Has anyone's opinion of Catalcysm changed over the years?

[Khahirr]

This is a topic I've pondered for a long time. I'm a long-time lurker here and rarely ever post, but this topic in particular is important to me because I really feel like Cataclysm is where things all started going downhill, and not necessarily because of game systems like LFR.

The biggest issue I have with Cataclysm is the 1-60 leveling revamp. At the time I thought it was great, mainly because I got a new character from 1-60 over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend immediately after the revamp was released. However, as time has passed I realized that the 1-60 zones are ultimately poorly written at best (awful referential humor) and poorly planned resulting in immersion breaks at worst (Garrosh in Stonetalon, Westfall perpetually under siege, etc.). Cataclysm seemed to start the trend of continuity-breaking the game experience with each expansion which has never been fixed and continues to get worse. It just makes leveling a new character so jarring. As a veteran player, the lack of attention to detail / forethought tells me that Blizzard has never really had clear plans or doesn't care about the game's future/story, and a new player must be utterly confused about what in the hell is going on.

Ultimately, I feel that the Cataclysm induced continuity breaks ruined the mystique that the world had and cannot recover without a carefully thought out massive (like 1-max tbh) questing revamp which will likely never come short of "WoW 2".

[CreatureLives]

Like others have said, the questing revamp was excellent. The problem is that the expansion's theme involved trashing some otherwise-nice-looking zones in ways that really reduce the aesthetic quality. I mean, they drained Loch Modan for a muddy puddle, tore up easy routes through the Barrens, etc.

It's fun for a one-off disaster event, but not for the "normal" state of the world. I know the old world still technically exists in Cata's time-frame, but we'd really benefit from Blizzard passing through and making things less narratively tied to Cata's events. Y'know, make it at least plausible that events are happening "now," especially with how the Allied Race stories work.

I agree with this. This is what I was trying to say.

If I was a new player there wouldn't be anything fun about questing through a world in ruins. At least I have memories of how it was before so I at least understand why it looks the way it does. This isn't knocking the quests themselves. They are great and even better than before. I just wonder if the quest revamps could have happened without destroying all of the nice stuff and I hope Blizz would consider another revamp. They don't gotta do every zone if it takes up too much time but I think some places should be fixed up. Now with the zone scaling they should think about it. It's been many years since the Cataclysm so why aren't people repairing the damage? Why isn't new things happening in some of these zones?

I get that before the Cataclysm some zones desperately needed some improving but I think they took it too far. Some zones didn't need that much change. Some zones now I don't even want to go to because of the Cataclysm. I used to love Thousand Needles for example. Who thought that change would ever be appealing to anyone?

[Varlak]

It was a good expansion

But the last patch was not great

Sadly people tend to remember the ending of things more strongly and probably didn't help Dragon Soul was out for almost a year to rub it in.

Also WOD was great for the first few months, but nothing really happened with it... Like the same thing for 2 years. Also part of why people don't remember it well.

I dunno all the hate was upfront the release week. Many many many players were puset because you couldn't pull half the dungeon and AoE mobs down. You had to think again about roamers and adds and try to use some CC. Many hated that fact and wished WotLK return for massive AoE.

[Jastall]

The thing about Cata is that for everything positive I could say about it, I could say something negative in the same breath.

The old world revamp has some really cool questlines and vistas, but removed a lot of other good ones as well and left some zones in a perpetually trashed state. It also obviously drained resources away from the endgame.

Goblins and Worgens were cool races with half-assed stories and models, especially the latter.

The new zones were probably the worst we got in any expansion. They either looked good but played badly (Vash'jir, Uldum) or played decent but were boring (Hyjal, Twilight Highlands). Deepholm is probably my favorite Cata zone and even then it doesn't rank very high overall. The disconnect that came from them not being on one continent also felt weird even if it was understandable.

Making Heroics not faceroll was a good idea, expecting people randomly queued together to skillfully use CC (or even have it) and know boss strategies was foolish.

The raids were good until Dragon Soul, but the changes to 10/25m difficulty probably destroyed more guilds than any move in this game's history

It introduced LFR which was welcome to a lot of players, but very poorly implemented at first.

Its class design was overall good, but it also started to suffer from button bloat.

Pretty much the one purely positive thing I have to say about Cata is that it added transmog which has probably kept this game fun for an absolute shit ton of players.

[Vanhyali]

No, I still think it was a good expansion

[Luzahn]

I still can't believe they thought a perpetually trash-covered Booty Bay was a good idea.

[CreatureLives]

I never got the unrelenting hatred towards Cata.

For me it's not so much a hatred. Sure, of all expansions it was the least I was invested in the end game stuff but other than that I loved it. I loved questing through the changed old world and I loved the few new zones they added like Uldum and Hyjal (hated the under water one though)

It's just that I've soured on it a lot as the years have gone on. The expansion itself was pretty good at the time but it did so much damage that all these years later the game still hasn't recovered from. It'll be 8 years since Cata by the time of BFA's release and the old world is STILL destroyed from everything that happened in Cataclysm (a expansion that is no longer relevant) with the exception of Stormwind which received a few repairs. That's my problem. Expansions should be for the most part self contained. Cataclysm wasn't.

[ro9ue]

I was one of the few who really liked Cataclysm. WoD is really the only expansion I didn't like. I also look back on BC with ... grey-colored goggles? Looking at some of the changes brought to the game in BC had long term bad effects, while during the BC era I did like the game a lot.

[Headayke]

No. Cataclysm was bad. I wish it wasnt so bad that I wasnt completely turned off WoW until late MoP which I really enjoyed but then Dreanor was released and at least that content was presented decently to make Alts fun but Cataclysm had nothing for me to enjoy so it turned me off completely & I likely would have enjoyed all of MoP had I been invested earlier.

[Acidz]

No, the revamp of the old world remains a crime.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

I'm still of the opinion that everything I dislike in the current game has its seeds in Cataclysm, so no.

[Shibito]

worst expansion

[elgarta]

I think I've eased up on Cataclysm a bit. I liked how it (initially) returned to a harder dungeon scene than Wrath had,and alt leveling did feel more streamlined (first time I maxed our 1 of each class), but I didn't care for what was done to the old zones at the expense of what made me feel attached to them. Plus, I hates that this new questing experience was offered but you still outleveled the zones and barely had any incentive to keep going through them. Still haven't completed anything after redridge, duskwood and Westfall...

Nowadays I still wish I could turn OG wetlands, Hillsbrad, Barrens, Azshara and WPL back on, but I still appreciate that they did a monumental task in bringing the old world into the new-game.

Also, give us an option to re-run Vanilla dungeons again. I want old-scholo and SM back!

[Deleted]

Zone revamp and early heroic dungeons were awesome.

Zul'gurub and Zul'aman getting their own queue rendering the previous dungeons obsolete, Firelands and Dragon Soul having almost no bosses and being really boring (not to mention the "dungeons" that were released with Dragon Soul) completely wrecked the expansion for me. It's the second worst expansion after Wrath (which I will never forgive for adding the dungeon finder as well as introducing the go-go-go mentality where you don't cc anything, pull everything in sight and just AoE it down which is still a thing even today).

If I were to rank it:
Legion > MoP >> Classic > Burning Crusade >>> WoD > Cataclysm > Wrath

[iamthedevil]

I always liked cata. I didn't raid at the time, so the dailies and then LFR+transmog were pretty good for me. The stories were good, like the Molten Front assault and the troll stuff. That and goblins.

[manypillars]

I thought the 80-85 + endgame was maybe OK at first but became miserable really quickly. I hated how everything was a forced chain, so when you got to some of the ridiculously unbearable quest lines you had to leave the zone since you couldn't skip it and move on. And their choice to make the caricature Jewish race play the part of the Nazis in an awkward and poorly done reliving of the Indiana Jones Movies was surely the classiest of all possible ways to spend 2/3 of a zone. It was like the pop culture and memes stopped being references and became the heart of the game at points like that. But some people liked it so, eh. The more I repeated the pop culture/meme content the more grating and frustrating it became. To the point there I leveled characters purely through gathering because the questing experience was intolerable.

I can't really blame them for their choice to make the Cataclysm affect the entire old world. It's a logical choice and it helped move stories over and refresh tired, dead zones. The cost may have been too high in the long run since it created a disjointed, nonsensical world where time is broken, and with the WTF bugginess of CRZ it seemed as if we were but moments away from an abomination breaking through reality and consuming the fabric of our existence before our very eyes as the sky flickered between night and day before melting into a broken confusion of skybox and procedural skies. The music of the spheres is screams and horrors are their offspring. Paint the altars red with the blood of the chosen and await the coming of the end.

...So, uh, while it would have been disjointed, I think Cata would have been less damaging to the game had they limited the world breaking that Destroyah did to the new zones and simply refurbished the old ones as if they existed in a more or less Vanilla time. Also, less memes and pop culture rather than allowing them to dominate the questing in some zones.

[Usagi Senshi]

Nope, its still the second worst behind WoD.

The only good things about the expansion were new races, updated world areas, Vash'ir, LFR, transmog, and a few dungeons.

The raids were alright (cleared them all on 10-man heroic) but nothing compared to the ones in before it in Wrath and the ones after it in MoP.

Edit: Eh, I guess for systems update/improvements, its alright at least. :P

[Kaldriss]

i always liked cata

[Oakshana]

There has not been an expansion I did not enjoy (yes, that oddly even includes WoD). I think it's partly because I don't cave in to the idea of a content drought. For me there is always something to do, something to work on, something to achieve. I get it that's not everyone, and I certainly don't expect everyone to agree with me... it's just my two cents. So... yeah, I always enjoyed Cataclysm.

I did not mind the zones revamp at all... at the time. Now? If there is one complaint I would have, it would be that they injected the twilight storyline TOO much into the 1-60 leveling zones. It was too pervasive and does not fit with current leveling from a story perspective. They could have easily have done the whole "Cataclysm caused by Deathwing caused a lot of damage and here are stories" withou shoe-horning the Twilight cult in EVERYWHERE. That should have been left for the specific Cata zones (Hyjal, etc).

Just my feelings. YMMV.

[Kantoro]

Nope. Every single class became categorically less fun to play from Wrath to Cata.