Why I think Cata was Great

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Okay, the vast majority of any all talk I hear about Cata has just been flat out ranting about why it was so terrible and why we should all pout that Blizzard even thought of it.

Let's take a moment here, and appreciate that a thousand game developers worked their asses off to bring to us what is - from my perspective - a great expansion and why it was such. Let us also break down why people apparently "hated" it so much.

1. It was a new approach to typical expansion content.
Unlike previous expansions, which just added a new continent and places for us to explore; Cata instead experimented with bringing us back to the starter lands we most love and add new content to those areas. Uldum, Vash'jr, Twlight Highlands...and finally; the very much antcipated Mount Hyjal; whom we've been waiting over a decade to finally visit again. Rather than learn about mostly new races exclusively; we got to learn much, much more about the civilizations and races we've come to love across the past three decades of Warcraft.

One problem though, was that where most people expected one, unified continent with heavily interconnected lore and physical borders; they found in Cata that the story took places in several different places far away from each other across the world. As such, they didn't feel that the overall arc was connected when traveling from region to region.

The plot was done the same way, but too many people didn't understand it.

The overall plot of Cataclysm carried across all those zones; and was quite an entertaining tale. Having learned from Wrath, the writers stuck to the storytelling formula WotLK set and didn't change much. Brilliantly written; the death of Calestraz was tragic; getting to explore with Brann Bronzebeard again was refreshing, and we also got to learn even more about Alextraza's ordeal in the mountain; the lore of the Dragonmaw; and got to pay a visit to Ragnaros's personal estate. We got a few, well planned out appearances from Deathwing, just like Arthas's appearances across the WotLK plot. Sadly however, while the vast majority of WotLK players familar with the plot had come to know Arthas personally through WC3; the vast majority of Cata players had never played WC2, and felt that they were strangers to the party during Deathwing's few appearances throughout the main plot. Also, since many players simply skipped over the Blackrock storyline during leveling up (Thanks to the ability to camp at home and just run LFDs), they came to said party with very little prior knowledge of the Black Dragonflight and Twilight Hammer's backgrounds, further compounding their difficulty in comprehending the script.

It was a return to challenging content, which people found unexpected.

Vanilla was hard. BC was a tad more forgiving. WotLK was a cake walk. Cata was hard...again.

The players from Vanilla and some from BC complained about Wrath being too easy and not fun since the challenge didn't really exist except on heroic difficulties. They wanted the third expansion to be a return to challenging content. The people who had joined in during WotLK had absolutely no experience whatsoever in co-oping Vanilla and BC content when they were considered modern. As such, having no comparisons to draw from, took Wrath content as their role model for content.

Blizzard had spent a bit too much time away from developing "challenging" content, so when Cata first released, the dungeons were way too hard, even for some Vanilla vets. Even after the nerfs, however; the Wrath players were completely jarred by the difficultly ramp up, and thus complained that the Cata dungeons on normal were just as hard as to ICC on heroic. (Thus, influencing the MoP dungeon design to be a middle ground between nerfed Cata and normal Wrath).

Dragon Soul didn't exactly meet expectations, and as the defining raid of the expansion; people judged Cata mostly off of it

When most people think of an expansion, they think of that one, defining raid of that arc. In this case: Dragon Soul. But when they remember Dragon Soul; they remember a raid that took place in multiple locations too fast, and a penultimate fight that was very confusing.

But just because the gameplay wasn't the best didn't mean that the raid was terrible: I loved the story and was very scarred all the way through as to whether or not there would be a happy ending. (Spoiler alert! George R.R. Martin wasn't, in fact, the first fantasy writers to have sad endings in his stories!) I loved the raid all the way through.

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Your thoughts?

[Facerockker]

Cataclysm was bad. It's not an opinion, it's just an unfortunate fact. The revamped 1-60 zones aren't particularly interesting, leveling is an absolutely joke so the new old world content doesn't matter anyway, Worgen starting zone was an absolute snorefest while Goblin's was much more exciting, the hard content so many people worked at was stripped away because Blizzard catered to the most casual side of their player base and sucked all the fun out of Heroics, Hyjal's story was disjointed and was overpopulated at launch while Vashj'ir was just overly arduous and not that fun, Tol Barad had not only no flying but an end level raid that required players to do PvP and dropped PvP gear, Firelands was pushed back a patch and an entire dungeon was just completely cut altogether, ZG and ZA were just filler content, Frost death knight became massively overpowered mid expansion... Need I go on?

[Darsithis]

Cataclysm was bad. It's not an opinion, it's just an unfortunate fact. The revamped 1-60 zones aren't particularly interesting, leveling is an absolutely joke so the new old world content doesn't matter anyway, Worgen starting zone was an absolute snorefest while Goblin's was much more exciting, the hard content so many people worked at was stripped away because Blizzard catered to the most casual side of their player base and sucked all the fun out of Heroics, Hyjal's story was disjointed and was overpopulated at launch while Vashj'ir was just overly arduous and not that fun, Tol Barad had not only no flying but an end level raid that required players to do PvP and dropped PvP gear, Firelands was pushed back a patch and an entire dungeon was just completely cut altogether, ZG and ZA were just filler content, Frost death knight became massively overpowered mid expansion... Need I go on?

No...that's pretty much entirely your opinion, not fact.

[Barkloud]

Cataclysm was bad. It's not an opinion, it's just an unfortunate fact. The revamped 1-60 zones aren't particularly interesting, leveling is an absolutely joke so the new old world content doesn't matter anyway, Worgen starting zone was an absolute snorefest while Goblin's was much more exciting, the hard content so many people worked at was stripped away because Blizzard catered to the most casual side of their player base and sucked all the fun out of Heroics, Hyjal's story was disjointed and was overpopulated at launch while Vashj'ir was just overly arduous and not that fun, Tol Barad had not only no flying but an end level raid that required players to do PvP and dropped PvP gear, Firelands was pushed back a patch and an entire dungeon was just completely cut altogether, ZG and ZA were just filler content, Frost death knight became massively overpowered mid expansion... Need I go on?

I enjoyed cata immensely. Cata suffered from a lack of content in my opinion. I read the book about deathwing and enjoyed laying through the story.

[Darsithis]

Cataclysm was bad. It's not an opinion, it's just an unfortunate fact. The revamped 1-60 zones aren't particularly interesting, leveling is an absolutely joke so the new old world content doesn't matter anyway, Worgen starting zone was an absolute snorefest while Goblin's was much more exciting, the hard content so many people worked at was stripped away because Blizzard catered to the most casual side of their player base and sucked all the fun out of Heroics, Hyjal's story was disjointed and was overpopulated at launch while Vashj'ir was just overly arduous and not that fun, Tol Barad had not only no flying but an end level raid that required players to do PvP and dropped PvP gear, Firelands was pushed back a patch and an entire dungeon was just completely cut altogether, ZG and ZA were just filler content, Frost death knight became massively overpowered mid expansion... Need I go on?

I'll expand.

You didn't like the revamp. I did. There were multiple emotionally-strong questlines such as Rhea in the Badlands, Auberdine in Darkshore, and Darrowshire's revamped sets in Eastern Plaguelands. Fighting for Andorhal was fun and I enjoyed the changes that brought Alliance players to the Barrens. Desolace got a great revamp that was quite a novelty after years of dead, dry desert.

I enjoyed the Worgen zone, myself, and I hated the Goblin one. I really hated that annoying car-ride mechanic and the whole "let's go shopping and to the pool for the day" questline.

Vashj'ir remains my favorite leveling area from 80 - 83 today and every one of my 14 90's has leveled through it. I'm not too fond of Hyjal, though.

Tol Barad was not an end-level raid that required people to do PvP. Tol Barad was a PvP-related raid for people who already PvP'd, just like VoA in Wrath. I don't see why that suddenly makes Cata so bad. As for ZA/ZG, well, the Troll dungeons were filler content until Firelands came out, it's true.

But my point is that everything you posted and everything I posted is just opinion.

[Keyblader]

I don't think Cataclysm was as bad as people say because I loved raiding through Firelands. But a lot of the content, I myself didn't care for it. That's just my opinion though.

[Raugnaut]

Cata did start off on a good note, but it got worse and worse with every single patch, finally culminating in the terribleness that was DS. Most of what the OP said has to do with the very start of the expansion. The "hard" content got nerfed to the ground within about 4 months, if not sooner, the storyline was somewhat lacking in the later patchs, ect.

Also, Dragon Soul "didn't exactly meet expectations"? Understatement of the year right there. Dragon Soul was a horrible, horrible let-down. There have been many, many threads explaining in great detail exactly why Dragon Soul was so terrible.

Pros of Cataclysm
1) 1-60 revamp. Was pretty good. Made questing more streamlined, didn't have to worry bout running out of quests/getting quests that took you to the middle of no-where, has better rewards, ect.
2) T11. Good challenging raid tier, many bosses, had many paths progression could take.
3) DMF Island.
4) Transmog.

Aaaand.. Thats about it for Pros of Cataclysm.

Cons-
1) Removal of much older content. As much as the 1-60 revamp helped, it changed Azeroth forever. The Ogrimmar Bank on which many people sat was gone for good. Many old haunts were permanently removed, or drastically changed. ZG/ZA, gone. (I still have a quest from old ZA that will likely stay in my quest log forever).
2)Lacking 2nd and 3rd raid tiers.
3)Deathwing did not have much of an actual presence, and was pretty much "CRAZY DRAGON GO RAWR!". Arthas was a plotting mastermind-ish villian. Througout the entire lvling process of WotLK, whenever you met with Arthas, you would get goosebumps, as you know that guy could turn around and slaughter you in an instant if he wished.
Deathwing, on the other hand? He didn't really show much of a plan. It was all "BURN ALL THE THINGS!". No ingenious planning, no deft manipulation of mortals. The Naga showed more planning in a single zone then Deathwing did an entire expansion. And for a Dragon that hated all mortals and wanted to kill all the people, you saw him up close and personal quite a bit without him immediately slaughtering you. (Hyjal, Green drake with a hero goes by, stares at DW right in the face. He does nothing. Twilight Highland, hero aids red dragonflight, slaughters many of his minions. He just goes "LOLOLOLOL I PWNED YOU ALEXSTRAZA!", doesn't even consider her champion. It can even be seen in Dragon Soul- For almost the entire fight, he displays NONE of the strength that his title, "The Destroyer", implies. He just goes around, chucking random fireballs that don't even kill anyone, and goes "LOLOLOL I DA BEST AND YOU GUYS ARE NUBZ!". And how does he go out? In a bazillion sparkly niblets! Fireworks! Babies! WTF?!?!?!
Deathwing was a total and complete LETDOWN.
4) Expansion of Broken Promises. At Blizzcon, who were the announced central villains of Cataclysm? Deathwing and... Queen Azshara. Of course, Azshara doesn't even make it to the Beta. We see almost NOTHING of Queen Azshara except a quick cameo in a wonky-time jump instance. In addition, they stated that they planned to have multiple raid tiers.. Which we only see at the start. We get a 7 boss raid instance for T12, and a meager 8 boss raid instance for T13. Abyssal Maw, scrapped. Neptulon has been getting tentacle-raped for 4 in-game years now or something. Muronzond, Nozdormu corrupted, Aspect of Time, he who saw the many ends of the World, who saw what would cause mortal minds to go insane, was a mere boss in a FLIMSY !@#$ING 5 man DUNGEON! He SHOULD have been a raid boss! Bam, Infinite Dragonflight wrapped up in a single instance, when it could have made for some GLORIOUS content! And War of the Ancients! That also would have been an awesome raid! Bam, another pathetically easy 5 man...

Cataclysm. A Cataclysmic Failure of an expansion.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Also, another thing I forgot to mention: I revamped the 1-60 experience. Yes, I know; most people that was resources wasted. But two very important things: the Vanilla 1-60 experience was quite frankly a boring grindfest of kill X mobs for this little XP or farm Y mobs for a chance to get Z items for this puny item. Although Vanilla was near and dear to my heart...let's face it: It was a mess. Cata fixed that by severely reducing the amount of kill X mobs for this little XP quests and actually made them entertaining.

Second, Cata revamp also moved the story along for our starter lands that were frozen in time right after the Third War, bringing with them updates to the story and...sadly, a lot of death.

As Tauren RPer for the past 8 years, I was utterly heartbroken when I found out that Camp Taurajo was massacred. I had RPed there for so long...that storyline just brought tears to my eyes; seeing one of my favorite RP spots...one that I had bonded with...just burned to the ground.

[Packing an i5]

cata has brought me a lot of tears. I use to love wow cata is when I quit for my longest period ever an entire year. Cataclysm is the worst expansion ever.

Rip old world

Rip actual talent trees

Rip wow 2004-2010.

[Apology]

The most fun I've ever had in WoW was healing the early Cataclysm heroics.

The period of time I hated in WoW the most was running those mindless 4.3 heroics and Dragon Soul (Raid Finder though, with that said) over and over and over with absolutely nothing else to do in game.

I think that just about sums up my opinion on Cataclysm

[Krekko]

I truly did enjoy Cata. I enjoyed the raids (save DS) and I enjoyed playing the content, new, old, and refreshed.

Cata hit a soft spot in me seeing these zones which I knew inside and out and developed them even further. There was some happy stories, and some sad stories, it struck some nice cords.

My only problems with it were that 1) Thrall didn't die at the end of DS, it would have been a great ending had he died. and 2) the Deathwing fight just truly fell short for myself.

[ZehGeek]

The start of Cata? Yes that was great. T11's mechanics were pretty interesting, and varied from 3 different raids compared to a super raid. Healing was interesting if in a pre-made group.
I'd love to have some mix of the good of the start of Cata, and good things of MoP, would be great IMO.

[Mormolyce]

I thought Cata had a lot going for it. It was arguably the weakest expansion but it was by no means bad. Pity it ended on a bad note with DS (which wasn't all bad either IMO), the earlier content was excellent. Launch heroics were divisive but personally I thought they were fantastic.

Cataclysm was bad. It's not an opinion, it's just an unfortunate fact.

It's an assessment of quality, it is literally impossible for that not to be an opinion.

[Faroth]

I disagree. I enjoyed Cataclysm okay, but it wasn't a great expansion in my opinion. I got 2 alts from 1 to max level on top of my five other alts to max level and more than one in raid gear. That much alt-itis comes from a lack of things to do on the main, even with doing a round of dailies every day.

To touch on your points:

1. It was a new approach to typical expansion content.[/SIZE]

I'll agree with this, but I think perhaps they went about it a bit wrong. It was well overdue for leveling to get a revamp, but I'm not sure they needed to touch every single zone. The result was the lack of end-game content and things to do for max level players. I liked the idea of using existing areas, but I think they could have done more with spreading out what was used where. Old zones we once knew and loved could have been for 80-85 in addition to the new zones, or used for daily hubs, etc.

I'm not sure how much we really learned about the races, though. I did like the Hyjal quests bringing back the Ancients, though.

The plot was done the same way, but too many people didn't understand it.

The story was *too* spread out, though. If you didn't go back and play through the leveling zones, you missed a lot. And who's going to know that doing the quests surrounding Dire Maul will give some tidbits on Cho'gall and his involvement with the Twilight Hammer. Likewise, Wrathion's storyline was died to Deathwing directly, yet again...if you didn't go back and do LOW LOW level content for story purposes, you'd never have a clue and nothing nudged players to do so.

Brann was fun in the dungeon, but turning the majority of Uldum into an Indiana Jones parody was downright boring and had no real connection to the plot until the last few quests. It was really annoying more than anything.

It was just overall a scattered mess. They should have contained the lower level zones primarily to the new threats to Azeroth from the Cataclysm as well as the Horde/Alliance conflict and kept the Twilight and Deathwing primarily to higher level content. Again, utilizing more of the old zones for high level quests would have worked, even having the Classic WoW "world tour" quests involved.

This was made worse to me by the focus on Thrall. Even the Ragnaros trailer was focused on Thrall's vision. The Alliance waited for over 5 years for the proclaimed monumental return of Malfurion and all he got was a lousy book (I think it's one of Knaack's worst ones and I don't hate Knaack) and a few quests with an appearance in the daily hub and raid. And we even got a dangling plot thread because of the focus on Thrall.

The Dragon Aspects summon Thrall and Malfurion to the World Tree to perform a ritual, Thrall gets attacked (ignoring Malfurion despite Fandral Staghelm HATING him), and we rescue Thrall....then he declares he wants to take Aggra as his mate and we all cheer the happiness. ..........what ritual? No, don't worry about it.
WTF was the ritual for?! It seems like it was important to call everyone there. And why was Thrall needed? Deathwing never blessed Nordrassil to begin with, so Thrall wasn't a stand in for Earth. Just way too much Thrall injected into the story where a more balanced approach to holding the world together would have been to have Thrall representing the Earthen Ring and Malfurion representing the Cenarion Circle and have Alliance work with Malfurion and Horde with Thrall to still keep a bit of faction representation in tact. Nobody believed Thrall was neutral.

That's like saying Mickey Mouse doesn't represent Disney for a couple of years. It's just nonsense.

It was a return to challenging content, which people found unexpected.

Vanilla was hard. BC was a tad more forgiving. WotLK was a cake walk. Cata was hard...again.

First off, I disagree. BC wasn't more forgiving than Vanilla. It introduced Heroics, some of which were pretty tough and the raid mechanics were far more complex than the majority tank n' spank with minimal DPS/Healer additional actions from Vanilla with the exception of Naxxramas which 1% of all players saw.

Wrath wasn't a cake walk either. I remember players needing to gear up, to hit certain stat points before they could really handle heroics. It was only a cake walk later in the expansion when every player had access to a full set of raid gear. Not that Wrath was really hard, it just wasn't as easy as people remember because they think back to later expansion rather than launch.

As others have pointed out, it was a combination of things in Cataclysm. The heroics were hard (I'd say too many were "Shadow Labyrinth" level of hard), the heroics were no longer being done by pre-made groups but by random strangers who has been trained in Wrath to ignore mechanics and just AoE everything, the healing changes made oom a real issue at the start. These combined made heroics a nightmare. Take one or two out and they wouldn't have been a big deal.

I also disagree with you about MoP being between Cata and Wrath. They weren't. They were seriously too easy. They made Wrath in T9 look challenging. I seriously had my first time in a heroic go so smoothly that we AoE tank/DPS'd everything and one shot every boss with absolutely no clue what they did, all in LFG. That's sadly easy. That's take a nap and tap the keyboard easy. :/

Dragon Soul didn't exactly meet expectations, and as the defining raid of the expansion; people judged Cata mostly off of it

I actually liked Dragon Soul well enough. A lot of people complained about the locations, but I think it works and makes sense to reuse resources when the story is going to take place in areas we've been to before. I see absolutely nothing wrong with utilizing the world you've built to tell new stories.

That said, I did feel like Deathwing was butchered. He was no longer the manipulative mastermind, the one pulling the strings on his way towards the endgame, but just a mad dragon out for destruction. The final battle with him was extremely anti-climactic.





I think the expansion also suffered from a lack of features at launch. The only new big shiny we had was really Guild Leveling/Perks. Not exactly stellar. Neat, sure, but not a home run. Thankfully by the end, we got the single greatest feature ever in Transmog.

[chase123]

Cata was great for an alt-a-holic like myself since I leveled up a bunch of alts through the new revamped zones. Patch 4.3 ran extremely long so thats why most see it as a bad expansion, especially those with the annual pass who were stuck playing until it ran out.

So besides 4.3, Cata was a good expansion. I still rank it ahead of MoP which will soon be hated as much as Cata by most since 5.4 will run even longer than 4.3 did.

[Vash The Stampede]

1. It was a new approach to typical expansion content.

1 There were less zones then previous expansions, plus you use a portal to get to most of them.
2 Most zones were extremely uninteresting. Not that MoP did a much better job.
3 Too much focus on redoing old content that didn't need to be redone.

The plot was done the same way, but too many people didn't understand it.

The plot would have been better if we had constant interaction with the main villain. In WOTLK they did it right to constantly bring Arthas into nearly every event that took place. Deathwing would just fly around once in a while and breath fire on people. Also the most lore we got out of Cata was hidden in older content and with Rogues. Cause everyone is going to level a character again and play a Rogue?

It was a return to challenging content, which people found unexpected.

And yet it brought LFR, the most hated thing ever created in WoW. Also difficulty has nothing to do with it.

Dragon Soul didn't exactly meet expectations, and as the defining raid of the expansion; people judged Cata mostly off of it

Dragon Soul had how many reused bosses with reused environments? Given that most dungeons and raids use some amount of old content, but Dragon Soul went too far. They also obviously tried too hard to bring back that WOTLK feeling with Dragon Soul. To the point that it looked like it was done out of desperation.

[hakujinbakasama]

I don't think Cataclysm was as bad as people say because I loved raiding through Firelands. But a lot of the content, I myself didn't care for it. That's just my opinion though.

Cata suffered from a few issues but it wasn't completely shit. For every bad decision there was at least one if not two that were good.

The problem was that some of the bass dwarfed the good by perspective. Crafting is a good example.
Orbs were an awful throw back to Wrath. The random enchant crafts were nice but several sets looked like complete shit. Enchanting was nice again, dust rates were the fuck not. Ect ect

[Faroth]

They also obviously tried too hard to bring back that WOTLK feeling with Dragon Soul. To the point that it looked like it was done out of desperation.

This is what I was referring to. I don't understand this mentality of complaint regarding reusing environments.
They established the important of Wyrmrest Temple.
They established Deathwing vs the Aspects.
They established his vision of destroying Wyrmrest Temple.
They have a showdown at Wyrmrest Temple....and people cry foul and say it's lazy.

So what, you can't develop a storyline to make use of what you set the plans in motion for? It's like raging at Game of Thrones if two books take place in the same kingdom. I just don't understand why you would expect them to redesign and make up some alternate plane of insanity for Deathwing to fight players pulled out of Blizzard's arse instead of, y'know, the place that makes logical sense for him to assault. :/

I'll grant you they could have come up with new boss models, but the environments make total sense to me to reuse, particularly when the plot is leading towards it.

I'd like to see old environments reused more often. Places of importance tend to have things happen.
It's like arguing that because a battle occurred at X location....nothing could have ever happened there again. EVER.

There's only so many times you can re-invent snow, mountains, grass, forests, and caves, so I say reuse them. If reusing environments makes things go quicker, that's great. We should just get new boss models due to the easier environment development, though. You'd also expect more content if there's less work on the environments. More bosses per raid, etc.

[Jawless Jones]

cata was pretty bad.

Ridiculously linear questing paths in 1-60 (all roads lead to the Blasted Lands), and the 80-85 zones were also linear

Removal of old content, what sort of game developer rips out their own games roots? especially during the expansion they add transmog in...
Combining the removal of old content and Linear questing, is it any wonder the world seems so small now?

The plot sucked ass, what did the death of Caelestrasz actually accomplish story-wise? If he had survived nothing would have changed.
Deathwings appearances consist of him flying over or blasting someone else, at least Arthas acknowledged your existence.

Black Dragons and the Twilights Hammer feature all over Kalimdor as well (Silithus, Desolace, Dustwallow, Stonetalon, Ashenvale, Aszhara and Darkshore), with Aszhara and Darkshore happening before level 15, and Black Dragons popping up in Redridge at level 15~.

PvP was a mess, healers (especially Holy Paladins) being invincible wasn't fun, especially when Blizz brought back Shockadins.
Sub rogues were crazy OP, with Warriors being trash the entire expansion.
Buffed Resilience and Resistance meant that people who tried to start PvPing part-way through the expac were punching bags until they could scrap together some Arena gear (unless they were healers), with PvE gear being useless in all instances of PvP.

BC was much harder than Vanilla when it comes to boss mechanics. Wrath heroics were only easy AFTER everyone far out-geared them. I agree that Naxx could've been more difficult. Ulduar and ICC introduced proper Heroic Raiding (not just swapping to 25-man).

Cata heroics were only hard because of the stupid Triage healing model blizzard forced on healers, if we had continued with the Wrath healing model (or the later Cata model or the MoP model) they would have been a lot less "difficult". Troll Dungeons.

T11 was as broken as DS was boring, with Stevie Wonder the Dragon being unkillable unless you exploited him, and some 10-man bosses not even being scaled down from 25-man.
DS had fairly basic mechanics of 'stand there' and 'kill that add', which aren't necessarily bad, but if you use them as often as DS did...
The last 3 bosses were glorified Trash pulls, and the conclusion is some of the biggest bullshit in lore.

"We lost our powers because we put them all in the Dragon Soul the defeat Deathwing" - fair enough, that still doesn't explain why they're unable to reproduce now. And it doesn't explain why ALL the dragons are losing influence over their respective spheres of power, the Aspects should be powered down to normal dragons, the normal dragons aren't tied to their Aspects powers, so why are they losing their natural born powers?

"Mortals are the true defenders of the world" - Thanks, y'know Medivh told us that at the end of Warcraft 3 right? And its been pretty obvious that we're the defenders of the world, since us mortals have been killing Dragons/solving problems all over the place, and the Dragons haven't been particularly useful in either regard.

"The purpose of the Aspects is the stop the Hour of Twilight" - If Neltharion wasn't made an Aspect, he wouldn't have been corrupted, and thus wouldn't have been able to create the Twilight Dragonflight, and thus the Hour of Twilight would never have been a possibility. Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.

TL;DR
Cata sucked at PvE
Cata sucked at PvP
Cata sucked at leveling
Cata sucked at Lore
Transmog is pretty cool

[Deviant]

I thought cata was bad because of a lack of content and difficulty drops. That alone made it the worst to me. The content pre-dragon soul was solid but after that the exp went to shit.

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cata was pretty bad.

Ridiculously linear questing paths in 1-60 (all roads lead to the Blasted Lands), and the 80-85 zones were also linear

Removal of old content, what sort of game developer rips out their own games roots? especially during the expansion they add transmog in...
Combining the removal of old content and Linear questing, is it any wonder the world seems so small now?

The plot sucked ass, what did the death of Caelestrasz actually accomplish story-wise? If he had survived nothing would have changed.
Deathwings appearances consist of him flying over or blasting someone else, at least Arthas acknowledged your existence.

Black Dragons and the Twilights Hammer feature all over Kalimdor as well (Silithus, Desolace, Dustwallow, Stonetalon, Ashenvale, Aszhara and Darkshore), with Aszhara and Darkshore happening before level 15, and Black Dragons popping up in Redridge at level 15~.

PvP was a mess, healers (especially Holy Paladins) being invincible wasn't fun, especially when Blizz brought back Shockadins.
Sub rogues were crazy OP, with Warriors being trash the entire expansion.
Buffed Resilience and Resistance meant that people who tried to start PvPing part-way through the expac were punching bags until they could scrap together some Arena gear (unless they were healers), with PvE gear being useless in all instances of PvP.

BC was much harder than Vanilla when it comes to boss mechanics. Wrath heroics were only easy AFTER everyone far out-geared them. I agree that Naxx could've been more difficult. Ulduar and ICC introduced proper Heroic Raiding (not just swapping to 25-man).

Cata heroics were only hard because of the stupid Triage healing model blizzard forced on healers, if we had continued with the Wrath healing model (or the later Cata model or the MoP model) they would have been a lot less "difficult". Troll Dungeons.

T11 was as broken as DS was boring, with Stevie Wonder the Dragon being unkillable unless you exploited him, and some 10-man bosses not even being scaled down from 25-man.
DS had fairly basic mechanics of 'stand there' and 'kill that add', which aren't necessarily bad, but if you use them as often as DS did...
The last 3 bosses were glorified Trash pulls, and the conclusion is some of the biggest bullshit in lore.

"We lost our powers because we put them all in the Dragon Soul the defeat Deathwing" - fair enough, that still doesn't explain why they're unable to reproduce now. And it doesn't explain why ALL the dragons are losing influence over their respective spheres of power, the Aspects should be powered down to normal dragons, the normal dragons aren't tied to their Aspects powers, so why are they losing their natural born powers?

"Mortals are the true defenders of the world" - Thanks, y'know Medivh told us that at the end of Warcraft 3 right? And its been pretty obvious that we're the defenders of the world, since us mortals have been killing Dragons/solving problems all over the place, and the Dragons haven't been particularly useful in either regard.

"The purpose of the Aspects is the stop the Hour of Twilight" - If Neltharion wasn't made an Aspect, he wouldn't have been corrupted, and thus wouldn't have been able to create the Twilight Dragonflight, and thus the Hour of Twilight would never have been a possibility. Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.

TL;DR
Cata sucked at PvE
Cata sucked at PvP
Cata sucked at leveling
Cata sucked at Lore
Transmog is pretty cool

Warriors were amazing in season 9. They were ok in season 10 and sucked in season 11. Holy paladins weren't invincible they could be solo'd by a single mage. Shamans were the op healers of that expansion and priest were behind them. Paladins were slightly better then druids. No, wotlk heroic dungeons were really easy. The only hard ones were the three that launched with Icc. Mana wasn't an issue anymore and dps just spammed aoes no cc required.

Pve gear wasn't useless that expansion legendary weapons and proc trinkets were amazing. Some 4 pieces were godly as well. Btw in cata I could kill people naked 1v1. I can't do that in mist of pandaria.