit the game. I was in a basically dead server so finding replacement healers that were good enough was a damn mission, so we started raiding a little later than intended, and since a lot of those healers that had quit had other friends in the guild, tensions were already high and only got higher. Compounded with other unrelated drama, it eventually killed my guild. Most of my friends quit, so I had no incentive to really do much of anything, and I basically haven't seriously raided since (I used to raid hardcore since vanilla). Now I don't raid for different reasons (work, mostly, plus I don't want to have to commit to a schedule to play. I want to be able to play or not play when I want).
Doing those difficult dungeons at the start of Cata was honestly some of my most memorable time in WoW ever. I'm all up for making that stuff super hard again, but I don't think the current player base would be able to up their game to that level of team play.
Deepholm my favorite questing experience I’ve ever had
I have some nostalgia for Cataclysm. The world revamp was needed, although they should have gone all the way and revamped the Azuremyst Isles and Quel'thalas as well. The worgen and the goblins were a nice addition and this was also when I really started to get the hang of this game. Of course I too had issues with the heroic dungeons, but that's only because I tried tanking which I sucked at.
Its because of the terrible way they designed Quel'Thalas and Azuremyst isles that they couldn't revamp it as easily. The rest of azeroth is connected in one large zone for each continent, and you have to zone into the other continents to access any of its zones. The BC zones they added appear on the map as if on Azeroth, but are actually in the same space as Outlands, which is why you go through a portal to get to them. Meaning if you didn't have fatigue and could fly directly out towards the edge of the map from Quel'thalas, you'd end up hitting Outlands. They did a lot of this stuff early on with ways they designed zones, making it much more complicated than it needed to be. Granted they still could have updated the graphics and mechanics of that area possibly and made it look more in-line with the rest, but for whatever reason they held off.
I loved Cataclysm, it was my favourite expansion by far. The new zones were all really different and a joy to quest in. The time travelling dungeons were my favourite and the changes were absolutely needed. I never had more fun before or since.
If someone doesn't like it, I say, hey, go make your own MMO and see if you do better.
I actually really enjoyed Cata. The only things I didn't like that much were the new Orgrimmar and of course Dragon Soul, other than that it was pretty great.
New zones suck.
Been playing consistently since March 2006, can tell you the absolute most hype I've ever been was during the Cataclysm announcement period. It was such a cool concept. There was no precedent for something as insanely epic as "remaking the old world" AND giving us the ability to fly in it. We would get to see new conflicts in many of our old favorite zones and see them from the sky. Cataclysm had a strong launch, that was thoroughly entertaining. This did not last.
As time went on the problem for many became the overly tough normal dungeons, the splintered feeling of zones, instead of the continents we had always known, the dreaded Raid Finder and more. Now, raiding felt less special, and less like a goal. To many, the epic nature of earning your right to raid was lost, and with it Warcraft in general. I still believe today that even though raid participation has gone up astronomically, the downward curve of subscriptions is closely tied to this. I haven't finished Belluar's video before posting this, and i'm sure he touches on all this and more. That said, just wanted to share my view of World of Warcraft at the time.
I liked World of Warcraft cataclysm as an expansion and all & However I really disagreed with (LFR) It just really wasn't good for the game in my opinion.
LFR or LFG?
it's was (LFR) I'm not trying to be mean or anything but to me it was just a bunch of people raging at each other & It wasn't really A good time.
John I personally think LFR was one of the best features they added. It allows people who can't commit to a raid schedule to still experience the content. You are going to have your asshats, but that happens in pretty much any other aspect of gaming or life in general.
I think LFR needed to be more like LFG to be any good. I had bigger problems with dragon soul itself though
Agree Robert. When wrath came out, the amount of people asking for 1 dps for ICC10 must have Ahead of the Curve achievement really infuriated me. Yeah I know you want to progress fair enough, but players like myself who really wanted to raid at the time, could not raid because people were being quite snobby and only wanting those who could link their achievements. Because of that, I switched from Alliance on the Silvermoon EU realm, to Horde. I had a better time on Horde. At least I got to raid. Then took a back seat during cata and halfway through Mop because of my baby being born. Then moved my full list of toons with a free character migration to a 50/50 server alliance to horde ratio just at the end of MoP. I stuck with Horde. I like Lfr simply for the reason I can get to raid if I want to. Being a mother has it's commitments in real life. I done, a bit of this and a bit of that whilst not really needing to commit to a raid in Legion, but doing it for the Nightborne Quest Chain for example, Xavius kill in Emerald Nightmare.
i loved leveling and doing dungeons on cataclysm, because just as you say, it was really hard, every pack was like an adventure, where you have to hex, focus the leader of the patrol, use aoes, different strategies.... and that lead to not steamrolling and not having to communicate, which is what i hate in pandaria. the tank just killing a dungeon boss in 4 seconds. crazy
how do you come up with such interesting videos so fast? keep up Bellular!
because he is truly passionate and invested in the game.
He’s actually part robot that’s why we don’t see his lower half , it’s just computer parts
probably has scripts for these kind of videos flying around for times when live/beta don't give much to work with.
He has the infinity gauntlet
Besides him being half-human, he devours families to fuel his creative power!
Cata feels like they had so many things in their minds,but they couldn't do all of them. That undersea zone feels unfinished. Neptulon is kidnapped but we had no idea where he was. Then all the sudden out of nowhere,he becomes our ally in Legion. Then in Firelands patch,everything was bright red and orange,and it was kinda monochromatic. Dungeon and raid difficulty at launch was spot on, but having people get used to LFR,they felt very hard for random groups. In light of this,the LFR feature that was released during WotLK was the real culprit.
- dailies were a mind numbing grind
- felt like chores rather than a fun game
- Deathwing fight could've been way better
- Tauren Paladin??
You mean sunwalker as Blood elfs are blood knights and zandalari are prelates, none of them are paladins.
They not only revamped the world and the talent system, but also the entire stat system and combat table. You mentioned this briefly on how mana recharge changed. Some stats were reworked, new ones were added and some were removed completely. This meant that people who had worked for months gearing their character for raids suddenly had to rethink their entire spec, gear set, playstyle, everything. My tankadin was probably in the top 10 on my server by the end of WotLK, but when patch 4.0 hit I was basically useless. This is what killed the game for me. I still played through Cata but by the time Panderia hit I felt like it was no longer the same game AT ALL, so I quit for 6 years until BFA finally peaked my interest in the game again.
Damn I miss Cata PvP it was so much fun
I began playing WoW at 12 in 4.3. Everyone says Dragon Soul was a nightmare but it was the most fun I've had in WoW since.
Cataclysm was my favorite expansion... hmm...
Its okay, you're a pleb, these things happen
The issue, was that from expansion to expansion, they kept making drastic course corrections. BC to WotLK - We need to make the game easier and bring in more people. WotLK to Cata - We need to go old school hard again Cata to MoP - No wait, we need to make it easier....and so on. And they didn't do it in minor ways. Each of those jumps was drastic. I was lucky enough to have a solid guild for the start of Cata, and it was fantastic...as long as I only played with guildies. Random groups were extremely painful which made leveling alts a lot less fun. Overall, people can deal with it if they simply can't have their way. But when you give them what they want, then grab it back out of their hands, hand it to them again, and then take it away again... No one deals with that well. And they did it to both the more hardcore and more casual crowd. In retrospect, I really don't care as much that they went one way or the other, it was the drastic changes in philosophy. That is what made people quit. That is what killed guilds. That is what made it so hard to keep a decent raid roster. I had one group of people at one level, another group at another, and BOTH were unhappy. One wanted a challenge, the other just wanted to kill some stuff and get some loot. BOTH started to hate raid nights, one because the content was too hard, the other because the skill level of some was holding them back.
Also, even during the expansions, there were shifts. Ulduar stands out in WotLK, and the Deathwing raid stands out in Cata. Both are far different from the content in their expansions.
I played pre nerf Grim Batol in lfd and i loved it^^ (i was dps at that time). The dungeon nerf is one of the reasons i quit in cata xD
You missed out one fact about the 10 man raids, Many of the bosses in ICC were actualy recognized as harder on 10 man, combine that with the fact 25man raids could get more gear by also doing 10 mans, 10 mans felt like second class, sometimes doing harder work worth inferior quality drops ( even worse in ulduar). Though it was a bit of a difficulty spike up to cataclysm raiding they recognized that 10 man raids should be treated with the same respect as 25man, eventualy this lead into the flex numbers we have now.
Cata was the best pvp expansion 🙌
I don't think anyone has mentioned yet but a big factor as to why they managed to keep the numbers (besides ICC being probably the best raid (in my opinion) they've released) is that they also offered a few goodies if you signed up for a year, including access to the beta and a shiny mount. I know a lot of people who did that (including myself).
0:46 Anduin look like young brad pitt
Cataclysm was the beginning of the end for me, the grind of leveling in vanilla was one of the most fun times, getting to 60 was a challenge. BC and WOTLK continued this, finding groups, getting gear, raiding made the game amazing, then came cataclysm and it all went to hell. I quit, tried to come back for Kung Fu Panda, but just could not get back into it. My old guild had all but disappeared. As a Warrior Tank I felt as if my abilities had be nerfed, and it became impossible to not get blame every time a dungeon failed. It was an unmitigated disaster. Perhaps WOW had just started to run its course and decline was inevitable, but I missed the old ways.
Wow Cataclysm opened on Pearl Harbor day.
Re-designing the old world was a waste of time. The problem back then pretty much was, that Blizzard had increased the leveling pace immensely. The increased level pace meant that you couldn't really quest through a zone without outleveling it and the follow up zone as well. So you couldn't really see a coherent storyline in the low level zones.
This hasn't changed much even now. You can't outlevel the early zones anymore. However when you use dungeons as well as quest content you pretty much reach level 60 after completing 4 zones. I'm leveling a druid at the moment and made it to level 84 now. By the time I was 60 I completed Mulgore, Northern Barrens, Ashenvale and Stonetalon Mountains. To reach level 80 I only had to do one zone from Northrend. How could one even imagine to play through the story lines with this level pacing and the amount of quests still remaining?
One could always "go back and do the rest then", but it's not really exciting to go through content that you easily one-shot.
The re-work of Vanilla content needed to be done with focus on the level pace. If a zone had a 5 level range the amount of quest content needed to reduced to fit into that level range.
In addition in Cataclysm I got bored quickly. There wasn't really anything new and exciting in the endgame content. The heroics where challenging, but unfortunately LFG runs would always be painful due to many players not really being able to play their classes well. Raids and PVP were just meh! So yeah, I dropped the game quickly after finishing the quest content.
I started at Cataclysm. I loved the game then and still enjoying it. I was mostly a lore guy tho. I played for the lore not the loot. From what I ve learned about the levelling in Vanilla I wouldnt play the game this long if the revamp have never happened. I would probably quit it before maxing my character. So the revamp secured a sub for WoW and I am pretty sure many more.
TheWeeaboo I played Warcraft 3. That is why I ran to the Black Temple to find Illidan and to take quests from him and learn more after what happened in WC3..little did I know that TBC was a mess when it comes to Lore. Well I just dont think I would quest for hours and then do attunements which would WASTE even more time only to get in a raid which has 37 people online when we need 40!
Vanilla wasn't too bad. It was harder for sure, but you felt much better when you defeated something. You worked for it, you earned that level. The levels are handed to you now, there is very little challenge. People bragged about being able to solo Hogger or Princess, just to give an indication of difficulty, and that food and drink, you used it, a lot. It was a challenge, but that is what made it fun, and you felt good when you succeeded. You couldn't walk in and pull every Murloc in sight and down them all in one swing. If you pulled more than two of them, you were probably going to die. There was genuine fear you felt when you heard one too many familiar Murloc war cries coming your way! ;) But it lead to some fun, and funny stories. You were more likely to quest with others to make things easier... you know, the multiplayer part. Guild members got to know each other that way from questing and were more likely to do dungeons together which was always fun, even when you wiped. I have a few funny stories I could tell about some spectacular wipes... like the one time we wondered what happened to the hunter's pet, then we seen him coming, he took the long way around and dragged the entire dungeon with him! :)
Aliens and space ships great lore yea
Neil Roy It's funny because I came from EverQuest to vanilla WoW and found the "difficulty" laughable. I was amazed that I could solo things. You can't really do that in EQ unless you were one of three classes. The fact that you had multiple graveyards to land in per zone after death instead of one spawn point in the entire world? Also the fact that when you died it entered a spirit world? Oof. In EQ you had to run, naked, to your corpse to loot your gear. And you lost XP. So you could revive two hours from your corpse with no gear and you could de-level. Now THAT was difficult. Not to mention 70+ player raids not the 40 ones in vanilla WoW. Want some challenge you feel good about and play some progressive EQ server.
All in all, I'm cool with current WoW and its difficulty. It's just as easy as it always was in my eyes.
TheWeeaboo Oh, any game is extremely bottable. I get into a group with bots on WoW constantly. Unsure how a game being bottable makes it less interesting but.
I loved random LFD with random heroics. It was really awesome to overcome hard encounters, even with hours to beat the dungeon. I would really love if players would've been forced to go through hardcore encounters to have a somewhat decent gear like it was in TBC and like it was in Cata.
Cata is my favorite expansion, fight me
What I remember most about Cata was how the duty finder was Cross-Region. So after your hour in queue, you find yourself in Grim Batol with a group that only spoke Spanish, and a Ret pally tanking. Made dungeons a complete disaster, (difficulty+no communication), and made gearing impossible outside of a guild. I attribute a lot of WoW's downfall to that single decision.
Cataclysm was my favorite xpac, just like mop...i don't understand why people hate cata.
the reason why they hate it so much is because they introduced lfr with dragon soul the last patch. Also the deathwing fight in Dragon sould was not what people expected they wanted a regular dragon fight like onyxia. Other then that the expansion was fine. Cataclysm was one of the best expansions pvp wise
You must have started in Cata if you really don't get it.
pvp wise cata was the best thing ever. Genuinely loved Tol Barad, I could play that game mode forever.
Cata dungeon difficulty was perfect. Heroic dungeons were a challenge you worked through, instead of the next faceroll you breeze through. It was a raid experience for people who didn't want to fuck around with the logistics of getting 10-25 people together routinely.
@DiffrentEra
A lot to learn, not learn a lot.
Being an old school player....I remember these times well. I was so excited for CATA.....Deathwing has always been my favorite baddie. However even my resolve was tested to it's breaking point. My guild died, and many of my friends were leaving. It truly did feel like the "death" of WoW had finally arrived. ...........Then Panda Land was announced. That very day was when I left the game for several years. Even though I've returned now, and do enjoy the game, ....today it's too tainted with "Activision" and mass market appeal in it's attempt for all the monies. The true WoW...did die! However maybe one day it can rise again.
IMO I think everyone hated Cata so much because it had to outdo WotLK which was pretty damn amazing
Lies.
Excellent nostalgic video!
I remember when I hit max lvl on my Druid, holy hell were heroic in cata a pain. It was rough to say the least.
*sees 2009 clip*.. They used the term "ladies and gentleman", ahh.. Those were different times, different times indeed.
Grim Batol should've been a major raid instead of a moderately difficult 5-man. That mountain was built up enormously in the lore, most notably in a number of the novels Blizzard released, and it remained a mystery. I always wondered what it would be like when Blizz finally opened that area up to the player experience, how much of a huge event it would be, would Krasus finally become a major character in game the way he had been in the novels and lore, would we work closely with him and possibly the red dragonflight in a story line leading up to us taking down the inhabitants of the hyped up mountain. Instead I felt let down. It was no where near the event I anticipated it would be and we got the Dragon Soul raid drawn out for a period of over 14 months. It was a missed opportunity for Blizz to salvage some nostalgia out of Cata. I think it is possible to salvage it still though. Look at how many instances they got out of Blackrock Mountain. I think there is still the potential to see more of it,up high and very deep with all the subterranean creatures that made passages that would go on seemingly forever. I guess we will have to wait and see what's in store in the future.
"The game is too easy, worst expansion ever!"
Makes it harder
"The game is too hard, worst expansion ever!
Trying to please everyone with just one thing. °_^
this is exactly why cata wasn`t as bad as ppl make it out to be.. it just had an increase in numbers after Wotlk end content (beside icc) being easy, and then cata end game was a "difficulty spike" so everyone that joined for wotlk were surprised.. honestly before wotlk the game was harder than cata so whats all the whining is about
Cata was the worst expansion ever, i permaquit the game over it, im only back for classic, i cant really think of a single change they made i liked.
And make no mistake, it was far more casual than ever. Wish i could track down my quit thread on the forums from all those years ago lol, fanboys got real mad at my real talk.
Cataclysm was by far AND hands down, the BEST part of WOW. New and INTERESTING zones, UNDERWATER gameplay, UNIQUE gameplay, such as the Keeshan quests in Redridge, where you drive a tank, playing as the Naga warrior(living her memories), to name a few examples. Still had the good old talents, the classes got new abilities, not overpowered but easier to solo.(Great for casual PvE gamers who like to play solo mostly). Laughed my ass off so much when you are in disguise in the Thousand Needles, assasinating people, then you talk to guards and they go " There is a maniac around here, attacking people for no reason, be careful". Oh, the double irony. The fanatic maniacs calling the player a maniac and saying that he/she attacks people for no reason, or so, i don't remember exactly but there were a lot of humorous moments in the game as well.
Then the command changed and we started getting crap like kung fu pandas and pathfinding shit to unlock flying. Why not pay for it like it used to be ? After a decade of paying to play, we lose the talents and getting forced to raise useless reputations and do a lot of boring stuff that takes months to unlock flying.
I liked Cata, compared to expacs since then.
You're not alone in that sentiment, bro. I much prefer the really hard heroics of Cata to "greater rifts for wow" in Mythic +. It rewarded you for playing the game as intended, rather than looking for cheap, yet inventive ways to "game the system" to achieve a higher level key.
A lot of people who played WC3 RoC and WC3 TFT, subscribed to WoW to see the end of WC3's story. After Arthas died, they one-time players left WoW, happy with what they saw. IN other words, WotLK sub numbers were a freak accident (positive accident). They never had any interest in playing WoW before or after WotLK.
Mid-Burning Crusade sub numbers should be nostalgic standard, not WotLK.
I made a comment before that, you have to take into acount the older WC III players (23-25 in 2003). In general those people didn't have the same ammount of time to burn in such a time consuming game and add that to what you said it just supercharges the effect.
I still remember the heroics at the beginning of cataclysm. It was both fun and pain in the ass. I remember doing that one dungeon I think it was stone rock or something like that down in deepholm. So many people would leave and quit because they couldn't handle it and it took so long for me to get that dungeon completed.
audible skip 01:10
Participation in raids was completely diminished because all guilds managed to "push the bads" out of the raids, both because the content was harder, but mainly because they didnt need those 25 ppl they were struggling to gather till that point. So the thing you missed to mention was the fact that most of the old guilds opted to downsize to 10 by "trimming the fat". Those that didn't had lesser progress so they lost their better players that left to create a 10 man "efficient" team. Then, if someone wanted to create a new 25 quickly realized it was close to impossible.
Other than that a great video man. Thank you for that, and the entire walkthrough to older expansions and the impact they had on the evolution of the game!
Cata was the worst expansion in my opinion and I’ve played since vanilla
Gabriel Rodriguez MOP was worse so was WLOD.
Honestly, I consider Cataclysm one of the best expansions, alongside WotLK. From a PvE/PvP perspective, the game was at a mechanical peak. I remember cataclysm's PvP being the most balanced thing I can remember with just the right number of buttons. It was also the birth of every spec feeling viable in PvP, at least to some degree. Cataclysm also felt like the peak of WoW RUclipsrs to me.This is the point in time where I found WoWCrendor, etc..
I don't know why people think queues were so bad. To my memory as a DPS you waited 15-30 minutes in a totally solo queue. Y'know. Like EVERY EXPANSION. Dungeons weren't THAT hard. They felt like miniature normal mode raids, which I liked. Players often forget they DEMANDED those dungeons from Blizzard. They wanted HARD dungeons that you actually needed to take your time doing instead of steamrolling for free gear. They wanted normal mode to be something they didn't just skip. In WotLK you would hit heroics the moment you level cap, no exceptions before hitting Naxx for more free loot. When the ICC dungeons came out, a newly level capped character would buy gear off the auction house, do whatever until they get enough gear to do those dungeons, and just queue those and maybe Trial daily and be done, unless they wanted to grind badges in which case they could hit the random button and maybe get other people doing the exact same thing they just had done, double-dipping on their chances for loot.
Also this may just be because WotLK was what it was. But... the content as a whole was quite easy. T7 was a joke, no if ands or buts. T8 was decent IF you played the hard mode version of the bosses. T9 was pretty easy, and T10 was only a significant difficult bump if you played on heroic, and even then it doesn't come close to the content of today. I know players have just gotten better over time and Blizzard has to make Mythic raids nuts to even compete with player skill now, but Naxxramas for example is equivalent to like 1 or 2 mythic raid fights today.
For me the decline happened with WoD. MoP is one of my most favorite expansions and Cata was good. WoD and Legion is the bad side of WoW. Cata is just so underrated. I mean yeah Dragon Soul was a disaster, but at the same time Firelands was an absolutely amazing raid. Cataclysm has the best music in all of WoW. The leveling revamp was great. Zones like Westfall and Desolace were complete garbage before Cata. Transmog is an amazing feature to make your character look cool and the lore was quite nice too. Ragnaros and Deathwing are some of the best villains in all of WoW.
Why do you dislike Legion?
Who thinks Legion is "the bad side of WoW?" If anything Legion is what the game needed.
I somewhat feel this way too, Cata and MoP I didn't like as much as the previous expansions but I still maintained my subscription and still played but with WoD I think I maybe had 2-3 months subscribed the whole time? Legion maybe 5 months, which it was a much better expansion but I think I may have WoW fatigue especially with loot system since sub stats can severely cripple you.
Do mean like how you have to choose between stats/damage and the ilv to even get considered for groups? Because that pisses me off. Game devs are fixing that next exp though according to a q&A. I agree with the fatigue, I normally quit for a few months near the end on an expansions life, WoD being my longest down time. Haven't quit legion yet though so it's doing something right for me.
Legion was good though.... you can say about the legendary system and the grinding of artifact power during 7.1.5 but the raids were okay and nighthold was really good furthermore mythic+ is like the best addition to WoW. But every expansion have their bad side like WOTLK which have trial of crusader :puke:
To add to it the WOW subscriber base, Starcraft 2 WoL: 2012. Hearthstone 2014. Heroes of the Storm 2015. OverWatch 2016. Im sure a some of the player base moved over to the other titles.
Agreed ... i hope one day we have WOTLK again , no exp after that ...
warmane man lol
I feel that Cata heroics were perfect, great challenge and thinking about every fight instead of trying to run through it, made a good tank heals duo a must
so pretty much player sucked and so cata failed, that is how i see it and lived it
yeah doin teh 5m heroics and everyone cant do mechanics, it was somehow hard to find 1 other player who was skilled enough to 2m the place
You are 100% about Grim Batol on LFD. It's a nightmare, I skip all the Cara dungeons while leveling and just do MOP LFD while simultaneously questing as DPS.
I like worgen and goblins
A big thing was also the finishing up of a story.
Most of the original wow players came from WC3. We wanted to finish the story of Arthus. Once that happened it was hard to find a reason to keep going.