I need to understand Cataclysm hate with rational argumentation

[Deleted]

I´m not that much of a cataclysm hater. The remake of Azeroth is great! However, I do hate that you can play through it so fast. You barely get to finish half of the quests in a zone before you´re greatly outleveled.

This this this, and 100x this.

The only real mistake from Blizzard with Cata, was not releasing a scaling quest system like the Legion one but also for the old zones.

The majority of people that dislike the Cata revamped zones probably never did any quest in them, but it's not their fault when you can outlevel them with a single LFD dungeon.

[Deleted]

The majority of people that dislike the Cata revamped zones probably never did any quest in them, but it's not their fault when you can outlevel them with a single LFD dungeon.

I dislike Cata revamp and did most of the new quests. First, I felt like I lost my connection to the world when many of the areas I spent huge amounts of time in vanilla were either destroyed or significantly changed. Second, while there is tons more quest content in the revamped areas, it made those areas feel like linear, on-the-rails tunnels instead of real areas of the world. I just preferred the old design even with all its issues.

[Flarelaine]

I think Cata was a decent expansion. I did not like it at the time, but WoD made me re-evaluate it.

Having said that, there's a lot to gripe about. Most of it was already mentioned in the thread. My personal annoyance was, after six years of whining after Malfurion and Nozdormu, they were suddenly there. Just like that. No notice or explanation. Which, of course, is really the same problem as the abruptly dropped Neptulon storyline. Cenarius kinda falls under this as well; we at least saw him return all right, but considering what a big deal his death was back in WC3, his return was underwhelming.

The dungeons were pretty difficult at the beginning, but that was fine. I actually appreciated having to use brains in a dungeon again as opposed to "gogogo!" Nerfing was a symptom of Blizzard's pussification.

The old world needed a facelift. Instead they butchered it in cold blood. And I do not only moan about different looks; they went overboard with making it convenient. Quest hubs, flight points and graveyards - practically under every second tree. And zones lost flavour to zany memefest.

On the other hand, I love Vash'jir. Still the most beautiful zone in the game, though Pandaland and Val'sharah are strong contenders.

[TwoNineMarine]

Personally I loved Cata.

The feeling of the zones was excellent in my opinion. The fear and recovery from such a devastating attack by Deathwing was fantastic. It made the setting incredibly tense in my opinion.

I do agree that DW should have played a bigger role but oh well.

I could go on forever but overall I really liked it.

[Daffan]

Everything was good until the last major patch IMO

huge influx of catchup mechanics, crappy raid, crappy raid group systems, changing the dynamic from expansion gear resets to patch gear resets. blah

[antelope591]

I hated cata because it killed 25 man raiding in favor of 10 man which I always found boring. Not to mention there was literally zero to do outside of raids....when I say zero I mean even less than WoD. I quit shortly after release and didn't come back till mists. Well, I came back to try LFR, wasn't impressed and quit again. By far the worst expansion in my eyes.

[ZenX]

For me the highlights for it deemed as being bad were:
- Deathwing was rendered to being a rage-monster instead of being the cunning PoS he was. Additionally, he lacked any proper presence outside Twilight Highlands quest line which
- Twilight's Hammer felt like an after thought in terms of storytelling past 4.0 and got axed quickly (Bastion of Twilight should have had a siege kind of prequel quest line following with its clear before DS while 7.0 should have been dealing with the Elemental unrest.)
- Shattering and Twilight of the Aspects novels' content should have been in-game.
- Abyssal Maw content was promised but cut.
- Uldum was not utilised to its maximum potential considering how it was a bastion for Titanforged (Compared to others I did like the Harrison Jones quest line) with Tol'vir being a joke and Wind Elementals not getting any proper development while they had heavy influence on the zone.
- Dragon Soul a 7-boss raid was creeped over a year and was a joke in terms of progress due to bad-tuning as H MoD being a push-over once you could beat H SoD killing the sense of climax.
- Rise of Zandalari shoe-horned into a dungeon rework and never really had any culmination (Even with MoP)
- War of the Ancients being axed down to a crappy Dungeon with a really small Well of Eternity which was basically a sea amidst the super continent.
- There was no added content on the world for end-game content in 4.3 and for anyone that had went through the progress of expansion it proved to be a terrible content-drought.
- Dragonflights got axed with lots of hanging strings in terms of their storyline with the Bronzeflight seeing the least of the light considering we finally had the chance to interact with Nozdormu for the first time. Re-gathering of Blue Dragonflight after Kalecgos becoming the Aspect never got proper emphasis. Can't complain regarding Ysera as she had seen proper light thanks to Dragons of Nightmare back in Vanilla and did so back again via Hyjal quest lines in Cataclysm.

The best highlight for me was the rework of the entirety of Vanilla zones (Except Deadwind Pass) and anyone else bickering at it can go jump into playing Call of Duty or Destiny.
- I will be even more mad at Blizzard if they axe Wrathion as I levelled another Rouge during the expansion once his involvement in 4.3 was announced just so that I indulged myself in the creation of a character that has (had at the least, as Blizzard seems to have been trying to axe him as of late) lots of potential.

TL;DR: Blizzard forgetting that WoW is an RPG nonetheless should never even have hoped for a yearly expansion cycle and rushed things accordingly as they fell-out of pace ending up axing things leading to storylines of expansions having holes in it.

[Simplex]

Janky story topped off with Dragon Soul, or rather majority of 4.3, combined with a bandwagon that got out of hand.

[Deleted]

I suppose dungeon quality is subjective, but in terms of complexity I think Cata definitely took a step up - the initial heroics in Cata had more complex mechanics than some raids in the pre-Wrath era. That ogre boss in Deadmines had the mechanics of the main boss of Ruby Sanctum!

I think they had a lot on their plate when they made BC - Karazhan was originally going to be a Vanilla raid tier but they pushed it out to BC, so the only raids they had time to build for launch were Mag and Gruul which were tiny. The "hub" concept that came into play when they split Scarlet Monastery into smaller dungeons seemed successful so they went to town on that. They did it a bit in Wrath too but apparently phased it out in Cata. I'm guessing the team was much smaller back then so they would've been short on resources.

I'm not sure how much they'd developed the War of the Ancients raid before scrapping it. They might've just built some assets and reused those. Either way they were converting raid resources into dungeon resources I guess.

Agreed, pre-nerf Cataclysm Heroic Dungeons were excellent, albeit, a poor choice post-LFD, sadly.

Right, though to be fair, they did keep us quite busy with all those gating mechanisms while they finished up work on the larger raids, at least. Remember having to farm all that rep to unlock Heroic Dungeons, & then we had to do the atunement quests for TK & SSH?

But the Scarlet Monastery split was also pretty much required, considering how much smaller Dungeons got with Wrath+ compared to Classic/BC. Even the Blackrock "remake" in Warlords was tiny compared to the original.

[SupBrah]

Cata was dope at first.

Heroics were hard, and raids were hard (including normal)

Then the entitlement generation started kicking and screaming to Blizz because they couldn't smash their face on the keyboard and receive free loot anymore, so Blizz nerfed the hell out of them.

Then they were boring.

[Deleted]

<snip>

Which reminds me;

Grim Batol was supposed to be a raid before it got chopped down to a Dungeon, wasn't it?

Agreed on the annual expansions thing. Thank fuck they finally saw the light & abandoned that delusion, if nothing else.

[Kazgrel]

Cataclysm started off catering almost solely to the hardcore audience. Dungeons were hard, world mobs had more hp, raids were ridiculously hard compared to naxx and ICC, especially the new ten man normal versions etc

The casuals hated it and left in their millions.

Then blizzard realised they dun fucked up and changed the game to be much easier, in the hope of bringing the casuals back.

The hardcores (who were more or less the only ones still playng wow by the time firelands landed) then got treated to dragon soul, a short raid that was for them laughably easy. They hated it.

An that's why cata is hated. Either you were a casual who got fucked with at the start or you were a hardcore who got fucked with at the end.

I'd dare say everyone got hosed with how phoned in DS seemed to be.

Part of the difficulty of the pre-nerf heroics was that healers went from being god mode and being able to top off a tank with a single cast from 60% to having to pretty much dump their entire mana bar in order to keep the group alive...on each trash pack. Coming off of how faceroll things had become in Wrath dungeons, it's no wonder they were not popular with a lot of folks.