I hate Cata for other reasons than most, I think

[Zoldor]

sigh, never has there been real danger in the leveling process. You've always been able to run away or avoid the patrols of those mobs. That is not danger, danger is an unavoidable task or a something that guarantees death. Dying to any of those mobs in the leveling process meant you went afk. Just like it will be in WoD.

- - - Updated - - -

Context, people; but people like to forget the reality of the moment, same as the claims to how snoozefest Wrath ones were, but forgot they presented some challenge and took some time when people were appropriately geared (HoL was hard for healers and the trash could wipe groups before Loken, when not overgearing it, not everyone are heroic raiders either, which is a definite part of the equation people tend to forget).

I think this is a major part of the problem most of the time. Is the general populace hears one heroic raider claim shit is too easy and then they all claim the same. Most heroic raiders don't care about the difficulty of LFR, Dungeons, LFD etc. Why? They are going to over gear it no matter what and they aren't in those places for gear, but for some sort of currency that benefits their gear, which means faster is better. Contest is always a giant issue with WoW players.

[Tziva]

There are a lot of things about Cataclysm I could critique (although I didn't hate it), but the old world revamp is not one of those things to me.

I think they did a phenomenal job. The quest flow desperately needed it due to so many poorly designed (at least outdated) quests, shitty rewards, and because all the xp bumps from Burning Crusade onward has made the process choppy, disjointed, and inefficient. Never mind that for many veterans, having leveled through that content many, many times really made the process more tedious than it was supposed to have been.

When the feature was announced initially, I had very mixed feelings, and I still do a little bit. Do I miss the things we lost? Absolutely. Original Stitches massacring Darkshire is one of the biggest examples, as is unmasking Lady Prestor in Stormwind. Those are some of my best in-game memories (ask me about Scruffles) from when I first began playing. Even little things, like when my Horde team hit 40 and no one had the gold for mounts so I -- I shit you not -- spend hours and hours every day swimming around opening lobster traps and killing lobsters (on a healer no less) off the coast of Desolace to get Big Iron fishing poles to sell so I could buy us all mounts to use. I have so many nostalgia for those times, even when it was occasionally not especially fun tasks like the aforementioned shellfish bonanza.

But this is an MMO, and the world is supposed to be dynamic. It's a necessary evil. Overall, I think they did really fantastic.

[Deleted]

Nah, I hated Cata because of boring, disconnected cliche leveling zones, flying in Azeroth, Indiana Jones parody zone.. all the other over excessive puns, references etc. too (what happened to the original lore?)

What else? Oh yea, because they nerfed everything few weeks-months after release too.. made doing more difficult things pointless.

[clevin]

I'm on the fence. The quest flow, as Tziva notes, needed help. But they didn't need to alter iconic leveling experiences like Stitches. The orcs behind the tree in Redridge were, despite what Zoldor says, a real danger in vanilla and TBC as they could 1-3 shot you.

Heroics... they screwed up in making some hard but doable (BRC), and others very hard and needing a guild group (Grim Batol). What they forgot was that TBC heroics (and vanilla dungeons) worked as harder instances that needed CC and coordination because they were invite only. You either ran with guildies or friends so you could hop on vent if you wanted (we often did just to be able to talk and shoot the breeze). The problem was that they introduced LFD in Wrath and in Cata they didn't account for that in tuning. They also babied people in Wrath and a lot of the subs that they lost in early Cata were Wrath players who'd never seen a need to learn CC, tactics etc since Wrath dungeons were Pull, AOE, Heal experiences for the most part.

[Bumbasta]

I miss the *real* Stitches.
I miss how a buff can really mean greater survivability for a leveling character. I loved casting buffs with my priest on players as they run past me.
I miss those Orcs that hid behind the rocks just outside of Lakeshire.
Who remembers Chok'sul?

...and I miss a ton more.


Nostalgia FTW!

That's not to blame on the revamping of zones, but on LFG, LFR, BG queue system and flying mounts.

[Jester Joe]

Yeah, 2.5h HoO Heroic wasn't fun and many of the others weren't far off in duration. Plus, forcing people to have more binds just because they wanted to validate keeping CC in PvE didn't work.

I'd rather 2.5h in HoO than however long Deadmines could end up going for...that was just...ugh.

[Deleted]

I think one of the problems with the quest revamp is that while it did result in smoother quests, the model of questing is ultimately the same meaning that the content is quickly going out of date. For example if some mixture of dynamic events and standard quests become the norm in WoD and beyond the old world is going to be outdated in a way it never has before.

[Awbee]

In my opinion, the main problem with the old world revamp is that they replaced timeless quests about the very lore of the zone itself with flashy "omg Deathwing just flew over here, shit's burning!" quests, which get old really fast and already appear very outdated, now that the Cataclysm is over. But Darkshore still is and probably will forever be a ruined mess, Ashenvale is still and probably will forever be burning, and so on.


I loved the mystery and "connectedness" feeling that the old world had. It was highly alluring and just the right amount of creepy. Eastern and Western Plaguelands were some of my absolute favorite zones, they were so ... shiver inducing. I also actually really liked the long questlines that spanned over several areas and even continents. I LOVED Awbee (I even named myself after him ) and his incredibly moving, sad story, and bringing his scale home to his mother.

I also loved those mysterious portals in elusive areas with dangerous high level elite dragonkins guarding them ... in Duskwood, in the Hinterlands, in Feralas ... oh, the old Azshara was also amazingly eerie. Now it's a goblin amusement park


I wish there was a portal in Caverns of Time that you could step through to get to the old world, before the Cataclysm. And one for the old dungeons before the revamp, too ... I miss the old Scholomance!

[thatmikeguy]

I like challenging content. Deathwing was cool. DS was long, but not as long as what we are doing now, lol.

The only thing I really hated about Cata was that there was no new "home" or place to call home. I had expectations of Shadowmoon as my new home, but that is gone. I can only hope they make a full hub in a new place, or our garrisons. Why force people into an older setting for the AH or anything? It becomes increasingly boring. Sure I'll have lower level alts who need to be in those places, but why when at cap?

It's also looking like we will be using a crazy amount of portals in WoD.

[Deleted]

I didn't hate the Cata dungeons because they were hard, they weren't, they just took forever.

The most I miss the elite mobs that actually could kill you in the 1-60 zones. Was something fun about that.

[Selah]

I actually liked Cata when it launched, the heroic dungeons (pre-nerf) were hard, Vashj'ir was a truly fresh zone, meeting the Earthmother was...interesting, seeing the elements forced into Azeroth was cool, getting to actually go to Gilneas and Kezan was amazing, phasing technology was really starting to be implemented and used in a very positive manner. Goblin and Worgen character models were by far and large the best character models of the time. The revamping of the old world was much needed and welcome. The lore tied into Deathwing and the old gods was exciting. Oh, and the new race/class combos were amazing, plus the Whaleshark was downright awesome.

There were a few gripes I had with the expansion when it launched, the biggest one was the talent system. Being forced to go all the way into a tree and then getting 5 points to go elsewhere really rubbed me the wrong way. Then there was a huge gap between patch releases and when they finally hit they were disappointing. 4.1 and 4.2 both were just rehashed raids with the Zandalari and Rag making an appearance...again.

The nerfs to heroic dungeons making them facerollable again, frustrated me. Did I mention the impossibly long wait between patches? Then when 4.3 went live with the Deathwing raid, it also brought 3 heroics with it that had gear equivalent to 4.2 raid gear, and you just had to run those a few times and you were ready to raid, totally destroying the reason a lot of people even raided Firelands, though to Blizzard's credit I really did enjoy the lore tied into those three instances. While I actually enjoyed the Deathwing raid (especially the getting on his back and removing the plates of armor) the final fight with Deathwing in the Maelstrom was rather disappointing, mainly because I was hoping for more fights with Deathwing himself. More dismantling his armor and breaking him down bit by bit. Something more like the Volan world boss event from Rift (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7E7ngVitdQ for reference, it's a long fight, but epic). Instead we hit him with a lazer once, we stabbed his tentacles and arms, then we stabbed him in the eye once or twice then Thrall lazered him again. Seemed very disappointing.

[Netherspark]

Yeah, the other thing about Cataclysm is that it's left dozens of horrible and permanent eyesores all over the world

Beautiful places are now blackened messes, zones are smashed to shit, others have massive swathes of destruction that literally take up a third of the zone, some zones have lost their iconic aesthetics. Hell in some places you can't even travel through it any more because of broken bridges/floods/fissures.

The whole of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are literally ruined; every place you go is just smashed and broken, it looks horrible. Blizzard really didn't think it through when they decided shatter the world. Even years after the expansion we're still stuck with all this ruined crap, and we probably always will be.

[CosmicGuitars]

It's the best thing they've ever done to the 1-60 experience.

[Deficineiron]

Context, people; but people like to forget the reality of the moment, same as the claims to how snoozefest Wrath ones were, but forgot they presented some challenge and took some time when people were appropriately geared (HoL was hard for healers and the trash could wipe groups before Loken, when not overgearing it, not everyone are heroic raiders either, which is a definite part of the equation people tend to forget).

I found wotlk heroics silly easy prior to 3.1, with the exception of Loken (the lightning dispersion boss?), who did wipe pugs regularly. Think there was one other boss somewhere that was sometimes trouble. Didn't run occulus. No cc, ever, no real need to learn boss strat in detail on many bosses (dps/heal through it). totally different than tbc heroic model.

I do agree with the idea that 2 years of easy - to- much easier 'heroics' had let an entire set of players (million? more?) come in who never learned older dungeon techniques (marked pulls/cc), or what a 2-hour run was like, etc. Throw all that in an LFD blender and cataclysm launch was gonna be misery in heroics.

Folks mostly wouldn't know this, but you had to CHOOSE pug players in tbc heroics, because folks who had the key simply didn't have the skill set that evening, as often as not. You built a friends list of folks who you found running at similar times, etc. If lfd had existed then, it would have been a nightmare. Finishing a pug woul dhave been a low-% event even on mechanar/spens/etc.

[MrKnubbles]

I like that Cata changed the old zones because they were so outdated. The quests were boring, NPCs had no personality and the gear was total garbage. Plus, we did that content SO many times! It was due for change. I'm glad all the zones got updated.

It's cool going to an area and being like "Oh, I remember the Goblins and Gnomes racing and hating each other. Oh, now they're stuck on a barge together. Haha, that's funny. Oh, I have to collect broken parts of their vehicles. This is relevant and interesting because I know the history behind it."

[Deficineiron]

I wish there was a portal in Caverns of Time that you could step through to get to the old world, before the Cataclysm. And one for the old dungeons before the revamp, too ... I miss the old Scholomance!

<gasp> Nostalgia! Everyone prefers a funhouse corridor with a talking skull guide screaming 'GO GO GO!'

[Caliph]

If I am not mistaken, most people hate Cata for how difficult heroic dungeons was at the start and how the new zones were so disconnected from each other.

I, on the other hand, loathe it for what it did to the 1-60 experience. I know most people love the new quests and how quick you can go from 1 to 60, but I miss the feeling of danger there was in the pre-Cata world.

I miss the *real* Stitches.
I miss how a buff can really mean greater survivability for a leveling character. I loved casting buffs with my priest on players as they run past me.
I miss those Orcs that hid behind the rocks just outside of Lakeshire.
Who remembers Chok'sul?

...and I miss a ton more.


Nostalgia FTW!

I agree with all you said. Cata sucked because of how bad it made things. what was the point of making a whole new world and having us just fly through it. it was so trivial as to make you wonder why even bother.

oh look they fixed that by selling lvl 90s. smart aren't they.

[ArthurVandelay]

If I am not mistaken, most people hate Cata for how difficult heroic dungeons was at the start and how the new zones were so disconnected from each other.

I, on the other hand, loathe it for what it did to the 1-60 experience. I know most people love the new quests and how quick you can go from 1 to 60, but I miss the feeling of danger there was in the pre-Cata world.

I miss the *real* Stitches.
I miss how a buff can really mean greater survivability for a leveling character. I loved casting buffs with my priest on players as they run past me.
I miss those Orcs that hid behind the rocks just outside of Lakeshire.
Who remembers Chok'sul?

...and I miss a ton more.


Nostalgia FTW!

I agree. I can't stand the whole questing on rails thing they did with the cata revamp. It would have been better if they had just improved quest rewards and left the old quests as was.

[McNeil]

The dungeons in Cata weren't hard, they just took forever to clear. Increasing the HP of all mobs and bosses isn't making them harder, just more tedious. I gotta agree that I miss the old world, they f*cked up so many zones (especially the Plaguelands), but they did a good job with zones like Silverpine though.

I do miss the elite npcs that you had to fear and those group quests, now u can solo hogger when it first was hard.
That's only thing i hate atm on leveling side.
There is no real danger outside the players.

Those Son of Arugals in Silverpine during night... came out of nowhere behind me, one of the biggest scare I had in this game. Maybe the biggest :P

[ringpriest]

If I am not mistaken, most people hate Cata for how difficult heroic dungeons was at the start and how the new zones were so disconnected from each other.

I, on the other hand, loathe it for what it did to the 1-60 experience. I know most people love the new quests and how quick you can go from 1 to 60, but I miss the feeling of danger there was in the pre-Cata world.

I miss the *real* Stitches.
I miss how a buff can really mean greater survivability for a leveling character. I loved casting buffs with my priest on players as they run past me.
I miss those Orcs that hid behind the rocks just outside of Lakeshire.
Who remembers Chok'sul?

...and I miss a ton more.


Nostalgia FTW!

I know where you're coming from. I tried to level a couple new toons to "see the post-Cata world" and all the much heralded redesigns and quests. (I'd already leveled a good 10 characters to max up through the end of Wrath.) I found Cata low-level questing to be much like Cata-questing at high-level: boring and not fun.

I miss El Pollo Grande <The Black Chicken of Death>.
I remember helping people with quests.
Who remembers farming mats for Wind Stone summonings?

I miss a ton more too.