I dont think comparing Cata to WoD is fair... I think the 2 biggest problems with cata is that it came after wraith (which it is compared to) and it was the first expansion where the entire thing had the new talent trees.. WoD was just fundamentally unfinished
I don't remember Cata having the new talent trees for the entire expansion. I started shortly before the Sunwell Plateau was released and played through Cata. I'd love to come back to the game for a little bit.
I still fully believe that Cataclysm was excellent. The raids were awesome, the zones were diverse, dungeons had cool mechanic that don't immediately become boring, and the additions to the game overall made the game more fresh. I really wish they didn't abandon guild bonuses, and stuff like the potion cauldron
@@cyanmage1 That and following up after Wrath, it had huge shoes to fill. Blizz and the players were riding high at that point so it could of been boom or bust.
Cata was a better WotLK in every way, except it didn't have a raid tier in 4.1 and it didn't have an equivalent to WotLK's PuG friendly 10 Man Normal Raid difficulty, since 10 Man normal in Cata was equivalent to 25 Man normal in difficulty.
Cataclysm was the beginning of the end of wow for me. Didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't completely quit until legion but enjoyed each expansion less than the last.
@@davewilliams4068Couldn’t agree more. I spent so long hoping for the old world to return with old servers. Now majority of the player base wanting the cata to return is hilarious to me. These people will play all the old expansions all over again and wind up bored, at live. Don’t get me started on the bastion of twilight raid tier. I will say I haven’t played much past the bc initial release on classic. I already played vanilla-mop heavy, I don’t need to do it again. I feel like a lot of these people are just robots at this point. It reminds me of people that rewatch the same movies over and over and over. Go try something new people… Maybe I’m being too critical but it’s just so odd to me.
Yeah, but it wasn't used that much. Only in several places. But in Cata, it became the default way for both new leveling zones (80-85) and old world zones.
I think expansions like Cata and WoD are examples of Blizz trying new things to keep things fresh and interesting, but not succeeding with it because it was too ambitious or wasn't done right
Story-wise, WoD was much worse, the amount of discontent with the "alternate timeline" burning legion and the missing plotlines was palpable at the time. At one point I remember they said there's actually one Legion across all timelines (to counter the joke at the time that the Legion could just summon infinite Legions from different timelines), and that's why Archimonde is truly dead after WoD, but if there's only one Archimonde and not only one Velen, where is the threshold where you don't conform to this game's rules of physics? Now, in Dragonflight, there's supposedly a timeline where "the Legion won", which goes back on everything they said, so the echoes of damage WoD caused to the game's lore is still present.
IMO WoD was great expansion. If Blizzard wouldn't drop the ball when it comes to content it would be one of the best expanions ever. Sure, it had many downsides like it's story or garrions being... strange etc. But still, it was much better than BfA and Shadowlands.
@@N4chtigall The story was a piece of content that they actually dropped. Gorgrond was changed heavily from the Alpha Telrador used to have some plan for Shattrath as a raid Even though the zones were pretty disconnected story wise from eachother and even the expansion itself. Then I would say that personally some zones were and still are enjoyable to level in as their story and art were pretty good on their own (Spires of Arak and Frostfire)
@@N4chtigall I genuinely think that WoD would have been considered one of the best expansions if M+ came out during it, instead of Legion. WoD was severely lacking in just having things to do, as all development sank into the garrisons. It was a great time for me personally, as I was a lot busier at the time. So, having a garrison be able to with 1 character pay off my subscription fee, and just do raids when I felt like it with my friend was nice.
Cata was my favorite expansion, I had great group of friends who would play together regularly. Pushed all the raids and no drama throughout. I really do miss those times.
@@Riscsnot at all, I miss the raids, enjoyed every one of them. Was fighting for server first hc rag for awhile. Pushed pvp in the same expansion for the first time to 2200 and have fond memories of dueling outside org on a daily basis. You can’t tell me why I enjoyed something, but playing with friends just makes it that much better.
in cata i played on a dead server with my friends .it was fun but then i found out some of my other friends where playing on other servers without my friends i was basically alone in the game. in mop things got more bearable because of crz but in wod most of my friends quit
Honestly, i loved Cataclysm. I started during Wrath and Cata was the first expac i started raiding in. DragonSoul is one of my favorite raids too, even though it was challenging, i thought the fight on Deathwing's back was really cool. We don't get many interesting raids like that.
I think it says a lot that the most popular vanilla + private servers add in features of Cata, like transmog (even if more limited), new races (Goblins for the Horde, High Elves for the Alliance on mine), and new race/class combos, while keeping the lvl 60 max and vanilla zones (though with new quests and sometimes whole new questing hubs). I actually did enjoy Cata, even if it was the end of the Classic era, and LOVED MoP. Legion was fun too, even if the disappointment of WoD meant I didn't go back to WoW until after Legion was already outdated.
Void Storage simply isn't needed now that transmog is done by unlocking an appearance by simply acquiring an item once and it's account-wide. Void Storage was necessary when transmog was locked to items currently in your current character's possession (bag, bank, Void Storage), but thankfully that's gone.
It still useful since there have been cases where certain appearances have been removed from the appearance tab. So I always keep the most important pieces or gear stored in the Void Storage just in case
I've always believed Cataclysm was a great expansion. The world changes were literally asked for by the community, and raid finder was a flop; besides that it was a solid xpac. We had great dungeons, raids, pvp was good; we got actual CONTENT in patches, remember being hyped by ZG and ZA coming back as epic dungeons? Yeah same; oh damn we also got some solid dungeons before Dragon Soul in kind of an ICC esque way to tell lore and give catch up gear for the new raid. Cataclysm made sure it gave people a reason to log in.
I actually loved cata but I'm also a pretty casual player that only raided occasionally. For a casual like me the worst thing about cata that I can think of is so many abilities being locked behind higher levels. AOE leveling was so badass and the took it away.
I think Cata was the first real expansion where a lot of the more casual raiding audience filtered out. Lich King ICC was the start, as before the buffs the heroic modes were actually quite hard, as you can see from the PTR right now, a lot of guilds are struggling (not the top 3% or so but many regular guilds who have been clearing all content thus far). Cata is where the difficulty with heroic raids ramps up a bit, so a lot of people hate on Cata i think because of that, their guild fell apart or their friends quit or what have you, plus the whole revamp of the world didnt sit well with a lot of OG players who had a strong connection to vanilla/tbc era wow. They eventually became the core audience for the first vanilla wow private servers that were actually scripted... acceptably. If you look at the expansion objectively, its actually not that bad and a lot of the first raids were very fun and challenging. I just think Cata is probably the limit to where wow classic ends, but I do hope they continue, id love to play legion because i missed it.
I'm pretty sure most people prefer old orgrimmar to cata's revamp of it. It's not fun having to take an elevator to reach the flight master instead of just running up a spiral staircase. Sure, you could fly there now, but at that point you also no longer need to reach the flight master either.
For me cata was a great expansion, leveling was great, raids before drsgon soul were awesome. Dungeons were hard and required coordination. And because gear from dungeons and badges were bluez, epic felt epic again. Problem was the introduction of raid finder with gear slightly worst than normal raid. But overall great. Better than MOP IMO
Cata was polarizing, it wasn't like Wrath or Legion that most considered good, or WoD and Shadowlands that most considered bad, Cata basically split people down the middle. Lots of people loved it, but an equal number of people hated it.
Cata had many interesting new things, but the inability to go back deeply hurt it. Also, Ragnaros and Deathwing are on the same side now, but we never got to see the Dark Iron and Dark Horde forced to work together, and thr consequences that can bring.
Cata was the last time Blizzard made dungeons work. M+ makes dungeons unbearable to look at after the expansion is over and i love M+. The system gets boring pretty fast i honly run them for the gear. DUNGEONS should be more interesting, misterious and engaging, hard and without timers to be memorable. We need BIG quest chains inside and be progressive and more interactive (if you bring 2 healers bring npc's to heal for us or scale depending on what we are doing. Dungeons that change depending on the part of the quest you are inn. I don't know man. Dungeons used to make me feel so good, now its just a grind.
The Old World revamp itself wasn't bad. Far from it. In some areas, it was needed. What made this such an extreme cut in WoW's history with some effects still lingering, and what makes Cata the worst Xpac for me personally, is that the pre-Revamp Azeroth, the Classic one, was rendered *inaccessible,* and with it many quests, items, stories and achievements were lost to time or in a limited supply eventually going down to zero.
so with talks of Cata Classic there has also been talks of having a "Chromie" to talk to in order to go back to the original map instead of having to stick to the cata map
Yea that was annoying i never made it past level 24 in pre cata .i always wanted to know what the old 1k needles was like and the old shadowfang keep .some of the zones became totally linear others where similar to the original one but way less epic
cata is still my favorite expansion. the story was meh, but the class mechanics and talent system was the BEST in cata that it has been in the entire game. if they went back to cata's class mechanics and talents i would still be 100% in this game still. the most fun i have ever had playing wow was in cata by far
I think the reason why people say Cataclysm was bad, is because they were so stuck with Warcraft 3 lore, they thought it's over with Illidan and Arthas done and nothing else can come after that. Or another theory is that Cataclysm just didn't feel much of an upgrade after WOTLK, which was huge after TBC in every possible way. But other than that, the zones were cool, the raids were noticeably improving and starting to become the modern raiding we know today, classes were fun to play and diverse.
As a fellow player who never played warcraft (rts) and had like the best time of my life (in case of privat life, friends and guildies who played with me cata, and so on), i still can say cata was and is still trash. T11 content is super good, also 5man dungeons are good (atleast before they nerfed it because people cried to much). But T11 and T12 cant safe what cata brings with 4.1 (full contant patch with za and zg rework...), dragonsoul, LFR tool, the weird feeling about 5 level and the new zones and so on, even the pvp bosses were trash... Btw the 5 new zones or should i say 4 because nobody went ever back to vashir after questing it one time... Dont know why people now think cata is good.
Cata was needed because technology was changing so fast at that time. Rewriting so many quests from the original zones had to be a real pain but it did make leveling new toons much smoother.
I liked Cataclysm, but i didnt play classic or TBC. Started in wrath, friend power leveled my first toon. He quit playing in cata, so i started a new toon and actually played the game for the first time in cata.
Dont be ashamed of that. Most people who aggressively hate cata literally never played wow until cata. They jsut say what the mob says. Not very smarthinkers.
Biggest problem with Cata was it introduced the "content drought" plague. Time between Dragon Soul and MOP was like a year or more. MOP from siege to WOD was close to a year as well. WOD was like 14 months or something absurd until legion. The time gap of no content is what i remember hating most about cata
See that was never actually an issue to me because prior to WoW I was playing Maplestory which at the time had almost no content updates for large periods of time.
Cata had the potential to be the best expansion ever but there were a few mistakes that were pretty big and noticeable. LFR being the obvious one and nerfing heroics being another (private servers addressed both of those and that is the new standard; no LFR and pre nerf heroics). Another issue is the patch dungeons make all previous ones irrelevant and funnel players into two or three dungeons; simply increasing the ilvl of all heroics to match that of the new dungeons would fix this; it is similar to how H++ keeps heroics relevant in Wrath Classic but this is a MUCH simpler solution. An issue not talked about enough is how the changes to talent system and when classes learn spells made the leveling much easier (with the exception of Shadow which feels weak before level 30). If they buffed the mobs to the point where leveling is CHALLENGING, I think this would make a huge difference. Cata is a very alt friendly expansion with great catch up mechanics. The most obvious of all was the last raid tier was a dud. This is what would take the most work, but is worth the effort IMO as it is the most bang for your buck when altering this expansion. Even if you CAN'T do this, if they would simply up the ilvl of the raid gear to match the new tier, then it is simply that new content is being added on. That would soften the blow a bit of having a raid tier most players don't like. 4.2 had great world content, but this seemed to be missing from 4.3... no one cared for the Thrall quests and just did it for the easy item. If 4.3 had repeatable world content added that would be another huge win. It's not a ton of work to fix most of this.
as a person who vastly liked the old world better than the new one after cata, i don't think it was a bonus that the world got revamped. I know that the world gets boring after so many years of it being the same, but i liked the old world better, but that is just me. Another thing i don't like is, that even though i "hate" leveling, i hate leveling gear more with a passion. it sucks that you do a boatload of dungeons to level and gear, but you literally can't use the gear, since you have basically every single slot filled with an heirloom. Which is where many will just say "then don't use it" but the problem also lies in early level pvp, where literally every single person will be wearing heirloom gear, and for those who don't, well, have fun getting one shotted by a rogue ambush or a warrior who oneshots you with a heavy crit. There is some aspects of cata that i liked, but mostly i would love if it just stayed as pre-cata for the most part.
The features you mention doesn't appeal to me. What I enjoyed about Cata was its core gameplay : pre nerf heroics were great, T11 and T12 were among the best raid tiers, the class mechanics were fun in pve & pvp. What sucked was the lack of content. The experience from leveling to being pre raid ready is extremely lacky - even more than WotlK - and so little content have been added. 9 month of DS was just a bad joke. I think Cata classic can be fun as long as it doesn't last for more than a year.
We need reforging and old gem system on gears back true you might not be able to equip gear right away but the fun and possibility of customizing your gear was really fun in my opinion and now that we don't have hit and expertise caps anymore it might be extremely fun
I heavily disagree and do think Blizzard was right. It was insane that in order to wear a single piece of gear, we had to import our character into a website which would calculate the best way to reforge all our gear to the most optimal settings, which sometimes required reforging 5+ different gear so your new gear can fit. Which meant that after every single boss, we would need to stop the raid so multiple people could go back to town to reforge all their gear. At least with Gems/Enchants you can have them ready in your bag to apply to a new item at a moments notice.
Cataclysm was a better WotLK in every single way, except it didn't have a raid tier in 4.1 and it didn't have an equivalent to WotLK's PuG friendly 10 Man Normal raid difficulty. But WotLK has Trial of the Crusader, which is the worst raid in WoWs history, along with EoE, RS and Naxx. Cata had many new features. Cata improved dungeon and raid quality, complexity and depth. Cata improved class design to the best it got until Shadowlands or even Dragonflight. The 1-60 revamp was excellent. The talent trees were finally polished. The tabard reputation was improved over WotLK as well. Again name something WotLK did, Cata did it better and had more on top of that.
I remember the people defending not having flying in the old zones and/or defending them not adding flying at the new expansions launch and adding it through the Pathfinder achievement. I always thought the pathfinding achievement for flying was the dumbest thing ever, because I can't imagine you finishing leveling on your main and wanting to level an alt or multiple alts and not having the ability to fly to speed up the process.
The only thing I had issues with cata was how cheesy some of the stories are, the end of Cata in particular. Uldum was okay but the Explorer's League stuff was very cheesy. Love the rolling gnomes though Vashj'ir story was great but the gameplay was unbearable. The Heroic dungeons at the start of the expansion had some of the most amusing ragequits I saw. All in all, great xpac, just some bad things balancing out the good things
They pumped so much in to the early game, that at the end the expac had only a runtime of about a year and then just focused on the next expansion. Which left us with the longest streak of no new content with about 10 damn months of waiting. But this won't be a problem in Cata classic i guess.
While not my favorite expansion, I dearly loved the expansion. I understand the hate is from the old-school players... but I'll be honest. I hated old school WoW. Cata was the breath of fresh air needed to keep me playing after Northrend, which I felt was a messy disappointment. That, and it brought it my favorite race: Goblins.
I loved Cata being the first expansion that was so alt friendly. The combined raid lock and 25 daily cap saved me massive amount of time to progress my main, free up tons of time to play alts. Levelling was fast I got to experience many different classes and builds at their max level.
Two little notes: You forgot Vashj'ir in the list of new Cata zones. Though who can blame you, it's Vashj'ir after all. And also Phasing might have been a big part of Cata, but it did not originate in it. It was first used in Wotlk in the DK starting zone, though I don't know actually, if it is used anywhere else in Wotlk.
Wrathgate quest chain (especially phasing Undercity), a couple of quests in Storm Peaks and several massive quest chains in Icecrown used phasing to show progress (notably the quest chain to unlock the Knights of the Ebon Blade flight point/hub at the Shadow Vault)
Vashj'ir was a great idea, but something that just can't be executed well in the game with movement mechanics. That's why they did Naz'jatar the way they did. It still gave the underwater feel, and immersion (pun intended), but you weren't actually swimming everywhere.
I did enjoy the new starting zones that a lot of races got. I liked the trolls new island start, it was nice to see major lore characters in a starting zone.
As someone who has played since classic with some breaks I actually think Cata is one of the best expansions the game has had. Its definitely not without its flaws but is in the better half of expansions.. A lot of important things were implemented and in my opinion it was the last expansion of "classical wow".
I literally resubscribed (haven't played since bfa) to play wotlk so I can play cata when it releases. Looking back I think cata was the most fun I had in this game. Wotlk/cata were my faves.
Cata was when the design philosophy changed with the dev team. Go read any interview from back then with Brack about Cata, dude talked like he didn't even like the game at all. Regardless of your opinions, the facts remain the subs PLUMMETED at Cata and never recovered. That is objective and not opinion.
Honestly, I don’t mind the changes to the world caused by Deathwing. I just wish things would advance a bit now that a lot of time has passed. Bridges over chasms should have been built; forests that were burned should have at least started to regrow or had new civilizations built in their place; flooded areas should have at least started to be drained or be cleaned out to allow more life to flourish.
Imo one of the main reasons cata was not liked, is because they destroyed so many zones and quest lines that we loved and were so important to us growing up and leveling playing classic and tbc.
TBC was fine. Agree otherwise. Was a perfect extension of the WoW that already existed, long, tonssss of content on release. And feel free to hate me but I liked the convoluted progression systems. Meant I could play at any point in that expansion and easily find people that needed to do the same things as me for progression@@mattiaskollnitz9794
So I think 8 out of the 10 are absolutely spot on, and DEFINITELY number 1 with transmog, which opened up a whole new style of gameplay for a lot of players, casual and hardcore alike. I disagree with number 5, and with number 3, that's some high grade copium and rose-tinted glasses shit right there. Firelands might be viewed with nostalgic feelings now, but at the time, it was hated. It's no secret that T12 and T13 were two of the worst raid tiers in wow and having them back to back to close out an expansion was an absolute travesty. One tier of 7 bosses and one tier of 8 bosses was absolutely pathetic by normal raid standards and the playerbase burned out on them very quickly in the normal mode raiding scene. In heroic is was different slightly, but no less frustrating, at least Firelands fixed the horrendous issues that T11 had with 25 and 10 man actually being balanced for each raid size as opposed to the disastrous BWD, BoT, and Tot4W raids. The problem was 6/7 bosses were pretty much on the same difficulty (with only Baleroc being a slightly higher challenge just because if you made one mistake with the crystals you were probably dead) and an absolute BRICK FUCKING WALL in Heroic Ragnaros. And of course, the phases that were the sticking point were the last two, meaning hours of sleeping through phases 1 and 2 and their intermissions to hopefully meet the dps check for phase 3 and then hopefully not getting fucked with roots on phase 4, not to mention hoping that blackflame didn't bug out, your designated fire manager was on their game, and about 14 other things going right just to ensure you could finally finish a 25 minute boss fight. People only think of reforging through a modern lens, where hit/expertise caps are long gone and breakpoints are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they used to be. Reforging was tedious (often being managed by an addon such as reforgelite) and prevented you from equipping raid gear in the moment. Now of course ever since BC new gear has needed to be gemmed and enchanted before use, but now wiith reforging you often had to reforge YOUR WHOLE ARMOR SET based on new calculations from your addons. A lot of people would prefer reforging just so they could always get optimal stats on gear, but that was because there were actual "dead stats" like too much hit or expertise. It was a welcome change to just get rid of those stats or bake them into classes which is what they did.
Bliz’s logic behind the Reforger removal has always felt to me like they just wanted people to not “settle” for a lesser piece of loot and to keep playing and farming over and over to get the piece that was actually bis. A simple “time-engagement metric” that they were so big on.
I find it very funny when people roast cata and some of the other old xpacs. Pandaria is my favourite expansion, Cata is an easy second. I think if you were to ask people why they don't like the expansions they wouldn't remember. I believe most people are just riding the hate train and now it's just etched into their brains that they must have been bad expansions if so many people are hating on them
My self-imposed endgame was climbing mountains and getting out of bounds so Blizz fixing the map and allowing flying on Azeroth really put a damper on my fun.
I started in TBC and I loved Cataclysm. I felt like it combined some of the best parts of TBC and Wrath but just ended on a bit of whimper. AQ40/Naxx, BT/Sunwell, & ICC were all great ending raids and I don't think Dragonsoul lived up. I think people forget how great heroics and T11 was, I just think it was a shock to the system for raiders who had joined only in WotLK. The raid tier reminded me a lot of TBC.
#8 is a pretty big minus for me and all the good things doesn't help the fact that the last raid of Cata was so bad that a Cataclysm Classic is basically an auto-pass for me. Even though I loved pre-nerf dungeons/T11 and Firelands is one of the best raids IMO.
Atleast it tried something uniqe. The actual lore ending was still cool. But Nzoth being lazer beamed to death after building him up for 15 years of wow was even dumber than the warlords ending
Although my favorite was wotlk, i was extremely hyped for cata i cant explain it with words, i also played all the starting zones multiple times, the world was so much more alive than before and the graphics were absolutely insane, especially the water! I only hated raid finder in cata, everything else was awesome. I tend to think mop ruined wow and changed it into what it is today, starting with pokemon like pet battles and classes losing their identity.
I been playing since Vanilla and Cata is still my favorite; it’s the perfect balance of streamlining things while still making elements actually matter (like questing, professions, etc). Also for someone who didn’t have time to raid - both Tol Barad and the heroic-specific dungeons were challenging and fun! 💪🏽👹👍🏽
I only agree about tabard rep, void storage, and the (damn cool) Firelands raid. Everything else you listed as a positive was IMO a detriment to the MMORPG experience and a large part of why I dislike Cata and retail.
I mean the only negatives i remember were the loss of some rpg elements. (Weapon skill for one) and dragon soul. I personally loved cata and that was my most active expansion
guild abilities like Have Group Will Travel, omg i miss it so much lol... idc what anyone says, cata was actually really good and had very few problems imo.... like look at Cata, and then look at the absolute trash cans that are WOD, BFA, and SL lol... cata was a masterpiece by comparison
I keep saying it: Cataclysm was good! Challenging Dungeons, Old World Revamp, good raids, Transmog, Molten Front, Archeology, Sandstone Drake and so much more But the final Patch.. Dragon Soul and the Dungeons.. It was so bad and also it lasted for almost a year. It was sooo bad.
I hated reforging so much. When you got a new piece of gear, it completely destroyed your hit and expertise cap so you had to reforge your entire gear over. Hit and expertise and their caps were an extremely pointless mechanic but that's not even a problem with reforging but a problem by itself
Yeah you can never overstate the amount of work/effort they did put into cataclysm, at least compared to other WoW expansions in similar amount of time
I'm slightly biased since i started playing during cata, but honestly.. It was extremely alt friendly, had some of the most long lasting additions to the game that are still meaningful and i'd argue firelands was one of the best raids ever.
Yea its even more extreme cata came out in 2010 13 years ago 2010 -13 is 1997 the year diablo 1 came out .but it gets even crazier. vanilla wow came out in 2004 19 years ago 2004 -19 is 1985 the same year as the original super mario bros.
OK I gotta say, reforging wasn't great at all. Like in the end it was just about putting your name on some websites and it would take all your stuff and calculate the best possible combinaison. I may have been with some tryhard people, but they were pushing on me to do that the way it was presented rather than letting me f*ck around with it. It wasn't really great. And even if I complain about, yeah fine tuning is cool, but could be really boring really fast, and I 100% used those websites 'cause I'm not gonna work with it at every piece of equipement I got, it was just too much time. Too me what made Cataclysm a good expansion was the revamp. Like I did a human Hunter, and god I loved all the humans questline, that are deeply connected, even if it took a more cartoon-ish side, it still was entertaining. All quests from a region bring you to this big last quests with a lot of things happening, and where they try to made it as dopamine-filled as it could, it was really a good time. Just to compare, I did only 2 reroll in Wotlk, I did all 7 others in Cataclysm since I enjoy it so much.
I played cata for 10 years on private servers. For me it is one of the best expansions. Cata had the best pvp and pve combined. There are expansions with better pvp, with better pve, but none of them were so good, entertaining and balanced in both of these playstyles. Don’t forget about 70-74 and 75-79 twink bracket. I play wow for 16 years, tried and played every expansion for at least half a year, and I never had so much fun than on cata 74 twink spamming 20BGs daily, speedrunning tbc raids and killing opposite faction in Northrend. But 99 % people didn’t experience it. I highly suggest to try it. We literally had 200k hk on our twinks, more than 99 % people on max level.
In cata i was doing a lot of pvp because there was nothing better to do and because my friends like it .but i really got sick of it after a while i couldn't stand the bgs anymore i remember bg ques getting a lot longer in mop in cata they where always instant at level 85. also does anyone know about another mmo where twinking is a thing ?
I don't care nearly as much as I used to but I used to be apart of that minority that thought xmog was a net negative for the game, I like to just look at someone and be able to eyeball what they are sporting without having to inspect them - if they had a way to disable transmog from your perspective I would be all for that
@@DrewPicklesTheDark you're right it's definitely coming from a very old perspective when I was super into the game like that, so when taking a step back it's better to just let people have their fun and not be so uptight about it - thanks for the change in perspective lol
I really REALLY enjoyed just about all my time with Cata. Yeah, it really sucked that there was a ton of cut content, but the classes all felt fun to play imo (even paladins like ret and holy were weird with combo generators, and I understand why not everyone likes them but it was pretty alright)....the ONLY issue I ever had with the game was that final raid being the only form of content in the final patch, which could easily be fixed today by making a new raid (or just moving on to MOP classic only after a few months). The first what 4 or 5 raids the game had were very fun, difficult but not so difficult that it ever felt unfair (even when half the player base was horrible at the game, finding that right group to be with to do heroic/hard modes with made it beyond enjoyable) and even dungeons at the start meant something to gear up first and weren't "Pull everything and press 1 ability each person to clear the trash". I think it could have been a much better expansion with changes, but I never understood (beyond that final raid fiasco lasting over a year) why people thought it was so horrible, especially the start of the expansion which had 4 fun raids with unique mechanics (Firelands, Bastion of Twilight, Blackwing Descent, and Throne).
A lot of these are highly debatable, if not negatives. Firelans, transmog, and the race/class combos are really the only ones that I think the majority people would consistently say were good, the rest were all polarizing (old world revamp, phasing, flying, tabard, cities), or actively disliked by many (reforging, void storage).
Cataclysm was overall a good expansion, and it clearly had a LOT of effort put into it (unlike the lazy job of WOD). But whereas WOD they just obviously didn't care and decided to throw whatever crap they could make quickly out, Cata they clearly put effort in, but that effort was not always put into the right places.
Wod would probably be my favorite expansion if their was one more raid where we dealt the final blow to the iron horde which would then lead to gulfan continuing to corrupt them.
Surprised that the guild levels and rewards are not up on the list. Anyone remember Have Group, Will Travel?
Yeah guild levels was huge, no idea how that was overlooked
I dont think comparing Cata to WoD is fair... I think the 2 biggest problems with cata is that it came after wraith (which it is compared to) and it was the first expansion where the entire thing had the new talent trees..
WoD was just fundamentally unfinished
I don't remember Cata having the new talent trees for the entire expansion. I started shortly before the Sunwell Plateau was released and played through Cata. I'd love to come back to the game for a little bit.
Cata was a mistake wod was just bad.
@@ryanhuffman7410It was the same talent tree than Vanilla just polished and reduced the unnecessary
Yer cata was already doomed from the start being straight after wrath.
The talent trees were mop prepatch? Why do people think Cata had the talent trees?
I still fully believe that Cataclysm was excellent. The raids were awesome, the zones were diverse, dungeons had cool mechanic that don't immediately become boring, and the additions to the game overall made the game more fresh. I really wish they didn't abandon guild bonuses, and stuff like the potion cauldron
I always said if it was for the final raid tier lasting for over a year this expansion wouldn't be so harshly remembered
@@cyanmage1 That and following up after Wrath, it had huge shoes to fill. Blizz and the players were riding high at that point so it could of been boom or bust.
Cata was a better WotLK in every way, except it didn't have a raid tier in 4.1 and it didn't have an equivalent to WotLK's PuG friendly 10 Man Normal Raid difficulty, since 10 Man normal in Cata was equivalent to 25 Man normal in difficulty.
Cataclysm was the beginning of the end of wow for me. Didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't completely quit until legion but enjoyed each expansion less than the last.
@@davewilliams4068Couldn’t agree more. I spent so long hoping for the old world to return with old servers. Now majority of the player base wanting the cata to return is hilarious to me. These people will play all the old expansions all over again and wind up bored, at live. Don’t get me started on the bastion of twilight raid tier. I will say I haven’t played much past the bc initial release on classic. I already played vanilla-mop heavy, I don’t need to do it again. I feel like a lot of these people are just robots at this point. It reminds me of people that rewatch the same movies over and over and over. Go try something new people… Maybe I’m being too critical but it’s just so odd to me.
Interactive phasing was added in wrath. You can actually see it if you ever quested in Icecrown or famously, done the wrath gate quest.
And in Wintergarde Keep. The inn is empty until you rescue the people
Yeah, but it wasn't used that much. Only in several places. But in Cata, it became the default way for both new leveling zones (80-85) and old world zones.
I liked how difficult Heroics were. There were definitely many that couldn't hang though...
Yeah, random groups struggle a lot with them, I vividly remember that :D CC is hard, and not breaking CC is even harder, lmao
I think expansions like Cata and WoD are examples of Blizz trying new things to keep things fresh and interesting, but not succeeding with it because it was too ambitious or wasn't done right
Story-wise, WoD was much worse, the amount of discontent with the "alternate timeline" burning legion and the missing plotlines was palpable at the time. At one point I remember they said there's actually one Legion across all timelines (to counter the joke at the time that the Legion could just summon infinite Legions from different timelines), and that's why Archimonde is truly dead after WoD, but if there's only one Archimonde and not only one Velen, where is the threshold where you don't conform to this game's rules of physics? Now, in Dragonflight, there's supposedly a timeline where "the Legion won", which goes back on everything they said, so the echoes of damage WoD caused to the game's lore is still present.
IMO WoD was great expansion. If Blizzard wouldn't drop the ball when it comes to content it would be one of the best expanions ever. Sure, it had many downsides like it's story or garrions being... strange etc. But still, it was much better than BfA and Shadowlands.
@@N4chtigall The story was a piece of content that they actually dropped. Gorgrond was changed heavily from the Alpha
Telrador used to have some plan for Shattrath as a raid
Even though the zones were pretty disconnected story wise from eachother and even the expansion itself. Then I would say that personally some zones were and still are enjoyable to level in as their story and art were pretty good on their own (Spires of Arak and Frostfire)
cata was just a result of very bad game design fads in 2010.
@@N4chtigall I genuinely think that WoD would have been considered one of the best expansions if M+ came out during it, instead of Legion.
WoD was severely lacking in just having things to do, as all development sank into the garrisons.
It was a great time for me personally, as I was a lot busier at the time.
So, having a garrison be able to with 1 character pay off my subscription fee, and just do raids when I felt like it with my friend was nice.
Cata was my favorite expansion, I had great group of friends who would play together regularly. Pushed all the raids and no drama throughout. I really do miss those times.
Yeah u missed the time with your mates not cata lul
@@Riscsnot at all, I miss the raids, enjoyed every one of them. Was fighting for server first hc rag for awhile. Pushed pvp in the same expansion for the first time to 2200 and have fond memories of dueling outside org on a daily basis.
You can’t tell me why I enjoyed something, but playing with friends just makes it that much better.
in cata i played on a dead server with my friends .it was fun but then i found out some of my other friends where playing on other servers without my friends i was basically alone in the game. in mop things got more bearable because of crz but in wod most of my friends quit
@@belstar1128I was on a medium-high pop server it was moderate but not over bearing. I didn’t even think about a dead server before crz.
@@Tapzer yeah im wrong but u told me the same thing now. You even said now u liked cata because of the memories... Pls dont lie to yourself
I loved cata, the beginning heroics were so rewarding to my then in high school self
It’s very nostalgic
Honestly, i loved Cataclysm. I started during Wrath and Cata was the first expac i started raiding in. DragonSoul is one of my favorite raids too, even though it was challenging, i thought the fight on Deathwing's back was really cool. We don't get many interesting raids like that.
I think it says a lot that the most popular vanilla + private servers add in features of Cata, like transmog (even if more limited), new races (Goblins for the Horde, High Elves for the Alliance on mine), and new race/class combos, while keeping the lvl 60 max and vanilla zones (though with new quests and sometimes whole new questing hubs). I actually did enjoy Cata, even if it was the end of the Classic era, and LOVED MoP. Legion was fun too, even if the disappointment of WoD meant I didn't go back to WoW until after Legion was already outdated.
Interactive Phsing ws actually introduced in Wrath.
True, but only for Npcs i think. They would be there or not depending on the quest you're in, but in cata entire parts of the map could change.
Void Storage simply isn't needed now that transmog is done by unlocking an appearance by simply acquiring an item once and it's account-wide. Void Storage was necessary when transmog was locked to items currently in your current character's possession (bag, bank, Void Storage), but thankfully that's gone.
Void storage isnstill useful if you are an RPer who needs some gear from a lesser armor class for a special occaion. Wedding dress type deal.
It still useful since there have been cases where certain appearances have been removed from the appearance tab. So I always keep the most important pieces or gear stored in the Void Storage just in case
Cata launched the game model they are running right now.
It was Cataclysm both figuratively and literally
I've always believed Cataclysm was a great expansion. The world changes were literally asked for by the community, and raid finder was a flop; besides that it was a solid xpac. We had great dungeons, raids, pvp was good; we got actual CONTENT in patches, remember being hyped by ZG and ZA coming back as epic dungeons? Yeah same; oh damn we also got some solid dungeons before Dragon Soul in kind of an ICC esque way to tell lore and give catch up gear for the new raid. Cataclysm made sure it gave people a reason to log in.
I actually loved cata but I'm also a pretty casual player that only raided occasionally. For a casual like me the worst thing about cata that I can think of is so many abilities being locked behind higher levels. AOE leveling was so badass and the took it away.
@@UniteForgetLeftRightyeh but now Activision own it so give them some smeckles and you'll get a level boost
Activision owned Cataclysm when it came out. They owned WoW ever since Wrath of the Lich King.@@japreet_kah
I think Cata was the first real expansion where a lot of the more casual raiding audience filtered out. Lich King ICC was the start, as before the buffs the heroic modes were actually quite hard, as you can see from the PTR right now, a lot of guilds are struggling (not the top 3% or so but many regular guilds who have been clearing all content thus far). Cata is where the difficulty with heroic raids ramps up a bit, so a lot of people hate on Cata i think because of that, their guild fell apart or their friends quit or what have you, plus the whole revamp of the world didnt sit well with a lot of OG players who had a strong connection to vanilla/tbc era wow. They eventually became the core audience for the first vanilla wow private servers that were actually scripted... acceptably. If you look at the expansion objectively, its actually not that bad and a lot of the first raids were very fun and challenging. I just think Cata is probably the limit to where wow classic ends, but I do hope they continue, id love to play legion because i missed it.
Cataclysm absolutely rocked until 4.3. Launch dungeons, raids and class design was probably the strongest of any launch and Firelands was great too.
I'm pretty sure most people prefer old orgrimmar to cata's revamp of it. It's not fun having to take an elevator to reach the flight master instead of just running up a spiral staircase. Sure, you could fly there now, but at that point you also no longer need to reach the flight master either.
I like the theme of new Orgrimmar (more like a fortress than ditch in the ground) but I like the layout of old Orgrimmar much more.
For me cata was a great expansion, leveling was great, raids before drsgon soul were awesome. Dungeons were hard and required coordination. And because gear from dungeons and badges were bluez, epic felt epic again. Problem was the introduction of raid finder with gear slightly worst than normal raid. But overall great. Better than MOP IMO
I loved Cata. Pity the community is so fickle.
The community is the worst thing about wow by far
Cata was only considered bad because literally nothing could've followed up wrath of the lich king with the WC3 story being complete
@@barial1 Exactly. It's what so many of us "grew up" on before wow came out
Cata was polarizing, it wasn't like Wrath or Legion that most considered good, or WoD and Shadowlands that most considered bad, Cata basically split people down the middle. Lots of people loved it, but an equal number of people hated it.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark "Most" is only the vocal minority posting on the internet.
Cata had many interesting new things, but the inability to go back deeply hurt it. Also, Ragnaros and Deathwing are on the same side now, but we never got to see the Dark Iron and Dark Horde forced to work together, and thr consequences that can bring.
"to go back" where?
@@barial1 In time, to the deleted content. Something most map changes ever since have had a bronze dragon in every zone to do.
Cata was the last time Blizzard made dungeons work. M+ makes dungeons unbearable to look at after the expansion is over and i love M+.
The system gets boring pretty fast i honly run them for the gear. DUNGEONS should be more interesting, misterious and engaging, hard and without timers to be memorable. We need BIG quest chains inside and be progressive and more interactive (if you bring 2 healers bring npc's to heal for us or scale depending on what we are doing. Dungeons that change depending on the part of the quest you are inn. I don't know man. Dungeons used to make me feel so good, now its just a grind.
Cata heroics were and always will be the best thing ever
TotalBiscuit throwback respect. RIP
Rest in Power Biscuit
The Old World revamp itself wasn't bad. Far from it. In some areas, it was needed.
What made this such an extreme cut in WoW's history with some effects still lingering, and what makes Cata the worst Xpac for me personally, is that the pre-Revamp Azeroth, the Classic one, was rendered *inaccessible,* and with it many quests, items, stories and achievements were lost to time or in a limited supply eventually going down to zero.
so with talks of Cata Classic there has also been talks of having a "Chromie" to talk to in order to go back to the original map instead of having to stick to the cata map
thats been solved with the release of wow classic.
Yea that was annoying i never made it past level 24 in pre cata .i always wanted to know what the old 1k needles was like and the old shadowfang keep .some of the zones became totally linear others where similar to the original one but way less epic
@@comq01 so in retail you have access to the old map?
Suramar is the best example of storytelling phasing. It wasnt leveling but it was fun! And it ended up kimda mattering since Nightborne did join horde
cata is still my favorite expansion. the story was meh, but the class mechanics and talent system was the BEST in cata that it has been in the entire game. if they went back to cata's class mechanics and talents i would still be 100% in this game still. the most fun i have ever had playing wow was in cata by far
Same
I think the reason why people say Cataclysm was bad, is because they were so stuck with Warcraft 3 lore, they thought it's over with Illidan and Arthas done and nothing else can come after that.
Or another theory is that Cataclysm just didn't feel much of an upgrade after WOTLK, which was huge after TBC in every possible way.
But other than that, the zones were cool, the raids were noticeably improving and starting to become the modern raiding we know today, classes were fun to play and diverse.
As a fellow player who never played warcraft (rts) and had like the best time of my life (in case of privat life, friends and guildies who played with me cata, and so on), i still can say cata was and is still trash.
T11 content is super good, also 5man dungeons are good (atleast before they nerfed it because people cried to much).
But T11 and T12 cant safe what cata brings with 4.1 (full contant patch with za and zg rework...), dragonsoul, LFR tool, the weird feeling about 5 level and the new zones and so on, even the pvp bosses were trash...
Btw the 5 new zones or should i say 4 because nobody went ever back to vashir after questing it one time...
Dont know why people now think cata is good.
Cata is my favorite expansion, the instances and raids are amazing and the chance of the whole world.
Cata was needed because technology was changing so fast at that time. Rewriting so many quests from the original zones had to be a real pain but it did make leveling new toons much smoother.
I liked Cataclysm, but i didnt play classic or TBC. Started in wrath, friend power leveled my first toon.
He quit playing in cata, so i started a new toon and actually played the game for the first time in cata.
Dont be ashamed of that. Most people who aggressively hate cata literally never played wow until cata. They jsut say what the mob says. Not very smarthinkers.
Biggest problem with Cata was it introduced the "content drought" plague. Time between Dragon Soul and MOP was like a year or more. MOP from siege to WOD was close to a year as well. WOD was like 14 months or something absurd until legion. The time gap of no content is what i remember hating most about cata
See that was never actually an issue to me because prior to WoW I was playing Maplestory which at the time had almost no content updates for large periods of time.
Cata had the potential to be the best expansion ever but there were a few mistakes that were pretty big and noticeable. LFR being the obvious one and nerfing heroics being another (private servers addressed both of those and that is the new standard; no LFR and pre nerf heroics). Another issue is the patch dungeons make all previous ones irrelevant and funnel players into two or three dungeons; simply increasing the ilvl of all heroics to match that of the new dungeons would fix this; it is similar to how H++ keeps heroics relevant in Wrath Classic but this is a MUCH simpler solution.
An issue not talked about enough is how the changes to talent system and when classes learn spells made the leveling much easier (with the exception of Shadow which feels weak before level 30). If they buffed the mobs to the point where leveling is CHALLENGING, I think this would make a huge difference. Cata is a very alt friendly expansion with great catch up mechanics.
The most obvious of all was the last raid tier was a dud. This is what would take the most work, but is worth the effort IMO as it is the most bang for your buck when altering this expansion. Even if you CAN'T do this, if they would simply up the ilvl of the raid gear to match the new tier, then it is simply that new content is being added on. That would soften the blow a bit of having a raid tier most players don't like. 4.2 had great world content, but this seemed to be missing from 4.3... no one cared for the Thrall quests and just did it for the easy item. If 4.3 had repeatable world content added that would be another huge win. It's not a ton of work to fix most of this.
Cata feels like an actual continuation of WoW and its story whereas every expansion past it never did.
Legion did.
The rest move away from WC1-3 content so don't feel like what the core of the game was about.
@@alecshockowitz8385 I'm sad that Legion had so many missed opportunities and nonsense lore, it could have been much better
as a person who vastly liked the old world better than the new one after cata, i don't think it was a bonus that the world got revamped. I know that the world gets boring after so many years of it being the same, but i liked the old world better, but that is just me.
Another thing i don't like is, that even though i "hate" leveling, i hate leveling gear more with a passion. it sucks that you do a boatload of dungeons to level and gear, but you literally can't use the gear, since you have basically every single slot filled with an heirloom.
Which is where many will just say "then don't use it" but the problem also lies in early level pvp, where literally every single person will be wearing heirloom gear, and for those who don't, well, have fun getting one shotted by a rogue ambush or a warrior who oneshots you with a heavy crit.
There is some aspects of cata that i liked, but mostly i would love if it just stayed as pre-cata for the most part.
The features you mention doesn't appeal to me. What I enjoyed about Cata was its core gameplay : pre nerf heroics were great, T11 and T12 were among the best raid tiers, the class mechanics were fun in pve & pvp. What sucked was the lack of content. The experience from leveling to being pre raid ready is extremely lacky - even more than WotlK - and so little content have been added. 9 month of DS was just a bad joke. I think Cata classic can be fun as long as it doesn't last for more than a year.
We need reforging and old gem system on gears back true you might not be able to equip gear right away but the fun and possibility of customizing your gear was really fun in my opinion and now that we don't have hit and expertise caps anymore it might be extremely fun
I heavily disagree and do think Blizzard was right. It was insane that in order to wear a single piece of gear, we had to import our character into a website which would calculate the best way to reforge all our gear to the most optimal settings, which sometimes required reforging 5+ different gear so your new gear can fit. Which meant that after every single boss, we would need to stop the raid so multiple people could go back to town to reforge all their gear. At least with Gems/Enchants you can have them ready in your bag to apply to a new item at a moments notice.
Cataclysm was a better WotLK in every single way, except it didn't have a raid tier in 4.1 and it didn't have an equivalent to WotLK's PuG friendly 10 Man Normal raid difficulty. But WotLK has Trial of the Crusader, which is the worst raid in WoWs history, along with EoE, RS and Naxx.
Cata had many new features. Cata improved dungeon and raid quality, complexity and depth. Cata improved class design to the best it got until Shadowlands or even Dragonflight. The 1-60 revamp was excellent. The talent trees were finally polished. The tabard reputation was improved over WotLK as well. Again name something WotLK did, Cata did it better and had more on top of that.
I remember the people defending not having flying in the old zones and/or defending them not adding flying at the new expansions launch and adding it through the Pathfinder achievement. I always thought the pathfinding achievement for flying was the dumbest thing ever, because I can't imagine you finishing leveling on your main and wanting to level an alt or multiple alts and not having the ability to fly to speed up the process.
The only thing I had issues with cata was how cheesy some of the stories are, the end of Cata in particular.
Uldum was okay but the Explorer's League stuff was very cheesy. Love the rolling gnomes though
Vashj'ir story was great but the gameplay was unbearable.
The Heroic dungeons at the start of the expansion had some of the most amusing ragequits I saw.
All in all, great xpac, just some bad things balancing out the good things
They pumped so much in to the early game, that at the end the expac had only a runtime of about a year and then just focused on the next expansion. Which left us with the longest streak of no new content with about 10 damn months of waiting. But this won't be a problem in Cata classic i guess.
While not my favorite expansion, I dearly loved the expansion. I understand the hate is from the old-school players... but I'll be honest. I hated old school WoW. Cata was the breath of fresh air needed to keep me playing after Northrend, which I felt was a messy disappointment. That, and it brought it my favorite race: Goblins.
I loved Cata being the first expansion that was so alt friendly. The combined raid lock and 25 daily cap saved me massive amount of time to progress my main, free up tons of time to play alts. Levelling was fast I got to experience many different classes and builds at their max level.
Two little notes:
You forgot Vashj'ir in the list of new Cata zones. Though who can blame you, it's Vashj'ir after all.
And also Phasing might have been a big part of Cata, but it did not originate in it. It was first used in Wotlk in the DK starting zone, though I don't know actually, if it is used anywhere else in Wotlk.
Wrathgate quest chain (especially phasing Undercity), a couple of quests in Storm Peaks and several massive quest chains in Icecrown used phasing to show progress (notably the quest chain to unlock the Knights of the Ebon Blade flight point/hub at the Shadow Vault)
Vashj'ir was a great idea, but something that just can't be executed well in the game with movement mechanics. That's why they did Naz'jatar the way they did. It still gave the underwater feel, and immersion (pun intended), but you weren't actually swimming everywhere.
I'm probably one of the only people going to Vashj'ir everytime i level up a new character because i love the zone that much
@@ahapkai started playing retail in 2013 (MoP). I remember going to Valj first at lvl 80, i enjoyed questing there so much... it felt refreshing
I did enjoy the new starting zones that a lot of races got. I liked the trolls new island start, it was nice to see major lore characters in a starting zone.
As someone who has played since classic with some breaks I actually think Cata is one of the best expansions the game has had. Its definitely not without its flaws but is in the better half of expansions.. A lot of important things were implemented and in my opinion it was the last expansion of "classical wow".
I literally resubscribed (haven't played since bfa) to play wotlk so I can play cata when it releases. Looking back I think cata was the most fun I had in this game. Wotlk/cata were my faves.
Cata was when the design philosophy changed with the dev team. Go read any interview from back then with Brack about Cata, dude talked like he didn't even like the game at all.
Regardless of your opinions, the facts remain the subs PLUMMETED at Cata and never recovered. That is objective and not opinion.
Honestly, I don’t mind the changes to the world caused by Deathwing. I just wish things would advance a bit now that a lot of time has passed.
Bridges over chasms should have been built; forests that were burned should have at least started to regrow or had new civilizations built in their place; flooded areas should have at least started to be drained or be cleaned out to allow more life to flourish.
Imo one of the main reasons cata was not liked, is because they destroyed so many zones and quest lines that we loved and were so important to us growing up and leveling playing classic and tbc.
Fangs of the Father questline for Rogues 🖤
Wait, did people actually dislike Cataclysm? I always thought that was just a joke
It was the 2nd worst expansion. The worst was WoD.
@@adamadamadam83Not true at all. Shadowlands, TBC, WOD and BFA were worse than Cata
TBC was fine. Agree otherwise. Was a perfect extension of the WoW that already existed, long, tonssss of content on release. And feel free to hate me but I liked the convoluted progression systems. Meant I could play at any point in that expansion and easily find people that needed to do the same things as me for progression@@mattiaskollnitz9794
@mattiaskollnitz9794 Why didn't you like TBC?
Really wish they'd bring reforging back to retail, especially with how Stat specific some specs are.
So I think 8 out of the 10 are absolutely spot on, and DEFINITELY number 1 with transmog, which opened up a whole new style of gameplay for a lot of players, casual and hardcore alike.
I disagree with number 5, and with number 3, that's some high grade copium and rose-tinted glasses shit right there.
Firelands might be viewed with nostalgic feelings now, but at the time, it was hated. It's no secret that T12 and T13 were two of the worst raid tiers in wow and having them back to back to close out an expansion was an absolute travesty. One tier of 7 bosses and one tier of 8 bosses was absolutely pathetic by normal raid standards and the playerbase burned out on them very quickly in the normal mode raiding scene.
In heroic is was different slightly, but no less frustrating, at least Firelands fixed the horrendous issues that T11 had with 25 and 10 man actually being balanced for each raid size as opposed to the disastrous BWD, BoT, and Tot4W raids. The problem was 6/7 bosses were pretty much on the same difficulty (with only Baleroc being a slightly higher challenge just because if you made one mistake with the crystals you were probably dead) and an absolute BRICK FUCKING WALL in Heroic Ragnaros. And of course, the phases that were the sticking point were the last two, meaning hours of sleeping through phases 1 and 2 and their intermissions to hopefully meet the dps check for phase 3 and then hopefully not getting fucked with roots on phase 4, not to mention hoping that blackflame didn't bug out, your designated fire manager was on their game, and about 14 other things going right just to ensure you could finally finish a 25 minute boss fight.
People only think of reforging through a modern lens, where hit/expertise caps are long gone and breakpoints are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they used to be. Reforging was tedious (often being managed by an addon such as reforgelite) and prevented you from equipping raid gear in the moment. Now of course ever since BC new gear has needed to be gemmed and enchanted before use, but now wiith reforging you often had to reforge YOUR WHOLE ARMOR SET based on new calculations from your addons.
A lot of people would prefer reforging just so they could always get optimal stats on gear, but that was because there were actual "dead stats" like too much hit or expertise. It was a welcome change to just get rid of those stats or bake them into classes which is what they did.
Bliz’s logic behind the Reforger removal has always felt to me like they just wanted people to not “settle” for a lesser piece of loot and to keep playing and farming over and over to get the piece that was actually bis. A simple “time-engagement metric” that they were so big on.
Wouldn't it be so cool if Cata Classic came out, you could choose to quest in OG zones or cata zones.
For me personally Cata was the favourite expansion. And i am still awed with how much work they have done about the locations
The Molten Front was awesome. Quit last of cata.
I find it very funny when people roast cata and some of the other old xpacs. Pandaria is my favourite expansion, Cata is an easy second. I think if you were to ask people why they don't like the expansions they wouldn't remember. I believe most people are just riding the hate train and now it's just etched into their brains that they must have been bad expansions if so many people are hating on them
A lot of these reasons could also be seen as negatives
Yeah I was thinking the same lol. It's disappointing when the best things the expansion had to offer are negatives for many people.
10:16
LMAO, I died at ten Arcane Blasts on spellbars :D Everything you need to know about mage rotation
It really is insane thinking about how much development work this xpac must have taken.
What’s the point of allowing items in void storage to be account wide but must be soul-bound?
My self-imposed endgame was climbing mountains and getting out of bounds so Blizz fixing the map and allowing flying on Azeroth really put a damper on my fun.
Whatever would have come after wotlk, players would have hated. Cata was excellent, the issue was the people.
I started in TBC and I loved Cataclysm. I felt like it combined some of the best parts of TBC and Wrath but just ended on a bit of whimper. AQ40/Naxx, BT/Sunwell, & ICC were all great ending raids and I don't think Dragonsoul lived up. I think people forget how great heroics and T11 was, I just think it was a shock to the system for raiders who had joined only in WotLK. The raid tier reminded me a lot of TBC.
#8 is a pretty big minus for me and all the good things doesn't help the fact that the last raid of Cata was so bad that a Cataclysm Classic is basically an auto-pass for me. Even though I loved pre-nerf dungeons/T11 and Firelands is one of the best raids IMO.
Just stop playing when Dragon Soul launches and pretend like the expansion is over.
My only problem with cata was the last raid in how stupid it was for parts and the ending of it.
Atleast it tried something uniqe. The actual lore ending was still cool. But Nzoth being lazer beamed to death after building him up for 15 years of wow was even dumber than the warlords ending
Although my favorite was wotlk, i was extremely hyped for cata i cant explain it with words, i also played all the starting zones multiple times, the world was so much more alive than before and the graphics were absolutely insane, especially the water! I only hated raid finder in cata, everything else was awesome. I tend to think mop ruined wow and changed it into what it is today, starting with pokemon like pet battles and classes losing their identity.
You forgot shadowland which is the real culprit of wow dying.
Correction: Gnome Hunters we’re not added until Legion
We don't talk about Vashj'ir because that place is scary.
I been playing since Vanilla and Cata is still my favorite; it’s the perfect balance of streamlining things while still making elements actually matter (like questing, professions, etc).
Also for someone who didn’t have time to raid - both Tol Barad and the heroic-specific dungeons were challenging and fun! 💪🏽👹👍🏽
I only agree about tabard rep, void storage, and the (damn cool) Firelands raid.
Everything else you listed as a positive was IMO a detriment to the MMORPG experience and a large part of why I dislike Cata and retail.
I mean the only negatives i remember were the loss of some rpg elements. (Weapon skill for one) and dragon soul. I personally loved cata and that was my most active expansion
I was so hyped for cata. But when i had to quest under water I quit the game right away and started again in in pandaria.
was wondering if i could do a sort of reaction to this video. not only showing your thoughts but id be able to add my own experiences with cata.
guild abilities like Have Group Will Travel, omg i miss it so much lol... idc what anyone says, cata was actually really good and had very few problems imo....
like look at Cata, and then look at the absolute trash cans that are WOD, BFA, and SL lol... cata was a masterpiece by comparison
Dont forget tons of QoL changes like AoE loot, mount collections etc
Yeah classic plus with aoe loot would be good.
QoL changes dont make cata any better
I keep saying it: Cataclysm was good!
Challenging Dungeons, Old World Revamp, good raids, Transmog, Molten Front, Archeology, Sandstone Drake and so much more
But the final Patch..
Dragon Soul and the Dungeons..
It was so bad and also it lasted for almost a year.
It was sooo bad.
Cata was my second favorite expansion right behind Legion
I hated reforging so much. When you got a new piece of gear, it completely destroyed your hit and expertise cap so you had to reforge your entire gear over. Hit and expertise and their caps were an extremely pointless mechanic but that's not even a problem with reforging but a problem by itself
Yeah you can never overstate the amount of work/effort they did put into cataclysm, at least compared to other WoW expansions in similar amount of time
I did enjoy my trinket Vial of shadows on a feral before it got nerfed I wonder if they gona place that item pre nerf or post nerf
I'm slightly biased since i started playing during cata, but honestly.. It was extremely alt friendly, had some of the most long lasting additions to the game that are still meaningful and i'd argue firelands was one of the best raids ever.
Cata is underrated and over-hated. It was the peak of my WoW experience, with WotLK, Legion, and Dragonflight being right behind.
We are further from the Cata world revamp, than the Cata world revamp from classic WoW.
Yea its even more extreme cata came out in 2010 13 years ago 2010 -13 is 1997 the year diablo 1 came out .but it gets even crazier. vanilla wow came out in 2004 19 years ago 2004 -19 is 1985 the same year as the original super mario bros.
OK I gotta say, reforging wasn't great at all.
Like in the end it was just about putting your name on some websites and it would take all your stuff and calculate the best possible combinaison.
I may have been with some tryhard people, but they were pushing on me to do that the way it was presented rather than letting me f*ck around with it. It wasn't really great.
And even if I complain about, yeah fine tuning is cool, but could be really boring really fast, and I 100% used those websites 'cause I'm not gonna work with it at every piece of equipement I got, it was just too much time.
Too me what made Cataclysm a good expansion was the revamp. Like I did a human Hunter, and god I loved all the humans questline, that are deeply connected, even if it took a more cartoon-ish side, it still was entertaining. All quests from a region bring you to this big last quests with a lot of things happening, and where they try to made it as dopamine-filled as it could, it was really a good time.
Just to compare, I did only 2 reroll in Wotlk, I did all 7 others in Cataclysm since I enjoy it so much.
I played cata for 10 years on private servers. For me it is one of the best expansions. Cata had the best pvp and pve combined. There are expansions with better pvp, with better pve, but none of them were so good, entertaining and balanced in both of these playstyles. Don’t forget about 70-74 and 75-79 twink bracket. I play wow for 16 years, tried and played every expansion for at least half a year, and I never had so much fun than on cata 74 twink spamming 20BGs daily, speedrunning tbc raids and killing opposite faction in Northrend. But 99 % people didn’t experience it. I highly suggest to try it. We literally had 200k hk on our twinks, more than 99 % people on max level.
Actually I had a lvl 74 ret paladin twink back in OG cata and that was a blast, I was definitely thinking about doing something like this again
In cata i was doing a lot of pvp because there was nothing better to do and because my friends like it .but i really got sick of it after a while i couldn't stand the bgs anymore i remember bg ques getting a lot longer in mop in cata they where always instant at level 85. also does anyone know about another mmo where twinking is a thing ?
Hw abt gathering, is it like retail? 1 mining/herbal node that can be gathered by more than 1 player?
I don't care nearly as much as I used to but I used to be apart of that minority that thought xmog was a net negative for the game, I like to just look at someone and be able to eyeball what they are sporting without having to inspect them - if they had a way to disable transmog from your perspective I would be all for that
Since I moved to a RP server I much prefer this, but back when I no-lifed the game and PvPed and raided and such, I had a similar view.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark you're right it's definitely coming from a very old perspective when I was super into the game like that, so when taking a step back it's better to just let people have their fun and not be so uptight about it - thanks for the change in perspective lol
Whats one of the best things i loved in cata is the Heroic dungeons being brutal
Yeeees i remember how hard they went at first, and it felt so good after crushing WotlK heroics
Played since Bc, but Cata was my first time getting into raiding and all the other stuff. Cata will always be my fondest memory. Great times back then
Same. Nostalgia, as Cata was my 1st timebwith WoW.
3:26 What about Vashj'ir? Vashj'ir deserves more love.
I really REALLY enjoyed just about all my time with Cata. Yeah, it really sucked that there was a ton of cut content, but the classes all felt fun to play imo (even paladins like ret and holy were weird with combo generators, and I understand why not everyone likes them but it was pretty alright)....the ONLY issue I ever had with the game was that final raid being the only form of content in the final patch, which could easily be fixed today by making a new raid (or just moving on to MOP classic only after a few months).
The first what 4 or 5 raids the game had were very fun, difficult but not so difficult that it ever felt unfair (even when half the player base was horrible at the game, finding that right group to be with to do heroic/hard modes with made it beyond enjoyable) and even dungeons at the start meant something to gear up first and weren't "Pull everything and press 1 ability each person to clear the trash".
I think it could have been a much better expansion with changes, but I never understood (beyond that final raid fiasco lasting over a year) why people thought it was so horrible, especially the start of the expansion which had 4 fun raids with unique mechanics (Firelands, Bastion of Twilight, Blackwing Descent, and Throne).
A lot of these are highly debatable, if not negatives. Firelans, transmog, and the race/class combos are really the only ones that I think the majority people would consistently say were good, the rest were all polarizing (old world revamp, phasing, flying, tabard, cities), or actively disliked by many (reforging, void storage).
Hiru wants to soften us up for Cata Classic? 👀
Cataclysm was overall a good expansion, and it clearly had a LOT of effort put into it (unlike the lazy job of WOD). But whereas WOD they just obviously didn't care and decided to throw whatever crap they could make quickly out, Cata they clearly put effort in, but that effort was not always put into the right places.
Wod would probably be my favorite expansion if their was one more raid where we dealt the final blow to the iron horde which would then lead to gulfan continuing to corrupt them.
Twilight's hammer music some of the best music in media
The number one best thing that cata brought us is the worgen playable characters
Why not use this for the 1st of April video?