So now that we've seen all of Cata...

[Dangg]

... can we admit that Tier 11 (WoW 4.0) was actually pretty damn awesome and one of the best states the game has ever been in?

Raid: Proper difficulty from easy to very hard, LOTS of content and different scenarios, nice fight mechanics and design.
Some bugs, but oh well every raid had that.

Maybe not as good as Ulduar or Karazhan, but probably Top 5 since release for me.

(Heroic) Dungeon: The right middle ground between BC nightmare and WotlK faceroll heroics for me.


Nearly all addition (other than Archaeology) added improved the game: Reforge, Guild leveling, Old Zone Revamp and Talent Tree Revamp (for Leveling) and while this might not be a popular opinion here 10/25 man instances.


Pretty disappointed in what came afterwards though other than Transmog and Ragnaros.

[eriseis]

... can we admit that Tier 11 (WoW 4.0) was actually pretty damn awesome and one of the best states the game has ever been in?

Raid: Proper difficulty from easy to very hard, LOTS of content and different scenarios, nice fight mechanics and design.
Some bugs, but oh well every raid had that.

Maybe not as good as Ulduar or Karazhan, but probably Top 5 since release for me.

(Heroic) Dungeon: The right middle ground between BC nightmare and WotlK faceroll heroics for me.


Nearly all addition (other than Archaeology) added improved the game: Reforge, Guild leveling, Old Zone Revamp and Talent Tree Revamp (for Leveling) and while this might not be a popular opinion here 10/25 man instances.


Pretty disappointed in what came afterwards though other than Transmog and Ragnaros.

1. Pretty surprised this has a rather positive tone.

2. LFR is great. I do wish Blizzard could fix the ethics of annoying players, just like everyone else wishes so.

3. All of Cata has been shown, but it has not really been seen. People don't include the revamp of old content when thinking about Cata or disregard it completely. I appreciate the revamp.

4. Questing experience overall was great. I never did Uldum, but I loved all other zones.

[Pull My Finger]

I absolutely agree.

[Intropid]

Well, personally I enjoyed Tier 12 more.
But Tier 11 was fun.

[WarpKnight]

Yes, I agree with OP's assessment of Tier 11. In many ways it was the golden age of Cataclysm.

[Snorkle]

I agree with the heroics, but disagree with t11 being the best raiding context. 4.0 was a good patch.

[Huehuecoyotl]

... can we admit that Tier 11 (WoW 4.0) was actually pretty damn awesome and one of the best states the game has ever been in?

i would agree with this. it wasnt T11 that caused so many people to leave; it was the fact that at 85 it was the ONLY decent thing to do.

(Heroic) Dungeon: The right middle ground between BC nightmare and WotlK faceroll heroics for me.

Nope. trying to do randoms felt far too painful, got to the stage where i felt like i was trying to raid 7 nights a week. this specifically is what drove so many people away imo. hard and occasional is fine. if something needs to be done repeatedly the difficulty needs to be moved down, so that it doesnt feel like a chore.

Nearly all addition (other than Archaeology) added improved the game: Reforge, Guild leveling, Old Zone Revamp and Talent Tree Revamp (for Leveling) and while this might not be a popular opinion here 10/25 man instances.

agree with most of this, but vehemently disagree with the old zone revamp. i went back through all the old zones to tidy up the achievements, and they have been turned into fairground rides. the example i have used elsewhere is the Jurassic Park one. they took areas that felt like the second part of that film; dangerous open worlds with lots of choices, into areas that felt like the first part. stuck in a vehicle on rails that someone else is driving. if they dont fix this ridiculous levelling model for MoP, i will be gone, no question.

[Volitar]

Tier 11 was magic. Only gripe was I played dps shaman so I was wind shear bitch on every single fight. It wasn't particularly enjoyable but it added another level of skill to shaman players.

[Deleted]

I agree with the heroics, but disagree with t11 being the best raiding context. 4.0 was a good patch.

4.0 a patch , what? Also , what raiding content was better then Tier 11, in Cataclysm according to you..? :/ Aside from single boss encounters ,Baleroc, Rag heroic , Yorsahj.

[Maleric]

I agree. But to play devil's advocate, here are two counter-points:

1) Tier 11 HM was too long. It contained eleven challenging hard mode encounters (Halfus and Chim were gimmes), several of which took the average guild multiple weeks to clear. Tier eleven offered average hard mode raiding guilds six months of solid progression, with little likelihood of finishing the tier and catching their breath. While the tier did not include any serious brick wall encounters, such as H LK or H Rag, it had many that were just under that difficulty.

A good raiding tier should be clearable with time to spare by hard mode raiding guilds - say, world 1,000 to world 4,000 - to prevent burnout. Tier eleven wasn't clearable, and as a result burnout and guild death were common.

2) Tier eleven sucked for bad players. They could barely do heroics, and raiding consisted of killing Halfus, Magmaw, and maybe Omnotron on normal mode. These people are paying customers, and at least some content should be designed for them. These people didn't have any content aimed at them in Cataclysm until the 20% normal mode nerf to T11, however, and they didn't have any current content until the 20% nerf to T12.

[Pikevinge]

I've always been a fan of t11, and firelands to an extent. I think that since subs dropped people foolishly believed that it had to be because the content was "bad". The content was fine, just a little on the small side.

[Wilderness]

I agree. But to play devil's advocate, here are two counter-points:

1) Tier 11 HM was too long. It contained eleven challenging hard mode encounters (Halfus and Chim were gimmes), several of which took the average guild multiple weeks to clear. Tier eleven offered average hard mode raiding guilds six months of solid progression, with little likelihood of finishing the tier and catching their breath. While the tier did not include any serious brick wall encounters, such as H LK or H Rag, it had many that were just under that difficulty.

A good raiding tier should be clearable with time to spare by hard mode raiding guilds - say, world 1,000 to world 4,000 - to prevent burnout. Tier eleven wasn't clearable, and as a result burnout and guild death were common.

2) Tier eleven sucked for bad players. They could barely do heroics, and raiding consisted of killing Halfus, Magmaw, and maybe Omnotron on normal mode. These people are paying customers, and at least some content should be designed for them. These people didn't have any content aimed at them in Cataclysm until the 20% normal mode nerf to T11, however, and they didn't have any current content until the 20% nerf to T12.

I think you do have a couple of very good points. I really liked T11 and to me it certainly was the best raiding tier of this expansion (Rag as a fight was more fun than anything in T11 in my opinion, but the rest of T12/T13 I don't really care about). But progressing in T11 was a pain in the ass, mostly because the tuning was out of whack (particularly for 10 mans) for the first couple of months. If T11 had been tuned at release like it was in February, then I think that raiding progression would have been much better and would have been cleared by good raiding guilds with time to breathe between tiers. But that wasn't the case so you do have a point about that.

I'm not sure I agree with you about the bad players part. I feel like a lot of the normal modes were fairly killable, but I may not be the best judge of that.

Outside of T11 though, there were a lot of problems for the general player base. Heroics were hard, which was awesome for people who are more skilled and enjoy that, but your average player didn't have a lot of good experiences with them, and while the leveling content being redone was really great, there just wasn't end game content outside of raiding T11/PVP for people to do which left a lot of people feeling kind of lost or uninterested.

[Nobleshield]

I personally didn't care for the "brick wall" difficulty of T11 coming from Wrath. Before I took a break and the nerfs hit, I was 10/12 normal T11 and working on Nefarian. Even in a fairly good guild at the time T11 was crazy hard compared to how ICC was, and it caused a lot of guilds to break up because they couldn't really progress at anything - killing Halfus and Magmaw and then wiping on the next bosses (the ones that should have still been joke easy as entry-level bosses) repeatedly killed a lot of guilds my friends were in and they ultimately unsubbed because there was nothing to do. Coupled with the fact the early Cata heroics were pains in the ass to do (looking at you, Grim Batol, Stonecore and Deadmines) and took a good bit of time even with a competent group, T11 wasn't very fun unless you were in a very good guild and could quickly barrel through the dungeons and progress through the raids.

[DarthDonut]

Raiding in T11 was terrible if you were a melee class. You had your option in fights of either being useless or being bored. The rest of the patch was great though, I'd agree with that.

[Mongoose19]

I agree. But to play devil's advocate, here are two counter-points:
2) Tier eleven sucked for bad players. They could barely do heroics, and raiding consisted of killing Halfus, Magmaw, and maybe Omnotron on normal mode. These people are paying customers, and at least some content should be designed for them. These people didn't have any content aimed at them in Cataclysm until the 20% normal mode nerf to T11, however, and they didn't have any current content until the 20% nerf to T12.

And thats why it was so good. Because it was HARD. Now everything is easy and people are mass quiting.

[DarthDonut]

I agree. But to play devil's advocate, here are two counter-points:

1) Tier 11 HM was too long. It contained eleven challenging hard mode encounters (Halfus and Chim were gimmes), several of which took the average guild multiple weeks to clear. Tier eleven offered average hard mode raiding guilds six months of solid progression, with little likelihood of finishing the tier and catching their breath. While the tier did not include any serious brick wall encounters, such as H LK or H Rag, it had many that were just under that difficulty.

A good raiding tier should be clearable with time to spare by hard mode raiding guilds - say, world 1,000 to world 4,000 - to prevent burnout. Tier eleven wasn't clearable, and as a result burnout and guild death were common.

2) Tier eleven sucked for bad players. They could barely do heroics, and raiding consisted of killing Halfus, Magmaw, and maybe Omnotron on normal mode. These people are paying customers, and at least some content should be designed for them. These people didn't have any content aimed at them in Cataclysm until the 20% normal mode nerf to T11, however, and they didn't have any current content until the 20% nerf to T12.

I understand what you're saying, but the elitist snob in me wonders if these are really bad things.

[Djuntas]

I agree OP. First 3-5 months off Cata held its ground. 4.0.6, 4.1 and 4.2 didnt improve anything, it just exspanded on something that was done already. Firelands however wasent all bad! Ragnaros heroic will always be the cataclysme propor end-boss. If you did that guy you saw the best part of Cataclysme raiding (DS heroic is big letdown imo)

[Deleted]

Heroic 5men were like a fresh breeze after the faceroll that was Wotlk... aaaaand then it turned back to shit. Oh well.

[trickster0306]

Wow, I actually really agree with this post, Cata started off really awesome, but as we go through patches, it has slowly declined....

[Pachycrocuta]

I didn't care for tier 11. My guild isn't too bad, but my raid group was rather terrible. Not really the skill level of the players, but the group as a whole. There were only 3 constants in that group. Me (paladin tank), my sister (enhance shaman), and her husband (resto druid). The rest of the group changed so much each week it was like starting completely over. Some weeks the raid leader wouldn't show, other players wouldn't show so we would have to get alts from the main raid group (we raided wednesdays only, the "main" raid group raided tues/thurs), or the other players would decide to bring in a different character that week. So, we only ever defeated the first 2 bosses of BWD (we never stepped foot into BoT until after the nerfs, and I have never been inside Throne of 4 winds at all). So needless to say, I hated tier 11 because of the raid group I was in.

The heroics... they blew hard. Of course, I am not really a fan of dungeons, but these crowd control-fests were fucking horrible. The difficulty itself wasn't bad, but it was a horrible change from the aoe-fest of Wrath to what we got in Cata, when taken into the random dungeon finder's audience. The dungeon finder was perfect for the time period it was introduced, where the dungeons were super easy. I can't believe anyone, at blizzard or here or the official forums, would have thought the difficulty increase of heroics would have been a good thing. I knew it was going to fail when they announced that Cata heroics were going to be tougher and require people to use CC, along with the nerf to healing.

Gear at the start of Cataclysm. People say that epics dropped like rain from the heroics in Wrath, and they were welfare epics and all this other bullshit. Wrath wasn't the one to introduce epics into the loot table of heroic dungeon end bosses. Burning Crusade had epics drop off the end boss of the dungeons. It wasn't a Wrath only feature. Again, why people thought that it was good to change that up from the previous TWO expansions, I don't know. I guess they just wanted to be able to charge 15k+ gold for the crafted epics they could make and then complain that gold is too prevalent.


Overall, each of the patches of Cataclysm (4.0 being the first "patch") were horrible, and they just got worse the higher the number. When it comes to the random dungeon finder, wrath difficulty is best. We saw a return to that in 4.3, even though people still fail horribly at them. Especially well of eternity and the azshara fight (had a paladin tank that wouldn't protect my priest healer, and would tunnel vision on a single mage while I mash my fade and fear spells on CD and still get raped because he wouldn't use his taunts). The difficulty increase of 4.0 was alright, but it was the death of many guilds and many accounts as people left. With the ease of 4.3, we saw the smallest drop of subs in Cata's lifespan. Still not sure about LFR feature, though.