Why all the Cata hate?

[Marema]

I liked Cata in general though the raids were pretty lackluster.

I'm really glad they updated all of the leveling zones. I still like Cata more than WotLK which is odd since everybody seems to have loved WotLK.

[Psynyx]

Bad story line, which lead to terrible questing experience and questing in areas that were so disconnected from one another it really didn't make much sense why you were going there.

Entire zones which really had no impact on the xpac.

5 man heroics that after a week really weren't hard anymore, and they were never really hard to being with; the change in how healers managed their mana pool made them hard. Once healers figured out to how heal in the new system they were cake.

Raids were short, un-inspired and outside of a single boss weren't that hard. (Rag, Spine, and Sindra were the only very difficult fights)

Buggy and far to long to fix issues which allowed players to cheese honor from the island. You could fully gear a toon in pvp gear within a few days without having to actually do a single bit of pvp.

[ro9ue]

I was a Cata fan. Its not the best expansion but still better than MoP.

[PuppetShowJustice]

What are your thoughts? Why was Cataclysm such a bad expansion in your eyes?

Archaeology was super lame. Path of the Titans didn't happen. The revamped leveling content was necessary but added nothing for those of us who didn't make new characters post Cata or decided to level via BGs / instances. The ZA/ZG patch gave us TWO options for our daily heroic -- which got old ultra fast. And was later replaced by THREE options (that were even more boring than ZA/ZG) for the year of Dragon Soul. Also, Dragon Soul.

Cata was the first time I froze my account due to the way they handled the RBGs. I was excited for them and then they removed the 25 player bracket and kept only the 10 -- which completely destroyed my RBG team.

The Twilight Highlands Alliance side storyline was abandoned in development and it shows. The Worgen and Goblins did not have a starring role in their own expansion. Deathwing felt flat and lifeless after Arthas. Cata gave us neutral Thrall, ruined the Malfurion / Staghelm story, and never delivered on many of the plotlines that were actually interesting. You can like Cata all you want but in my eyes it was the worst point in the game's history.

[Vizardlorde]

Playing a ret paladin in heroics at launch did it for me... THE WORST MASTERY IN THE GAME, Nerfed survivability, shit damage, relearning to play with all the RNG shit going on etc. Needless to say I stopped it after a week at 85.

[PuppetShowJustice]

Oh and I forgot another beef I had with Cata. Gilneas. To this day I keep hoping they eventually make that part of the world actually good for something. It's a beautiful area and it just sits there completely abandoned and non-functional.

[KonkeroaR]

This is a new and original thread that we certainly dont have hundreds of other ones. It is all subjective. Best and worst are in the eyes of the beholder.

And that's exactly what I'm interested in seeing. What is YOUR opinion on Cata?

- - - Updated - - -

2 expansions later. Why you are exactly on schedule my good sir.

Tune in next time for "Cata was the peak of WoW" and "Why all the MoP hate?" Folks. Next bat-expac, same Bat-channel.

Oh, should I create a "Why is WoD the best expansion ever created?" thread, just because it's current?

[seam]

The raid bosses were amazing. T11 and 12 were, and still are, two of my favorite tiers I've ever raided.

The questing is/was fluid(Low level questing is still really fun, especially compared to before cata).

The issue is it kinda dragged on. T11 lasted far too long, the raids overall were set to last over much longer than they should have, and MoP took too long.
They also kinda dropped the ball with Dragon Soul, not giving nearly as much of an awesome experience as they should have.

[Lothaeryn]

1. Story was incohesive, Worgen got little to no development after Gilneas for the Alliance, only the Horde saw any form of continuation. Most of the Story Arcs felt lopsided or incomplete, where some stories just literally fall off and tell you "you have done all that you can, you are needed elsewhere". Not to mention the numerous amounts of Horde Victories across every frontier, with the Alliance getting little to no ground aside from being constantly berated for the mistake at Taurajo.

2. The questing experience was sickeningly tedious and repetitive, you knew what you were in for every time you got an Alt to cataclysm, there was no deviation from the quest pathing, you HAD to do quests in that exact sequence of events or be stuck doing dungeons non stop to reach level cap.

3. Dungeons were too tedious, while BC was the epitome of Bring the class, not the player, Cata dungeons had numerous points where if one tiny part was fucked up, it would mean a definitive wipe, as there was little leeway for recuperation if something went wrong. Not to mention the Healer issue with mana regeneration causing most people to be unable to do regular dungeons do to a lack of proper gear itemization through the questing experience.

4. Itemization reached climax here, regforging had to be invented just to help with the crazy amounts of min/maxing needed to raid properly. Expertise/Hit caps required you to literally rework your entire stat modification each time you got a new piece of gear, meaning heaps of gold being thrown away if the upgrade got replaced sooner than you expected it to.

5. Raid content was continuously cut and ignored. 4.1 being the worst offender of a content patch in WoW. Not only did they Cut an entire raid out of the question, they spent more time re-using old raid content locations (Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman) and made them a heroic only mode that rewarded piss poor item level quality gear that was barely on par with Tier 11. These two dungeons also replaced the Originals for no real reason since they were dungeon versions and could have easily been adjusted with a raid/dungeon mode choice option in the User Interface.

6. Excessively imbalanced classes, PvP was a mess, some classes were one shot wonders in early patches and healers started becoming increasingly impossible to kill (that apparently stretched into MoP later). Some classes having new systems implemented with very situational utility or outright dependant on RNG to perform correctly (See: Retribution Paladins with the Holy Power System in 4.0-4.2).

7. Dragon Soul, re use (seeing a pattern here...) of an old location from the previous expansion as the center stage for the final raid encounter of the expansion. Most bosses and mobs were literally re used NPC model with no variation for the raid itself, and the duration of the patch lasted far too long for the amount of effort put in to make the raid.

8. Looking for Raid, a bandaid fix for the problem of having Raids too exclusive, that sadly caused more problems than it fixed. Creating 3 item tiers of gear and causing numerous complaints across the board for Raid Audiences of all difficulty levels.

9. Raid lockouts merged, made 25 or 10 man a very hot topic of debate and caused lots of guild drama and breakups.


I could go on, but I already listed more than a handful.

[Bad Ashe]

IMO it sucked. goblins and worgen were both lack luster, both BGs were just boring copies, the raids weren't fun (firelands was nicedespite the horrible prequests), and honestly it just felt like another same-ol same-ol expansion.

The only thing that felt new about it was the 1-60 leveling experience. That is the only good thing that cata brought.

my feelings exactly.

however in retrospect, now every time i go through that old content, i seriously wish it was the original content.

[Chain Chungus]

Cataclysm had fun dungeons at first and after those got nerfed we got fun dungeons where raids were turned into dungeons. True those were rehashed, but since I never did them in vanilla or TBC they were new and fun for me. If I raided during Cata I may have had more distaste for the expansion though.

My problem with Cata was and still is that they cut so much, rushed it out for a Christmas release even though it needed 4 more months of beta, and went hog-wild on the Goblins but barely did anything for the Worgen. Worgen district? Cut. Turning Darkshire into a Worgen hub on par with Azshara? Cut. Proper Worgen models? Cut. Worgen boar mount? Cut. Goblins? New zone after starting area, buttloads of new doodad models, story was completed (not left to finish on Forsaken like Worgen), models were well done, got a district in Orgrimmar, and overall polished to a much higher degree than Worgen.

In fact, if you played Alliance you got the shaft on content (Andorhal). They basically finished out everything they wanted for Horde and they ran out of time on Alliance, instead of doing them side-by-side and cutting an equal amount from each.

[FroggyChaos]

WOTLK had very casual friendly raids which made it easy to fill spots. At the end of WOTLK my casual raid had cleared all of ICC. Then the expansion and we were rip roaring ready to go in a new raid. After 3 weeks of the new raid we had killed 1 boss, and we couldn't seem to get it down again. Frustrated with the revamped difficulty my raid leader quit wow and the raid died quickly after that. So what did we get from Cata frustratingly difficult raid encounters. So many long time raiders quit wow during that expansion. I hope blizzard has learned from that expansion. I guess we will find out over the next month or so. But the current level of difficulty in heroics tells me that they did. Heroics feel like a good in between difficulty between WOTLK and CATA.

And let's not forget the worst part about CATA the end raid boss Deathwing. Which should have been a super cool fight against an epic dragon. Only the dragon was so large in scale that it never at any point felt like you were fighting a dragon. Instead it felt more like you were fighting waves of adds with frustrating mechanics...

[Teelie]

I don't hate Cata but it was disappointing unless you were leveling alts and/or just enjoyed redoing everything in the same order with no variation. There was a lot to dislike about it but I really didn't burn out until Mists of Repetitive Dailies and stopped playing for nearly that entire expansion.

So far WOD feels like a good combination of all the previous expansions although there are still a lot left to be seen before we know if it will be a success or a spark that quickly fades away.

[Jayjayhey]

For me, Cata was better than MoP. I liked the raids (other than DS) better, the lore was better, and the zones were definitely 100x better.

[Gank Sinatra]

The Lore was terrible, the raids were uninteresting in the first tier (and loooong running for DS), the heroics and new zone quests were dull, sooooooo much Thrall, dailies were horribly repetitive (even for dailies) and the factions were lame, Firelands was the only thing I enjoyed.

[Wildstaff]

there are a bunch of reasons(to me) why Cata sucked

1. They nerfed the difficulty of all heroics to laughable levels. before the nerfs the bosses were difficult but rewarding and you felt you accomplished something when you finished it. After the nerf it felt like wrath level heroics minus be able to AoE everything down in ten seconds.

2. They spent so much time revamping the old world that endgame suffered. there was absolutely nothing for you to do if you didn't raid.

3. Worgen (and by association, Alliance players) got shafted out of a story because you leave gilneas on a bit of a cliff hanger and then you find out all the cool stuff involving your people gets seen by undead players. You don't get to see King Greymane's second-in-command wrecking undead shit, or turning the last remaining humans in Lordaeron into Worgen to prevent them from turning when they die. but horde players get to see it.

4. it was the most blatant display of dev bullshit and Horde favoritism. Everywhere you went Horde was wrecking alliance shit all over the place and alliance was getting shit wrecked by bandits we defeated 6 years before or gnolls or some other useless and incompetent enemy. And when people complained about this bias Blizzard was saying "it's okay cause southern barrens is the new tarrenmill/southshore there's no winners or losers" and then the horde wins.

5. Dailies dailies dailies dailies. I hope you really liked dailies because there's a shit ton of them especially leading up to firelands

6. I also hope you like Thrall because for no reason this Alien is somehow the only hope for Azeroth and literally becomes an Aspect.

7. Probably the most disappointing thing. Dragon Soul was absolute shit. There was not a single new thing inserted into the raid. Location? no lets just reuse Wyrmrest Temple. Bosses? hey we made new models at the beginning of the expansion lets just reuse ALL OF THEM. The fights were boring as shit. "This fight is a tank and spank but here's the twist we give you this big ass button in the middle of your screen and when he does the only ability that does any damage you press it and ignore it completely. fun right?" and for this last fight you basically just kill tentacles until Thrall kills the boss for you.

8. What could have been. they cancelled so much shit Vashj'ir raid and new dungeon? gone!

9. Deathwing was so boring. every once in a blue moon you might see him fly through a zone and incinerate everything enjoy your repair bill loser.

10. I REALLY hope you like references because everythign is a joke or a reference to something. They wasted an entire fucking zone just to jerk off over some Indiana Jones movie with their Harrison Ford ripoff character, the fact that he still exists and plays some sort of role in Ashran still sort of pisses me off to this day.

[Servasus]

Cataclysm was the worst pile of garbage the developers of this game have ever released in ANY of their games, for reasons already stated by pretty much everyone here. If you liked it, that's fine, you're allowed to. But it definitely was bad.

[Kuul]

No end game content other than raiding/arena. People outside of those got really bored and that point the gaming industry had grown so much with other games (also MMORPGs) coming left and right so most of the people felt WoW had nothing to offer for them anymore.