Streamers always talk bad about group finders. Esfand did it. Asmon did it. Then when Blizzard finally listened to the players instead of the influencers, it was too late for WOTLK. These people have armies of viewers. They're effectively using a group finder every time they go live, they just get to pick and choose who they invite. They aren't making groups out of their friends. They're making groups with their viewers. It's essentially a "Let Them Eat Cake" argument.
@@nuke2099 genuinely curious… I have only had bad experiences with group finders. Where as people I find manually almost always stick with the dungeon, are engaged socially and gameplay wise, and a generally friendly. RDF people are assholes, leave randomly, and frequently don’t engage socially…
The problem for me was that lvling was so fast you out lvled a zone before you even finished the quests. There was no time to even just be in for a while, just a conveyor belt of content.
@Vida_99 not to mention classic wrath is worse with the XP boost and in both original wotlk and now in classic, lots of people started just dungeon finder leveling
Man I remember watching TotalBiscuit's PTR playthrough of the worgen starter area and how the worgen mount would glitch out making you into a worgen holding your human form in your left hand with a speedboost. Man I miss TB
The thing that I always found baffling was that the destruction in Cata was cool... It reset what people knew about the world and had an end boss that was actually affecting the environment, it was bold at the time. BUT then they just bounced over to Panda land, and left the world exactly the way it was with Cata. It would have been amazing to have an interim expansion that had quest lines and world building focused on factions and races rebuilding their homes and fixing the world from what Deathwing did to it. THAT is the world we should have right now in retail and it still isnt exactly the case. They just keep adding worlds and islands.
that's the problem with wow, the old zones never evolves in relationship to the expansion, imagine in goldshire seeing DF npcs having daily quests that offers catchup rewards instead of vaults
Personally if they didn't just go to panda land and they instead just built up on Cata making it so the world would be getting fixed and healed and continuing what was made in Cata, then WoW wouldn't be where it's at today in retail. They totally dropped the ball with MoP.
I never understood why the old overworld had to be deleted to make way for the revamp. I thought it was stupid now, and I thought it was stupid back then to. The talents and everything else got nerfed. They should have kept in weapon skills and ammo as well as every other rpg feature. I mean, hybrid speciliaztions were so fun. It became boring when mages had only frost moves for frost mage. Only frost dks had frost spells and frost runes only. Never understood why they did that. It just felt like so much to take in. As cool as the revamp was, and it was. They removed the old overworld. Never will forgive blizz for that. I just want one permanent version of wrath classic servers. Wrath was so good. Never should a mmo delete stuff like that. It's find to have exclusives. But man did it suck to be told, oh yah. That old overworld. You are never coming back. I also felt like the old deadmines and old sfk were way better than the revamped ones. Kind of deleted the idea behind transmog to. So much stuff you couldn't even transmog because they were deleted. Just so frustrating. Like you shouldn't have to give up old content to appreciate new content. For the next several years, blizzard had a perma boner for deleting shit in the game for really no real reason. And it just was stupid to me.
If they wanted to do the Classic reboots they should have just done each expansion on their own servers. better data to collect on what people really enjoy and then make future expansions better from that.
This would make everyone happy but i dont think it would last. Less enjoyed expansions would have very few players and that would sabotage the experience for the people that actually want to play that expansion. Personally i think this sort of «recall» to the past with each previous expansion in order while also leaving vanilla as permanent was a good choice.
I started and WotLK, and so Cataclysm was the first time I've been there for day one of an expansion drop. It brought huge changes to my favourite class, paladin, by introducing Holy Power as a resource. I loved the zones that came with it, and the dungeons were a genuinely challenging experience, and the last time I've seen a dungeon that REQUIRED CC to get through. I'm excited to play it again, but I also think that it goes completely against the spirit of WoW "Classic", because Cataclysm was the expansion that destroyed the Old World.
YUP! spot on my friend. Cata, at that point where it dropped was something that IMO was needed, you had the "old" world build on old stuff and then you went in to Wrath with its new mechanics etc. There was ... a gap, a really big gap that didnt make the leveling experience "fun". Cata did break the world but it also changed it so people didnt feel like they were doing the same thing AGAIN. At least to level 60 (at that time). But is it a smart move to bring Cata again like that? No, what people wanted was the "classic" experience of Vanilla WoW, BC and Wrath. Cata isn't in that ball park.
Cata is the first expansion the game became fun and classes became entertaining . There is 0 gameplay on all classes before cata. I’ve been playing since OG TBC . And I think the biggest divide between people that play retail and classic . Classic players are not there for the gameplay . They don’t mind pressing 1 button for a whole rotation
I remember going into deadwind pass with my first character when my level was in the mid 20s or early 30s. Felt exactly what Asmongold describes about how it adds to the experience seeing endgame zones at such a low level.
While I agree, there's more to the game than just this and Cata added a lot to the game, a lot of good things. I've played WoW since Vanilla, back when I was 14 in 2004... I loved the game back then, games were different and as a result what I expected out of them was a lot different... Nowadays with all the changes to WoW over the years, while I hate the latest expansions, I've started to find things like TBC and Wrath dungeons to be an absolute chore, the sheer amount of CC is just... boring. Like I want to play my class, not have control taken away from me constantly, that's really dull, at least make it so I can avoid this kind of stuff... Which is what they really started focusing on from Cata onwards, instead of just constant unavoidable damage in the majority of content, there was more avoidable stuff added in and less CC which made combat feel more engaging, like I'm playing my class, I'm able to actively do things in response to attacks to ensure I don't get dead without having to have some CD up or rely on another idiot in the group to use theirs (they never do) Not to mention the intricacy of quests, they became more engaging if not as expansive. Pre-Cata quests were almost always "go here, kill this", "go grab this quest item" or "go talk to this guy"... very few if any notable quests that AREN'T like this back then and while those quests can be good, when they're pretty much all there is they get a bit stale, at least to me, as a now 33 year old (that still has all day every day to play video games). I can happily say, now that everyone's had their fun with Vanilla, TBC and Wrath, it's my turn to play my favourite expansions and I'm extremely excited and there's sadly a lot of people in the community that are sitting complaining that people like me now get to enjoy our expansions while we sat quietly and waited while they enjoyed theirs.
@@I_Crit_My_Pants Idk, for me the "go here, kill this" is not a bad design because if you spend time reading then it feel real, when I lvled my undead warlock and the quest giver said bringe me 6 bat wings so I would make a blanked because I feel cold it felt natural for me and different than the others. So mostly those quests are just bad if you don't read and just accept - complete it
But nobody did that in Cataclysm because it was too linear and everybody experienced this happen already in the classic world. I was happy to have the empty spots on the map filled finally and the travelling wasn't as bad because of portals but it also made the world smaller. In Wrath you had to fly from Tundra to Stormpeaks and in Cata you just hearthed and took the portal.
@@I_Crit_My_Pants just shows you never read quest texts. Classic is teeming with memorable quests and I can't remember a single chain from Cataclysm because that was exactly the boring experience Nixxiom said. Less CC? CC was ramping up even more than before because I was mainly a PvP player. Tell me about not playing my class - they added more CC which lead to the exact opposite.
I have a story like that with Nagrand (started in TBC). I was level 61 or something, and I was exploring Shattrath. I stepped foot into Nagrand and was absolutely blown away. It was such a beautiful zone that I stepped foot into it just to check it out. I then was chased by a level 68 elekk and died. It was worth every second and I knew EXACTLY where I wanted to go to level.
Another reason why changing the old zones damaged the game that is not nostalgia: it made it so new players cannot relate to the experience of journey of old players, dividing the community and separating veterans and newbies even more.
I would argue the "new world bad" players were more damaging than the world changing. The world became better. They updated zones to have a more coherent story instead of loosely tied together stories that barely made sense to the greater world. Was it perfect? No way. There was problems with the new world too. But the experience of leveling 1-60 and leveling 1-85 wasn't different because the world changed. It was different because the game wasn't months of leveling to get to max. It was leveling AND all the end game content, with a new method to enhance gearing and a new method of using LFG(Which was still pretty new at the time) to help enhance all of that. You run dungeons and farm up rep to get some of your gear to help you get into heroics and then progress into raiding. The game was no longer a weird disjoined path to end game raiding, you had a laid out plan for what you had to do starting from level 1.
@@entryofemotion12 I mean i dont dislike Vanilla, but when im now watching some HC streamers, it just comes back to me how bad the Vanilla World just was. Some Quests took hours - not of epic fights and content, but of running around half the world for no reason (look at you, SM quest...) - and a lot of Zones were just dead ends with pointless, scattered quests (like Desolace, Aszhara, Hinterlands and literally every zone from lvl 50 upwards...). When i was leveling up an Alt in Wrath back in the days, i literally spammed dungeons, cause it could not force myself to go through the 1-60 Threadmill again. From Cata onwards, i basically leveled every alt in Vanilla, cause the quests made kinda fun again.
@@Fartboy226 ye, I myself started after the world revamp, and I always had this feeling like I missed out on something great, and I will never be able to truly understand what the game was about
@@MrVaeron I am of the opinion that people can prefer the old world, but the new revamp was just objectively a better experience. Like you mention...running across half the world because you have to go deliver an item to someone who was in a different zone because "I don't know" just never was exciting, and it one of the most painful things about the Classic experience. Like I love playing the game. But then you have a 7 or 8 minute run through a zone just to get to the parts you need to be at....and it's just not fun or engaging. I've gotten to where I have stuff to read up and I just numlock and read a bit just glancing back to make sure I stay on track while I run. Just because I don't want to sit there and waste my time. These days in retail I also just do Vanilla stuff. None of the quests are hard and it's very easy to just pound out 2-3 zones in a couple hours, and if you want to tank or heal it you can knock out Vanilla dungeons too, though some of them have also had their revamps, and it's a pretty painless experience.
Brooo I read Day of the Dragon in middle school. I was that kid who chose it as a book for class and had to give a book review in front of my class. At the end, I got the grading sheet from the teacher and she wrote the title of the book as “Dave the Dragon”. Realized people must’ve thought I was reading a book for a 4 year old as a teenager.
So, I really do agree with the point that having a high level zone right next to a low level one is a great feeling even in new expac content. In dragonflight even I accidentally did this in waking shore in the black dragonflight area, I knew it wasn't going to stay hard but when you're 62 and you run into a 70 (or any other relative number) it just feels good.
I'm actually a little excited for Cataclysm classic. But that's just because Cataclysm was when I started raiding in WoW, but I wasn't able to experience all of Firelands because the laptop I was playing on was too weak to handle majordomo or Ragnaros, even on lowest settings. I kinda want to have a chance to see what I missed out on.
@@BrawndoQC By what metric and why do YOU get to decide that? For me and Mitchel cataclysm IS CLASSIC because its where we started playing, there was no real nostalgia for us in vanilla/tbc/wrath because we didn't play them.
I still remember the first time I was lifted into the air as the Chosen One by Elune and told that I and I alone was the one who needed to save the world. It was a terrible plot idea that only got worse over time.
@@dwarfminerwillieCata was the final and complete breakaway from how the game systems in actual classic functions. It couldn't be any less "Classic" Wow. Your nostalgia or when you began playing isn't an objective factor in this.
VashJir is such a cool zone. It’s one of the few zones that reading the quest text made so much better. I thought it was so cool you get shipwrecked on the zone, have to explore the wreckage, and complete quests under the boat. You don’t immediately have underwater breathing or an underwater mount and they get unlocked over time. And then you slowly make your way exploring the rest of the zone where quest givers have made camp in little caves. It’s such a unique zone and I really love the feeling that you were kind of stranded exploring this strange Naga infested ocean with only a small group of survivors
@skeliskull I only like vanilla really and see the rest of the expansions as sucky, and yet the underwater zones in cata are actually really awesome. the quests and mounts and lore and all that is pure shit, but the idea of an underwater zone belongs in the final version of vanilla. like the only way you can get there is you have to swim out into the ocean or something. it could be level 50 or something. everyting you said is right, it's such a unique zone and the stranded exploration was awesome.
I wouldn't have minded cata so much if they had just kept all the old content and zones in to. Vashjyr is still one of my favorite zones in the whole game. But they deleted all the other cool content for no real reason.
But hey, I love some of the story progression in Cata. Like what happened in the plaguelands. Argent dawn retook part of the city of andorhal, cenarion circle finally be able to grow some trees in desolace, the grim batol in wetlands finally have purpose, mount hyjal is finally open to the world, we now can see what uldum is and so on.
I loved the Legendary Daggers on my Rouge didn't like asshole DK/Druids taking them as I was the one on the Quest to get the wrap. Because I was there and on this they'd drop and of course some shithead would be ooooo purrrtyy orange I'll take ☠️🤦♂️
@@syrasmine Tech limitation is the issue here that was back in 2010, having a phase for every single players who are at different stages would be chaotic for them back then there was no layers tech CRZ (Cross Realm Zone) did not even exist yet and ETC. However they could 100% do this today in Dragonflight or the next expansion but probably won't, It would be cool though.
@@Vegeta-9000-and-a-half You say that, but even in BFA where there were quests about healing the world, we never saw any phasing for what parts of the world we did work to heal. I just think that phasing is hard to do and keep the game feeling fully "together" since a big problem people have with Retail is how there's no real sense of community in the game. Splitting up players at all is probably not the best way to deal with things, which is probably the real reason we don't see phasing to that extent. I think if we had even half the playerbase of the Wrath days they'd probably be more open to doing it.
Never played cata but have absorbed quite a bit of wow content so ignore me if I'm ignorant. They revamped the world, losing some while gaining a lot. I feel like the amount of new lore and how you interact with the quests, had a hard time sticking with players after they left the zone. Almost too dense. Then, it again became stagnant and left behind with future expansions. I'm sure if zones actually evolved throughout future expansions. It would be a massive upgrade.
I stopped playing after Cata. I never completed the expansion but I got about halfway through it, at least. What I remember is that I started to realize that I was just logging in to do dailies. This was the first time I felt this way, in WoW. One major change I recall changing my perspective is the ability to fly in the original zones. We were no longer tied to the flight paths and we no longer had to travel through the environment. I am not sure if this was a problem. But it did mean people skipped past a lot of the game.
Great point, total immersion breaker on several levels. Those beautiful green and purple trees in Ashenvale suddenly became low res 2D garbage from above.
Loremaster achievement was actually hard to get originally due to quests being so limited. Actually felt amazing to achieve and some of the quests were awesome. I still have some item to see ghosts in blackrock mountain, tho not sure if it does anything anymore. It was on a different level.
I'm running loremaster right now about to finish kalimdor... it's a slog lol but the old writing for some of the quests is so good. especially with that AI voiceover addon - really adds a lot of flavor to the game while running around
@@ep8310 hmm,i assume your talking about classic wow,otherwise not sure how u could on retail since they changed it all back in cata..,so that's still a thing huh,u can actually go through the process of getting the original loremaster achievement? That's awesome. Well, enjoy man, as fulfilling as it was,it was definitely brutal finding enough quests in some areas but felt worthwhile in the end. And just the things you'll see, is pretty cool.
I did this on a private server in Cataclysm and it was basically my last WoW checkbox. Now that I've done it, I don't really have any care to ever return to the game.
@@rulinggodsidly2941 unless he's talking about WotLK, no achievements in classic wow; I'm assuming he's talking about getting the loremaster achievement in retail which would involve doing the current questlines which woooould be any cata replacements. The loremaster achievement now is just broken up by expac, zone + specific questline rather than # of quests in a particular zone, and you have to do it for all expacs to get the title/ tabard afaik
@@jeremybot1 Ya i couldn't quite figure how you could do the ORIGINAL loremaster since everything got changed in Cata, so basically people can't read very well or they don't know what the word ORIGINAL means.
I'm like, one of the few actually looking forward to re-experiencing cata because I took a break from WoW due to playing wrath a little too hardcore. I think Cata has some good additions but the zeitgeist of people is they don't like it so no one is allowed to like it.
@@MrBeetsGaming I have a solocraft server of both wrath and legion. I do love playing on them, as on wrath I can set the talents per level higher and just fill out all the trees for hilarity. The problem is they don't really function like a regular server. Even private servers function a bit weird depending on how the owner sets them up and a lot of times the population just isn't there. Honestly if I were blizzard, I'd have it set up so for each expansion there's at least one dedicated era server and one rolling server that goes on like retail used to.
1. State that you look forward to playing cata. 2. State that you took a break during cata and thereby didn't play it as much as others 3. Get annoyed when the people who actually played it tell you it was shit. If you enjoy it, good on you. Unfortunately that doesn't disallow the rest of us from ranting about how cata sowed the seeds for the shitshow that was to become modern wow.
To me all of Catalcysm questing felt like a guided tutorial, rather than being sent out to a sandbox world where you have to figure out the path by yourself(and google).
I love Vashj'ir. Still to this day the top 3 zones I've had. I think it's beautiful/colorful. Seriously, I fear depths and when I went to its depths for the first time. OMG I shat my pants. Or when you have to go to the dungeon for the first time... OMFG I was freaking out.
It is one of my favorites also. I still don't understand why they had to delete the old overworld though. So in order to appreciate vashjyr and all this other cool shit. I have to accept the fact that I can never, ever EVER visit unflooded thousand needles again. Or visit og non split barrens again. Makes zero sense to me now. And made zero sense to me in 2010 as well.
For me it's similar to a lot of other opinions out there - Cata was exciting at launch but quickly became an obvious decline for the playerbase and fans quitting the game, and my memories of it are tainted by that slightly, as well as the fact the entire expansion builds up to what is a disappointing final boss encounter. I'll definitely be jumping in though to see how I feel about Cata now knowing what is to come.
good to hear you will return to cata. I think catas 80-85 content was some of my favorite content in the game. The dailies felt satisfying. Personally I would really love if they can make firelands last a little longer this time. It felt like firelands was out for only a few months, and then they tossed us into dragonsoul where we were stuck with that for the longest time.
@@pauls4522The problem is that people wanted "the game to be challenging again" so at launch they made it so you had to farm heroics to get blues to be able to the go and raid. They tried keeping it difficult and because of that overtuned a lot of bosses. One thing I think massively gets slept on is how good PvP was in Cata. There is always S tier comps and things like that but in terms of how classes played / CC and things like that it was really well balanced. Cata really is the blending point of classic era wow with modern wow. As far as the raiding experience there was still a lot of the "bring the player not the class" mentality that started around ICC. I personally find Cata much more enjoyable than MoP or WoD.
I think generally speaking, it wasn't a bad expansion and had alot of good moments. But the removal of the old overworld, was definitely not one of them. I hated the fact that the old overworld had to be deleted to make way for the revamp. It ruined the appeal of transmog to. So much gear that even to this day is still lost for transmogging because it is deleted. Even now I still request that they add the old overworld for chromie time. Alot of other things I didn't really care for either. The talent tree system in wrath was better in my op. I liked getting ammo on my hunter and weapon skills on shamans. Cataclysm just had so many problems and changes. Alot of stuff felt disjointed to, specially for leveling. I definitely feel it is imperative to have at least one permanent classic realm up. Vanilla sucked to in my op, and wrath was really where wow got really good. And I want to experience cata classic. But not at the cost of wrath classic.
They had to revamp the old world anyways so they could add flying mounts (which ppl really wanted) so it really isnt a huge step at all to doing something bold with the time. I also get why not everyone liked the idea at all. Its an interesting time in gaming history tbh
@@erikostebo2152 it takes away most of the original mmo aspect, because it forces you into other players. most fun i had was in classic and vanilla, so many rivalaries endend in long friendships
@@swardlertv1372yeah we fundamentally disagree on what makes a good mmo I guess. I don’t play wow or any game to make internet friends. I just want to do dungeons get loot. I don’t make relationships in video games.
I think its a bit like this : on paper the idea sounds amazing - You get to fight Deathwing, hes gonna change the zones and bring destruction. Yeah that does sound pretty epic. But when actually doing it in game and experiencing it, it kinda sucked. And the video says it too the zones felt disconnected and it didnt really make any sense. Its kind of like reading about something and in your head it sounds epic, but some things should have just stayed written and not actually implemented, or rather implemented in the way Blizz did it in Cata.
I mean just look at populations of Private Servers, before WoW Classic was even a thing. The most popular ones were for Wrath, then Vanilla, and then Burning Crusade. Every other expansion had a very small population.
the problem with the guild thing wasnt the incentive. it was that unless you were a big guild no one would join you. they wanted those rewards so they killed small/mediumish guilds for big ones because they unlocked everything.
this is strange to me because I'm actually pretty excited. TBC and cata are two of my favourite expansions at least in terms of endgame content. It's very cool and iconic to me, I had a lot of fun playing it back in the day
Cataclysm was panned for a few key reasons - Content difficulty, and content drought. A Classic version should be able to avoid both, but the stigma behind it being a 'bad expansion' will never be truly erased.
the stigma of Wrath being the super best xpac was deleted, why can't Cata have a redemption arc? after all, Cata is simply a much better game than Wrath.
@@nopnop9077straight up, tbc and wotlk honestly sucked gameplay and pvp wise. Cata was always the better expansion. Classic has already proved wotlk wasn't some amazing experience that everyone loved. It was simply the best game to play at the time. It was wrath and cod4. That's all anyone played. Cata only lost players due to the fact that gaming wasn't just world of Warcraft anymore. The entire gaming landscape changed during cata and the new era of constant game jumping became a thing. Too many new games for world of Warcraft to hold everyone's attention.
@@nopnop9077 Meh I disagree. I liked cata. But it deleted alot of stuff, and changed alot of stuff to. And I wasn't a fan of being told that I could never go back to the old overworld ever again. Like sorry but that is completely stupid. And classic era, wrath era was better in my op. Vanilla era just sucked. But, they won't give us permanent wrath classic servers. Like fuck this company.
i thought it was a great idea to have the cataclysm changing the way zones looked after the first 2 expansions. what i don't like is that after all these years later, the players/npc s have not done anything to heal the lands and just ignore it all. could have some really fun druid/shaman factions come together to help heal the the zones..... put out fires, regrow burnt area's, fix the dam and so on
They should have kept the old content in my honest opinion. The revamp was cool. But it sucked losing all the old content to. I hated that shit. It kind of made transmog less appealing to. Look at all this armor you want to transmog, but you can't because it was deleted from the game. Like I never will get the idea of deleting content.
@@goodknight6828 No. It absolutely did not. It needed the revamp. And the original 1-60 content that I could go to whenever the fuck I wanted to lol. I should be able to choose to do the revamp or the original 1-60 content at will at any given time playing cataclysm. Simple as that.
Benchmarking leveling was one of the last things I did before Cataclysm changed the old world, when they added some of the pre-expansion content before they changed everything. I was able to take a mage with full heirlooms from lv1-80 in just under 22h played, this was largely in part to having played for years and knowing optimal questing routes.
I started in vanilla day one and was the 2 rank 14 on horde on my server. Then raided through TBC and Wrath and quit as soon as Cata came out. Cata was the point where WOW stopped feeling like a real living and breathing World your a small part in. From Cata onwards it was catering to casuals and convinience at the detrimend off a community. Before people had a reputation on their server, their were rivalarys and everybody knew each other but all that was gone in Cata. But it started way before with stuff like realm groups, LFG/LFR finder and all that stuff. It thrifted more and more into a almost single player game with a lobby. They lost me on that road and Cata was the point where I had enough and clearly saw where WOW was heading. So I quit and never logged in again and looking back it was a wise move never felt more vindicateted. Edit: and don't forget that's where all the microtransaction store BS started big.
At first it was really cool to see the zones change... but most the zones changed in ways that weren't very satisfying. Rarely got to see the impact of our original quests, working for rambo was cool the first time but got old fast.
I dont understand why they dont just make separate servers for vanilla, tbc, wotlk, cata classic so people can pick which classic experience they want to enjoy.
I'm actually excited to see what Cata was like and how they do Cata classic (speaking as someone who started in Legion). From my experience, most of the hate for Cata stems from the "Dungeon/Raid Finder bad" or "Mah world building" groups. The actual reworking of the world I believe was overall positive for the health of the game, removing a lot of the piss-taking quests and making the world fresh again to explore. Granted the Cata-exclusive zones were... mixed (fuck off Vash'jir and Twilight Highlands), but it was still overall positive. I believe the actual features of Cata were probably some of the ebst decisions Blizzard ever made. Reworking the talent system to remove bloat and feature creep, guild perks to reward a guild for sticking together and doing stuff together, expanding the glyph system to allow more customization without making it overbearing, the reworking of a shit ton of classes to actually make them meet up to modern standards and be playable (looking at you Paladin and Hunter), were all exceptional for the game as a whole. I also like the story of Cata and how everything connects back to the expansion's villain. No, not Deathwing. N'zoth. Deathwing at this point was basically a mindless pawn of the Old Gods and N'zoth (the last living Old God at this point in the story) was sending him around the world essentially nuking everything to try and distract people while he set plans in motion for his escape. This also connects to each of the new zones (Naga being servants of N'zoth via a pact, the Highlands and Bastion being a base for Twilight's Hammer, the fire people trying to burn down Mt. Hyjal, Uldim being a center for Titan technology and Titan creations, and Deepholm being connected to the STonemother). Not to mention that the expansion involved all four of the Elemental Lords, which were basically SLAVE GENERALS of the Old Gods until the Titans came along! Looking into everything, you see how interconnected it is into N'zoth's bid for freedom and conquest, which wouldn't succeed until a decade later, but still! The early game zones are also an example of this connection to this story. A repeat from the last paragraph, the entire old world is basically getting nuked on repeat, and you're dealing with the fallout and consequences of that, and seeing people's reactions to everything burning down and changing around them. Now there are some aspects of the story I don't agree with (Insert "Wtf are you doing Thrall?" x9999 here), but overall each of the zones that got changed or introduced in Cata were all done very well. And if you still want that classic experience, Outland and Northrend were untouched. As for criticism to linearity, yeah, eventually everything will fall into linearity. It's called a meta (Most Effective TActic AVailable). While potentially you have a lot of choice, eventually people will gravitate to what's most efficient and what give the best result. Also the Dungeon/Raid Finder isn't really a problem as long as it's kept to entry levle content (AKA Normal Dungeons and Easy Mode Raids) for people who want to experience the story moreso than try to push high tiers. Like, any actual raid difficulty still needs you to find a group, and if they took away the Heroic dungeon queue I think it'd be perfect. Now there are some bad parts as well that I agree with. Yes, 4.3 way overstayed its welcome, same with 3.3 and 5.4. Archaeology was pretty much dead on arrivial. Yes it gets you cool swag, but leveling it and getting to that shit is so annoying and tedious that sometimes it's just not worht it. Some of the instance design fell flat on its face as well (cough Spine of Deathwing cough Nefarian cough Forgemaster cough). Also the level cap was... too low. Come on, WHY THE HELL didn't you go all the way to 90? Overall, I think that people will come back to Cata classic and find that it's actually aged quite well, and amybe Blizzard will throw some changes in to make it more appeal to their Classic audience (they've done it beforE). Now, if I end up wrong, fine, I'll be fine being wrong. But either way, I think this release will be a positive thing. Either people will come to appreciate the expansion more or Blizzard will learn that this is where things went wrong and use the experience to improve both sides of their game going forward. Either way, I'm happy to see what the future of Warcraft brings.
Leveling was too easy, making it not fun, were people to kill mobs, while leveling with her eyes closed. Removing group contact in leveling took away a lot of the social aspect. Making more rewards for guilds and making bad classes good, is good and should be done on their own without adding the rest of the Bad Cata expansion.
I enjoy listening to people talk about wow as its a game I've always loved but never got to really experience at a young age. Cata is consistently the most shit talked expansion in my experience. Cata is when a lot of people think the game started to go downhill.
@HellfireBowsa the linearity problem isn't cata's fault you're right that all things will fall into that eventually. the problem is that it should not have gone past vanilla to begin with. they should'ev stayd level 60 forever and just made that experience better. the ocean maps were A+, asmon is right, one of best zones wow ever did. the physical zone itself could belong in Vanilla and fit in nicely tbh. archaeology is also actually worthy of being in vanilla but it'd need ui tweaks to be 9999% more disjointed and difficult. like 100% of archaeology should be in text, nothing on the map whatsoever.
With classic i appreciate no push to be part of a guild (expect raiding probably) and i appreciate phases and associated currencies i can get through various ways, because in my mid 30s sometimes there is time of several weeks you just do not have time or energy to play. It is definetly great system also given a fact that i can get close with equip using currencies.
You know, at earlier points in my life I’d wonder why people would say they didn’t have the energy to play games because in my mind it wasn’t a physical activity. Now that I’m in my thirties I 100 PERCENT now get it. Just turning on my console sometimes is enough for me to be like “nah.”
25:40 soloing group quests was probably my favorite thing to do in vanilla and burning crusade wow. Honestly. That, and the raids which were way more wonky and satisfying back then. I remember downing rag for the first time, being like one of the first 100 guilds to do it. How much of a pain in the ass it was to get 40 ppl together, the dramma that would go on, and how my heart was racing the first time we got that guy. These dynamics just didn't exist anymore with group finder, and the massive toning down of difficulty on quests and the open world. Soloing 3 mobs was no longer this challenging thing to do anymore. Not only could the tanky classes do it, all the classes could do it, and mages started trying to farm like 20 mobs at a time and often it not being a problem. People started scripting it with macros. The game started being automated, which didn't make it a game anymore, it was a job and you were min maxing your farming routines and subroutines.
I'm excited for cata classic. In terms of gameplay, cata was where the game peaked for me. The huge improvement to leveling/quests, the better spec/talent/glyph systems, the challenging heroic dungeons, the abundance of new race/class combinations including goblins and worgens, flying everywhere, the updated areas like Orgrimmar and Thousand Needles looking way better than before, etc. Admittedly cata raids weren't the best but for every other aspect of the game it was an improvement. Leveling 80-85 and surpassing 100k health was fun. Note: I am not looking forward to MoP which was truly where the game went into terminal decline.
I tested cata also and i told them the way healing was screwed over was not acceptable. I played holy paladin and healing was impossible for me in cata.
Man I’m so glad I played vanilla-wotlk as a pre teen/young man back in the day. I quit right before Cata bc I was graduating high school that year and had big shit happening. I’ll never forget experiencing Azeroth the first time with 2 other buddies. Snow days meant wow all day baby. It was truly a special period of time.
I made 14 alts playing WoW from WoD but I would always unlock the Vashir, Deepholm and Twilight highlands portals on all of them. I would also do the WoD opening questline to unlock the portals in Warspear and Tanaan Jungle and get the garrison. Even on the alts I made in Legion. I liked the Vashir and Deepholm zones quite a lot. I also liked WoD Draenor. What I like about Classic WoW is I can level anywhere, well anywhere there are quests at my level. As a Druid I don't have to stay in Darkshore and Ashenvale. I can go to Eastern Kingdoms and level there and then go back to Kalimdor if I wanted.
The mobs have been nerfed and the characters buffed? I need to return to the game then! Update 7.3.5 ruined the game for me and I've played next to none of it since haha. Other than Classic, of course.
I loved raiding in Cata, it was the last time I was in a great group of people and connected outside of the game. 90% of my guild quit as soon as MoP came out.
when mop comes back around i know i'll be leaving. cata put me on the line with their talent system, but i ultimately loved cata. i justified it because of levels increasing. but then they gave us that atrocity in mop. i wont put myself through that again.
i think the new quests were worse because most of the new 'more engaging' things were one-click interactions about the level of fruit ninja, instead of the forays into dangerous territory of old where you needed to use your kit in different ways, and watch your surroundings. old just sounds worse because in essence its collecting drops over and over, but its differentiated by the adventure to get them. click the fire to put it out can't really go more than one way. on the lore side, the new quests were too memey too often, or else relied completely on prior knowledge of zone quests/npcs that are not there anymore. it's like going to a friends house to watch a series but they dont wanna start at the beginning again so you have to start halfway into season 2.
Dungeon spamming as a tank or healer was actually really fun, with enough heirloom gear you would barely have to repeat a dungeon and you'd get to practice your skills needed for raiding.
I loved Cata. My only real beef with it was at the very end where they did away with the old talent trees and introduced those 3 choice every 15 levels abominations that we had to deal with for the next decade after
@@jellyfrosh9102 People confuse it due to the pre-expac patch that was going on when a lot of people were still running dragon soul, but yep 100% correct
I didn't like how they deleted all the old content. That was such a dumb and stupid change. Ziridormi could easily just allow you to transfer between the revamped world and the old world at will. And cata would have been alot better.
The reason why so much players dropped off(aside from the world literally changing) during Cata was that it was too linear. It was a great first time experience because everything was well curated but essentially there was only one way to play it. It's great game design if it were a single player offline rpg but this was the most popular mmorpg at the time and it contradicted with many of the game's core designs. Many OG players who liked the original gameplay left and the new players it did attract left too because they were the more casual type players that Blizzard wanted by making the game easier and more linear.
As someone who was a 10 year old kid first playing World of Warcraft with Cata as my first expansion, I am hyped for it but it is more for me as a nostalgic trip through memory lane of first leveling up a Worgen Warrior (I was a ten year old kid and werewolves were hella cool to me as a kid). While I've played through classic to wrath now, I'm kinda excited to see that jump from wrath and Cata to truly understand that difference from old world to new in cata.
Good for you buddy, but that excitement you felt for Cata, that's what us older players felt for each of our expansions when we started playing the game, and given how the biggest WoW has been is Wotlk (12 Million) , it's fair to say that we lived through the best WoW had to offer in terms of gameplay/story and such. I had a bit of fun in Cata too, but real life responsibilities took the main seat over gaming so I guess that's why I couldn't even enjoy it as much as the others
i havnt played since cata but the zones are great and i like it more than a new island and new sub zone like we had since mop. it was nice to go back to tomb of sargeras, see pandaria and nazjatar (wasted zone) but now it gets pretty old and we have too much disconnected zones which results into teleporting around the world 10.2 was released in november and we have to wait almost 1 year too now 😂 nothing changed with long last patches.
@20:30 The assertion that 'everybody' wanted the leveling changes is simply not true... I did not want them so therefore EVERYBODY did not want them. I thought that the leveling had ALREADY been sped up too much by later patches in WotLK and wanted them to dial that back. Instead they tripled down making the leveling faster AND making the questing zones more linear.
He speaks from my heart. When I saw the sunken Auberdine, I knew I never wanted to see WoW again. The old world was sacred and no one had the right to screw it up.
WoD was it for me. But 1. I started in Cata & haven’t played for a few years; 2. I really enjoyed MoP which remains the “worst” expansion according to a significant portion of WoW players. (I’m basing this statement on YT comments)
@@jluchettethey said mop is bad because the guy to their left told them it was, they never actually played it. One of the best expansions theyve ever done, the SoO raid was so fucking cool.
@@jluchette more like MoP is the 'worst' according to a very loud minority who simply hate pandas. Legion was the worst, and has done more to damage the game than any other expansion with the revamp of the daily quest system into world quests and the addition of mythic+ which not only destroyed dungeon going but ruined the overall raiding experience. then every other expansion after was simply discount legion, even dragonflight.
I seriously dont understand why when i goto the blizzard laucnher i cant just choose wow classic tbc classic wotlk classic cata classic individually.. allow me to have a character start on any of them and if i complete for example vanilla wow give me the option to transfer it and clone it from the vanilla to tbc to join the chars i started on tbc seperatly if i want to
I loved it when you had to get on a flight path to get to a raid or a big questing area bc the mount would take you all over the island and you could see areas you missed or haven't seen yet. Plus it was just a great time to take a break while it carried you wherever you needed to go. I loved the cata raids but was extremely upset that teldrassil and ashenvale was gone. So many early memories there.
The only thing I hope about is getting the pet that allows you to turn into a flame cat I know it’s a mog you can use but I spent hours trying to get that in tmog runs to not get it and find out it had been removed from the game
I grew up on Warcraft 2. I not only knew who Deathwing was, but I had chosen to play the Deathwing server because I loved him so much. From a story perspective I was super excited when it was first announced that he would be coming to WoW. The Cata raids and dungeons were not was made the expansion garbage... it was the game overhaul. Destroying the old world and revamping the class and talent system that just made me fall out of love with my characters, and the nostalgia of leveling a new one was gone, since the quest zones had all been deleted. Add to the fact heavy phasing that kept me from questing with friends was the final nail in the coffin. If i was on a different step of a quest than my friend, I could not play with him. In party it would just say "player is in another phase", with no option to join it. It became a waiting around simulator, as we had leveled as a duo from day 1, despite being on very different schedules. I could no longer quest ahead and then come back and help him catch up when he got on. Cata was the reason i quit WoW... and sadly, it is the reason I am once again letting my subscription run out. It's back to random steam games for me... unless by some miracle they come back and say "woops, we forgot to mention WotLK eras at Blizzcon!" Edit to add: I forgot to mention Also, Cata was the first expansion to permanently remove collectibles from the game. So all those months or years you spent trying to get the ZG tiger or Raptor were wasted... you ran out of time. I got 3 raptors, and never once saw the tiger drop. ;-;
Replaying Classic, especially TBC, I joined this superb guild on Westfall server. It was alive, warm, and you could always find someone to run non-current content with (older dungeons and TBC dungeons - not only the last raid). That guild was composed of about 50% players who had never played WoW before and I got a smile listening to them talking about how great this game was... and I watched their soul progressively get corrupted as WotLK progressed. These are the guy that convinced me to get into WotLK again, I am and always will be a TBC guy, this is the ONLY xpac I want to play, FOREVER... yet they convinced me to join them. But when quit last March, they where all consumed into the raid treadmill. No longer could you play other dungeons, or even play together again except in those darned raids... Only ppl that would where the other WoW veterans who knew better, but there wasnt enough of us left in the guild at that point. I guess they're going to hit the Cataclysm wall head-on, like most if us did back then. And I am still angry, now what? 18 months later? that Blizzard pulled the plug on TBC. Not giving them my sub anymore either, but they aren't briging it back and it p*sses me off to no end. Never was a private server guy. So TBC is dead again, and with it, the warm cozzy guilds it created. Now that said, I will probably come back if they make a MoP server at some point, provided it's permanent and won't be deleted like TBC. But I've lost any and all trust in Blizzard these days. We'll see.
Im playing SOD right now. Haven't played classic in since 2004. Decided to give it another shot. AND OMG i honestly love the quest system. Almost every quest in the game is worse if you don't party up. Creating a reason to be social with others. Where as retail, my bread and butter, is in all reality a solo game. In Classic every upgrade I get feels great. Leveling is like the game itself. Ive been in the Barrens for 5 days now. This is ONE ZONE. I've been in more parties for quests than I ever have. I've been a retail andy, but this feeling that classic wow has given me is something I miss so much in MMOS. So glad I gave it a shot!
I remember everybody saying back during cata that the problem with the expansion was that it spent too much time working on renovation, and not innovation. Nobody really complained about a lot of the minutiae of it unless you were a sweaty die hard player. The underwater starting zone was probably the biggest pain point, and the initial 5 man dungeon rollout was unforgivingly difficult.
There was 28 weeks between 3.3 ICC and 3.35 Ruby Sanctum and a 24 week gap between 3.3.5 and 4.0.1. That's 52 weeks compared to 43 weeks from 4.3.0 to 5.0.5a. The end game gap wasn't anything unusual. Blizzard almost had the same problem with BC -> WotLK but they added in Sunwell to buy time. The reason it didn't seem as long is because ICC was gated when it originally launched.
Anything prior to update 7.3.5 was good if you ask me! I hope Classic doesn't ever catch up to that update and maybe it'll permanently stop at Draenor haha.
Agreed with Zack - I was so hyped about Deathwing after knowing the lore of the original Warcraft games. People who said Warcraft ended with Lich King seems like they only played WC3. Vashj’ir was epic - the first zone and only zone I completed to 100%
Vasjir is my favorite zone inn all the games. Cata was my first time playing wow, and i remember that zone sticking out compared to all the others. It was colorful, had cool questlines, and was overall a completely new experience. Il never forget vasjir.
I remember how my dad loved cata simply because they added archaeology so he could go back from his job (on wich he was a teacher of archaeology) just to do archaeology From my perspective there is nothing in WoW except social interacions, everything else is just like a worse rpg, why would i play WoW when i can play dragonAge, masseffect, n you name it. 2011 was a really good age of gaming so there were alot things to choose from esp if you want to play something to find people to socialise with.
I cannot get my head around the vitriol of hate towards Cata. Minus the colossal gaps between content, I found it to be a solid and fun expansion. I'd even go as far to say it's probably in my top two wow expansions. Personally, I'm looking forward ro adventuring towards Ragnaros and Deathwing once again.
I'm actually really excited for Cata, was peak PvP for me and my brother. I also learned tanking on my pally through Dragon Soul at that time. I probably spent the most amount of time playing that expansion than any others.
The reason Blizzard never did anything like adding zones to the old continents like they did in Cata was not entirely because people didn't like it, but If I was willing to bet, was because there is no "real estate" in the old world like there was during vanilla. Remember mount Hyjal, Twilight highlands and Uldum were already there is the old world, we just couldn't access it but the space was there in the map. And even with all that real estate they still had to tweak the world a bit to make those new zones bigger. Since they were already redoing the world for flying mounts to work in the old zones they might as well tweak them and add those zones that everyone was so curious about while playing vanilla. They couldn't just keep changing the continents to fit new stuff every expansion so we've just gotten new clusters of islands. I personally hope that by the end of the Darkness trilogy we get to see all the old world zones brought back into relevance into the present by using the "Zidormi" approach or adding an even better solution that allows us to just move in time in the world.
I absolutely loved cata. I personally think cata is actually peak wow. The qol updates were awesome. The guild system was great. I had the most social experiences I've ever had in wow in cata. Now I don't disagree with some of the criticisms and I agree with asmon that this was the first of the downfall of focusing on mmo players.
I don’t think cata was bad as an expansion, especially lore wise. But, I do think that classes really need huge fixes whether it was damage or healing. Some specs were just completely unplayable in either PvP or pve
As much as the instanced starting zones were great for storytelling, I think they killed some of the immersion that comes with creating a new character and immediately being dropped into the actual world.
16:09 Yeah you're right. Cataclysm was the first expansion where you "only" had to gain 5 levels, instead the usual 10. The thing was, those 5 levels took as much XP and time to level then 10 levels and the power gain was the same. They did the same with MoP, but by that time people where used to that.
Cata is when I really started playing wow, before I dabbled with TBC pirate servers, but cata retail was awesome, at least until dragon soul. I had 5 max level twinks, and that’s the only expansion I had any max level twinks…
I agree. It was alt-friendly. And if you go on Netherwing right now (the best TBC private server) half of it is just Chinese Horde and the rest are insular guilds. There's no game for pugs.
Cataclysm was a great expansion. The biggest cause of hate was the year long drought on last raid... And the fight with Death wing being a letdown. Phasing was also in its infancy, so that awesome unlock chain for Hyjal could be annoying when your friends were in different parts. But sync came in a bit later and fixed most of that. And, come on, Firelands was EPIC writ large. Though... there were two major oversights: Because of the spread out high level areas, no one had a reason to SEE many of the new quests. And there were several awesome chains that I KNOW the bulk of people probably never saw. The be a quest giver on the Horde side was just a cool chain. And they should have updated and moved Quel'thelas, Ghostlands, and Azurmyst to the main maps. Those whole areas are in dire need of updating. I think, technically, the Exodar was fixed and hovering over the island by Pandaria.
After going from Classic Vanilla into Wotlk, I just do not see it going well. From my experience each expansion step in difficulty chops off huge percentages of guild rosters who are just unable to complete the raids. Classic we did absolutely no recruiting and had players in Kel'Thuzad progression that had to learn to move their character for the first time a few months prior. TBC's increase in difficulty was low, but our roster still had to replace about 5-10 people who could not perform in SSC, TK, BT, or Sunwell. Fights like Vashj were huge indicators that some of our roster were not coordinated enough to understand the fights, even after working with many of them 1 on 1 to help them improve. Wotlk was an entirely different beast for us. Throughout WoTLK we went through 50-60 raiders and applicants. Once we reached Ulduar it was clear you needed another level of coordination to do fights like 0 light and Agalon during early progression. Personal responsibility was at an all time high for Classic expansions during WoTLK and our guild suffered. We killed Heroic Lich King with 12~ of our starting 35~ roster. People quote things like Covid being the huge stabilizer for Classic Vanilla, but sub numbers were higher in the past when less people had access to the internet or personal computers, literally hundreds of millions of more people have access compared to 2004. I think this is just poor judgement and analysis from people who have not lead a guild during any of the Classic expansions. The reason Classic was more successful is because its accessible to ANYONE. The simple fact is that ANYONE can sit in Molten core, spam 1 ability, and kill bosses. They need to just realize what the game is and develop two separate type of games. Retail should be competitive and hard content. Classic should be easy and accessible RPG content. They are making Cata for maybe 5% of the original Classic Vanilla playerbase.
For us it was running into Western Plaguelands from Tirisfal Glades. We ran down the road just to see what was in there, only to be greeted and murdered by a giant lvl ?? bear. Notice another detail to classic wow was that they made higher level mobs, bigger in size, so when it came running, not only did you know it was dangerous, but also that you are small in comparison to it.
Lot of good points here. It went from a sandbox to a rollercoaster ride, I thoroughly enjoyed cata when it was first released. I feel like SOD just completely shadows cata classic.
The sheer size of the world was made dramaticly smaller with the addition of flying in eastern kingdoms in cata, it really hurt the overall mystery of the world when that was added, most of the changes in cata was due to people complaining in Wrath
Cataclysm turned the game into easy mode. Before Cata, I only had one 60 character. After Cataclysm I had max level characters on both Horde and Alliance.
I enjoyed the easier and more relaxing gameplay of Cata. Even prior to that, the difficulty was still fair and laid-back. It was update 7.3.5 that ruined the game for good with cheap difficulty mechanics and that awful level scaling, etc.
out of all 4 classic expansions so far cataclysm was actually my favorite. i played the most and started pvping for real and hit high rating. it was my overall best time in wow probably. but im still not that excited for it. dont really know why. honestly if they added mythic + to cata i might be more excited.
Your opinion about the quests in Vanilla WoW is spot on! In Classic you have to put more effort into finding quests, they are not linear, and the game forces you to go on an adventure to find them
Imo the lost its fun while leveling when they started making all the quest items sparkle and the mini map had quest locations on it. It seems around the time cata came out everything became ENDgame focused and blizz took the fun out of the game to rush everyone into endgame.
I thought it was a mixed bag. I liked most of the new zones though they were a little drawn out. I liked some of the quality of life stuff and by the last patch it was was pretty good. What I didn't like was a lot of the revamped zones. In Kalamdor it was needed in a lot of zones because they always seemed unfinished. Thousand Needles and Tanaris being the only exceptions. Darkshore I'm on the fence about. In the Eastern Kingdoms most of it was annoying. I didn't mind the "time jump" with new buildings but the deathwing destruction was really annoying. The removal of weapons points and grouping of quests was also kind of annoying. I do get the point of it being cleaner though. I hated losing Southshore but I did find the Forsaken changes interesting. The game just became to linear and it lost a lot of the magic. I started at Cata launch and didn't hit 85 until about 3 months before MoP. After that I pretty much quit the game until Legion. I'd come back periodically to check things but nothing held my interest. I did enjoy MoP fresh leveling in Legion though.
Yes it was, people love pawning that off on Cata though. They love trying to do that for LFR too but that came in dragon soul at the very end of the expac and was basically something made for mist.
0:30 Also, to be even more fair, you could only understand every 3rd word she said. I'm not trying to be harsh or mean, but she has a really thick accent that was pretty hard to understand with the echo and acoustics of the hall being picked up as well.
tell me you've played since Vanilla and now you're only playing vanilla thinking about your childhood when mommy was feeding you on your s**t bucket without telling me so :D@@loosecannon6142
ROFL Cata is A) not "classic" and B) was the reason why my whole 70 person guild left the game. The few stragglers that remained ended up forming their own guild and complained to us over Vent that it was shite and they hated it. I came back for Pandaria and only went back to Cata to farm mounts and hunter pets. It was just crap (to me), I was miserable the entire time and seemed even MORE crap after the masterpiece that was Lich King. OK, Some of the earlier raids and dungeons were really fun... but in general? And they trashed everything that we loved in the world, and for what? What was the plot... everyone from the dev's to Deathwing literally lost the plot. There was no plot!
For me it became obvious throughout the end of wrath and certainly with Cata that you're just playing a worse version of retail. I enjoyed Vanilla classic and TBC classic as it felt different to what retail was offering more of a adventure, a slow immersive journey, just a different vibe to retail but not so much with Wrath and certainly not Cata.
It's like back in the 80s and 90s you'd go to the stores to go shopping, the layout forced you to explore and you'd find things you didn't intend on buying and you'd make a day of it and go with family or friends and have fun. Now you go online and get precisely what you need in a few clicks and it feels more like a chore than fun because it's designed entirely for functionality and not experience. Even if you go to the store now you know everything they have because of the internet so the stores don't have the same role anymore.
“Cata started at level 85 whereas Classic started at level 1” - I really like this quote as an explainer. Reminds me of the Southpark where they finally grind to max level and the answer to “what now?” Is “now we can finally play the game” 😅
Streamers always talk bad about group finders. Esfand did it. Asmon did it. Then when Blizzard finally listened to the players instead of the influencers, it was too late for WOTLK. These people have armies of viewers. They're effectively using a group finder every time they go live, they just get to pick and choose who they invite. They aren't making groups out of their friends. They're making groups with their viewers. It's essentially a "Let Them Eat Cake" argument.
PREACH
Asmond is a hypocrit when he said "People like that want to get carried" when all he does is play the game by getting carried.
I hate group finders with a passion… play League of legends if you don’t like MMOs…
@@tainicon4639 I would rather not lose what's left of my sanity thanks. I will stay with group finders.
@@nuke2099 genuinely curious… I have only had bad experiences with group finders. Where as people I find manually almost always stick with the dungeon, are engaged socially and gameplay wise, and a generally friendly. RDF people are assholes, leave randomly, and frequently don’t engage socially…
The problem for me was that lvling was so fast you out lvled a zone before you even finished the quests. There was no time to even just be in for a while, just a conveyor belt of content.
That's a really good point, and one I experienced also.
+1 to conveyor belt. You get no time to take in the story in like any zone or dungeon.
Yup, this was a big part for me.
Zone lore was downhills from there to me.
i mean the same happened for me in wotlk honestly
@Vida_99 not to mention classic wrath is worse with the XP boost and in both original wotlk and now in classic, lots of people started just dungeon finder leveling
Man I remember watching TotalBiscuit's PTR playthrough of the worgen starter area and how the worgen mount would glitch out making you into a worgen holding your human form in your left hand with a speedboost. Man I miss TB
Classic
RIP TB
HahaahHH!!!!
I miss him and his content, i really liked "WTF is X?!" he also was one of the few curators you could take seriously on steam
Tb was a legend RIP
The thing that I always found baffling was that the destruction in Cata was cool... It reset what people knew about the world and had an end boss that was actually affecting the environment, it was bold at the time. BUT then they just bounced over to Panda land, and left the world exactly the way it was with Cata. It would have been amazing to have an interim expansion that had quest lines and world building focused on factions and races rebuilding their homes and fixing the world from what Deathwing did to it. THAT is the world we should have right now in retail and it still isnt exactly the case. They just keep adding worlds and islands.
that's the problem with wow, the old zones never evolves in relationship to the expansion, imagine in goldshire seeing DF npcs having daily quests that offers catchup rewards instead of vaults
Personally if they didn't just go to panda land and they instead just built up on Cata making it so the world would be getting fixed and healed and continuing what was made in Cata, then WoW wouldn't be where it's at today in retail. They totally dropped the ball with MoP.
I never understood why the old overworld had to be deleted to make way for the revamp. I thought it was stupid now, and I thought it was stupid back then to.
The talents and everything else got nerfed. They should have kept in weapon skills and ammo as well as every other rpg feature. I mean, hybrid speciliaztions were so fun. It became boring when mages had only frost moves for frost mage. Only frost dks had frost spells and frost runes only. Never understood why they did that.
It just felt like so much to take in. As cool as the revamp was, and it was. They removed the old overworld. Never will forgive blizz for that. I just want one permanent version of wrath classic servers. Wrath was so good.
Never should a mmo delete stuff like that. It's find to have exclusives. But man did it suck to be told, oh yah. That old overworld. You are never coming back. I also felt like the old deadmines and old sfk were way better than the revamped ones. Kind of deleted the idea behind transmog to. So much stuff you couldn't even transmog because they were deleted. Just so frustrating.
Like you shouldn't have to give up old content to appreciate new content.
For the next several years, blizzard had a perma boner for deleting shit in the game for really no real reason. And it just was stupid to me.
@@1ViivviiX1 but that chinese market they tried to capture, all china did was steal their source code then kick blizz out
If they wanted to do the Classic reboots they should have just done each expansion on their own servers. better data to collect on what people really enjoy and then make future expansions better from that.
This would make everyone happy but i dont think it would last. Less enjoyed expansions would have very few players and that would sabotage the experience for the people that actually want to play that expansion. Personally i think this sort of «recall» to the past with each previous expansion in order while also leaving vanilla as permanent was a good choice.
@@tianskullerud385 Then why add Cataclysm???? Just leave it at Wrath, like when does it end bro?????? Keep updating till retail lmao!?
@@colt4531 did you even read my comment? you clearly missed the point
You don't want to split up the player base like that in an MMO. So I don't think that would be a good idea.
I started and WotLK, and so Cataclysm was the first time I've been there for day one of an expansion drop. It brought huge changes to my favourite class, paladin, by introducing Holy Power as a resource. I loved the zones that came with it, and the dungeons were a genuinely challenging experience, and the last time I've seen a dungeon that REQUIRED CC to get through. I'm excited to play it again, but I also think that it goes completely against the spirit of WoW "Classic", because Cataclysm was the expansion that destroyed the Old World.
YUP! spot on my friend. Cata, at that point where it dropped was something that IMO was needed, you had the "old" world build on old stuff and then you went in to Wrath with its new mechanics etc. There was ... a gap, a really big gap that didnt make the leveling experience "fun". Cata did break the world but it also changed it so people didnt feel like they were doing the same thing AGAIN. At least to level 60 (at that time).
But is it a smart move to bring Cata again like that? No, what people wanted was the "classic" experience of Vanilla WoW, BC and Wrath. Cata isn't in that ball park.
Your the audiance they made this xpac for a wraith baby.
Play M+ if you think you don’t need to CC in dungeons 😂
Cata is the first expansion the game became fun and classes became entertaining . There is 0 gameplay on all classes before cata. I’ve been playing since OG TBC . And I think the biggest divide between people that play retail and classic . Classic players are not there for the gameplay . They don’t mind pressing 1 button for a whole rotation
Wait this shit dropped? I heard no news of this whatsoever maybe time to get back on wrath them
I remember going into deadwind pass with my first character when my level was in the mid 20s or early 30s. Felt exactly what Asmongold describes about how it adds to the experience seeing endgame zones at such a low level.
While I agree, there's more to the game than just this and Cata added a lot to the game, a lot of good things. I've played WoW since Vanilla, back when I was 14 in 2004... I loved the game back then, games were different and as a result what I expected out of them was a lot different... Nowadays with all the changes to WoW over the years, while I hate the latest expansions, I've started to find things like TBC and Wrath dungeons to be an absolute chore, the sheer amount of CC is just... boring. Like I want to play my class, not have control taken away from me constantly, that's really dull, at least make it so I can avoid this kind of stuff... Which is what they really started focusing on from Cata onwards, instead of just constant unavoidable damage in the majority of content, there was more avoidable stuff added in and less CC which made combat feel more engaging, like I'm playing my class, I'm able to actively do things in response to attacks to ensure I don't get dead without having to have some CD up or rely on another idiot in the group to use theirs (they never do)
Not to mention the intricacy of quests, they became more engaging if not as expansive. Pre-Cata quests were almost always "go here, kill this", "go grab this quest item" or "go talk to this guy"... very few if any notable quests that AREN'T like this back then and while those quests can be good, when they're pretty much all there is they get a bit stale, at least to me, as a now 33 year old (that still has all day every day to play video games).
I can happily say, now that everyone's had their fun with Vanilla, TBC and Wrath, it's my turn to play my favourite expansions and I'm extremely excited and there's sadly a lot of people in the community that are sitting complaining that people like me now get to enjoy our expansions while we sat quietly and waited while they enjoyed theirs.
@@I_Crit_My_Pants Idk, for me the "go here, kill this" is not a bad design because if you spend time reading then it feel real, when I lvled my undead warlock and the quest giver said bringe me 6 bat wings so I would make a blanked because I feel cold it felt natural for me and different than the others. So mostly those quests are just bad if you don't read and just accept - complete it
But nobody did that in Cataclysm because it was too linear and everybody experienced this happen already in the classic world. I was happy to have the empty spots on the map filled finally and the travelling wasn't as bad because of portals but it also made the world smaller. In Wrath you had to fly from Tundra to Stormpeaks and in Cata you just hearthed and took the portal.
@@I_Crit_My_Pants just shows you never read quest texts. Classic is teeming with memorable quests and I can't remember a single chain from Cataclysm because that was exactly the boring experience Nixxiom said. Less CC? CC was ramping up even more than before because I was mainly a PvP player. Tell me about not playing my class - they added more CC which lead to the exact opposite.
I have a story like that with Nagrand (started in TBC). I was level 61 or something, and I was exploring Shattrath. I stepped foot into Nagrand and was absolutely blown away. It was such a beautiful zone that I stepped foot into it just to check it out. I then was chased by a level 68 elekk and died. It was worth every second and I knew EXACTLY where I wanted to go to level.
Another reason why changing the old zones damaged the game that is not nostalgia: it made it so new players cannot relate to the experience of journey of old players, dividing the community and separating veterans and newbies even more.
I would argue the "new world bad" players were more damaging than the world changing. The world became better. They updated zones to have a more coherent story instead of loosely tied together stories that barely made sense to the greater world. Was it perfect? No way. There was problems with the new world too. But the experience of leveling 1-60 and leveling 1-85 wasn't different because the world changed. It was different because the game wasn't months of leveling to get to max. It was leveling AND all the end game content, with a new method to enhance gearing and a new method of using LFG(Which was still pretty new at the time) to help enhance all of that. You run dungeons and farm up rep to get some of your gear to help you get into heroics and then progress into raiding. The game was no longer a weird disjoined path to end game raiding, you had a laid out plan for what you had to do starting from level 1.
@@entryofemotion12 I mean i dont dislike Vanilla, but when im now watching some HC streamers, it just comes back to me how bad the Vanilla World just was. Some Quests took hours - not of epic fights and content, but of running around half the world for no reason (look at you, SM quest...) - and a lot of Zones were just dead ends with pointless, scattered quests (like Desolace, Aszhara, Hinterlands and literally every zone from lvl 50 upwards...). When i was leveling up an Alt in Wrath back in the days, i literally spammed dungeons, cause it could not force myself to go through the 1-60 Threadmill again. From Cata onwards, i basically leveled every alt in Vanilla, cause the quests made kinda fun again.
This, this is kinda true, i started in cata and have always have a bar between me and the people who started in vanilla for that reason
@@Fartboy226 ye, I myself started after the world revamp, and I always had this feeling like I missed out on something great, and I will never be able to truly understand what the game was about
@@MrVaeron I am of the opinion that people can prefer the old world, but the new revamp was just objectively a better experience. Like you mention...running across half the world because you have to go deliver an item to someone who was in a different zone because "I don't know" just never was exciting, and it one of the most painful things about the Classic experience. Like I love playing the game. But then you have a 7 or 8 minute run through a zone just to get to the parts you need to be at....and it's just not fun or engaging. I've gotten to where I have stuff to read up and I just numlock and read a bit just glancing back to make sure I stay on track while I run. Just because I don't want to sit there and waste my time.
These days in retail I also just do Vanilla stuff. None of the quests are hard and it's very easy to just pound out 2-3 zones in a couple hours, and if you want to tank or heal it you can knock out Vanilla dungeons too, though some of them have also had their revamps, and it's a pretty painless experience.
Brooo I read Day of the Dragon in middle school. I was that kid who chose it as a book for class and had to give a book review in front of my class. At the end, I got the grading sheet from the teacher and she wrote the title of the book as “Dave the Dragon”.
Realized people must’ve thought I was reading a book for a 4 year old as a teenager.
So, I really do agree with the point that having a high level zone right next to a low level one is a great feeling even in new expac content. In dragonflight even I accidentally did this in waking shore in the black dragonflight area, I knew it wasn't going to stay hard but when you're 62 and you run into a 70 (or any other relative number) it just feels good.
I'm actually a little excited for Cataclysm classic. But that's just because Cataclysm was when I started raiding in WoW, but I wasn't able to experience all of Firelands because the laptop I was playing on was too weak to handle majordomo or Ragnaros, even on lowest settings. I kinda want to have a chance to see what I missed out on.
Cataclysm is no longer a classic era though. That is the problem. For me it ends at WOTLK and I played WoW since vanilla launch in 2003.
@@BrawndoQC By what metric and why do YOU get to decide that? For me and Mitchel cataclysm IS CLASSIC because its where we started playing, there was no real nostalgia for us in vanilla/tbc/wrath because we didn't play them.
I still remember the first time I was lifted into the air as the Chosen One by Elune and told that I and I alone was the one who needed to save the world. It was a terrible plot idea that only got worse over time.
@@BrawndoQC World of Warcraft launched on November 24th, 2004. I'm not sure where you're getting 2003 from, but have fun lying, I guess.
@@dwarfminerwillieCata was the final and complete breakaway from how the game systems in actual classic functions. It couldn't be any less "Classic" Wow. Your nostalgia or when you began playing isn't an objective factor in this.
VashJir is such a cool zone. It’s one of the few zones that reading the quest text made so much better. I thought it was so cool you get shipwrecked on the zone, have to explore the wreckage, and complete quests under the boat. You don’t immediately have underwater breathing or an underwater mount and they get unlocked over time. And then you slowly make your way exploring the rest of the zone where quest givers have made camp in little caves. It’s such a unique zone and I really love the feeling that you were kind of stranded exploring this strange Naga infested ocean with only a small group of survivors
@skeliskull I only like vanilla really and see the rest of the expansions as sucky, and yet the underwater zones in cata are actually really awesome. the quests and mounts and lore and all that is pure shit, but the idea of an underwater zone belongs in the final version of vanilla. like the only way you can get there is you have to swim out into the ocean or something. it could be level 50 or something. everyting you said is right, it's such a unique zone and the stranded exploration was awesome.
😂😂😂 trash zone worst in the game.
Vashjir is a zone for chads, the only people who hate it are wowmount mixmaxer addicts.
I wouldn't have minded cata so much if they had just kept all the old content and zones in to. Vashjyr is still one of my favorite zones in the whole game.
But they deleted all the other cool content for no real reason.
But hey, I love some of the story progression in Cata. Like what happened in the plaguelands. Argent dawn retook part of the city of andorhal, cenarion circle finally be able to grow some trees in desolace, the grim batol in wetlands finally have purpose, mount hyjal is finally open to the world, we now can see what uldum is and so on.
I loved the Legendary Daggers on my Rouge didn't like asshole DK/Druids taking them as I was the one on the Quest to get the wrap. Because I was there and on this they'd drop and of course some shithead would be ooooo purrrtyy orange I'll take ☠️🤦♂️
@@syrasmine Tech limitation is the issue here that was back in 2010, having a phase for every single players who are at different stages would be chaotic for them back then there was no layers tech CRZ (Cross Realm Zone) did not even exist yet and ETC.
However they could 100% do this today in Dragonflight or the next expansion but probably won't, It would be cool though.
@@From_Here_Till_Then I started using PvP to level as the ques for dungeons on hunters/DPS classes was agonizingly longer then pvp
@@Vegeta-9000-and-a-half You say that, but even in BFA where there were quests about healing the world, we never saw any phasing for what parts of the world we did work to heal. I just think that phasing is hard to do and keep the game feeling fully "together" since a big problem people have with Retail is how there's no real sense of community in the game. Splitting up players at all is probably not the best way to deal with things, which is probably the real reason we don't see phasing to that extent. I think if we had even half the playerbase of the Wrath days they'd probably be more open to doing it.
Never played cata but have absorbed quite a bit of wow content so ignore me if I'm ignorant.
They revamped the world, losing some while gaining a lot.
I feel like the amount of new lore and how you interact with the quests, had a hard time sticking with players after they left the zone. Almost too dense.
Then, it again became stagnant and left behind with future expansions.
I'm sure if zones actually evolved throughout future expansions. It would be a massive upgrade.
I stopped playing after Cata. I never completed the expansion but I got about halfway through it, at least. What I remember is that I started to realize that I was just logging in to do dailies. This was the first time I felt this way, in WoW.
One major change I recall changing my perspective is the ability to fly in the original zones. We were no longer tied to the flight paths and we no longer had to travel through the environment. I am not sure if this was a problem. But it did mean people skipped past a lot of the game.
Why is no one mentioning flying mounts in azeroth for the first time? That killed it for me.
Yah. Flying in general was a bad idea.
Great point, total immersion breaker on several levels. Those beautiful green and purple trees in Ashenvale suddenly became low res 2D garbage from above.
Loremaster achievement was actually hard to get originally due to quests being so limited. Actually felt amazing to achieve and some of the quests were awesome. I still have some item to see ghosts in blackrock mountain, tho not sure if it does anything anymore. It was on a different level.
I'm running loremaster right now about to finish kalimdor... it's a slog lol but the old writing for some of the quests is so good. especially with that AI voiceover addon - really adds a lot of flavor to the game while running around
@@ep8310 hmm,i assume your talking about classic wow,otherwise not sure how u could on retail since they changed it all back in cata..,so that's still a thing huh,u can actually go through the process of getting the original loremaster achievement? That's awesome. Well, enjoy man, as fulfilling as it was,it was definitely brutal finding enough quests in some areas but felt worthwhile in the end. And just the things you'll see, is pretty cool.
I did this on a private server in Cataclysm and it was basically my last WoW checkbox. Now that I've done it, I don't really have any care to ever return to the game.
@@rulinggodsidly2941 unless he's talking about WotLK, no achievements in classic wow; I'm assuming he's talking about getting the loremaster achievement in retail which would involve doing the current questlines which woooould be any cata replacements. The loremaster achievement now is just broken up by expac, zone + specific questline rather than # of quests in a particular zone, and you have to do it for all expacs to get the title/ tabard afaik
@@jeremybot1 Ya i couldn't quite figure how you could do the ORIGINAL loremaster since everything got changed in Cata, so basically people can't read very well or they don't know what the word ORIGINAL means.
I'm like, one of the few actually looking forward to re-experiencing cata because I took a break from WoW due to playing wrath a little too hardcore. I think Cata has some good additions but the zeitgeist of people is they don't like it so no one is allowed to like it.
Just play on a private server that's what I do, it's free...
@@MrBeetsGaming I have a solocraft server of both wrath and legion. I do love playing on them, as on wrath I can set the talents per level higher and just fill out all the trees for hilarity. The problem is they don't really function like a regular server. Even private servers function a bit weird depending on how the owner sets them up and a lot of times the population just isn't there.
Honestly if I were blizzard, I'd have it set up so for each expansion there's at least one dedicated era server and one rolling server that goes on like retail used to.
" they don't like it so no one is allowed to like it."
Or is it simply that it was shit.
@@andywest6062 Thanks for proving my point lol
1. State that you look forward to playing cata.
2. State that you took a break during cata and thereby didn't play it as much as others
3. Get annoyed when the people who actually played it tell you it was shit.
If you enjoy it, good on you. Unfortunately that doesn't disallow the rest of us from ranting about how cata sowed the seeds for the shitshow that was to become modern wow.
To me all of Catalcysm questing felt like a guided tutorial, rather than being sent out to a sandbox world where you have to figure out the path by yourself(and google).
I love Vashj'ir. Still to this day the top 3 zones I've had. I think it's beautiful/colorful. Seriously, I fear depths and when I went to its depths for the first time. OMG I shat my pants. Or when you have to go to the dungeon for the first time... OMFG I was freaking out.
I would love to have the unreleased dungeon in vashj'ir in cata classic. Maybe that would make it more interesting for some people.
It is one of my favorites also. I still don't understand why they had to delete the old overworld though. So in order to appreciate vashjyr and all this other cool shit. I have to accept the fact that I can never, ever EVER visit unflooded thousand needles again. Or visit og non split barrens again. Makes zero sense to me now. And made zero sense to me in 2010 as well.
never actually did vashjir until cata classic. Prob the best zone in the game i couldnt name a better one, maybe in legion
For me it's similar to a lot of other opinions out there - Cata was exciting at launch but quickly became an obvious decline for the playerbase and fans quitting the game, and my memories of it are tainted by that slightly, as well as the fact the entire expansion builds up to what is a disappointing final boss encounter. I'll definitely be jumping in though to see how I feel about Cata now knowing what is to come.
good to hear you will return to cata. I think catas 80-85 content was some of my favorite content in the game. The dailies felt satisfying.
Personally I would really love if they can make firelands last a little longer this time. It felt like firelands was out for only a few months, and then they tossed us into dragonsoul where we were stuck with that for the longest time.
@@pauls4522The problem is that people wanted "the game to be challenging again" so at launch they made it so you had to farm heroics to get blues to be able to the go and raid. They tried keeping it difficult and because of that overtuned a lot of bosses. One thing I think massively gets slept on is how good PvP was in Cata. There is always S tier comps and things like that but in terms of how classes played / CC and things like that it was really well balanced. Cata really is the blending point of classic era wow with modern wow. As far as the raiding experience there was still a lot of the "bring the player not the class" mentality that started around ICC. I personally find Cata much more enjoyable than MoP or WoD.
I think generally speaking, it wasn't a bad expansion and had alot of good moments. But the removal of the old overworld, was definitely not one of them. I hated the fact that the old overworld had to be deleted to make way for the revamp. It ruined the appeal of transmog to. So much gear that even to this day is still lost for transmogging because it is deleted. Even now I still request that they add the old overworld for chromie time.
Alot of other things I didn't really care for either. The talent tree system in wrath was better in my op. I liked getting ammo on my hunter and weapon skills on shamans. Cataclysm just had so many problems and changes. Alot of stuff felt disjointed to, specially for leveling.
I definitely feel it is imperative to have at least one permanent classic realm up. Vanilla sucked to in my op, and wrath was really where wow got really good. And I want to experience cata classic. But not at the cost of wrath classic.
Because Cata is the first expansion when people started wanting to roll back the game.
This.
They had to revamp the old world anyways so they could add flying mounts (which ppl really wanted) so it really isnt a huge step at all to doing something bold with the time. I also get why not everyone liked the idea at all. Its an interesting time in gaming history tbh
flying mounts was the worst decision they ever made, at first glance its cool if you follow through with it, it really took away alot from the game
@@swardlertv1372 Flying mounts rule. Sorry you can't gank low levels anymore, play call of duty or something to get your angst out.
@@erikostebo2152 it takes away most of the original mmo aspect, because it forces you into other players. most fun i had was in classic and vanilla, so many rivalaries endend in long friendships
@@swardlertv1372yeah we fundamentally disagree on what makes a good mmo I guess. I don’t play wow or any game to make internet friends. I just want to do dungeons get loot. I don’t make relationships in video games.
@@erikostebo2152ganking only became easier because high level players can fly around ganking wtf are you even saying
I think its a bit like this : on paper the idea sounds amazing - You get to fight Deathwing, hes gonna change the zones and bring destruction. Yeah that does sound pretty epic.
But when actually doing it in game and experiencing it, it kinda sucked. And the video says it too the zones felt disconnected and it didnt really make any sense.
Its kind of like reading about something and in your head it sounds epic, but some things should have just stayed written and not actually implemented, or rather implemented in the way Blizz did it in Cata.
I mean just look at populations of Private Servers, before WoW Classic was even a thing. The most popular ones were for Wrath, then Vanilla, and then Burning Crusade. Every other expansion had a very small population.
the problem with the guild thing wasnt the incentive. it was that unless you were a big guild no one would join you. they wanted those rewards so they killed small/mediumish guilds for big ones because they unlocked everything.
this is strange to me because I'm actually pretty excited. TBC and cata are two of my favourite expansions at least in terms of endgame content. It's very cool and iconic to me, I had a lot of fun playing it back in the day
Cataclysm was panned for a few key reasons - Content difficulty, and content drought. A Classic version should be able to avoid both, but the stigma behind it being a 'bad expansion' will never be truly erased.
the stigma of Wrath being the super best xpac was deleted, why can't Cata have a redemption arc? after all, Cata is simply a much better game than Wrath.
@@nopnop9077straight up, tbc and wotlk honestly sucked gameplay and pvp wise. Cata was always the better expansion. Classic has already proved wotlk wasn't some amazing experience that everyone loved. It was simply the best game to play at the time. It was wrath and cod4. That's all anyone played. Cata only lost players due to the fact that gaming wasn't just world of Warcraft anymore. The entire gaming landscape changed during cata and the new era of constant game jumping became a thing. Too many new games for world of Warcraft to hold everyone's attention.
@@nopnop9077 Meh I disagree. I liked cata. But it deleted alot of stuff, and changed alot of stuff to. And I wasn't a fan of being told that I could never go back to the old overworld ever again. Like sorry but that is completely stupid. And classic era, wrath era was better in my op. Vanilla era just sucked. But, they won't give us permanent wrath classic servers. Like fuck this company.
i thought it was a great idea to have the cataclysm changing the way zones looked after the first 2 expansions. what i don't like is that after all these years later, the players/npc
s have not done anything to heal the lands and just ignore it all. could have some really fun druid/shaman factions come together to help heal the the zones..... put out fires, regrow burnt area's, fix the dam and so on
They should have kept the old content in my honest opinion. The revamp was cool. But it sucked losing all the old content to. I hated that shit. It kind of made transmog less appealing to. Look at all this armor you want to transmog, but you can't because it was deleted from the game. Like I never will get the idea of deleting content.
@@qunt100nah. The game was out for 6 years when cata released. It needed a change.
@@goodknight6828 No. It absolutely did not. It needed the revamp. And the original 1-60 content that I could go to whenever the fuck I wanted to lol.
I should be able to choose to do the revamp or the original 1-60 content at will at any given time playing cataclysm. Simple as that.
They should have left WOTLK indefinitely
tbc
@17:12 that is Ataraxis, Cudgel of the Warmaster. Drops from Warmaster Blackhorn.
Benchmarking leveling was one of the last things I did before Cataclysm changed the old world, when they added some of the pre-expansion content before they changed everything.
I was able to take a mage with full heirlooms from lv1-80 in just under 22h played, this was largely in part to having played for years and knowing optimal questing routes.
I started in vanilla day one and was the 2 rank 14 on horde on my server. Then raided through TBC and Wrath and quit as soon as Cata came out. Cata was the point where WOW stopped feeling like a real living and breathing World your a small part in. From Cata onwards it was catering to casuals and convinience at the detrimend off a community. Before people had a reputation on their server, their were rivalarys and everybody knew each other but all that was gone in Cata. But it started way before with stuff like realm groups, LFG/LFR finder and all that stuff. It thrifted more and more into a almost single player game with a lobby. They lost me on that road and Cata was the point where I had enough and clearly saw where WOW was heading. So I quit and never logged in again and looking back it was a wise move never felt more vindicateted.
Edit: and don't forget that's where all the microtransaction store BS started big.
Ye eit was a role playing at its best
At first it was really cool to see the zones change... but most the zones changed in ways that weren't very satisfying. Rarely got to see the impact of our original quests, working for rambo was cool the first time but got old fast.
They REALLY need to use some of their new retail tech to allow us to switch between the OG classic and Cata versioms of the old world zones
No this I agree with. One of the biggest L's from blizzard in my op when chromie time was announced. Like what the fuck.
I dont understand why they dont just make separate servers for vanilla, tbc, wotlk, cata classic so people can pick which classic experience they want to enjoy.
I'm actually excited to see what Cata was like and how they do Cata classic (speaking as someone who started in Legion). From my experience, most of the hate for Cata stems from the "Dungeon/Raid Finder bad" or "Mah world building" groups. The actual reworking of the world I believe was overall positive for the health of the game, removing a lot of the piss-taking quests and making the world fresh again to explore. Granted the Cata-exclusive zones were... mixed (fuck off Vash'jir and Twilight Highlands), but it was still overall positive.
I believe the actual features of Cata were probably some of the ebst decisions Blizzard ever made. Reworking the talent system to remove bloat and feature creep, guild perks to reward a guild for sticking together and doing stuff together, expanding the glyph system to allow more customization without making it overbearing, the reworking of a shit ton of classes to actually make them meet up to modern standards and be playable (looking at you Paladin and Hunter), were all exceptional for the game as a whole.
I also like the story of Cata and how everything connects back to the expansion's villain. No, not Deathwing. N'zoth. Deathwing at this point was basically a mindless pawn of the Old Gods and N'zoth (the last living Old God at this point in the story) was sending him around the world essentially nuking everything to try and distract people while he set plans in motion for his escape. This also connects to each of the new zones (Naga being servants of N'zoth via a pact, the Highlands and Bastion being a base for Twilight's Hammer, the fire people trying to burn down Mt. Hyjal, Uldim being a center for Titan technology and Titan creations, and Deepholm being connected to the STonemother). Not to mention that the expansion involved all four of the Elemental Lords, which were basically SLAVE GENERALS of the Old Gods until the Titans came along! Looking into everything, you see how interconnected it is into N'zoth's bid for freedom and conquest, which wouldn't succeed until a decade later, but still!
The early game zones are also an example of this connection to this story. A repeat from the last paragraph, the entire old world is basically getting nuked on repeat, and you're dealing with the fallout and consequences of that, and seeing people's reactions to everything burning down and changing around them. Now there are some aspects of the story I don't agree with (Insert "Wtf are you doing Thrall?" x9999 here), but overall each of the zones that got changed or introduced in Cata were all done very well. And if you still want that classic experience, Outland and Northrend were untouched.
As for criticism to linearity, yeah, eventually everything will fall into linearity. It's called a meta (Most Effective TActic AVailable). While potentially you have a lot of choice, eventually people will gravitate to what's most efficient and what give the best result. Also the Dungeon/Raid Finder isn't really a problem as long as it's kept to entry levle content (AKA Normal Dungeons and Easy Mode Raids) for people who want to experience the story moreso than try to push high tiers. Like, any actual raid difficulty still needs you to find a group, and if they took away the Heroic dungeon queue I think it'd be perfect.
Now there are some bad parts as well that I agree with. Yes, 4.3 way overstayed its welcome, same with 3.3 and 5.4. Archaeology was pretty much dead on arrivial. Yes it gets you cool swag, but leveling it and getting to that shit is so annoying and tedious that sometimes it's just not worht it. Some of the instance design fell flat on its face as well (cough Spine of Deathwing cough Nefarian cough Forgemaster cough). Also the level cap was... too low. Come on, WHY THE HELL didn't you go all the way to 90?
Overall, I think that people will come back to Cata classic and find that it's actually aged quite well, and amybe Blizzard will throw some changes in to make it more appeal to their Classic audience (they've done it beforE). Now, if I end up wrong, fine, I'll be fine being wrong. But either way, I think this release will be a positive thing. Either people will come to appreciate the expansion more or Blizzard will learn that this is where things went wrong and use the experience to improve both sides of their game going forward. Either way, I'm happy to see what the future of Warcraft brings.
Leveling was too easy, making it not fun, were people to kill mobs, while leveling with her eyes closed.
Removing group contact in leveling took away a lot of the social aspect.
Making more rewards for guilds and making bad classes good, is good and should be done on their own without adding the rest of the Bad Cata expansion.
I enjoy listening to people talk about wow as its a game I've always loved but never got to really experience at a young age. Cata is consistently the most shit talked expansion in my experience.
Cata is when a lot of people think the game started to go downhill.
@@levislooney TBC is when it started and wrath was nail in the coffin. cata wasn't even a game anymore
@HellfireBowsa the linearity problem isn't cata's fault you're right that all things will fall into that eventually. the problem is that it should not have gone past vanilla to begin with. they should'ev stayd level 60 forever and just made that experience better.
the ocean maps were A+, asmon is right, one of best zones wow ever did. the physical zone itself could belong in Vanilla and fit in nicely tbh.
archaeology is also actually worthy of being in vanilla but it'd need ui tweaks to be 9999% more disjointed and difficult. like 100% of archaeology should be in text, nothing on the map whatsoever.
Twilight Highlands was good. Uldum bad even worse than Vashjir
With classic i appreciate no push to be part of a guild (expect raiding probably) and i appreciate phases and associated currencies i can get through various ways, because in my mid 30s sometimes there is time of several weeks you just do not have time or energy to play. It is definetly great system also given a fact that i can get close with equip using currencies.
You know, at earlier points in my life I’d wonder why people would say they didn’t have the energy to play games because in my mind it wasn’t a physical activity. Now that I’m in my thirties I 100 PERCENT now get it. Just turning on my console sometimes is enough for me to be like “nah.”
@@ParzivalMcflyGaming lazy boomers
25:40 soloing group quests was probably my favorite thing to do in vanilla and burning crusade wow. Honestly. That, and the raids which were way more wonky and satisfying back then. I remember downing rag for the first time, being like one of the first 100 guilds to do it. How much of a pain in the ass it was to get 40 ppl together, the dramma that would go on, and how my heart was racing the first time we got that guy.
These dynamics just didn't exist anymore with group finder, and the massive toning down of difficulty on quests and the open world. Soloing 3 mobs was no longer this challenging thing to do anymore. Not only could the tanky classes do it, all the classes could do it, and mages started trying to farm like 20 mobs at a time and often it not being a problem. People started scripting it with macros. The game started being automated, which didn't make it a game anymore, it was a job and you were min maxing your farming routines and subroutines.
I'm excited for cata classic. In terms of gameplay, cata was where the game peaked for me. The huge improvement to leveling/quests, the better spec/talent/glyph systems, the challenging heroic dungeons, the abundance of new race/class combinations including goblins and worgens, flying everywhere, the updated areas like Orgrimmar and Thousand Needles looking way better than before, etc. Admittedly cata raids weren't the best but for every other aspect of the game it was an improvement. Leveling 80-85 and surpassing 100k health was fun. Note: I am not looking forward to MoP which was truly where the game went into terminal decline.
I feel MOP was great as well, but WOD? straight dumpster fire after.
I got to be in cata f&f alpha. Seeing how broken it was and how it came together for me is more nostalgic than cata itself is.
Got in in early beta. Remember Harrison Jones was in Vashj'ir and characters had their reflection in the new water.
I tested cata also and i told them the way healing was screwed over was not acceptable. I played holy paladin and healing was impossible for me in cata.
They should have let Deathwing destroy things slowely, have us experience his destruction make it real for us players.
Man I’m so glad I played vanilla-wotlk as a pre teen/young man back in the day. I quit right before Cata bc I was graduating high school that year and had big shit happening. I’ll never forget experiencing Azeroth the first time with 2 other buddies. Snow days meant wow all day baby. It was truly a special period of time.
I made 14 alts playing WoW from WoD but I would always unlock the Vashir, Deepholm and Twilight highlands portals on all of them. I would also do the WoD opening questline to unlock the portals in Warspear and Tanaan Jungle and get the garrison. Even on the alts I made in Legion. I liked the Vashir and Deepholm zones quite a lot. I also liked WoD Draenor. What I like about Classic WoW is I can level anywhere, well anywhere there are quests at my level. As a Druid I don't have to stay in Darkshore and Ashenvale. I can go to Eastern Kingdoms and level there and then go back to Kalimdor if I wanted.
have anyone leveled in wrath recently? there is pretty much no grp quests and mobs are nerfed while we are buffed
The mobs have been nerfed and the characters buffed? I need to return to the game then! Update 7.3.5 ruined the game for me and I've played next to none of it since haha. Other than Classic, of course.
Dude I could not agree more, level variety in zones is great fun. Love bumping into something crazy strong and running! Makes the world feel real
I loved raiding in Cata, it was the last time I was in a great group of people and connected outside of the game. 90% of my guild quit as soon as MoP came out.
Me too... e.g. Dragon Soul or Firelands
when mop comes back around i know i'll be leaving. cata put me on the line with their talent system, but i ultimately loved cata. i justified it because of levels increasing. but then they gave us that atrocity in mop. i wont put myself through that again.
i think the new quests were worse because most of the new 'more engaging' things were one-click interactions about the level of fruit ninja, instead of the forays into dangerous territory of old where you needed to use your kit in different ways, and watch your surroundings. old just sounds worse because in essence its collecting drops over and over, but its differentiated by the adventure to get them. click the fire to put it out can't really go more than one way.
on the lore side, the new quests were too memey too often, or else relied completely on prior knowledge of zone quests/npcs that are not there anymore. it's like going to a friends house to watch a series but they dont wanna start at the beginning again so you have to start halfway into season 2.
Leveling through the revamped zones might be fun. If it where not for dungeon finder being there and lvling you 10x faster throught 2004 dungeons
Dungeon spamming as a tank or healer was actually really fun, with enough heirloom gear you would barely have to repeat a dungeon and you'd get to practice your skills needed for raiding.
I loved Cata. My only real beef with it was at the very end where they did away with the old talent trees and introduced those 3 choice every 15 levels abominations that we had to deal with for the next decade after
That was added in Mists. Cataclysm had the vanilla style talents but you had the one point every 2 levels and were locked into a single tree.
@@jellyfrosh9102 People confuse it due to the pre-expac patch that was going on when a lot of people were still running dragon soul, but yep 100% correct
I didn't like how they deleted all the old content. That was such a dumb and stupid change. Ziridormi could easily just allow you to transfer between the revamped world and the old world at will. And cata would have been alot better.
@@jellyfrosh9102 It was mists pre-patch, but that's still technically part of cata to me
A total quest revamp would've been interesting to see in SoD
The reason why so much players dropped off(aside from the world literally changing) during Cata was that it was too linear. It was a great first time experience because everything was well curated but essentially there was only one way to play it. It's great game design if it were a single player offline rpg but this was the most popular mmorpg at the time and it contradicted with many of the game's core designs. Many OG players who liked the original gameplay left and the new players it did attract left too because they were the more casual type players that Blizzard wanted by making the game easier and more linear.
As someone who was a 10 year old kid first playing World of Warcraft with Cata as my first expansion, I am hyped for it but it is more for me as a nostalgic trip through memory lane of first leveling up a Worgen Warrior (I was a ten year old kid and werewolves were hella cool to me as a kid). While I've played through classic to wrath now, I'm kinda excited to see that jump from wrath and Cata to truly understand that difference from old world to new in cata.
Good for you buddy, but that excitement you felt for Cata, that's what us older players felt for each of our expansions when we started playing the game, and given how the biggest WoW has been is Wotlk (12 Million) , it's fair to say that we lived through the best WoW had to offer in terms of gameplay/story and such. I had a bit of fun in Cata too, but real life responsibilities took the main seat over gaming so I guess that's why I couldn't even enjoy it as much as the others
i havnt played since cata but the zones are great and i like it more than a new island and new sub zone like we had since mop.
it was nice to go back to tomb of sargeras, see pandaria and nazjatar (wasted zone) but now it gets pretty old and we have too much disconnected zones which results into teleporting around the world
10.2 was released in november and we have to wait almost 1 year too now 😂 nothing changed with long last patches.
@20:30 The assertion that 'everybody' wanted the leveling changes is simply not true... I did not want them so therefore EVERYBODY did not want them. I thought that the leveling had ALREADY been sped up too much by later patches in WotLK and wanted them to dial that back. Instead they tripled down making the leveling faster AND making the questing zones more linear.
He speaks from my heart. When I saw the sunken Auberdine, I knew I never wanted to see WoW again. The old world was sacred and no one had the right to screw it up.
I enjoyed Cata for the leveling experience. I started so many new characters trying out the changes. Vashjir is still one of my favorite zones.
same! i like leveling in Cata.. but raiding... not so much
Oh this was you. The only guy who liked Vashjir. Pleased to meet you, signed everyone else (aka: hyjal team) kekw
AHOY!
@@Karami42 Hey, I loved Vashj'ir too! One of the best and most unique zones that's ever been put into WoW, imo
They should have let Deathwing destroy things slowely, have us experience his destruction make it real for us players.
In my experience, the "Worst" expansion was Battle for Azeroth.
But I agree with Nixiom because the world reverts back to current Retail.
WoD was it for me. But 1. I started in Cata & haven’t played for a few years; 2. I really enjoyed MoP which remains the “worst” expansion according to a significant portion of WoW players. (I’m basing this statement on YT comments)
@@jluchettethey said mop is bad because the guy to their left told them it was, they never actually played it. One of the best expansions theyve ever done, the SoO raid was so fucking cool.
Legion and especially update 7.3.5 ran me off from the game. Everything prior to that was great!
@@jluchette more like MoP is the 'worst' according to a very loud minority who simply hate pandas. Legion was the worst, and has done more to damage the game than any other expansion with the revamp of the daily quest system into world quests and the addition of mythic+ which not only destroyed dungeon going but ruined the overall raiding experience. then every other expansion after was simply discount legion, even dragonflight.
Classic lived long enough to become the villain..again
I seriously dont understand why when i goto the blizzard laucnher i cant just choose wow classic tbc classic wotlk classic cata classic individually.. allow me to have a character start on any of them and if i complete for example vanilla wow give me the option to transfer it and clone it from the vanilla to tbc to join the chars i started on tbc seperatly if i want to
I loved it when you had to get on a flight path to get to a raid or a big questing area bc the mount would take you all over the island and you could see areas you missed or haven't seen yet. Plus it was just a great time to take a break while it carried you wherever you needed to go.
I loved the cata raids but was extremely upset that teldrassil and ashenvale was gone. So many early memories there.
The only thing I hope about is getting the pet that allows you to turn into a flame cat I know it’s a mog you can use but I spent hours trying to get that in tmog runs to not get it and find out it had been removed from the game
I grew up on Warcraft 2. I not only knew who Deathwing was, but I had chosen to play the Deathwing server because I loved him so much. From a story perspective I was super excited when it was first announced that he would be coming to WoW. The Cata raids and dungeons were not was made the expansion garbage... it was the game overhaul. Destroying the old world and revamping the class and talent system that just made me fall out of love with my characters, and the nostalgia of leveling a new one was gone, since the quest zones had all been deleted. Add to the fact heavy phasing that kept me from questing with friends was the final nail in the coffin. If i was on a different step of a quest than my friend, I could not play with him. In party it would just say "player is in another phase", with no option to join it. It became a waiting around simulator, as we had leveled as a duo from day 1, despite being on very different schedules. I could no longer quest ahead and then come back and help him catch up when he got on. Cata was the reason i quit WoW... and sadly, it is the reason I am once again letting my subscription run out. It's back to random steam games for me... unless by some miracle they come back and say "woops, we forgot to mention WotLK eras at Blizzcon!"
Edit to add: I forgot to mention Also, Cata was the first expansion to permanently remove collectibles from the game. So all those months or years you spent trying to get the ZG tiger or Raptor were wasted... you ran out of time. I got 3 raptors, and never once saw the tiger drop. ;-;
Replaying Classic, especially TBC, I joined this superb guild on Westfall server. It was alive, warm, and you could always find someone to run non-current content with (older dungeons and TBC dungeons - not only the last raid). That guild was composed of about 50% players who had never played WoW before and I got a smile listening to them talking about how great this game was... and I watched their soul progressively get corrupted as WotLK progressed. These are the guy that convinced me to get into WotLK again, I am and always will be a TBC guy, this is the ONLY xpac I want to play, FOREVER... yet they convinced me to join them. But when quit last March, they where all consumed into the raid treadmill. No longer could you play other dungeons, or even play together again except in those darned raids... Only ppl that would where the other WoW veterans who knew better, but there wasnt enough of us left in the guild at that point.
I guess they're going to hit the Cataclysm wall head-on, like most if us did back then.
And I am still angry, now what? 18 months later? that Blizzard pulled the plug on TBC. Not giving them my sub anymore either, but they aren't briging it back and it p*sses me off to no end.
Never was a private server guy. So TBC is dead again, and with it, the warm cozzy guilds it created.
Now that said, I will probably come back if they make a MoP server at some point, provided it's permanent and won't be deleted like TBC.
But I've lost any and all trust in Blizzard these days. We'll see.
Im playing SOD right now. Haven't played classic in since 2004. Decided to give it another shot. AND OMG i honestly love the quest system. Almost every quest in the game is worse if you don't party up. Creating a reason to be social with others. Where as retail, my bread and butter, is in all reality a solo game. In Classic every upgrade I get feels great. Leveling is like the game itself. Ive been in the Barrens for 5 days now. This is ONE ZONE. I've been in more parties for quests than I ever have. I've been a retail andy, but this feeling that classic wow has given me is something I miss so much in MMOS. So glad I gave it a shot!
I remember everybody saying back during cata that the problem with the expansion was that it spent too much time working on renovation, and not innovation. Nobody really complained about a lot of the minutiae of it unless you were a sweaty die hard player. The underwater starting zone was probably the biggest pain point, and the initial 5 man dungeon rollout was unforgivingly difficult.
There was 28 weeks between 3.3 ICC and 3.35 Ruby Sanctum and a 24 week gap between 3.3.5 and 4.0.1. That's 52 weeks compared to 43 weeks from 4.3.0 to 5.0.5a. The end game gap wasn't anything unusual. Blizzard almost had the same problem with BC -> WotLK but they added in Sunwell to buy time. The reason it didn't seem as long is because ICC was gated when it originally launched.
Anything prior to update 7.3.5 was good if you ask me! I hope Classic doesn't ever catch up to that update and maybe it'll permanently stop at Draenor haha.
I’m personally excited for MoP. Cataclysm Classic is just a stepping stone to get there
I cannot wait for MoP/WoD classic, was pvp heaven
@@LeagueClassicAndy Same thing J Allen Brack said about 2019 classic but it seems to have been one of the best things Blizz ever did
I'm excited for mop tbh
MoP, Legion, and BfA will be fun again. WoD might be half-ass ok with a shorter time frame like a year or year and a half max
@@Tuoni996 They’ll probably draw the line at MoP tbh
Agreed with Zack - I was so hyped about Deathwing after knowing the lore of the original Warcraft games. People who said Warcraft ended with Lich King seems like they only played WC3. Vashj’ir was epic - the first zone and only zone I completed to 100%
Water world ?😂
Vasjir is my favorite zone inn all the games. Cata was my first time playing wow, and i remember that zone sticking out compared to all the others. It was colorful, had cool questlines, and was overall a completely new experience. Il never forget vasjir.
HELL YEAH ANOTHER VASHJIR FAN
I've been kicked from groups because I don't do skips as a tank because I'm disabled and can't do jumping skips so I stopped tanking for randoms.
I remember how my dad loved cata simply because they added archaeology so he could go back from his job (on wich he was a teacher of archaeology) just to do archaeology
From my perspective there is nothing in WoW except social interacions, everything else is just like a worse rpg, why would i play WoW when i can play dragonAge, masseffect, n you name it. 2011 was a really good age of gaming so there were alot things to choose from esp if you want to play something to find people to socialise with.
I cannot get my head around the vitriol of hate towards Cata. Minus the colossal gaps between content, I found it to be a solid and fun expansion. I'd even go as far to say it's probably in my top two wow expansions. Personally, I'm looking forward ro adventuring towards Ragnaros and Deathwing once again.
I'm actually really excited for Cata, was peak PvP for me and my brother. I also learned tanking on my pally through Dragon Soul at that time. I probably spent the most amount of time playing that expansion than any others.
peak PVP was open world in vanilla imo.
Sorry to hear that.
@@BrawndoQC Bruh Open world pvp is cap, its 99.9% either level 60's ganking level 20's or giant blobs of groups just spamming AOE at each other.
@@BrawndoQCstop crying about the past and enjoy modern wow.
PVP in Cataclysm was the best we ever had, it was actually a great expansion but few understand
The reason Blizzard never did anything like adding zones to the old continents like they did in Cata was not entirely because people didn't like it, but If I was willing to bet, was because there is no "real estate" in the old world like there was during vanilla. Remember mount Hyjal, Twilight highlands and Uldum were already there is the old world, we just couldn't access it but the space was there in the map. And even with all that real estate they still had to tweak the world a bit to make those new zones bigger. Since they were already redoing the world for flying mounts to work in the old zones they might as well tweak them and add those zones that everyone was so curious about while playing vanilla. They couldn't just keep changing the continents to fit new stuff every expansion so we've just gotten new clusters of islands. I personally hope that by the end of the Darkness trilogy we get to see all the old world zones brought back into relevance into the present by using the "Zidormi" approach or adding an even better solution that allows us to just move in time in the world.
I absolutely loved cata. I personally think cata is actually peak wow. The qol updates were awesome. The guild system was great. I had the most social experiences I've ever had in wow in cata. Now I don't disagree with some of the criticisms and I agree with asmon that this was the first of the downfall of focusing on mmo players.
I'm actually now hyped for cata, got hit by nostagia
I don’t think cata was bad as an expansion, especially lore wise. But, I do think that classes really need huge fixes whether it was damage or healing. Some specs were just completely unplayable in either PvP or pve
Same as in Classic? It's what you all wanted and love so much? Go roll a retri pala there, see how it goes for you lmfao.
cata had far more viable specs then wotlk/tb/vanilla
Really depends on the kind of content. In terms of pvp, not everything was viable. PvE was a different story in terms of viability.@@shnibby12
As much as the instanced starting zones were great for storytelling, I think they killed some of the immersion that comes with creating a new character and immediately being dropped into the actual world.
This. Even Classic WoW wasn't the same due to layering. Immersion seems to have taken a huge hit in the entire industry, it seems.
16:09 Yeah you're right. Cataclysm was the first expansion where you "only" had to gain 5 levels, instead the usual 10. The thing was, those 5 levels took as much XP and time to level then 10 levels and the power gain was the same. They did the same with MoP, but by that time people where used to that.
This didn’t age well, SoD is dying and playing Horde on Gehennas EU for Cata Classic the realm is full with queues at peak hours..
Cata is when I really started playing wow, before I dabbled with TBC pirate servers, but cata retail was awesome, at least until dragon soul. I had 5 max level twinks, and that’s the only expansion I had any max level twinks…
I agree. It was alt-friendly. And if you go on Netherwing right now (the best TBC private server) half of it is just Chinese Horde and the rest are insular guilds. There's no game for pugs.
For me Cata is second best expansion.(after TBC)
I renewed wow subscription 1st time since 2011 just because they announced Cata.
Cataclysm was a great expansion. The biggest cause of hate was the year long drought on last raid... And the fight with Death wing being a letdown.
Phasing was also in its infancy, so that awesome unlock chain for Hyjal could be annoying when your friends were in different parts. But sync came in a bit later and fixed most of that. And, come on, Firelands was EPIC writ large.
Though... there were two major oversights:
Because of the spread out high level areas, no one had a reason to SEE many of the new quests. And there were several awesome chains that I KNOW the bulk of people probably never saw. The be a quest giver on the Horde side was just a cool chain.
And they should have updated and moved Quel'thelas, Ghostlands, and Azurmyst to the main maps. Those whole areas are in dire need of updating. I think, technically, the Exodar was fixed and hovering over the island by Pandaria.
After going from Classic Vanilla into Wotlk, I just do not see it going well. From my experience each expansion step in difficulty chops off huge percentages of guild rosters who are just unable to complete the raids. Classic we did absolutely no recruiting and had players in Kel'Thuzad progression that had to learn to move their character for the first time a few months prior. TBC's increase in difficulty was low, but our roster still had to replace about 5-10 people who could not perform in SSC, TK, BT, or Sunwell. Fights like Vashj were huge indicators that some of our roster were not coordinated enough to understand the fights, even after working with many of them 1 on 1 to help them improve. Wotlk was an entirely different beast for us. Throughout WoTLK we went through 50-60 raiders and applicants. Once we reached Ulduar it was clear you needed another level of coordination to do fights like 0 light and Agalon during early progression. Personal responsibility was at an all time high for Classic expansions during WoTLK and our guild suffered. We killed Heroic Lich King with 12~ of our starting 35~ roster. People quote things like Covid being the huge stabilizer for Classic Vanilla, but sub numbers were higher in the past when less people had access to the internet or personal computers, literally hundreds of millions of more people have access compared to 2004. I think this is just poor judgement and analysis from people who have not lead a guild during any of the Classic expansions. The reason Classic was more successful is because its accessible to ANYONE. The simple fact is that ANYONE can sit in Molten core, spam 1 ability, and kill bosses. They need to just realize what the game is and develop two separate type of games. Retail should be competitive and hard content. Classic should be easy and accessible RPG content. They are making Cata for maybe 5% of the original Classic Vanilla playerbase.
For us it was running into Western Plaguelands from Tirisfal Glades. We ran down the road just to see what was in there, only to be greeted and murdered by a giant lvl ?? bear. Notice another detail to classic wow was that they made higher level mobs, bigger in size, so when it came running, not only did you know it was dangerous, but also that you are small in comparison to it.
Lot of good points here. It went from a sandbox to a rollercoaster ride, I thoroughly enjoyed cata when it was first released. I feel like SOD just completely shadows cata classic.
WoW was never a sandbox, but with cata, it ceased being what I’d even call an MMO…
I loved Cata endgame zones being separated. It reminded me how I had to travel long distances back in Vanila to get to leveling zones.
you had portals in capitals to each of those "distanced" places.. so its definitely not the same feeling as vanilla lol
@@Gril018 Was gonna reply exactly that lmao
@@Gril018 So? It's about looking at the map.
You do know that traveling on a ship in Vanila is teleportation, right?
@@ulfgaar7724 And you had to unlock the portal first.
@@Gril018ignorant...
The sheer size of the world was made dramaticly smaller with the addition of flying in eastern kingdoms in cata, it really hurt the overall mystery of the world when that was added, most of the changes in cata was due to people complaining in Wrath
For sure, however after being in wotlk, I'm tired of fucking riding on the ground everywhere in the original continents 😂
Cataclysm turned the game into easy mode. Before Cata, I only had one 60 character. After Cataclysm I had max level characters on both Horde and Alliance.
I enjoyed the easier and more relaxing gameplay of Cata. Even prior to that, the difficulty was still fair and laid-back.
It was update 7.3.5 that ruined the game for good with cheap difficulty mechanics and that awful level scaling, etc.
Having a new raid in blackrock mountain was so sick in cata
out of all 4 classic expansions so far cataclysm was actually my favorite. i played the most and started pvping for real and hit high rating. it was my overall best time in wow probably. but im still not that excited for it. dont really know why. honestly if they added mythic + to cata i might be more excited.
Your opinion about the quests in Vanilla WoW is spot on! In Classic you have to put more effort into finding quests, they are not linear, and the game forces you to go on an adventure to find them
100% for me, the more they streamlined the game, the more they took the fun out of it.
Imo the lost its fun while leveling when they started making all the quest items sparkle and the mini map had quest locations on it. It seems around the time cata came out everything became ENDgame focused and blizz took the fun out of the game to rush everyone into endgame.
I thought it was a mixed bag. I liked most of the new zones though they were a little drawn out. I liked some of the quality of life stuff and by the last patch it was was pretty good.
What I didn't like was a lot of the revamped zones. In Kalamdor it was needed in a lot of zones because they always seemed unfinished. Thousand Needles and Tanaris being the only exceptions. Darkshore I'm on the fence about. In the Eastern Kingdoms most of it was annoying. I didn't mind the "time jump" with new buildings but the deathwing destruction was really annoying. The removal of weapons points and grouping of quests was also kind of annoying. I do get the point of it being cleaner though. I hated losing Southshore but I did find the Forsaken changes interesting.
The game just became to linear and it lost a lot of the magic. I started at Cata launch and didn't hit 85 until about 3 months before MoP. After that I pretty much quit the game until Legion. I'd come back periodically to check things but nothing held my interest. I did enjoy MoP fresh leveling in Legion though.
LFG was introduced in WotLK, wasn't it? I remember I was using it for the end-game heroics
Yes it was, people love pawning that off on Cata though. They love trying to do that for LFR too but that came in dragon soul at the very end of the expac and was basically something made for mist.
0:30 Also, to be even more fair, you could only understand every 3rd word she said. I'm not trying to be harsh or mean, but she has a really thick accent that was pretty hard to understand with the echo and acoustics of the hall being picked up as well.
Classes felt amazing in Cata. I'm excited for it for sure. I wish they'd keep WotLK around tho
If you liked cata just go play retail
@@loosecannon6142 Chromie time made all the expansions up to legion pretty much dead content in retail, no thank you
tell me you've played since Vanilla and now you're only playing vanilla thinking about your childhood when mommy was feeding you on your s**t bucket without telling me so :D@@loosecannon6142
ROFL Cata is A) not "classic" and B) was the reason why my whole 70 person guild left the game. The few stragglers that remained ended up forming their own guild and complained to us over Vent that it was shite and they hated it. I came back for Pandaria and only went back to Cata to farm mounts and hunter pets. It was just crap (to me), I was miserable the entire time and seemed even MORE crap after the masterpiece that was Lich King.
OK, Some of the earlier raids and dungeons were really fun... but in general? And they trashed everything that we loved in the world, and for what? What was the plot... everyone from the dev's to Deathwing literally lost the plot. There was no plot!
100% agree
For me it became obvious throughout the end of wrath and certainly with Cata that you're just playing a worse version of retail. I enjoyed Vanilla classic and TBC classic as it felt different to what retail was offering more of a adventure, a slow immersive journey, just a different vibe to retail but not so much with Wrath and certainly not Cata.
It's like back in the 80s and 90s you'd go to the stores to go shopping, the layout forced you to explore and you'd find things you didn't intend on buying and you'd make a day of it and go with family or friends and have fun. Now you go online and get precisely what you need in a few clicks and it feels more like a chore than fun because it's designed entirely for functionality and not experience. Even if you go to the store now you know everything they have because of the internet so the stores don't have the same role anymore.
“Cata started at level 85 whereas Classic started at level 1” - I really like this quote as an explainer.
Reminds me of the Southpark where they finally grind to max level and the answer to “what now?” Is “now we can finally play the game” 😅
I mean the entire point of Classic is to experience Pre-Cata WoW
You can literally play Cata in Retail, most of the zones haven't changed since then