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

[Shiny212]

It changed class design radically, altered quests across the board to be more casual friendly and injected more narrative into them.

Here's why it sucked: biggest class design change was the 200% health increase from last expansion effectively slowing down all gameplay making it boring and less impactful, while also easier where you died less. Extra health affected healing too, making it more boring to heal since it wasn't reactionary, but instead just filling the bar when it was lower than full. Second, it removed threat as a concept by automatically giving tanks aggro regardless of their play. None of this made the game better, it was easier, but less fun from a mechanical gameplay perspective and imo, never ever recovered.

The injection of new casual questing in every old world zone and more focus on tightnit narratives backfired horribly, because it turned out (as if we didn't already know), that WoW is not a great conduit for storytelling at all, and it never was. In vanilla, and TBC they knew this, the change here started in WOTLK, but didn't become the all-out intrusive and horrible shit it became in cata and every subsequent expansion. It made every zone less re-playable, less capable of giving players personal agency and overall boring and uninspired.

[rogoth]

I've spoken in defense of Cataclysm before, as I think the social stigma towards it is both undeserved and largely manufactured by people just parroting 'the popular opinion' at the time. It is my belief that Cataclysm was scorned because of two primary reasons: First of all, the expansion got off to a rocky start with players when Blizzard massively spiked heroic dungeon difficulty. This was something that hyped people the fuck up for the expansion, but once it dropped, the silent majority went apeshit. Subs dropped and, due to the advent of RIFT and SWOTR, the two latest "WoW Killers, For Sure(TM)", popular opinion started to be that WoW was literally dying, and obviously Cataclysm (the recent expansion) was to blame for it.

Things blew over a bit and I remember people starting to say "hey this expansion isn't so bad" with the release of Firelands. A brief period of people again decrying the game as dying when Abyssal Maw was announced as scrapped, but then all was quiet until Dragon Soul. People bitched relentlessly (not that they were entirely wrong to do so) about the recycling of models and raid environments, and it seemed like Cataclysm both started and ended in a swell of negative pushback, again only compounded by the fact that the entire expansion was accented by lots of players talking about how 'totally dead' it was because RIFT and SWOTR killed it.

Personally, it's my favorite expansion. I really loved that they continued with the WotLK-style of Rep grind, as it didn't time gate rep gain and let you get it at your leisure. Same with dungeons. Instead of logging in once a day to get your daily dungeon badge, you instead were able to do 7 dungeon runs each week. Again, not just taking away some of the time gating but also letting you play the game at your leisure. These two things alone were fucking great for me, but the raids were all really, really well done. Dragon Soul might have had some unimpressive bosses, and even if both Deathwing fights were visually spectacular, they got very fucking repetitive to do week after week (which I think was the real nail in the coffin for Dragon Soul's reputation).

All in all, Cataclysm was a really great expansion. It gave us a revamped old world, decent leveling experience (I feel I should mention that negative criticism towards Vashj'ir also contributed to a lot of Cataclysm's early tarnished image) and very memorable raids. The first tier of Cataclysm raids was three raids, for a total of 13 bosses, AND they originally planned for Firelands to be part of the launch tier, too. Cataclysm was certainly one of, if not the most, ambitious of the expansions. It was everything good about WotLK and TBC gameplay theories, only perfected a bit more.

All in all, I completely refute and do not understand anyone who actually, unironically, tries to call Cataclysm one of the worst expansions. Rather I think most people just mindlessly parrot opinions everyone else was parroting at the time and I almost never see anyone actually explain their stance on Cataclysm, they just say CATA SUCKS I HATED IT MORE THAN WOD EVEN LOL and expect people to just nod along with them. I feel, even, that most people who just parrot how bad they thought the expansion was probably weren't even playing when it was current content.

So, I ask you: Explain why you didn't like Cataclysm. I'm not saying people aren't allowed to not like it (WoW is inherently a shit game, after all) and I understand why people might criticize it, but I do wonder why people so easily, and with seemingly so little consideration, claim it's one of the worst expansions in comparison to the others.

this was the expansion they obviously tried to artificially extend content by not having the standard +10 increase on level cap, instead we got +5 levels, the overall story of the expansion was ok, but the over reliance on green jesus (thrall) for almost all aspects of the story was grating, especially to alliance players.

once you hit level cap there was really not much to do, the entry level dungeons were fine, some were a bit of a gimmick and boring but they were fun to do, the heroic modes were also fine for proper groups but the pug world screamed about them so they got nerfed instead of them learning to play better making it even easier for proper groups and this removing the challenge of them, then you had the clusterfuck that was raiding, 25 man difficulty was decimated by the merger of 10/25 loot, to the point where blizz almost killed it off completely so they had to have an exorbitant amount of loot drops in 25 to warrant people running it over the much easier to organise 10 man version, raiding on the whole was fine in cataclysm, if we ignore the mess that was dragon soul, but outside of raiding there really was not that much to do, thanks to the time taken to 'revamp' the old world they had left the rest of the content very sparse in comparison.

that's why 'at the time' cataclysm was a bad expansion.

[Bigby]

Blizzard admitted they bit off more than they could chew with Cataclysm. They thought they could get the old world revamp and a solid endgame done with their resources and time. Now ordinarily that probably wouldn't be too much of an issue considering Blizzard's former willingness to delay games until they were finished, but I don't think it's much of a coincidence that Cataclysm was their first expansion under Activision and ended up pushed out for a Christmas release date despite being plainly unfinished when with The Burning Crusade they had no problems missing the Christmas window for February. With that being said, at least they tried to deliver too much and failed compared to WoD's "yeah cba maybe we'll add stuff if we have the time but don't count on it."

The second issue is they managed to upset both the casual and more hardcore audience in two strokes. Cataclysm's Heroics were actually difficult, in the sense they went back to requiring CC, DPS to know mechanics, time to kill went up, etc. This was coming on the heels of WotLK where by the end of the expansion you pretty much didn't even need a healer for any dungeon save maybe Pit of Saron. I'd say that WotLK was by far the easiest WoW has ever been, so naturally for players accustomed to that being required to do more than roll your face across the keyboard meant wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe. So that pissed off the casual crowd. What did Blizzard do? They panicked and nerfed the content's difficulty into the dirt. So then the more hardcore players were pissed off, but casuals were already gone anyway, so they weren't coming back regardless.

What next? The time between 4.0 and 4.2. What came after the long awaited patch? Just revamped ZA/ZG. Oops. People weren't much impressed by that. Firelands was pretty good though... but what we got was Dragon Soul. After the Troll Dungeon patch, Cataclysm's rushed state and obvious lack of quality compared to WotLK, Dragon Soul being 90% reused assets was the straw that broke the camels back... no, actually, that would probably be twelve months of one of WoW's worst raids ever.

Remember that Cataclysm was WoW's first 'bad' expansion, so even if WoD and BfA were worse - and in my opinion they were - it has nonetheless cemented itself a special place of memorable scorn. Another issue is that the revamped old world is still 'relevant' content to anybody who's levelling a new character. A lot of zones were rushed or poorly done - mostly Alliance content - but compared to other expansion zones where you can rush through them in a few days at worst, MOST of WoW's levelling content is the revamped Cataclysm content. So especially obnoxious locations like Redridge, Uldum, etc are all the more prominently featured compared to even say... Outland, which as a whole is the worst content to actually level through now.

[sam86]

also i was busy irl with the failed egyptian revolution fiasco, cata f8cked healers the most
i play since vanilla, also didn't heal/tank in top content until TBC, I don't remember during TBC that even if no one do a single mistake, u still oom and tank get raped in normal dungeon, which cata did
in cata, even if no one does a single mistake, and i enter a dungeon in a group all of rl friends, i still oom at normal trash pulls, and we wipe due to oom from NORMAL pull
CDs should be used to save a mistake, try to fix a wipe, not a part of ur rotation, that what happened in Cata, cata even normal boss in normal dungeon, u'll blow all ur cds, coordinate with tank (which was - back then - easy since he was rl friend) on cds, and still wipe because i oom before dps kill the boss
I left cata way early, after zul'again dungeons, which was again a spit on face, zul'gurub was 'ok' but zul'aman was sh8t, i wiped on zul'aman in TBC enough to not desire this joke 5 men version
the nail in coffin - for me - was the cut of abyssal maw raid content because of 'time constrain', but by that time i already left wow and didn't see firelands (which was 'fiery', maybe raid fights were fun but entire firelands seems copy paste of same environment)
and while i didn't see DS when it was its current content, there is no doubt DS is one of worst raids ever with how they reused many assets from different parts of the game, almost like copy-paste glue stuff to create a raid, i feel pity for ppl who suffered entire year of it, i dumped wow earlier but cata made the entire wow gang drop one after another and since that time we never played online together again
I don't think cata is worse than WoD, but i hate Cata the most since after playing with 11 rl friends for long time and even go raids together, cata was the end of it, i play since TBC and i didn't 'miss' the gameplay where healers can't heal their team because they oom, cata is worse than TBC in that regard, and during TBC i was more noob than cata time

[Tomana]

And when have dailies ever not been crap????

To each their own, I guess. I like WOTLK dailies quite a bit. Cata dailies were few and far between, with "meh" rewards at best and spread all over the place.

What made this one somehow different? I guess from a healer's perspective you didn't like what they did, so I can understand that much of it at least.

Precisely. Healers were completely and utterly gutted. What is worse, this retarded "triage" healing philosophy (which leads absolutely nowhere) is still used to at least some degree in the current expansion.

Dungeons were nerfed barely two months into the expansion. I don't think you have a super strong argument to say 'DUNGEONS TOO HARD' when they reverted the change so quickly.

Barely? They should never have been released this way. This shows exactly how retarded the dev team was at that moment.

[Baroclinic]

Lets see, wrecking the original content with dumb crap. Really dumb that they removed 2 reputations, when atleast 1 still existed... but kept Argent Dawn as a ghost in the backyard of a chapel

Content was really slapstick and childish.

Third rate villains that left me feeling lackluster throughout the content. Its mostly a bunch of cultists and 1 big dragon that really feels like he doesn't threaten anything.

God awful horrible mechanics in dungeons. God forbid you miss something, Timewalking Cata week is still such fun...

I did enjoy Firelands raid though. And Transmog which was long overdue, even then it took 3 more expansions so we could clear our bank space...
Also it was great to get to where I needed to be so easily. Too bad Devs found that to be a downside of the expansion...

[msdos]

Here's why it sucked: biggest class design change was the 200% health increase from last expansion effectively slowing down all gameplay making it boring and less impactful, while also easier where you died less. Extra health affected healing too, making it more boring to heal since it wasn't reactionary, but instead just filling the bar when it was lower than full. Second, it removed threat as a concept by automatically giving tanks aggro regardless of their play. None of this made the game better, it was easier, but less fun from a mechanical gameplay perspective and imo, never ever recovered.

This was going to be my exact answer.

Cata was the expansion I was going to push arena and PVP hardcore because they finally weren't fumbling Shamans anymore and Elemental had the lightning bolt while running glyph which made them one of the best ranged PVP classes.
But then Tol Barad came. You know, the unwinnable outdoor BG? You needed an entire raid to kill a resto druid and all healers could heal everything with time to DPS you as well. Health pools skyrocketed, classes had umpteen billion CCs, arena matches lasted 2 hours, if you went up against anything with a resto druid just afk the match. Healers never went OOM, ever, never.

Cata was probably the beginning of the end of instanced PVP as we knew it.

[Laqweeta]

I saw someone mention RealID and it reminded me of the Blizzard employee that had his social leaked, home address leaked and everything. Blizzard soon announced after that RealID would no longer require first and last names LOL

[Armourboy]

Cata had several problems, but most of them were due to changes Blizzard was either trying to revert from WotLK, or because of rather short sighted solutions.

The new 5 mans in my opinion were not really all that enjoyable, and that has nothing to do with the difficulty. On the difficulty though Blizzard really missed the mark on difficulty. They had tuned them to be more in line with guild groups, but then still had the LFD system. Random groups just didn't really work in this setup. Also another issue is that healers were completely overhauled, mana was stripped, and some healing classes became something they hadn't been before ( holy power for Paladins, Druids being less about HoTS and more about direct heals ), which made things more difficult for randoms. Also the fact that while CC was spread out more, it was still heavily type based, and LFD wasn't smart enough of a system to make sure you didn't get a group of 5 and no one having the proper CC. I left more 5 mans than I ever had, and it wasn't because it was going badly, it was so that they could hopefully get someone in with the proper CC.

The other big change was too raiding, and it really hurt casual guilds in Cata and I would argue created a bunch of issues later on in WoW's life cycle. Starting in TBC ( and one could argue with Vanilla and the 20 mans ) and all through Wrath, Blizzard had started building up a creating raiding that could be used by more casual guilds. 10 man's offered these guilds progression and something to do if they so chose fully in Wrath ( like mine ), but to more or less save the more hardcore from themselves ( doing 4 raids a week), Blizzard decided to combine 10 and 25 man loot and put them on the equal playing field. This completely destroyed the raiding that these casual guilds had been doing for all of Wrath, and forced those guild to either " get good " or quit raiding, most just quit. Now quitting wouldn't have been an issue but Blizzard didn't anticipate this, and there was very little to do once you hit the point of where you would normally raid. This one single change is what led to the creation of LFR, to give these casual raiders something to do again.

In the end I think the raiding change in Cata was the single largest misstep they ever made in this game. It led to lots of dying guilds, both casual 10 man and 25 man. This ultimately led to LFR and eventually into Warforging gear as well. Frankly I think this change also began the cycle of people coming and going with content patches, as these communities and guilds were no longer there and things turned into a much more solo event for these cyclical players.

Frankly I think the Cata content itself would have been tolerable if not for the above changes. I think ultimately the destruction of guild communities and the pug communities, which also died with this expansion, just left a lot of people feeling disconnected.

[RuneDK]

Cataclysm sucked because they gave up on it to make MoP. When it first launched the initial raids/dungeons made me feel as if this was the best iteration of wow...then people complained it was too hard...and they made dungeons easier. Then they scrapped a raid for a daily quest hub and made raids only have 7/8 bosses...Firelands was a fun raid...but dragon soul was a giant shit sandwich. Vashj'ir is a wasted zone as well with Abysal Maw not being a raid. It's not their worst...but they continually went backwards throughout the expansion in quality.

[Archibalde]

àCataclysm had about the same number of bosses as TBC did. WotLK had a shit load of them because of Ulduar and ICC had 12 bosses (which was more than either Black Temple or Sunwell before it, as prior 'end expansion' raids).

Again, I don't think either of your points are putting Cataclysm in 'worst expansion' territory. Minor criticisms, sure, but that's it.

There were 40 raid bosses in TBC, spread across 7 raids. Cataclysm had 32 bosses spread across 6 raids, and that's counting Baradin Hold. 8 bosses is not just about the same, that's essentially an entire raid in itself.

I also feel like you'll never get any answer to your question if you are not willing to accept that what you consider minor criticism might be major for others. You're asking the question but you don't seem to be opened to any of the answers, you just want to argue with people instead of actually considering their opinions as valid. All of the other person's criticism resonated with me as far as why I found Cataclysm to be one of the least enjoyable expansion.

Sure, Warlords and BFA (so far) have gotten a much worse reception, but that doesn't mean everyone will immediately think "oh well Cataclysm was actually fantastic in hindsight". There were still a lot of features and changes that were not great for a lot of people. You won't necessarily agree with those reasons. But if you genuinely want to know why they feel that way, getting defensive when they explain it isn't going to do anything except waste everyone's time.

[Zulatomten]

1) Cataclysm ruined the old world with the revamp, destroying forever the leveling experience.

2) Leveling experience in Cata was disjointed, all over the place, VERY short and a pretty mixed bunch (I still cringe at the Uldum "Indiana Jones" part, and Hyjal and Twilight Highland are among the most boring places in WoW).

3) It doubled down on the stat inflation that started in WotLK, which is the source of half the bad things in WoW today.

4) It started the trend of locking down specializations, which ended up in having three disconnected subclasses instead of having a baseline class of which specializations were adjustments.

5) It didn't kept its promises for more than a month ("gear color now means something !", "5-men are challenging !").

6) Troll instances & Dragon Soul.

I mostly agree on your points but i'd like to say my piece of mind on some of them.

I fundamentally dislike leveling so i agree on your first two points, however on the first point you make it out to be that there was good leveling to beginwith. How you leveled in Wow have never been good per say. It have always been a means to an end, a stepping stone to reach other heights.

On it's outside it is trying to tell the player that you have an effect on the world. But you have never been able to roleplay a personality, a good, a bad or neutral character. Other than the one blizzard have forced opon you. You have always been forced onto a designed path. The closest thing of breaking this habbit is in BFA whenever you choose to support Saurfang((?) I'm not playing horde this expansion so im not very updated on it) or go against Sylvanas...

Rehashing content, sure it's boring. but then when something new is made with that content, in my mind that makes it up for acually rehashing it.
I find it harder to like something when Blizzard seemingly is trying to hard to hook players.
In legion we had Spaceships? We're gonna fight a interdimensional beings with swords and leather armor. And whenever they repeat the theme way, way to much. Like Orcs for Dayz

[I Push Buttons]

I thought Cataclysm started our strong and just got progressively worse as it went on.

At launch it was great. Good leveling experience, good factions, lots of dailies, vendors that sold worthwhile rewards for that rep, etc. The dungeons were actually difficult and decent. It launched with four separate raid instances, so lots of opportunity for variety and loot from raiding from the get-go. Tol-Barad was interesting-ish for a time.

But then Firelands was mehhh and Dragon Soul was super mehhhhhh, and then the first year long content drought afterward.

[Budong]

I was indeed trying to be funny - It wasn't meant as a poke at Wildstar though, more a poke at the people who are convinced that going back to "hardcore" content would instantly restore WoW to it's former Sub numbers.

I thought so. It's a damn good indication of what would happen in real life as opposed to the fictional reality that exists in their nostalgia fueled heads.

It's just ....Wildstar man. I can't let go....

[Sinaa]

I liked Cata. I liked the new maps (Vashjr & Uldum are still top5 maps for me), I liked the raids before Dragon Soul, especially Firelands, what an amazing raid that was. I especially liked the dungeons, Halls of Origination at launch was my favorite..
Sure there were problems, but compared to WoD, or BfA it was infinitely better.
(I've been playing on and off since Vanilla)

[Akka]

I mostly agree on your points but i'd like to say my piece of mind on some of them.

I fundamentally dislike leveling so i agree on your first two points, however on the first point you make it out to be that there was good leveling to beginwith. How you leveled in Wow have never been good per say. It have always been a means to an end, a stepping stone to reach other heights.

Well, it's a difference of preference here, because if you don't like leveling, obviously we are going to disagree on the leveling experience (as I love leveling myself).
I somewhat agree with your criticism of the fact that a player has no choice and no real personality when it comes to quests, though, but I don't mind too much.
SWTOR had pretty awesome questing where you could develop a personality and make choices, if often somewhat forced and artificial, but I'm not sure Blizzard has the writers to pull the same. The simplicity of early WoW had a definite charm that has been lost in the hamfisted Hollywood approach of late WoW.

Though Pandaria is still for me the absolute best in WoW leveling, and it had quite a lot of writing of pretty good quality, sooo... maybe Blizzard just need to be motivated, and they lost their motivation long ago ?

[AGoodMMOPls]

ITT:
OP "Cataclysm is my favourite expansion, please tell me why you think it was bad so I can tell you you're wrong."

On a more serious note:

1) The overhaul to the world was a bad one, effectively killing a decent explorative levelling experience and turning it into a streamlined "Do this one camp before moving onto the next camp until zone is complete." - You can't even pick and choose what quests you want to do anymore; the entire camp is mandatory in order to continue the zone's story. I don't know about you but I enjoy when quests send me across the world to explore Azeroth and find new levelling zones/instances along the way, not be confined to a single zone and not even have the option of what quests to do.

2) Talents being locked to one spec, ultimately leading to WoW's current state of talents basically being their own class at this point.

3) The introduction of LFR, being an additive to the already socially butchering LFD tool, allowing raids to become more pointless individual loot farms instead of a progressive experience as a community.

4) Dragon Soul's design, Deathwing boss fight.

5) Basically a continuation of everything post wrath, such as sharding/phasing, group finders and any/all other socially destroying aspects, forcing the game towards a single player loot fest instead of an MMORPG.

[MidnyteTV]

I really enjoy reading this thread.

I was a Wrath baby, and quit about month into Cata.

Why?

1. My guild fell apart about a month before Cata launched due to poaching. They still had people to play with, but we went from having 50-60 players, multiple raid teams, good environment, to less than 15 people and the guild had no pulse.

2. Like I said, at the time, I was a wrath baby, so it took me about an hour to do normal stone core, this was unacceptable for a wrath baby at the time. So I felt like the gear grind to raid wouldn't be worth it. Plus I didn't have the support in my guild like I did during wrath, not enough people to play with.


So I'm glad to read what people are saying about it because I didn't come back until MoP. Cata was the expansion in which I always wanted to try out but never will know how it was. So it's nice to hear people's perspectives.

[Viikkis]

I enjoyed Cataclysm but it was mostly just afking in major hub waiting for that que pop up. It also had the messed up guild perks like summoning whole raid so I almost never had to travel anywhere. Tol Barad was fun though.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

It gave us a revamped old world

Yeah, the worst crime in this game.