Can anyone even really well sum up why they think Cataclysm was a bad expansion?

[ro9ue]

I loved Cataclysm, but it wasn't without flaws.

To me the biggest problems were when Blizzard caved about "hard dungeons" early on in the expansion, the anti-climactic Deathwing fight. (Actually thought Spine fight was cool, though hard af), and the disjointedness of the story and zones kinda took away from the feeling.

[Chloral]

I loved cataclysm. Firelands remind one of my favorite raid in the game.

[Darknessvamp]

I wasn't playing during Cataclysm so I don't have an opinion on what the expansion was like. Though as of it's legacy what I did like was the dungeons and their boss encounter design, what I didn't like was it laid the groundwork for the stripped down changes to the talent system in MoP and has kinda been the reason for the terrible class balancing since then.

I'm still confused how cata 5 mans were hard. CC X is not hard, if you refused to even try to do that, that was your fault. Nothing about is hard.

If I remember correctly what people were saying about Cata after I joined back in MoP, it wasn't that CC was hard but that it was needed for almost every pack of mobs for multiple targets on top of mobs hitting for extremely high damage and that was starting with normal difficulty. It only got worse with HCs.

[Akka]

I'm still confused how cata 5 mans were hard. CC X is not hard, if you refused to even try to do that, that was your fault. Nothing about is hard.

Especially considering how Cata dumbed down even CC by making the mob braindead and not reacting when one of them was sheeped/sapped/hexed/etc.
That was really the moment where I knew that Blizzard was still going with the shitty WotLK "WoW for retard" mentality instead of going really back to the roots.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Man you people are predictable.

[Akka]

If I remember correctly what people were saying about Cata after I joined back in MoP, it wasn't that CC was hard but that it was needed for almost every pack of mobs for multiple targets on top of mobs hitting for extremely high damage and that was starting with normal difficulty. It only got worse with HCs.

Meh, that's basically an easier version of what was TBC.
If not for WotLK lowering the standards so much for so long, people would have found Cata HC to be pretty easy.

[mag07]

Dragon Soul. By far the most underwhelming raid and end fight in the history of the game. Lasted forever. Additionally, blaming lower subs on harder content and nerfing what were some of the most entertaining dungeons in the game just killed it for me.

[Biggles Worth]

Dragon Soul

[mickybrighteyes]

Nah, for a pretty long time you would join the LookingForGroup channel if you used a tavernkeeper/meeting stone "join group" ability.

I don't remember this feeture at all.
meeting stones pre-2.0 were half assed meeting places for a single instance and really were better used as a marker for "hey there's loot in this area somewhere!"

I don't know when tavernkeepers had any interface beyond selling beer or being the innkeeper.... that must be something like rogue buckler era

[Dug]

I'm still confused how cata 5 mans were hard. CC X is not hard, if you refused to even try to do that, that was your fault. Nothing about is hard.

They really weren't but people were too accustomed to the absolute facerolls that were wrath dungeons (except maybe the ICC ones)

[Lime]

I'm still confused how cata 5 mans were hard. CC X is not hard, if you refused to even try to do that, that was your fault. Nothing about is hard.

I don't get to control 5 players at once. Multi-boxing isn't for me.

They were just as easy as TBC Heroics with a good group, especially friends and guildies. PuGs, though, jesus christ... The amount of 2+ hour GBs I joined because the group was braindead is hilarious. I never even left because, well, what else was there to do? It was comical. Same thing as TBC. Raiding is on it's own schedule and there really isn't anything to do in the downtime.

I ran so many TBC Heroics with my alts just because I enjoyed playing the game and needed something to do. The healer changes + the difficulty spike in early Cataclysm made PuGs a shitshow. Casual raiding was probably easier for those players than trying to do 5 mans.

[Zafire]

Cataclysm was the pinnacle of PvP for me. I got my highest rating ever in Cataclysm. I was one of the most reputable Alliance members on my low population server because of Tol Barad, and I had a reason to PvE to improve my PvP gear (that trinket, can't remember its name now). I CHOSE a small server because I PREFER everyone knowing everyone. Cataclysm was the last time I got to experience that tight-knit community. PvP hasn't felt the same since Cataclysm for me.

MoP was my most hated expansion. Most of the people who liked it seem to have liked it for the raiding, which is something I didn't really do. The things to do outside of reputation grinding and dailies just made the world feel very stale very quickly. The questing was just god awful, as most of the zone stories had nothing to do with any serious conflict. This was the first expansion they made PvE gear completely useless in PvP, so I didn't really feel a desire to PvE at all (even though I did). Some of the heroics were good, but none of them feel terribly memorable to me. Also, holy hell that last raid felt like eternity.

I REALLY liked the Garrison system in WoD, even though not many other people did. This expansion was great for leveling alts, and it gave you a serious benefit for doing it. The questing was good and rewarded you nicely via companions for doing it. I had a lot to do this expansion, and I was playing for free too so it was really nice when I had 5 alts making me gold.

For me personally the question is "Why did anyone like MoP". Cataclysm was great for me. The only part about it I didn't like was most of the good quests being removed from the game in the old world. Like whyyyy. Getting the Sword of Serenity was a staple for every character I made.

[Nyel]

Cataclysm had two major problems:

5.1 aka Troll dungeons rehashed
5.3 aka Dragon Soul (maybe the worst final patch of any expansion) and the introduction of LFR

Besides that Cataclysm was great. The dungeons were amazing, the zones were great (Uldum, hello?), Firelands were very nice. Starting raids were great... Dragon Soul and ZG/ZA farming destroyed most of the goods of Cata.

[Tomana]

Cataclysm had plenty of dailies, though.

A lot of them were pretty crap though. Deepholm are the only ones worth mentioning.

And you could grind dungeons for reputation to get early expansion epics.

After what they did with healing in early Cata? Heck no. It was about as exciting as eating broken glass.

If you think Cata had no non-raid content to do, then what did you do in WotLK, TBC or Vanilla?

In WOTLK, the dungeons were MUCH easier to pug than in early Cata. It's not even remotely comparable.

[Wewlad]

Launch was great for endgame, and I thought the same with regards to the new leveling experience—at the time.

I was younger and didn't get at the time how fucking atrocious Blizzard's reliance on references was with the 1-60 Cataclysm leveling. The zones that were completely revamped had no lasting value, and those they didn't do a total renovation with were essentially butchered versions of their Vanilla counterparts.

Loved the initial endgame. The heroic dungeons were fun, the raids were exciting.

Then they were nerfed, and I began losing interest with WoW's endgame as a whole (about the same time TotalBiscuit did).

[Zeph76]

It started great, I loved that Heroics where hard and I liked the raids up until Firelands. Then Dragon Soul happened. The only reason I kept playing was the fact that I was the only Rogue on our 25man team so I was the one getting the daggers.

[Spiel]

When you were looking for people to join a 5-man, yeah you'll often go to the city, because that was the most convenient way to get a common channel (though the LookingForGroup global channel was used extensively too).
But playing an instance, despite being the main activity, was far from being the only one.
There was a lot of things to reach for in TBC, because professions were pretty good and required a lot of materials, reputations gave unique items that weren't made obsolete every two weeks, and gearing was slow enough you could find good things to grab from many sources.

Also, leveling being much slower and catch-up mechanisms being much scarcier (at least until mid/late TBC), starting an alt was actually a very long endeavor that would allow someone to be busy for months on end. Something that was deeply diminished with WotLK and disappeared with Cata, which gutted leveling from the game.

Team leader? yeah of course. But trying to form a group I found more often than not that after completing the group, I was usually the first one to arrive to the stone. Anyway thats a community thing.

You are absolutely right about the 2nd part, but tbh I had a much alt-friendlier and different experience than you did in Cata. Professions still were relevant for me.
In fact this was the only expansion where I maintained 8 chars able to raid. Maybe 2 able to raid hc optimum, other to fill spots for a missing guildie and be able to have a raid night. LFR was a godsend for this.

I honestly missed the attunement questlines for "special" dungeons and raids, that I will admit.

I think in the end its a matter of taste. I liked some of the changes that cata brought in the alter aspect, and some that were kept like the tabard reputation system. I loved the difficulty of the hc dungeons. Not with a random group, especially in the beginning, when everyone was still learning. I mostly raided shaman elemental, and perhaps thats the reason. I think elemental shaman hit its "cool" peak in Cata and started diminishing since, suffering quite a lot with the streamlining and homogeneization of classes

[Jastall]

-Retarded decision to merge 10M and 25M in loot and difficulties, creating way too hard 10Ms which hamstrung the casual raiding scene until LFR/Flex raids picked it back up.

-Heroics at launch expecting a random group of people to do mechanics properly, and sometimes have a specific ability or class in the group. One of the dumbest ideas in WoW's history. Then they railroaded everyone into the same two dungeons for months, which is almost as bad.

-Very little non-raid max level content at launch, and hell for the entire xpack. The only patch content of note that wasn't instanced was the Molten Front. 4.1 being raids recycled as dungeons (removing the raids forevermore) didn't help, unlike say Wrath, Mists or Legion who got meaty X.1 patches.

-The absolute mess that was Tol Barad.

-Meh raids. Tier 11 was a very mixed bags, with some good bosses and some bad ones. Firelands was great if undertuned until Rag. Dragon Soul is easily the worst raid in the game if you ask me.

-Meh dungeons. I actually enjoyed Grim Batol myself, everything else was utterly forgettable. Cata Timewalking dungeons put me to sleep, especially Lost City and Throne of the Tides.

-So many quests lost, so many areas rekt forever. I'm not a huge vanilla fan, but what was done to places like Loch Modan or quests such as the Darrowshire line was a travesty. The xpack did add great quests itself, but getting rid of the good old ones wasn't required.

-Terrible lore. Garrosh being inconsistent as hell. Cairne killed in a book. Alliance losing towns in some silly attempt at equality. Deathwing being a lame villain. And of course the Green Jesus idiocy. BfA may have it beat in that department, but Cata was still a dark age in terms of lore.

- Poor and disconnected leveling. You didn't get a continent, but instead a mish-mash of zones that had very little to do with each other beyond "Twilight's Hammer was here". Maybe. And the overuse of pop culture jokes ruined some zones, especially Uldum. Vash'jir was pretty to look at, but awful gameplay wise, especially for melee DPS.

So yeah, it was pretty bad by my reckoning. I only played for the first four-ish months but even BfA didn't make me unsub like Cata did. It had redeeming factors, sure, such as Firelands, transmog, or PvP which I'm told was good, but that is really not enough to rescue it from the bad expansion status.

[Kokolums]

In game community had collapsed by Cata. That made both raiding and PvP feel shallow and pointless compared to vanilla or BC. It still feels shallow and pointless to this day.

Back in vanilla or BC, you were actively competing with rival guilds on your server for progression. Between progression wipes, you'd wait with baited breath to hear if your rival raiding guild had downed a boss, or cheered if they had a bad wipe and quit. the best was if both of you were on the same progression boss and then one of you finally got a kill and it was epic.

Today, you raid with with your guild, kill some bosses, and .... well .... whatever. Feels very shallow now without that community interaction. Cata was really the first xpac where the community was dead.

[Fus Ro Yay]

This is my personal opinion on the matter and might not reflect everyone elses experience with the expansion, so views might vary- anyway

1st, Cata killed the 10man raiding community, or at the very least crippled it, wich hurt the friends&family raiding guilds and pugs the most. For larger raiding guilds it wasn't as bad, but it did hurt the pool of people they could reqruit from

2nd It didn't Quite feel like a "new expansion" as much as it felt like a update to the old world. This was mostly due to the new zones being so far spread out and surrounded by vanilla zones. And to make matters worse it reinforced the "hub game" that wow has since become with portals to all the new zones being aviable in the capital cities.

3. The dungeons were firstly very hard compared to their wrath counterparts(save HoR), and then got nerfed very hard turning them into relative Snoozefests again, this made a lot of people angry.

4. The missing Raid and neptulon storyline was really painful, and not really led into anything.

5. The rise of Garbage guilds (no idea what to call this) Guild levels, achievements and perks led to smaller guilds being abandoned in favor of the larger ones, and the larger they were, the more gold they generated. It led to a really toxic community.

6. Dragonsoul and more. It lasted too long, it Had too much RP, Deathwing was dissapointing, LFR had its issues, and is still considered either the best or worst addition this game has gotten, Green jesus.


It had some good stories, some bad ones, it was great for Hunters who collected rare pets and people who enjoyed rare camping. Archeology was cool, but extremely painful and RNG filled-

Cata had the problem of Dividing the community on several matters and ending on a bad note- wich tends to paint the whole expansion in a much worse light than it might've recieved if it ended positively.