I miss cata...

[Queen of Hamsters]

Not sure what you think you're breaking to me. What's happening in 7.3? There'll be one patch of flying this entire expansion.

Half the expansion will have flying, half of it didn't. If you think the game is ruined by flying and you're one of those that can't issue self-control, there are other mmorpg's that haven't allowed flying for longer than they didn't.

[Deleted]

I miss it too, it was the time where a lot of nabs where benched from they guild and they start their vanillafag love

[Spoonman]

Zul remakes and well of eternity dungeons was the only good thing in cata, everything else sucked

[WowIsDead64]

Define unacceptably.

Simple stat - dungeon completion rate. Amount of dungeons started, but not competed was overwhelming. And you should know, that if dungeon is started - players in it have priority over players, who are still in queue. So if tank/healer leaves - group, that is already in dungeon, get new ones first. Situation is being worsened due to the fact, that dungeons were extremely long back in Cata. So, even if group were succeeding - healers/tanks were still occupied for way too long time. If players start to constantly leave - that starts to be infinite loop. So queue times became enormous - from 30 minute to 1 hour. Players were very nervous due to this fact. This caused all kind of bad behaviour. Conflicting, kicking, leaving, ninja-looting, ninja-pulling, etc. Overall atmosphere was way too toxic. "Right difficulty" of dungeons obviously wasn't worth it.

[nekobaka]

Bulk of my solo queue groups was successful. Never felt like I needed to preform. Even late in players was explaining fights to those who asked. My day to day experience was rarely "toxic". The issue was the impact the bottom minority could have on the majorities experience and it still shows in LFR today. Those same people though would shut down even WotLK launch heroic groups.

[ramenkoenig]

Early cata was awesome. I played with a bunch of friends and really enjoyed the hard heroic dungeons.
Mythic dungeons brought that back for me and I love racing through 15+ dungeons.

[Baelic]

I actually miss the general difficulty of Cata (pre-nerf). Having to use your skills to the fullest was quite refreshing.

[Aggrophobic]

I miss Cata as well.
WoW was at its best from Wrath to and including MoP.

WoD was not that great but at least the raids were good.

[Propainn]

The good: 5 mans, T11, S10 (universally regarded as one of the best Arena seasons), transmog, and the leveling revamp were the best things to come out of it (S11 was pretty good for RBGs too, though I stopped playing them after Cata so I don't have many seasons to compare it to).

The bad: T13 (statistically the easiest raid of all time, and that's including lolEN), LFR, content draughts, Spine (I know it's still T13, but it deserves to stand alone as the garbage fight it was), lack of in game development for Death Leno, Green Pickle Jesus aka Thrall.

It was pretty middle of the road all things considered, but one of my biggest gripes is the beginning of the streamlined "5 raid" model that Blizz seems to love now: 3 intro raids in the first tier, then 1 each in the next two. Cata, MoP, & Legion all share this design philosophy (WoD even failed at this and only had 3, and Legion could have more, but the plan seems to be 5).

Before Cata, every xpac had 7-8 instanced raid zones. Vanilla=7, TBC=8, WotLK=8. It made the world feel a bit bigger when you were actually visiting all of these areas throughout an expansion, instead of just a couple different ones. TBC had the lowest amount of bosses pre Cata at 47, and then Blizz decided to drop down to 31 bosses. To put that in perspective, the universally hated WoD managed 30 bosses in 3 raids. WoD essentially had the same amount of raid bosses compared to Cata, despite having 2 less raid instances. And the worst part is, when you compare Cata to it's direct predecessor, the expansion had a 42% drop off in raid content vs WotLK. 31 bosses in the expansion vs 53. This is by far and away the steepest drop off we've ever seen.

[Glaziola]

Cataclysm was quite a bad expansion for me, but it also had positive sides aswell such as hard heroic dungeons and interesting raid content up to firelands and also decent questing experience from 1-60. I especially enjoyed the ZG and ZA remakes!

What made Cataclysm the worst was that they removed Blood DK dps and forced it to be a tank spec..

[Zoneseek]

cata was hot garbage for so many reasons. it kicked off wow's decline. glad its long gone.

[RobertMugabe]

Because 2 medium raids and 1 small one is better than one raid, like EN, ever could be.
Even Naxx with 2 one boss raids was better than just one raid (again, EN).

Bugged? Most raids were at launch. No one liked Al'akir anyway.
Boring? Matter of opinion.

I enjoyed Blackwing and Bastion of Twiligt due both themes and difficulty. BWL was great raid and Nefarian was great character imo. So was cho'gall (wc2 represent!)
Also getting to Sinestra, good stuff.

Also:Because Dailies were content still. Not to forget that low levels could do Fishing dailies and Cooking dailies - its nice addition to alts and new players.
7.1.5 or 7.2. added only few WQs to the mix, which is fine since there are already loads of them in-game but "meh".

EN is just 1 of 2 raids in 7.0 though...

Also, NO, not all raids were as bugged and as boring as the cata ones. Blackwing descent (it's not BWL...) was actually the most bugged mess they've ever released.

Fishing and cooking dailies. WOW. These were what? 2 dailies per day, these aren't even worth mentioning as these didn't have any influence about cata's popularity. New players and alts didn't care about these anyways...

Also 7.2 isn't even out and it's a lot more than "meh" WQ's (interesting how you find WQ's to be meh, but dailies are for some reason a "nice" addition).

Either way, cata's only endgame content besides dungeons and raids was the Tol Barad daily hub(and in 4.2 the firelands questhub which offered almost nothing and was done in 10min) and 1 daily per new zone. There's a reason(actually a couple) why people simply didn't like this xpac...

The theme, gameplay changes, new races and world changes seemed very exciting at first. I was actually hyped af about cata, but it simply was a half-assed xpac overall. Some revamped zones were great, but most of them were overall shit and seemed rushed, especially the Kalimdor zones. I remember doing Stonetalon Mountains as horde. It started off really great and then suddenly you haven't even explored half of the zone, but you just 5 need quests for the zone-achivement. It just ended abruptly. There were hubs which were completely useless.

[thewallofsleep]

Exactly. Literally a lot of people's hate for MoP is just "LUL KUNG FU PANDA" and they don't even bother to see past it.

I strongly disliked nearly everything about MoP, as the game systems started to move towards what we have now.

The "chapters" format to zone quests started to emerge in MoP, which I really dislike. I prefer the old "boring" format, but understand that most people do not. I really dislike the talent system which started with MoP.

I also did not like the pandas or any of the npc and mob races. The entire aesthetic of the expansion were very unappealing to me, but that's subjective. The zone designs and China inspired landscapes were nice.

[Caerule]

I loved Cataclysm. It had its downsides, but I never got all the hate it got. Except how long we had to wait for the next expansion.

I had more complaints about WoD, which I didn't hate either. I had plenty of fun. Just more to complain about.

That said, so far Legion is best so far, as I'm concerned. My only complain there is how "everything" requires you to do dungeons.

Of course, it's popular to complain about the last expansion. The Legion hate is already loud. A lot of that is just people hatin'. There's always -something- to complain about. See my signature. Nostalgia is a factor, sure. But a lot of people just can't enjoy something without finding some detail that annoys them, and then obsessing about it.

[dr3amvillain]

Cata was excellent, at least early on. It's actually really funny how that expansion progressed, considering how many people complain about talents and "dumbing down" of the game now.

Early Cata dungeons were the absolute BEST designed dungeons in the history of this game. It felt dangerous...well until they had to nerf it because everyone cried about the difficulty. BWD and BoT are still 2 of my favorite raids to date, with BWD being a strong candidate for my top 3. The Nefarian fight is some of the most fun I've ever had raiding only considering mechanics. Oh, and RIP guild perks. I remember when working with your guildmates to actually make your guild desirable for others who were interested in more than just what your progression in raid content was like. It was awesome. And you got awesome stuff for it.

Unfortunately, it did fall off and the the story wasn't coherent. It seems like when Blizzard wants to make system changes (old world flying/new character models) the end game content suffers GREATLY and while you could tell Cata was destined for greatness, content cutting and staff rearrangement took a toll after the troll patch. Cata was easily setup to be the best expansion we've ever got, but you know how that goes.

[voidillusion]

Raids were good until the last tier. Ragnaros HC and Sinestra were 2 of the bosses i had more fun so far in this game. Dungeons also ranged from decent to good, and classes were at a nice point. Professions weren't totally butchered yet, and 10m HC raiding was still a thing.

On the downside, it rellatively little to do outside of raids and dungeons, and Dragon Soul was one of the 3 worst raids in the history of the game, and for sure the worst last tier raid.

[huehuehue]

I still very much enjoyed PvP during Cata. I guess I miss it because of that.

I just miss the game before pruning in general.

[Deleted]

I loved cataclysm too, in retrospective. It was the last expac with tabards.

[Xargoth6634]

Said no one ever. What a shit expansion.

[Banquetto]

I only played the 4.0 period of Cataclysm before taking a reasonably lengthy break due to guild burnout issues. But I loved that period, and absolutely devoured everything 4.0 had to offer.

Definitely enjoyed Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight as much as or more than any previous raids. Enjoyed the 5-mans very much (yes, the controversial "harder" dungeons were great fun). Had a lot of good times in Tol Barad and world PvP'ing in the daily quest zone. And questing a new alt in the reworked old world.. that worked so well. Landing on Darkshore and finding quest givers I remembered all lying dead on the beach, that kicked me right in the feels.

Excellent expansion. I consistently voted it WoW's best, although now Legion is probably neck and neck with it.