Lets talk about why people hate Cataclysm

[anaxie]

No please go ahead tell me why the expansion was bad without talking about Dragon Soul.

T11 was one of the greatest tiers of all time
The Entire world got redone ALOT OF ZONES and the new zones are probably still the largest zones we ever had gotten.
T12 Firelands and it's daily hub were praised and Ragnaros H is one of the greatest boss encounters of all time.
The Heroics that launched with Cata stand out as some of the most interesting ones made.
Loot wasnt a mass RNG fest and you could work towards goals with rep or Valor for other gear.

So tell me what was bad.

[Gilthresa]

You say without talking about dragon soul but that is the sole reason cata turned to shit

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

You already made a pretty good argument why Cata wasn't good.

[anaxie]

You say without talking about dragon soul but that is the sole reason cata turned to shit.

except dragon soul only was there for 8 months not 14 months.

So again outside dragon soul why did cata suck?

[Gilthresa]

except dragon soul only was there for 8 months not 14 months.

So again outside dragon soul why did cata suck?

It didn't /10 chars

[anaxie]

It didn't /10 chars

The norm seems to be it did. When the major complaints when it was out PRE 4.3 was that it's too hard!

[Deleted]

The Romance of Thrall Ingalls

[Wishblade]

Deathwing was a boring villain throughout the expansion in its entirety. Showing up randomly in zones, appearing briefly with other characters, chatting, while The Lich King showed up more often and actually interacted with us, or the more recent Warlords on Draenor.

Running the same two dungeons for ages because they had the better loot compared to the dungeons of 4.0.

Personally felt there was too little about Al'Akir, just there as a sudden boss. Cho'Gall and Nefarian could've made some more appearances too, at least Ragnaros had his own patch and occasionally his minions taunted us.

Can't think of anything to pick on right now but then again, didn't really hate Cata all that much.

[Wilian]

I'll post my review from way back:

Hay, I've been gathering my posts about Cataclysm from all over teh interwebs and put it now into a single edited post I'm gonna share in few places to offer insight into the one real and true opinion of things, mine.
It's not a positive review (as for me Cataclysm was all but positive expansion) but it's a honest one from my perspective. I will give Blizzard praise on things they did right and say when they did things wrong.

This "review" is divided into 4 parts:

Quest content (the BIG thing of Cata)
New mechanics
Overall (mix of dungeon/reputation/raid stuff/gear)
Nostalgia


Quest content:
When Cataclysm was announced with the revamp of old world, there was one huge selling point Blizzard brought up. Three thousand new quests. And when talking of new quest content, there is only one thing you can really compare it to and it's earliel expansions which will happen.
All I can say, son, I am disappoint.

It all boils down to few things. Linearity, hand-holding and streamlining. When I read forums and read "Cataclysm brings so much better quests than before" I ask, what has changed?

The only thing that differs is that now you get usually 3-4 quests at once TOPS, from which one is kill x amount of things, second is gather y amount of stuff. Third is usually gimmick quest with some sort of engine type of content involvement/click mobs to heal them stuff. Fourth is the single optional quest that might be the only one that you can skip without the entire zone locking up as a whole, thanks to the linear structure of quest lines. I can feel the BETTER and AWESOME in these quests.

"But the stories are so much better!"

Are they? Cataclysm brought in plenty of entertaining quests to do atleast once, but the storylines and villains presented are very weak in majority of cases. Usually they end up either as pop cultural references rather than original storylines, or villains from Saturday morning cartoons with an agenda of "BUAHAHAHA MY PLANS OF ULTIMATE EVIL ARE ABOUT TO UNFOLD AND YOU CANT STOP ME... Oh snap" Not to mention that A LOT of quest lines/quests are just streamlined and recycled ones from vanilla with newly named NPCs to make the "progression" of time stand out.

There is no balance between the quests either. Questline might start as something that is grimdark and has serious undertones, but somehow Blizzard manages to add "humour" inbetween the whole thing and the "feel" of the quest just simply vanishes into a mix of something that is about as tasteless as hamburger bought from shop. Think of a Crusader Bridenbrad questline (Excellent questline from WotLK made in memory of employee whom died to cancer) and then add a poo-joke somewhere inbetween there. How that would've worked out?

While I think WotLK was a total failure past Ulduar, the initial quest content it delivered was brilliant. Expesially the whole build up for Yogg-Saron has been in my mind as of late when thinking of Cataclysm quests. That line started slowly building up in starter zones when the miners started digging up this strange ore which had unexpected ill effects on people. It was built slowly throughout the zones up to Icecrown and Storm Peaks and led quite naturally to what and who Yogg-Saron is. This one was largely missed by community at the time as very few read quest logs afterall and it's overarching nature could be missed on the way.

And that was only one of the many storylines that WotLK delivered brilliantly within the limitations of the game. Others worth of mentioning are Drakuru quest line about betrayal and the troll gods of Zul'drak. Many of the ICC questlines were well thought-out and put together along with Storm Peaks, though the latter did suffer from heavily referencing to Norse myths. (Which I didn't mind so much as I'm sucker for those)

TBC too had plenty of well done zone-related questlines, Teron Gorefiend out of them deserving a special mention as excellent character build up and (re)introduction.

"Atleast we don't have to travel half the world to deliver socks anymore!"

Then vanilla quests. When people say comments "lol travelling half a world because of delivering socks" I can only sigh and shake my head. Good example is the night elf questline about worgens from Ashenvale, that established how worgen came to be and how they spread into eastern kingdom before Cataclysm.
The quest leads from Ashenvale up to Duskwood in a manner that makes sense and even the quest text was part of making good atmoshpere for it, referring the travel as great adventure into lands far away which they were at the time. Travel to the unknown, through deserts into goblin town, over the sea with a ship, crossing perilous jungle and finally entering the human kingdom, or what was left of it in Duskwood.
The scale was entirely different before flying mounts and low level mounts ruined the sense of size of the world. I loved the sense of adventure and mysticism that the quests provided before becoming spoon-fed streamlined cartoons aimed at modern pre-pubescent AD/HD patient.

"lol did you get that Rambo joke from Redridge?"

Blizzard used to be somewhat good with pop culture references. They were often hard to find (or very inside-joke like one wouldn't get right away) and most of all, rewarding to find because things were not so blatantly up in the face. Good examples are the zerg in the forests of Ashenvale in WC3 which you can recruit if you just use siege engines in right spot to cut down few trees. Or the tanky dude from Starcraft I singing Ride of the Valkyries when you click him many times enough. Or Linken/Super Mario quest line from WoW. Or the face of Sarah Kerrigan in Goblin Shredder monitor panel if you zoom in close enough.

Those are good references. They aren't part of anything and usually out of the way, but still there if you hunt for them.

Nowdays it's just zones and zones filled with references in a poor attempt to make everything tongue-in-a-cheek fun from which few work and majority are trash. Uldum is the greatest victim of this. During alpha it was paraded to be the zone where we find mysterious new race that had protected ancient weapons for years, and it would become to be the major struggling point between Horde and Alliance as both are trying to gain control of it.
What did we get? A short questline on about the new mystic race and it's internal troubles and then Indiana Jones ripoff for rest of the zone. Hurray.

Enough for quests rite?!

New mechanics (and lack of):
Big thing with Cataclysm "failure" for me was that it did not anything new in terms of mechanics. When we exclude quests, raids/dungeons, zones, BG's, professions, graphical tweaks and class/race stuff what did it really bring at launch?

When we look at other expansions:

TBC:
The new daily quest system
Flying mounts
Heroic dungeon system
Badges for gear system
Arena
New honor system
Socket/Gem system

WotLK:
Pre-rendered cinematics (Wrathgate, LK)
Hard mode system for raids
New raid size system (All raids can be done either 10/25 man)
Achievements
Barber shop
The whole Engine thing (siege engines etc.)
Phasing
Large scale outdoor PvP area (Wintergrasp)
Glyph system

And now, what did Cataclysm bring?
Rated BGs system
Terrain phasing
Guild levels
Spec specialization
Reforging

The ingame cinematics were already possible in vanilla (Tower of Azora orb clickey click) for some reason it just was never used. When looked at it like this, Cataclysm did not bring anything new to the table that would benefit the gamers in manner that the earliel expansions did, simply more of the same that we have had now for ages, just in different clothing.

The new things it did bring were irrelevant from gaming aspect for most parts. Rated BG's were waste of time until Blizzard "fixed" Conquest point gain (as in, made it so that you can only cap it through RBGs, pissing on feet of Arena players (at the time) ). In theory it was awesome initially but the whole thing died very fast atleast on the two realms I played on.
Terrain phasing doesn't really add anything to do, only fluff for the enviroments and guild levels were something that happened on backround and if the guild was even a wee bit larger, it was capped automatically early in the day.
Spec specialization was indeed a nice thing to have and defined the class/spec fairly early on, making the early levels much more enjoyable. For beyond level 40 it didn't add almoust anything though what people wouldn't have had at that point and it was only fix for early gameplay. Once again a mechanic that would have no long lasting effect on the game.

What I hope is that Blizzard adds something new and does so fast, because one of the reasons that the game is getting so stale for is that there is simply nothing new that could compete with what previous expansions added. It only expands slightly on what we already had.

As example, they could expand on the previous idea of Path of Titans and make it a proper end game progression thing that is not related to professions this time as it was supposed on Archaeology. Removal of it afterall was "because they didn't want force people to do profession to gain something" along with "we wanted to fix glyph system instead".

Overall:

I liked the raid content in release. Far better than what WotLK had for almoust of it's entirety.

Encounters of T11 were all interesting and had their own thing going on, even in normal mode pre-nerfs and the hard modes really had stepped up from ICC grind, giving hard but fair gameplay with a extra sense of progression when there was so many different places to go. (Feeling that was amiss from WoW for almoust entire WotLK)

Firelands I never did properly due to quitting for internet troubles/lack of non raid content and I've only done normal DS thus far.
Which has been the most disappointing raid since the whole ToTC debacle by the way, with every fight being about as mind numbing as on LFR, just with bloated HP/damage. The boat was only highlight of the raid and the only fight there to give some sort of sense of involvement.

Dungeons, even if very few expesially on high end front, were nice initially and I liked the idea that there would've been 5-man endgame content progression when going to heroics and long lasting while at it, but it was quickly dumbed down into a daily faceroll again and any hope for real 5 man end game died with it.
I want more 5 man content that doesn't assume you're a retard lion with a sword sticking from head.
Troll dungeons were a pleasant surprise due to that but since they were only two and had no normal mode to progress through first, the whole thing just died and dried up real fast. The three new Twilight ones weren't.
Each of the three reeked of all the possible issues I have with modern 5 man scene of the game (limited size with room-corridor-room design, INVISIBLE WALLS, mindnumbing trash/bosses) and the fights themselves, trash and bosses, could've been just lootboxes instead of "EPIC BATTLE SET PIECES" that are about as memorable as the paint before it dried up.

5-man content leads into another gripe of mine, the jumps in gear levels and the constant resets.
Personally, I'd like the gear I've put so much effort to get stick around for a while, because in the end that is what defines the character and what has been achieved with it.
The whole gear-reset thing has taken the taste of gearing away from me, and it makes the game too gamey. Expesially the attitude that if it's not replaceable by next tier, it will get nerfed down as the trinket got just recently(T11 trinket when T12 was introduced).

When I think of awesome gear, I don't look at the latest tier I can cash out of point vendors, knowing I will do the same in few month's time, or kill the boss that gives even better gear. I look at items such as the dungeon set upgrades from vanilla, DM class trinkets, tiered weapon from BS in TBC, quest rewards from Teron Gorefiend line and hell, DFM: Greatness for which I at the time paid arm and leg and it lasted me all the way from the beginning to ICC, until I got lucky with drop from ToTC HM.

Items that each lasted for a very long time and could take few tiers to even think of replacing. Now it's just junk you rotate around over and over again and it detaches me from the game since as I said it earliel, makes it feel gamey. WotLK was faulty of this aswell but it had atleast some redeeming points on that front. Now they go into lenghts to make sure that next item is always superior and easy to reach and I don't like that direction at all.

Then there's the trimming down of talent trees. This was something that Blizzard said three things about during the beta.
Reduce the bloat, make invidual talents feel both stronger and interesting , give more options for players to juggle them and "choose their talent set" instead of forcing a obvious linear path.
But what did happen? Yes, they trimmed the trees down and lost the bloat of them, which is most likely the only thing true to their presented ideas and success of this change.
What happened to the "powerful&interesting and more decision making" thing?
As a paladin I have most likely more than what one hand can count of talents that are pretty much a straight "increases x by %" talents. Then again, what does the talent itself matter when the ability to choose is not there?
Each tree that I have played as through various classes has so far had as much as one "proper" path with 2-3 extra talents which you can spend in usually pointless flavour stuff.
And that along with the whole "you must fill one tree before setting up another" setup, I can only ask why do we have talents anymore? The lockout was done for balance reasons which is understandable with the amount of specs the game but when the trees itself are so damn linear if you wish to be effective at all, what is the point of these talent trees? To my eyes it's nowdays more of a relic of old times rather than important part of the game.
Blizzard would've saved plenty of the time for all of us if they simply expanded on the "when at level 10, you choose your specialization" thing and only added more passives as you level up in the same manner as Mastery becomes available at level 80.
As of how things are right now, it would make more sense rather than have this whole facade of false freedom of decisions. And would most likely be easier to balance too.

Lack of real rep grinds was the final knee-shot for me. It was the butter for the bread when there was no raiding about but it was non-existant. The reps were easily farmed in one week through dungeons and only real alternative was very few dailies and even then only for couple of factions. Basically it left many people without anything to do in-between raid days and was the largest reason for many of us leaving the game. Hell, if you make rep only available from dailies atleast make sure it lasts longer than 15 minutes.

Firelands dailies were utter disappointment after the hype Blizz created. Sure it was fun few times, but the fun lasted again only for 15-30 minutes with no alternative way to progress at all. Exactly the type of carrot-on a stick content I utterly hate.

As for community, there isn't much to say. I met p. much all friends I have from WoW during vanilla and TBC while looking for groups to do outdoor group quests and looking for heroics (Hell, as Retri paladin one had to be one sweet talker to get into groups).
After that point my friend list has only been shrinking and there has been no incentive at all to meet new people outside of established guild as the content doesn't support it.
Trade is always spammed up and no one's going out in the world so it's a bit of a no no situation unless you want to harass random people with random whispers.

So yeah, all in all, for me Cataclysm was p. much total failure , that was only saved initially by the launch raid content which grew really thin over the time due to lack of alternative things to do while on off-raid days.

I didn't like the result of a revamp (visually it was alright, content wise it just felt lacking), nor the new zones apart from Vash'jir. Vashjir was cool and felt fresh.

RATING:
Rating is for nubsters and bane of modern reviews. There is nothing worse but reducing opinion into numerical value that has no real scale and differs from one site to another. One's 8 is another's 5 or third's 73% even if they share the exact same opinion of the game. As such the idea of what and how they game is should come from the review itself, not from some arbitary numbers that could stand for anything and has no real scale at all.

PS: About nostalgia:

Everyone spouting about rose tinted goggles about vanilla quests, maybe you should take the jaded one of yours off first? Those quests you speak of were available until the very end of last year (at the time of writing, which was early 2011) and it certainly has not been so long to get the nostalgy-steer kick in proper. After burnout in ICC, I spent last 6 months of WoW WotLK basically leveling alts through vanilla zones and enjoyed it immensely, the quest lines and delivery were brilliant when you put the effort to read the quest text, the flavour text from items and all that. The only thing that I was missing from the zones were the sense of danger that in any case is given up for the sake of theme park which WoW is nowdays.
I can understand people who didn't care about quests, their texts or context and wanted only to bash through the ASAP, but why do you expect everyone to think so and if they don't agree, they are on nostalgy trip?
I've grown very tired of people triumphing on about nostalgy to back up their own opinion as the truth and then force it down the throat of those who might've enjoyed it different.

[Deadite]

I think it was better than MoP and WoD. My main issue was how lazy the content was. 99% of the quests were the same for both factions. I also personally didn't like the way the changed the Old World.

[micwini]

Just like WoD, there was almost no endgame content outside of raiding and dungeons.
4.1 was just 2 revamped dungeons. Compare that to 5.1 or even what we are getting in 7.1
Dragon Soul did last 9 months which is shorter than SoO and HFC, but it only had 8 bosses instead of 14.
The revamped leveling zones were cool, but the rest of the non raiding content was shit.

[Alydael]

I don't consider Cata to be bad really, I just don't like it as much as I like BC, Wrath or MOP. My favorite part of Cata was when they brought the Troll dungeons back and the three dungeons that launched with DS. The raids overall were lackluster, imo. I also really didn't like the deathwing theme and how the aspects had to sacrifice to kill him.

[anaxie]

Deathwing was a boring villain throughout the expansion in its entirety. Showing up randomly in zones, appearing briefly with other characters, chatting, while The Lich King showed up more often and actually interacted with us, or the more recent Warlords on Draenor.

Running the same two dungeons for ages because they had the better loot compared to the dungeons of 4.0.

Personally felt there was too little about Al'Akir, just there as a sudden boss. Cho'Gall and Nefarian could've made some more appearances too, at least Ragnaros had his own patch and occasionally his minions taunted us.

Can't think of anything to pick on right now but then again, didn't really hate Cata all that much.

Cho'gall was in Dire Maul and Highlands questing.

Deathwing was the face. But make no mistake the Antagonist guiding the events of the expansion was N'zoth. Thats why the Old God factions are all varied and causing havok everywhere.

Faceless , Naga, Black/Twilight Dragons, Twilight Cult, Fire Elementals, Air Elementals,

Lets look at Legion? Is Kil'jaeden up in your face yet? No? Guess who the finale villan is likely to be since hes central to illidans entire story arc.

[Alydael]

Just like WoD, there was almost no endgame content outside of raiding and dungeons.
4.1 was just 2 revamped dungeons. Compare that to 5.1 or even what we are getting in 7.1
Dragon Soul did last 9 months which is shorter than SoO and HFC, but it only had 8 bosses instead of 14.
The revamped leveling zones were cool, but the rest of the non raiding content was shit.

I think one mistake they made with Cata was that they released those revamped zones with the pre patch. So everyone ran in and played through them in the "drought" period. They should have left them for launch so players had something to do when not raiding or running dungeons.

[Rhoe]

Deathwing is not as epic as a villain as Lich King was.
A lot of effort went into the 1-60 leveling experience, which many (most?) players were not as interested in as the 80-85 journey and things to do at max level.
It was not confined to a new continent, but spread all over, and thus Blizzard felt we needed portals all over, making the game feel less like a connected world.
Underwater zone that most people hated (and a few loved).
Tol Barad left a lot of people out as it demanded the same amount of people on both sides, and on a server with a 1 horde to 0.02 alliance population rating, that just meant horde didn't get to play.
Cata heroics were too hard for the general LFG population.
Intro raids (t11) were unusually hard for intro raids, especially on 10man.
There wasn't much to do outside of raiding beyond the weekly hc valor farming.
Firelands was a small raid and had mostly gimmicky bosses. Most people liked Ragnaros, but the other ones? Not so much.
Also, unlike t11, Firelands was mostly easier in 10man which started to kill off 25man guilds.
Dragon soul was also easier on 10man for the most part which left very few 25man guilds alive.
Less 25man guilds = less dps spots = lots of people leaving raiding. Add nothing to do outside of raiding and it equals a lot of people leaving the game.
LFR.

[anaxie]

Just like WoD, there was almost no endgame content outside of raiding and dungeons.
4.1 was just 2 revamped dungeons. Compare that to 5.1 or even what we are getting in 7.1
Dragon Soul did last 9 months which is shorter than SoO and HFC, but it only had 8 bosses instead of 14.
The revamped leveling zones were cool, but the rest of the non raiding content was shit.

You had literally more questing content then ever in the game and each faction had a large amount of rep quests.

SPOILER thats pretty much everything that was IN WoW at that point in time.

consider for a moment 4.1 was ZA and ZG but ZG was a part of the Major revamp overhaul and its story for the revision concluded in the dungeon.

Is the 1-60 content not counted? Because thats worth a hell of a lot more then some minor or even major content patch.

[Shadow Fox]

Well... For me...

I complete the provided content rather quickly, and didn't have much to do once I achieved Loremaster.

Firelands came out, and some-what relieved that with those Dailies, but that wasn't very much. Firelands was a pretty large raid with a Legendary chain that worked similar to that of Shadowmourne from ICC: But did work out well in the long run.

I personally really enjoyed the ZA/ZG updates, though was upset they removed the previous versions.

Blackwing Decent I enjoyed for a Raid, Twilight raid I didn't really enjoy.

World gathering was a royal pain with the speed+fly hack on level 1 bots a major fiasco that took Blizzard forever to fix.

Dragon Soul was fun when it was released, but ended really bad. In a guild, was fairly decent. In LFR, as LFR/LFG is with most things in WoW, was a nightmare.

I really enjoyed the Caverns of Time Dungeons they added with that expansion. Some of my favorite dungeons game-wide, actually.

The beginning of the PvP season at launch I thought was okay, can't say much mid-way, or by the end of the expansion.

A lot of the animations they added to the game seemed... Well, not complete and rushed. (Goblins and Worgen primarily)

[anaxie]

Deathwing is not as epic as a villain as Lich King was.
A lot of effort went into the 1-60 leveling experience, which many (most?) players were not as interested in as the 80-85 journey and things to do at max level.
It was not confined to a new continent, but spread all over, and thus Blizzard felt we needed portals all over, making the game feel less like a connected world.
Underwater zone that most people hated (and a few loved).
Tol Barad left a lot of people out as it demanded the same amount of people on both sides, and on a server with a 1 horde to 0.02 alliance population rating, that just meant horde didn't get to play.
Cata heroics were too hard for the general LFG population.
Intro raids (t11) were unusually hard for intro raids, especially on 10man.
There wasn't much to do outside of raiding beyond the weekly hc valor farming.
Firelands was a small raid and had mostly gimmicky bosses. Most people liked Ragnaros, but the other ones? Not so much.
Also, unlike t11, Firelands was mostly easier in 10man which started to kill off 25man guilds.
Dragon soul was also easier on 10man for the most part which left very few 25man guilds alive.
Less 25man guilds = less dps spots = lots of people leaving raiding. Add nothing to do outside of raiding and it equals a lot of people leaving the game.
LFR.

It was confined to TWO entirely FINISHED finally and completely remade continents. Disconnected indeed. Lets just smash all the various 5 zones together. There was no other way to do it.

You talk about community created issues vs the content itself. Pretty easy for me to dismiss.

[Nezia]

Cata had the best start of all expansions until legion.

It remade the world.

It had some really amazing raid tiers.

But then DS came out... Asking someone to talk about an expansion without talking about it's finale is not fair so I will talk about it: DS was terrible, it was a mess and fail everywhere, no new scenario, no new boss models, a pretty terrible storytelling and pretty lame mechanics(other than spine). They should have made the 3 dungeons of hour of twillight into one raid(maybe even a separate tier), with murozond as it's final boss.

Some minor issues like poor character development was also a thing but DS is what broke the expansion for most.

[anaxie]

I think one mistake they made with Cata was that they released those revamped zones with the pre patch. So everyone ran in and played through them in the "drought" period. They should have left them for launch so players had something to do when not raiding or running dungeons.

perhaps. I did do nearly all the zones in the lead up month. It let me enjoy the story and KEEP the story rolling when the new zones opened. In that respect and i found that a fantastic idea at the time.