Why Cata was/is a good expansion and you are just repeating bs like a parrot :)

[Loveliest]

I remember Cata first few weeks quite clearly.
For me it was quite fun. The paladin was basically the only tank that could easily pull mobs without breaking CC. I played with good players so instances were great in a way I never knew, since I was a Wrath baby. Did hero in the first week in greens before the 3 nerfs to some dungeons. And I had no issue holding aggro, since I understood hit and expertise.

That being said, the dungeons were too hard for the majority of people. They nerfed dungeons pretty soon, they changed CC not to put mobs in combat. Tank population dwindled. Ppl were paying me gold to tank dungeons for them because there was a shortage of tanks. They introduced bags as extra rewards for needed roles as incentive in LFD. Tanks only started tanking again after the change in Firelands to aggro, a 5x multiplier. 5x. By that time a lot of my guild quit. One, because they could not finish dungeons to get valor, as outlined. And two, because the 10m lockout was same with 25m lockout. This meant we could not get them gear from 25m like we did in Wrath, because we were progressing in 10m and were locked to 10m. And their own 10m was not good enough to get past Magmaw. This essentially meant they had NO gear source and nothing much to do. This is why people say they dislike Cata.
Oh, they also changed hunter from mana to focus and that pissed a lot of ppl.

Personally, I liked having only raid and a couple dungeons to do every week because that left me time to level alts, do achis, relax. We had some rep grinds and later the Firelands quest area, but that was not enough for ppl to be happy. They used to do dungeons and raid in Wrath and they could not. So I get it. I liked Cata, but I would also not do it again.

[Azsune]

I don't really know why I quit Cata early. I came back for Deathwing and rated battlegrounds, I remember really enjoying raiding but that could be because I had an awesome group to play with. I then quit and didn't try MoP past the beta and the first few quests just put me really off.

The smaller talent trees didn't really change much as before specs were pretty set in stone and you didn't have much flexibility for specs. Reducing the number of talents didn't really take away much choice. I feel MoP was the one that really changed how the game into what we know as retail, WotLK and Cata were small steps in that direction.

[rogoth]

It wasn't that hard though, most of it was straight forward content. Only 4.0 was hard pre-nerf. Firelands, ZG/ZA, DS weren't that hard.

let me just correct you on your incorrect statement here:

4.0 launch content wasn't hard for co-ordinated groups who knew how to play the game to a competent level, it was an almost insurmountable wall for the casual players who made up the bulk of the playerbase which is why it was nerfed so hard.

4.1 and the revamped ZA/ZG were vastly over tuned to the point where i as someone with full heroic T11 BiS gear was unable to get the reprised time trial bear mount until the very quick and very meaningful nerf to the dungeons about 2 weeks after it launched, these 2 dungeons were impossible for anyone not fully raid geared from T11 content, there was literally no chance players who were geared in 359 crafted gear and 5 man heroic trinkets/weapons etc were going to be able to clear any of these dungeons in the first day/week of them coming out, the bosses had too much health, did too much damage and the trash had too many mechanics for most casual players to mitigate.

4.2 saw the biggest tuning hurdle ever seen, firelands normal mode was a joke for the first 6 bosses, then ragnaros was a mammoth jump in difficulty for most normal mode players/casual players to the point he wasn't feasibly killable, and on heroic he became a solid wall where the previous bosses were so easy it was a joke and by rights 80% of players who reached heroic rag had no business being there, not to mention the sheer bombardment of mechanics on herioc rag was the first time we had seen the devs throw so many mechanics all with extremely tight timings together into a single boss fight before, i only got a heroic rag kill after his first wave of nerfs, but before the monster nerf patch to him, and let me tell you if you think that was 'easy' then you didn't play at that point in time.

4.3 saw some of the most egregious power creep the game had ever seen with the new 3 dungeons added invalidating EVERYTHING that came before, and again with the same problem the 4.1 dungeons had, they were nigh impossible for casual players to clear because of how they were tuned, and the raid was extremely hard until the passive nerf aura was implemented, personally i only managed heroic kills up to spine before the aura was 15% after that i cleared the remainder, but most people still struggled with boss mechanics until the aura effect was 20-25% and even at the strongest point of 35% guilds were still unable to clear spine due to the burst dps requirement, so no, it wasn't 'easy' as you're trying to claim, for the vast majority of the playerbase it was all actually rather a futile waste of time as the majority of the content in the game when it became available was off limits to them, which was a total design shift from blizzard at the time and was one they doubled down on for MoP until shit hit the fan.

[Gimlix]

let me just correct you on your incorrect statement here:

4.0 launch content wasn't hard for co-ordinated groups who knew how to play the game to a competent level, it was an almost insurmountable wall for the casual players who made up the bulk of the playerbase which is why it was nerfed so hard.

4.1 and the revamped ZA/ZG were vastly over tuned to the point where i as someone with full heroic T11 BiS gear was unable to get the reprised time trial bear mount until the very quick and very meaningful nerf to the dungeons about 2 weeks after it launched, these 2 dungeons were impossible for anyone not fully raid geared from T11 content, there was literally no chance players who were geared in 359 crafted gear and 5 man heroic trinkets/weapons etc were going to be able to clear any of these dungeons in the first day/week of them coming out, the bosses had too much health, did too much damage and the trash had too many mechanics for most casual players to mitigate.

4.2 saw the biggest tuning hurdle ever seen, firelands normal mode was a joke for the first 6 bosses, then ragnaros was a mammoth jump in difficulty for most normal mode players/casual players to the point he wasn't feasibly killable, and on heroic he became a solid wall where the previous bosses were so easy it was a joke and by rights 80% of players who reached heroic rag had no business being there, not to mention the sheer bombardment of mechanics on herioc rag was the first time we had seen the devs throw so many mechanics all with extremely tight timings together into a single boss fight before, i only got a heroic rag kill after his first wave of nerfs, but before the monster nerf patch to him, and let me tell you if you think that was 'easy' then you didn't play at that point in time.

4.3 saw some of the most egregious power creep the game had ever seen with the new 3 dungeons added invalidating EVERYTHING that came before, and again with the same problem the 4.1 dungeons had, they were nigh impossible for casual players to clear because of how they were tuned, and the raid was extremely hard until the passive nerf aura was implemented, personally i only managed heroic kills up to spine before the aura was 15% after that i cleared the remainder, but most people still struggled with boss mechanics until the aura effect was 20-25% and even at the strongest point of 35% guilds were still unable to clear spine due to the burst dps requirement, so no, it wasn't 'easy' as you're trying to claim, for the vast majority of the playerbase it was all actually rather a futile waste of time as the majority of the content in the game when it became available was off limits to them, which was a total design shift from blizzard at the time and was one they doubled down on for MoP until shit hit the fan.

4.0 was just overtuned and nothing to do with actual difficulty it got nerfed quite fast so far i remember?
4.1 was just ZG/ZA farm and any noob farmed the heroics through dungeonfinder i don't remember it ever being hard.
4.2 was the best patch of Cataclysm with Firelands and Molten front, Firelands was a hella fun raid with great mechanics but only a few bosses were actually hard.
4.3 was just a joke from begin to end. Spine was the only hard part of the raid. Deathwing itself was a big dissapointment.

[kranur]

The point OP doesn't get is that it's just too similar to retail, except all of features are in their worse version.
What would be the point to play a watered down retail?
Also, last I checked, people were still allowed the like/dislike specific expansions

[Relapses]

I liked Cataclsym and I'm getting pretty tired of these "my opinion is better than yours and here's why" posts.

[onesBronson]

Cata was where I joined my long time horde guild, which I been apart of all til early Legion. Looking back on it, I can't say that Cata was really all that bad, mainly because I had friends via guildmates to spend time with. Heck, even Dragon Soul was my very first heroic raid done when it was relevant, and we had fun overcoming those hard encounters. So in theory, no. Cata was not that bad of an expansion. It just varies from individual experience.

[Recovery]

I know, but this isnt an issue of content being to hard. Just like you said classic wasnt hard, because people are not playing a new game. Cata will end up being the same.. its not gonna end up being hard, I dont believe that.

The reason why people dislike lfr as of the discussion, is ptetty much dead. Its in retail and lfr is not going to do much, because the social aspect has been ruined even before that in classic.

You can ask yourself the question, do I want to play an gimped retail version, with content that is still fresh in our memory.

The real question is... Why do you care whether or not they develop Cata? You obviously dont like it. We get it. So, dont play it, then? Why try to prevent the realization of it for the very large group of players that DID enjoy it and DO want to play it?

Also, youre talking out of your rump. Cata is nothing close to retail. Literally, no where near it. There are 3 less classes in cata. Balancing is way better. Loot options and gearing method is WAY better. PVP is in my opinion, the best its ever been, with the exception of season 11.

The only REAL difference that any of the goof balls around here have cited is the outdoor world changes. WHO CARES? Noone goes outside, anyway. Also, you folks that are so upset about the world changes are probably the same goons that are crying about the current "NEED" for world changes in retail. lmao. Its actually hilarious.

The only similarity between cata and retail that doesnt exist between TBC or Wotlk and retail is the stupid LFR, which Blizz can just delete, same as they did lfg for wotlk.

But, then, guess what? ALL of you that complained about LFG for all of these years will complain about them taking LFR out of cata, JUST AS YOU COMPLAINED WHEN THEY TOOK LFG OUT OF WOTLK CLASSIC.

[rogoth]

I liked Cataclsym and I'm getting pretty tired of these "my opinion is better than yours and here's why" posts.

i too liked cataclysm, but that's due to being part of the 0.1% crowd and could experience everything the game had to offer at any point in time i felt like it, which for a lot of people wasn't something even remotely close to being possible, which is what made it an objectively bad expansion, whether people enjoyed it, liked it, that was irrelevant, at the time it was a colossal failure of an expansion.

[Chilela]

I'm gonna go through this bit by bit.

2 Races - Worgen and Goblin + New Race/Class Combos

For the most part, this was fine. Outside of some questionable lore decisions and the butchering of the female Worgen model, I don't really have any complaints here.

Revamp of entire world, which can be subjective as "good" thing, but watching people boasting about MUH VANILLA WORLD and still levelling in dungeon or getting afk boosted to 70 makes me thinking it was just nostalgia bullshit

The revamp was very hit-and-miss. Some areas, such as Silverpine, got a clear upgrade, while others, such as Azshara or Westfall, were ultimately left worse off. IMO, boosting's more of an efficiency thing than an issue with the world design itself. It will probably be every bit as prominent in Cata as it's been in previous Classics, more or less attributable to the "Get to the endgame quickly" mindset that's increasingly plagued the WoW playerbase over the years.

Flying was there since the start

And it kinda took a lot of depth out of the world. The system of getting flying near cap in TBC/WotLK was something that wasn't broken, and thus didn't need to be fixed.

Guild Achievments > The phoenix, the cauldrons the pets the guild mounts, remember? Probably not.

I do, but way to leave out that issues that the Cash Flow and Have Group, Will Travel perks brought, leading to their eventual removal. Mostly okay, but not some sort of great salvation otherwise.

Rated BGs

I actually like RBGs more than I do arenas, real shame they aren't played as often.

Mastery Stats

No objections here, Mastery was a good addition.

Haste Breakpoints which created a new way to min max your character.

Don't really have any comments on this one either way.

Reforging : which had the PRO to give items a longer life due to the fact you could re-use an item by relocating different stats making them bis-ish but on the CONS side made people becoming ultra greedy and Reforging was just relocating stats nothing mind blowing, wow you Reforged Crit into Mastery? Fucking MIT material there.

Hot take: Reforging was one of the most overrated additions in WoW. Reforging into better stat while ensuring you're hit capped was not fun, nor engaging. Would be the case even moreso if it were re-added into Retail, which doesn't even have said caps. But I digress. At least it was a decent enough money sink.

Tol Barad was an amazing combination of PvE and PvP better in some way than Winterlag or Lagspring.

lol. Winterspring utterly smoked Tol Barad.

Classes were fun to play both in PvE and PvP - until late stage cata when the triple dps meta ruined PvP imho

Can't really give an educated comment on this one, since I basically mained Feral through the whole xpac. And Feral's a spec that hasn't really seen any world-breaking revamps like a number of other specs have seen over the years.

PVE WAS ACTUALLY HARD - this need a separate mention, PVE in Cata was more Retail than Classic, hence required skill and wasnt just pressing 111111111 deleting bosses like now, HC Dungeons were fun and hard not the Wotlk HC snooze fest or the TBC one which can be sumd up "lets bring 3 mages and aoe everything down wow"

Hard, but sometimes borderline unfairly so. My 10/12H guild struggled to get past even the first boss of H Stonecore at the start since people kept getting waxed by the instakill mechanic. But this was eventually nerfed to be more reasonable, without being too easy. When all was said and done, Cata's difficulty was fairly reasonable, so I will give credit for that. Though once Cata Classic actually does hit, it's entirely possible that people will learn to hard-cheese dungeons. After all, TBC Heroics were saucy back when TBC was current content.

LFR

I have no real issues with LFR, outside of the times where it would be borderline necessary to run because set item bonuses were busted.

Dragon Soul

Was fine, even good for the first few clears, then became garbo. Asset flips everywhere, the clown fiesta that was the Deathwing encounters, and being obnoxious to run even on Retail due to the sheer amount of timed encounters (Pre and post-Hagara RP, Ultraxion trash, Blackhorn, Spine of Deathwing). The fact that it was current content for almost a year was just icing on the cake.

New Talents

The talent system was actually pretty close to being perfect. Leveling was fast enough in Cata where you didn't need a talent point every single level, the reduction of talents meant there was less obvious filler in the trees, and choosing a spec early on gave you solid tools early on. Only real issue was the fact that choosing a spec pidgeonholed you into dumping several talent points into that spec before you could touch other specs, but past that, the Cata trees were basically the ideal system to me.

That said, you forgot a few points:

-Cut content. Development issues ultimately resulted in the first major content patch giving us all of two rehashed dungeons as the big new thing. Granted, the ZG revamp was solid, but the ZA one, not so much. We didn't get a new raid until the second content patch, and even that had all of seven bosses. The Nazjatar plot was all but scrapped, and that could have very well been another raid.
-Removal of content. The world revamp is the biggest culprit of this, as they took out hundreds of quests, which even with Chromie time, haven't been re-implemented, and can only be experienced via Classic servers at this point.
-Uldum's focus shifting from the Ramkahen conflict to DUDE INDIANA JONES LMAO
-The quest structure becoming extremely linear: Zones turned into "Do 2-3 quests, turn them in, then go do another 2-3 quests, rinse and repeat". It got so out of hand that they backed up on it a bit in future xpacs.
-Quest rewards becoming more standardized. Compare and contrast with TBC/WotLK rewards, where there was a degree of variance with stat distribution and even occasional socketed items. Cata, however, started the "Items need a static amount of primary stats based on ilvl" trend that's more or less continued to this day.

Overall, at the time, I thought Cata was the worst expansion to date, but as time's gone on, it's shifted to a mid-tier expansion, though that's more an indication of my thoughts on more recent expansions, than it is me looking at Cata in a better light.

[deenman]

Cata made me leave wow, dungeons/raids weren't that hard they were just CC heavy, at no point did I ever think anything was too hard in cata.
What chased me away, zones that were instanced didn't really feel great (cough SL) and the class revamps into what is essentially wow 2.0 weren't changes I liked. The old world revamp was OK, but it's play once content and it didn't add much to the game. I still consider it the worst expansion, although SL is right there with it.

you have to be trolling...just omnitron alone shits all over 98% of wraths difficulty,i mean seriously dude?trolling is banable,staph


also yeah,cata had issues,some very big issues,but i think after they got solved it was fairly ok

[SinR]

Subjective Opinion is Subjective

[God Save The King]

My general experience with Cata 'haters' is that it's clear they did not play Cataclysm when it was live, as so many complaints are about systems/additions from MoP and beyond.

[RoKPaNda]

The problem with Cata is simpler than that. Cata alienated the casuals at the start with the way dungeons were set up, and patches didn't offer them any content. This shouldn't be a problem with Classic because there are very few casuals in Classic to start with. LFR was introduced because of how few people were raiding, but Classic is different in that seemingly most people are raiding anyway. So they could do Cata without LFR and it would be fine. Though LFR was always more of an imagined problem than a real one.

[Relapses]

i too liked cataclysm, but that's due to being part of the 0.1% crowd and could experience everything the game had to offer at any point in time i felt like it, which for a lot of people wasn't something even remotely close to being possible, which is what made it an objectively bad expansion, whether people enjoyed it, liked it, that was irrelevant, at the time it was a colossal failure of an expansion.

An opinion about an expansion cannot be "objectively" anything.

[Sting]

ok but who asked

[Myradin]

The problem is that heroics weren't puggable. Running with guildies was an fun experience, but early Cata heroics with randos were a pain. It pretty much took 1 bad player to cause the group to descend into drama and accusations.

Honestly though I didn't like the dungeons aesthetically. A lot felt kind of off and full of the same cackling and babling cultists. This sorta continued into the raids. Didn't like Bastion of Twilight. Blackwing Descent was okay but its layout felt dull.

Firelands was bore. The fights were okay but the places was very visually uninteresting. Everything is orange and black, every enemy talks about how they're mad and on fire.

Troll dungeons were random rehash. They were actually kind of fun tbh.

Not going to touch on DS and its dungeons as everyone talks about those.

I will say I did enjoy class design in this expac. Both Cata and Mop felt rather fresh and creative. No longer constrained by having to produce so many options for the talent trees.

[Khaza-R]

Virtually all of this is just opinion. And not even a good or well formulated one. Whenever you have to defend something by telling people you disagree with that they didn't experience the "real XYZ" you're already starting on shaky ground.

I mean I fondly remember Cata PvP, but TB is being considered "fun" is certainly something I've seen very, very few people ever say.

[Zolaris192]

okay let's pretend cata was not a huge mistake and we get cata classic, what next? panda classic? wod classic? shadowlands classic?

[rogoth]

An opinion about an expansion cannot be "objectively" anything.

it's not an opinion though, it's a fact, through poor design decisions the game lost subscribers, it lost money, it was disliked by the majority of the playerbase at the time and is still disliked to this day, those are objective facts, which when you add up all the issues the expansion had, made it a commercial failure relative to what came before, and objectively a bad expansion, how is that so hard for you to grasp?, you or me liking it is irrelevant to the conversation here.