Cataclysm, not as bad as we remember?

[Faldric]

Is it possible that the bad experiences that came from the few flawed systems gave us a negative perceptual filter for the entirety of the expansion?

No its the massive amount of flawed systems that overshadows the little good this expansion did. Read your own post again. You couldnt name a single good thing that has no BUT following it. The initial release was good but not THAT good. The troll patch was a bad joke after the long wait. Firelands was a bland instance with few good fights. Then was Dragon Soul which is pretty much the pinnacle of everything bad you can do in a raid. Rehashed Environments ? Check. Portals? Check. Generic Nobody Bosses? Check. Rehashed Models? Check. Keeping it up for a year? Check.

Cataclysm started off average and ended the most terrible way possible.

[Deleted]

I enjoyed the 5 mans at launch, there were challenging and gave a real feeling of accomplishment, unless you tried doing them in FLG in which case they were utter Ballache. Tier 11 was pretty fun until they nerfed it to the gorund. And they nerfed firelands to the ground aswell, beofre the tier was even over, and after that Tanks really couldn't die, healer mana was infinite and Threat was a joke. They made the first tier too challenging and then over reacted and nerfed everythign to the point of triviality. My favourite part of DS was the Rogue legendary solo parts in Gilneas and Kara.

So no, Cata was bad.

[Thage]

Cataclysm's 1-60 revamp was great, from the standpoint of more engaging storytelling, but its endgame really did suffer for it. The dungeons jumped in difficulty from Wrath with no in-between ramp-up, and didn't mesh well with the matchmade groups in the LFD tool, an entire raid got scrapped, Firelands and Dragon Soul both had extremely long lifespans that the content within couldn't measure up to, the storylines were extremely disjointed and had you teleporting from one end of Azeroth to the other, the Molten Front daily zone got grindy fast (a problem also reflected in 5.0's daily zones), and for months on end, the only new content available were the Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub 5-man Heroics.

I do think they got the Hour of Twilight 5-mans right, but it's telling that most of the art assets in 4.3 seemed to be for Well of Eternity, End Time, and Hour of Twilight and Dragon Soul was victim to rampant asset reuse, albeit lore-justified thanks to the locations.

edit: I also adore the Gilneas and Kezan storylines, and enjoy goblins and worgen as player races. Here's hoping that when they get their pass at a revamp they'll fix the female worgen model's numerous bugs.

[Thimagryn]

Cata started very strong. Dungeons were hard again, the quests weren't half bad, and the first few raids were actually pretty good. We got 2 5-7 boss raids and a 2 boss mini raid off the bat.

5.1 was a shallow disappointment, with revamped troll raids into dungeons. It wasn't bad, but it was disappointing since everyone was expecting an actual raid, and at that point we needed new raid content since the previous was already on farm.

5.2 comes out. Molten front dailies are awesome!!! For the first week... The lack of randomization made it grindy, and people grew to hate it even though it's one of the best uses of phasing for quests IMO. The firelands raid itself is tough and challenging, but fronted with a whole bunch of design problems and limitations. Trash mobs gave rep for gear, and the whole instance was fronted by it. A lot of early weeks were not spent on progression, but constant trash clearing. It also didn't help that we've waited nearly 6 months for a measily 7 bosses.

5.3 hits. Worst raid ever. '8' bosses with Deathwing being the only unique model in the entire raid. And thus lives on the memory of Cataclysm's pain and agony.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Honestly i liked cataclysm, i loved the hard dungeons at the beginning, too bad they nerfed them to the ground after one patch, loved every raid including DS, the leveling was really good imo, and pvp was really balanced until the very end when rogues got out of control. Tbh i dont know why people didn't like cataclysm...

[Jawless Jones]

the only good part of the expansion was transmog

everything else sucked, the majority of the music, linear questing, the zones, etc

but its worst failing was blizzard removing ALL the old class quests, iconic spells, hunter quivers in the name of their twisted version of Fun™

moral of cataclysm? add to your source material instead of removing it, and don't dictate what people think fun should be

[Deleted]

Dragon Soul was a disappointment to me from the first boss. Nothing in later bosses was able to redeem the instance from that first boss.

They put a ton of work into 1-60 content and a good bit of end game content just got bumped off the Expansion truck. Poof. Gone. They had too many people wasting time on TITAN, not enough on WoW (hindsight and all that) and it mattered more than they anticipated.

I've played through a bit of the 1-60 revamp and it was actually a lot of fun for me. It made me sad that they hadn't had the time to actually finish the rest of the expansion off properly.

I still liked it better than the Wrath experience. XD

You crazy? wraith was the best expansion with tbc. I wonder did you even play wraith at his time, we played icc for a year (with 3-4 chars a week a 2 resets (10/25)) and still had higher subs than in cata and mop together. Not to forget 4 raidtiers plus an Extra Boss halion. Thats content you never saw in an expansion.

[Deleted]

sry but cata was bad
deathwing split the world in half and then takes a long long vacation.
spice it up with a lot of bosses suddenly returning like zombie onyxia and nefarian, ragnaros returning again from a history point of view why couldn't they just have stayed dead. To many small tiers and hideouts with a few bosses.
As much as naxx was recycled at least it was fun and well having 10 and 25 man back then made it quite fun from a social point of view.

new zones to far apart and without any connection. the old world rebuild though probably necessary removed a lot of fun quests and put everything on rails there is no exploration and enjoying the scenery somehow.

hmm faction capitol as the waiting place well no fun at all, but considering in tbc we where waiting in shat and in wotlk we waited in dalaran so nothing really new there except in cata we waitid in the capitol for the que to pop wow. The annoying thing about it all was that valor vendors,portals, honor vendors where all placed in SW or Oggri so the other capitols in your faction where at an disadvantage and to be honest i liked hanging out in other capitols than sw or oggri, other better music and different scenery.

mass summons while a nice feature mostly just was a feature for lazy people to go afk and let other people summon them when the other people arrived at their destination...

got no problem with a slow release of content as long as it is interresting content, but extremely small raid patches etc. and troll dungeons no that was just insulting.

And yeacata was plain bad because it destroyed many raiding guilds nuff said.

[xskarma]

I enjoyed the Cata content when we had it, most of the time though it was long waits between little to do, and I made due with the older content I hadn't done yet, and building up my character's reps and mount count and achievements. I enjoyed myself during Cata, but up until 4.3 it was mostly due to doing older content. After 4.3 I joined a guild that raided sort of regularly, so I got to do some more stuff (even if LFR meant I had allready seen the raid).

All in all I like Cata, but there was a definite lack of content in it.

[Deleted]

I wasn't that big a fan of WOTLKs handling of the scourge, so the bar wasn't that high for me. Deathwing was still a colossal disappointment from a lore perspective, mechanically he was absolutely atrocious and I'd take half of T11s bosses over him, which is inexcusable for the final boss of a tier, let alone expansion.

The world I didn't think was so bad, the leveling revamp was pretty fun and the other zones were alright, they served their purpose.

The capitol I didn't care much for, but didn't care enough to hold it against the game.

At the time and still now, I consider Cataclysm to be the absolute worst WoW has ever been - I'd never even considered quitting until Dragonsoul (though what blizzard have been doing to affliction warlocks since MOP launch has had me considering it for all new reasons).

The rest of the expansion was alright for me, worse than the others - but not so bad that I cared, but don't even try to defend Cataclysms raiding. 7 boss fireland and DS? No, that's not going to fly. Thankfully MOP has been a much better direction.

T11 and the new BGs were great.
Everything else was mediocre.
FL and DS ranged between bad and terrible.

[SoundOfGuns]

...im surprised so many people hate DS but nobody has a problem with Twilight-Bastion nor Blackwing-Discent who were both full of very boring encounters with the exceptions of 3 or 4 that were old-school in all the wrong ways. But hey... whatever floats your boat.

[Kuul]

Sure because now you don't have to queue for lfr/flex/dungeons/scenarios.
At least in dragon soul you had to walk a bit to the entrance, now it takes 10 seconds to get to soo.

Have Group, Will Travel says hi.

[Xargoth6634]

No, it was terrible and you people making these threads every month or so need to stop it with the revisionist history.

[Aeula]

Liked it more than most of MoP, could have used more factions with dailes instead of tabards but hey ho!
Also it would have been nice to fight deathwing as a humanoid and maybe have a bit more political intrigue.

[fangless]

Welcome to the world of warcraft. Where every past expansion is bad, and only the current date is fun.

[Abstieg]

Cata was one of the best expansions, with some of the best raiding content and well designed dungeons.

And then we got Dragon Soul.

[schwank05]

I liked T11 and 12, They just fucked it all up in T13, I wanted to Fight a giant Dragon Apect, I mean come on I got to fight Malygos Directly. If we had gotten to actually fight Deathwing It may have been better than fighting tenticles.

[Switchshot]

No, it was terrible and you people making these threads every month or so need to stop it with the revisionist history.

Thank you for the compelling argument. Your ability to build and deconstruct premises is astounding. Really, why not try to conduct legitimate discourse. Is your desire to communicate with substance stifled to the point of non-existence?

[MasterHamster]

Throughout pretty much all of Cataclysm endgame consisted of a few dungeons and a single raid.
Even casuals got bored as they finished weekly character progress in 2 hours queued in Orgrimmar, barely able to locate Cataclysms factions on a map.

Geez

[PuppetShowJustice]

Cataclysm. The only expansion that I stopped playing during.

Yes, it was that bad.