If The Cataclysm Revamp Never Happened...

[Okacz]

I think it was WotLK which was the culprit, Cataclysm just cemented the deal.

WotLK was just the continuation of what BC started:

-Streamlined questing with big quest hubs
-Small, digestable dungeons to farm
-Well balanced raids of smaller sizes where everyone needed to play optimally
-Even more emphasis on instanced PvP
-Progenitor of LFD system makes its appearance
-Every "spec" becoming balanced and optimal for raids

Anything WotLK did to go away from vanilla it was just a continuation of BC changes.

[owbu]

One to sixty leveling is ask irrelevant part of end game. Classic is about no lf and unfixing of the games bumps. And wanting to relive the good old times of course. Cata wasn't all that special in any of those

[Akka]

No, it wasn't.

First off, the quest rewards made sense, hence you didn't rely on Dungeons / crafting for useful gear during leveling.

Second, the vast majority of quests were designed to be more convenient, most quests actually took place in an area near where you picked up the quest, rather than a totally different zone, also most quests that sent you all over the world were pretty much limited to 70 (and even those were rare).

Long Dungeon questchains were also trimmed down, whereas in Vanilla you had occasionally complete very long questchain to pick up dungeon quest(s), in BC you could pick up the majority of dungeonquests in the nearest questhub or right at the dungeon itself.

Elite areas such as Jintha'Alor / Stonewatch Keep / Hearthglen / Tyr's Hand were also nonexistant in BC.

Horrendous drop quest (Aged Gorilla sinew anyone?) were also removed.

The quest design of BC and Wotlk were pretty much the same and that was vastly different to that of Vanilla, the only similarities between BC and Vanilla was that that single mobs were "tougher" for one person.

Yeah, good points overall (though the single most traumatizing quest when it comes to droprate in the whole WoW history was the one with the strider tentacles, so horrible droprate were definitely still in). The tough mob helped make it "feel" Vanilla though, WotLK dropped the ball on this.

[Soon-TM]

I think it was WotLK which was the culprit, Cataclysm just cemented the deal.

This guy nails it. WotLK introduced the "bring the player, not the class" meme, whose predictable result was the homogeneization of classes and roles. But at least, the homogeneization in WotLK was still somewhat nuanced (hpalas were mostly tank healers, trees and shamans were mostly raid healers, etc.) that in Cata onwards.

[Armourboy]

I voted for Cata because I think that was really the point of no return with the game, but lets be honest as others have said it started long before then. TBC started it, and frankly would have probably been closer to Wrath than Vanilla if it wasn't due to lots of complaining coming into the expansion. If I remember correctly they pulled back a lot of changes or nerfed some things because of major complaints by the pure classse.

Every Rep had decent gear on it for someone, Arena was nothing more than a place to farm epics for most of the playerbase ( didn't even need to win back then ), and you could get pretty solid gear from Badges. Really the only difference between TBC and Wrath on this front was the ease of doing it, Reps were easier and so was the content, oh and they put Tier on vendors.

Frankly I always thought Wrath was the expansion play wise they wanted TBC to be, they just got too much resistance or held back because they were scared it was too big of a change. Cata I will always hate though because not only did it change the world we kind of came up with, it brought in an even more linear leveling, and it pretty much gutted the TBC/Wrath small causal raiding guilds that had formed over those years due to it's changes.

[PenguinChan]

If the Cataclysm revamp never happened, we would still have people screaming for past expansions. It happens for TBC and WotLK -- and shocker, they haven't been revamped. It's not rocket science why people want past expansions as an official thing.

[Armourboy]

If the Cataclysm revamp never happened, we would still have people screaming for past expansions. It happens for TBC and WotLK -- and shocker, they haven't been revamped. It's not rocket science why people want past expansions as an official thing.

I think everyone has that sweet spot where the game just lined up for them. For me it was Wrath, but I still love the older versions of the game for what they were.

[PenguinChan]

I think everyone has that sweet spot where the game just lined up for them. For me it was Wrath, but I still love the older versions of the game for what they were.

Aye, and that's what people want back - to some extent anyways.

[In Ogres We Trust]

People have been wanting Vanilla realms since TBC launched. I would say TBC was the one big change that made vanilla desirable.

Personally, I would prefer BC realms, or at a minimum, an option for Classic, BC, and WotLK realms.

[GreenJesus]

It was WOTLK "bring the player not the class" that started everything the homogenization and prune.

[Eon Drache]

https://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-m...-wow-25902237/

I love the quote:

"i really think it ruined it because you couldnt be casual and still be good." I think that says soooo much lol.

[Deleted]

Cataclysm was a catastrophe. It destroyed the world we loved. Downhill ever since.

[Cæli]

for me, cataclysm was obviously the main reason wjy classic happens
always said it, you don't remove things from a video game, especially from a good one, that's a nonsense, look at what it does
I hope blizzard learned it, which seems to be the case since they created zidormi

[Thage]

Personally, my only real dog in this fight is that the classic 1-60 world and associated raids/dungeons are, effectively, gone. Many dungeons reuse maps but the actual fights and story tied to them are either completely different or changed so heavily as to make the difference academic, and many other dungeon maps have changed for expediency's sake--which isn't in and of itself a bad thing, but there's no option to revisit these changed dungeons and raids as they were in their original form.

My argument since I revisited my opinion on Classic servers has come from a historical standpoint. World of Warcraft brought MMORPGs into mainstream gaming culture in a way EverQuest and Ultima Online could only dream of, and did so through a perfect storm of timing, marketing, and Blizzard somehow managing to take a handful of really well-designed systems, a lot of badly-designed systems, and Frankensteining them together into a cohesive whole that caught like wildfire in one of those once-in-a-generation moments. Historically, the Vanilla game is very important to preserve, and that was impossible to do so legally until the announcement this past Blizzcon.

So I do think that people would still be asking for Classic servers if Cataclysm hadn't revamped the old world, because there's still class design changes (paladins today play very little if anything like paladins in Vanilla; this is triply true for Retribution) and Blizzard's tendency to pillage old dungeons/raids for new endgame content in WotLK (Naxxramas, Onyxia) and Cataclysm (Zul'Gurub, Zul'Aman, 1-60 dungeon revamps).

- - - Updated - - -

for me, cataclysm was obviously the main reason wjy classic happens
always said it, you don't remove things from a video game, especially from a good one, that's a nonsense, look at what it does
I hope blizzard learned it, which seems to be the case since they created zidormi

I'd put money on it that Zidormi letting players phase into zones before post-Cata updates (for example, Blasted Lands and Theramore) was a lesson learned from the sweeping updates with no way to go back to the old maps in Cata.

[Cæli]

Just a quick question: Do you know of any quests or other features which the Cataclyms removed from Outland and Northrend?

To rephrase this question:
Was there something introduced with BC and WotLK which Catacylsm got rid of - Aside from the main Klaimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Continents?
- were there any other revamps happening in the zones of the previous two expansions?

no and oh surprise the demand for bc and wotlk realm is not nearly as high as classic

[Macaquerie]

Vanilla servers were up for debate since BC.

Honestly, a lot of people always look at Wotlk and say "that's when the game changed", but in truth it was BC that laid the groundwork for the sweeping changes that Wotlk made.

For starters, the "easy epics" thing came into existance during BC when raid loot was offered for Badge of Justice, especially flared on during 2.4 when BT equivalent Loot was made available for raiding Karazhan (since BoJ dropped there) multiple times.

A lot of people complained about Arena and the death of "real PvP" (=Battlegrounds).

Some people complained about the streamlined questing in BC, whereas in Vanilla you had them all over the place.

In BC the dungeon layout was also extremely changed, Vanilla dungeons are sometimes quite massive and confusing / less logical whereas BC dungeons were streamlined so you could navigate much easier, the "Pre Instance" stuff was also removed, you could go straight for Instance Portal.

The Cataclysm changes were neccessary because a lot of people dreaded to level another character from 1-58 because Vanilla levelling was so much "worse" than in BC where quests gave meaningful rewards and were properly streamlined.

Well I think the distinction is that Vanilla was developed at a time when MMOs were still a niche genre, while BC was created for the massive audience that WoW had accumulated by that time, and so the design approach had to be altered to be more suitable to a larger and more casual player base. The success of the game really changed Blizzard's perspective - Naxxramas felt like a waste of time because only a small percentage of players got to see it, even though in absolute terms it was still many times more people than ever played most MMOs. And I don't fault them for welfare epics, hardcore players in Vanilla were such giant assholes about showing off their loot and rubbing it in the faces of casuals that it only made sense to open that up to more people. Arguably the community is much less toxic these days, since the elitist douchebaggery is mostly just back and forth between top guilds now rather than with the larger mass of players who mostly don't participate in that at all.

[durenas]

Well I think the distinction is that Vanilla was developed at a time when MMOs were still a niche genre, while BC was created for the massive audience that WoW had accumulated by that time, and so the design approach had to be altered to be more suitable to a larger and more casual player base. The success of the game really changed Blizzard's perspective - Naxxramas felt like a waste of time because only a small percentage of players got to see it, even though in absolute terms it was still many times more people than ever played most MMOs. And I don't fault them for welfare epics, hardcore players in Vanilla were such giant assholes about showing off their loot and rubbing it in the faces of casuals that it only made sense to open that up to more people. Arguably the community is much less toxic these days, since the elitist douchebaggery is mostly just back and forth between top guilds now rather than with the larger mass of players who mostly don't participate in that at all.

It's amusing that you're pointing at TBC as the expansion that Blizzard altered their design approach to be more suitable to more casual players. The expansion with nested attunements, insanely difficult bosses that were required to unlock the next tier(Kael and Vashj), and of course the king of all raids, Sunwell, which was seen by less than 1% of the playerbase(if my faulty memory serves me).

[Khaza-R]

Certainly Cataclysm adds to the nostalgia by making you miss zones that were completely changed or ruined. Looking at Ashenvale, Azshara, Barrens, Hillsbrad, 1k Needles.

However for most people they seem to miss the social aspect of vanilla or the grindy, more RPG like gameplay. I think the demand would be there whether the old world got revamped or not

[Armourboy]

It's amusing that you're pointing at TBC as the expansion that Blizzard altered their design approach to be more suitable to more casual players. The expansion with nested attunements, insanely difficult bosses that were required to unlock the next tier(Kael and Vashj), and of course the king of all raids, Sunwell, which was seen by less than 1% of the playerbase(if my faulty memory serves me).

Yeah but then you also had gear, including weapons that were on par or better than BT gear from a vendor. It really was the first catch up they did when a raid was released.

[durenas]

Yeah but then you also had gear, including weapons that were on par or better than BT gear from a vendor. It really was the first catch up they did when a raid was released.

Yeah but... let's be honest. Sunwell was so difficult that no amount of catch-up was going to save you if you couldn't do BT.