Page 3 of 16 FirstFirst
1
2
3
4
5
13
... LastLast
  1. #41
    The Unstoppable Force
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Where Thrall and the Horde needs me to be
    Posts
    23,561
    Quote Originally Posted by Cybran View Post
    It was rushed and unfinished when it came out. They were afraid of the competition that looked serious at the time (SWToR). Blizzard always launch their games and patches at the same time as their competitors which causes their releases to be unfinished and sub par.

    I don't have a specific quote, because Blizzard would never publicly admit it. However the implementation of LFR is the prime suspect for the low number of bosses in FL and DS.
    No, it's *your* prime suspect. Nothing here but theories and assumptions.

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  2. #42
    Give it another year for the nostalgia brigade to catch up.

    Then it will be fine...

  3. #43
    Deleted
    Why not hate it? Everything was uninspired and re-hashed.

  4. #44
    Most of the bashing I've seen are from a few reasons:

    1) Redesigning the old world, while it had to happen, took away from the endgame. Since the majority of players that frequent WoW forums are endgame PVPers/raiders, this content was lost on them and seen as a waste of time.

    2) People had gotten complacent with the ease of WOTLK heroics, and Cata then turned the dial on difficulty up. Coupled with LFG, this made heroics early into the expansion a real pain in the ass as they were pretty unforgiving in regards to mistakes. 4.1 brought in even harder dungeons that were also rehashes (although ZG was totally new in the same zone, which was great. ZA was just lazy though since it was identical to the old raid with the name of the last boss changed).

    3) Related to #2, the initial difficulty of T11 was a big turn off for lots of guilds that could do ICC on normal at the least without much difficulty (due to the buff). T11 was a huge wall for these guilds as even the entry level bosses like Magmaw, Halfus and Omnotron were pretty tough at launch. I had quite a few friends whose guilds just imploded due to not being able to make a dent in T11. Ironically I think they didn't learn from that, as T14 was pretty rough too at launch and some guilds again broke up due to just bashing their head against what should have been a very easy fight in Stone Guard. I still think that MSV should have been tuned a lot easier than it was (IMO it should have been only slightly harder than the heroics were) simply due to being the entry-level raid and there being two other raids that could have been more difficult for the challenge, but giving even the most average of guilds something easy to farm each week while working on the harder bosses. T15 seems to be the same way, as the "wall" bosses are too early leaving guilds to bash their heads feeling they're accomplishing nothing, but this isn't quite the thread to vent about that.

    4) Dragon Soul wasn't a large raid, when people had been spoiled with Ulduar and ICC (and to a lesser extend Naxx 2.0) in Wrath. Also other than the Maelstrom and the two maws (and technically Spine of Deathwing), it was a zone that we had all seen before, and a barren/bland/uninspiring zone at that.

    5) Dragon Soul was out for a year (or more?) and got insanely boring the umpteenth time you were doing it.

    6) LFR came out and all the hate associated with that, which I won't go into as there are plenty of LFR threads.

  5. #45
    The Unstoppable Force
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Where Thrall and the Horde needs me to be
    Posts
    23,561
    Quote Originally Posted by Sarithus View Post
    Why not hate it? Everything was uninspired and re-hashed.
    While I'm in no way defending Cataclysm - that is just braindead nonsene and you know it.

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  6. #46
    Quote Originally Posted by Benggaul View Post
    *shrug* I rather liked Cataclysm--particularly because of the care they took evolving the older zones--though it wasn't my favorite expansion. If that puts me in the minority, so be it. I'm also really enjoying MoP currently, if that makes any difference. Cataclysm got a bad reputation from a vocal few and there are always scores of people who will jump on a bandwagon rather than trouble themselves with forming their own opinion.

    It wasn't a bad expansion (and LFR didn't ruin raiding, "the community" or WoW despite what those same vocal few will parrot ceaselessly), though I would say it lacked enough endgame content for some people because of the time they spent revamping older, low-level content.
    I think the rehash of the old content is too easily dismissed by players but, you can't really blame people. An expansion should mean the addition of content, otherwise it's less expansion and more of a "correction". The did in fact fix the leveling process 1-60, it became much more fun, but again, it was all old content ... not an expansion in the sense everyone expects.

    I didn't care for the whole 10s/25s all dropping the same gear but neither do I believe it was a terrible idea. It made running a 25 man raid guild significantly harder, and created a situation where people picked sides and created new levels of elitism, or rather wannabe elitism. I personally think the biggest hit was to the sense of team, that had existed previously. More and more people seemed less willing to wait for others to gear or assimilate the content, the easy answer was always "let's just do it in tens".

    The backlash and instant nerf to the return of actual "heroic" heroics was a let down. It wasn't that I liked the length of the dungeons, it was just nice to have to use all the abilities again. I do blame the community more for crying about it than I do Blizz for giving the masses what they seemed to want. I think challenge modes in MOP was a brilliant solution.

    Dragon Soul was bad because it was a terribly dull raid. After the Ragnaros encounter it also felt like a huge letdown. The mechanics of the final two fights were such that with the gear inflation it was pure faceroll, particularly with how quickly the nerfs were implemented.

    For me, the old content rehash was Cata's greatest contribution to the game. LFR for all the criticism it gets helped bring back many of our raiders who couldn't commit to regular raids and had retired. Many got the itch to see the fights at normal and heroic levels and thanks to LFR they were moderately well geared and able to give us a healthy stable of back ups.

    Because of how awful DS was, I can understand a lot of the criticism Cata gets.
    Last edited by Haloswin; 2013-04-30 at 11:53 AM. Reason: typo

  7. #47
    Deleted
    Little content, much scrapped content, short and overall pretty bad raids, lasted too long, they fucked up the PvP, dumbed down most of the classes and so on. I think most people have good reasons to bash cata.

  8. #48
    The Unstoppable Force
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Where Thrall and the Horde needs me to be
    Posts
    23,561
    Quote Originally Posted by Arothand View Post
    Most of the bashing I've seen are from a few reasons:

    1) Redesigning the old world, while it had to happen, took away from the endgame. Since the majority of players that frequent WoW forums are endgame PVPers/raiders, this content was lost on them and seen as a waste of time.

    2) People had gotten complacent with the ease of WOTLK heroics, and Cata then turned the dial on difficulty up. Coupled with LFG, this made heroics early into the expansion a real pain in the ass as they were pretty unforgiving in regards to mistakes. 4.1 brought in even harder dungeons that were also rehashes (although ZG was totally new in the same zone, which was great. ZA was just lazy though since it was identical to the old raid with the name of the last boss changed).

    3) Related to #2, the initial difficulty of T11 was a big turn off for lots of guilds that could do ICC on normal at the least without much difficulty (due to the buff). T11 was a huge wall for these guilds as even the entry level bosses like Magmaw, Halfus and Omnotron were pretty tough at launch. I had quite a few friends whose guilds just imploded due to not being able to make a dent in T11. Ironically I think they didn't learn from that, as T14 was pretty rough too at launch and some guilds again broke up due to just bashing their head against what should have been a very easy fight in Stone Guard. I still think that MSV should have been tuned a lot easier than it was (IMO it should have been only slightly harder than the heroics were) simply due to being the entry-level raid and there being two other raids that could have been more difficult for the challenge, but giving even the most average of guilds something easy to farm each week while working on the harder bosses. T15 seems to be the same way, as the "wall" bosses are too early leaving guilds to bash their heads feeling they're accomplishing nothing, but this isn't quite the thread to vent about that.

    4) Dragon Soul wasn't a large raid, when people had been spoiled with Ulduar and ICC (and to a lesser extend Naxx 2.0) in Wrath. Also other than the Maelstrom and the two maws (and technically Spine of Deathwing), it was a zone that we had all seen before, and a barren/bland/uninspiring zone at that.

    5) Dragon Soul was out for a year (or more?) and got insanely boring the umpteenth time you were doing it.

    6) LFR came out and all the hate associated with that, which I won't go into as there are plenty of LFR threads.
    8 months :P

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  9. #49
    The Insane Aeula's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Nearby, preventing you from fast traveling.
    Posts
    17,415
    Personally prefer cata to mop... But cata could have been so much better if they stuck to the theme of 4.0 instead of veering off to trolls and such :S

  10. #50
    Elemental Lord
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
    Posts
    8,868
    Quote Originally Posted by Maniac2 View Post
    Every poll and thread here where expansions are compared, Cata gets worst opinions or close to it.

    Im really interested why ppl didnt like Cata.

    For me, Cata wasnt best expansion (wotlk and tbc are), but still, I cant say it was bad. It had great 5-man heroics (loved DM prenerf), we got old world flying, rewamp of old world zones.
    Only bad thing were raids, DS in particular, maybe cos it lasted too long.

    What do you think?
    They mishandled the revamp - they needed to add flight, they need to streamline the quest. They went for a reboot, did little to update the graphics (increasingly needed to attract players), and overall the result was a patchy mishmash where some elements worked and many didn't.
    The dungeons weren't really fun - not too difficult to be impossible, but with lots of trash and with huge health pools they mainly dragged.
    The raids were OK but DS was lacklustre. I know some who love it though.
    The zones were spread out, with no sense of scale or connectivity, even amongst the bad guys.
    Deathwing was wasted. Completely and totally wasted. We could have had HIM as Malkorok persuading Garrosh to launch his war.
    Thrall was vastly over exposed as a character. Others badly written or portrayed.
    Too many pop-culture storylines (Uldum, Westfall), too much wasted (Tol'vir), too many gimmicks (Vash'jir) and wasted storylines (Koltira - you DON'T stop a story in mid action)
    Next to nothing to do outside raiding. It got boring.

    Its very easy to list where things went wrong.

    EJL

  11. #51
    Herald of the Titans Vintersol's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Location
    Germoney
    Posts
    2,817
    Cataclysm was good at start. Hard heroics, great T11 Content in general. After several nerfs and the small raids (firelands was still good and the new Ragnaros was by far the best raidencounter in the whole expansion), the general expansion felt like a lackluster.

  12. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by Venziir View Post
    8 months :P
    Patch 4.3.0, "Hour of Twilight", went live on November 29, 2011

    Mists of Pandaria was released on Tuesday, 25th September, 2012.

    That makes 11 months.

  13. #53
    Quote Originally Posted by Maniac2 View Post
    Every poll and thread here where expansions are compared, Cata gets worst opinions or close to it.

    Im really interested why ppl didnt like Cata.

    For me, Cata wasnt best expansion (wotlk and tbc are), but still, I cant say it was bad. It had great 5-man heroics (loved DM prenerf), we got old world flying, rewamp of old world zones.
    Only bad thing were raids, DS in particular, maybe cos it lasted too long.

    What do you think?
    Because different people have different opinions.

    For example: I dislike old-world flying. Immensely. If ever there was a way for the developers to ruin immersion in the game... Something that they recognised themselves. But now are in such a bad place to reverse the damage they caused to the game and their efforts to make it more engaging. Thus the vocal disatisfaction about not being able to fly in Pandaria until level 90, or Isle of Thunder.

    I also disliked the revamp that they did. They did give questing more engaging stories but they took it to the extreme, making quests feel more like taking a ride around the world of the game, rather than exploring and adventuring in it. And the result was even more quests for "lazy" players, coupled with an embarassing utilisation of the zones, where only a small part of them was used for the new quests, so that they could be done quickly and easily, leaving most of the zones just empty.

    Also, most people's impression of the expansion was what they can remember towards its end, and that was the most underwhelming raiding tier in the history of the game. A ridiculously easy raiding dungeons, accompanied by three group dungeons that were made as if to compete with the raid one for ridiculousness. Very few bosses for such a long time that we only Dragon Soul to play in, and not even a faction to grind reputation with at least.

    The best part of Cataclysm was the first two tiers of raiding and the group dungeo0ns it came with. They re-introduced challenge to the game, but even those were scrapped for the piss-easy tier 13 content.

    So, while I am not bashing on Cataclysm, I can certainly say it was the lesser of the expansions up to now.

  14. #54
    The Unstoppable Force
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Where Thrall and the Horde needs me to be
    Posts
    23,561
    Quote Originally Posted by Cybran View Post
    Patch 4.3.0, "Hour of Twilight", went live on November 29, 2011

    Mists of Pandaria was released on Tuesday, 25th September, 2012.

    That makes 11 months.
    Still less than a year.

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  15. #55
    Quote Originally Posted by Venziir View Post
    Still less than a year.
    Felt like 3 though.

  16. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by Briga View Post
    its because of the following combination.

    Recycled content and few new bosses. (Oh great Onyxia is back, AGAIN, with Nefarian and Ragnaros... didn't I loot your head?)

    cut endgame content due to world revamp taking too long. (war of ancients, abyssal maw)

    harder difficulty raids and dungeons with one shot mechanics, because everbody loves a 2 hour long Stonecore run.

    Awful storyline.

    Incompetent overpowered villain who has the power to destroy the world with one /cast but instead just goes missing. (and has so many friends he seems to be socialwing)

    Indiana Jones for an ENTIRE zone!

    On come on! Indiana Jones was the only good thing about Cataclysm!!

    I unsubscribed very early but I did Firelands recently and the mechanics are horrendous. Turn a boss by attacking his leg? Fighting on a spider web? It was like some grade-schooler designed it on a day he stayed home from school sick.

    Most of these have been mentioned but the big ones are.

    Shared lockout - destroyed the social aspect of WoW.

    LFR - destroyed the social aspect of WoW

    Rehashed content - if they want to update content thats great, but it has to be in addition to new content....not instead of new content

    Terrible DPS balance - still a big problem, the game hasn't been balanced since Wrath from a PvE perspective


    While a lack of content is unforgivable for a game that makes so much money, a lot of veterans had already bailed long before Firelands. MoP seems like a good expansion but my formerly high pop server is still a ghost town these days and I don't see that changing.

  17. #57
    Quote Originally Posted by Haloswin View Post
    The did in fact fix the leveling process 1-60, it became much more fun, but again, it was all old content ... not an expansion in the sense everyone expects.
    Except that it wasn't old content after they revamped it. Just lower-level content. They completely changed the storylines, quests, terrain and feel of the bulk of the old zones. It was definitely new content after they were finished with it. The only problem with it was that it was way underappreciated because a lot of people were just focused on the high-level rather than the low. As someone who enjoys rolling the odd alt now and again just for a change of pace, I thought they did a spectacular job, particularly with how well the story for each zone flowed as opposed to several questing hubs per zone that had nothing to do with one another. It's just content that not a lot of people saw because they weren't interested in anything that didn't reward them with better gear.

  18. #58
    Warchief Szemere's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    Gnomeregan
    Posts
    2,193
    Firelands was small and lasted for quite a while, and the massive gap in skill and gear required between the first 6 bosses and the last boss on Heroic, was kinda silly.
    The expansion itself was a massive World of Portalcraft one: nothing felt connected, everything had loadscreens or queues.

    Dragon Soul's tier was shitty in the sense that you had to take a portal or flightpath to EVERY bossfight, further contributing to World of Portalcraft. The entire instance was stuck in a square cut in a wall of the caverns of time, with some art assets thrown in that hole with some instance portals. This is by far not as nice as Black Temple, Sunwell's isle, Icecrown Citadel, or Ulduar.
    The inside of the instance was 99% rehash: Wyrmrest temple. Maws that were used in Twilight Highlands. Eye of Eternity. More Wyrmrest temple. Gunship. Only Spine and Madness were somewhat new in environment, but grossly compensated negatively by starting with a loadscreen and a ton of RP, and shitty mechanics. I was warlock, Spine HC. Yeah. Final fight consisted of peeling off plates of the back of the boss, and scratching loose his nails and chin so that the NPCs could do the real work. Oh, and Thrall turned from a badass warchief into a massive sissy, the whole Aggra thing as well as the Dragon Soul beamshooting thing was just cringeworthy.

    The DS loot system was the worst ever: For the first time ever only dropping 1 normal item from tokenbosses, and no coins or whatever to compensate. BiS trinkets stuck behind an RNG wall, only 6 bosses had a miniscule chance of dropping one of these, as well as the only item for some classes stuck on those bosses that only drop 1 out of their 12 normal items (IE: tanking shield, took us 9 months). I personally ran all bosses in DS from release to Cataclysm lauch: some items just only dropped once or never on 10man.

    The DS nerf system was the worst ever: Blindly after 2-3 months, EVERY MONTH WITHOUT FAIL, 5% nerf. As someone who finished Madness HC with 15% nerf, we just did not get a chance to properly progress on some fights. You looked forward to Ultraxion's DPS check? Let's get 5% nerf as soon as you get there. Not soaking on gunship consistent enough, truly having to progress? 10% nerf in your face, and it doesn't hurt anymore. Trying to min-max on Spine? Let's throw a 15% nerf in your face so you can just do it without having to try. From 20% and onwards: Abilities that should oneshot you were survivable, making farming DS a complete borefest. These nerfs shouldn't have affected Heroic, period. The Spine Tendons HP nerf was a good one, flat nerfs had to be replaced with targeted nerfs.


    TLDR: 90% that was bad was DS, and the fact that DS covered 55% of the duration of the expansion, made the overall expansion bad too, especially because the previous 45% wasn't that good that we could forgive it that easily.
    Last edited by Szemere; 2013-04-30 at 12:26 PM.
    Ex-GM and Raidleader of the MoX Purple Kittens Raidteam on Twisting Nether (formerly Grim Batol), RIP, Winter 2010 - Spring 2013.
    Armory. WoWProgress. Might start streaming Soon(tm) http://twitch.tv/szem/

  19. #59
    At first when I seen the Cataclysm reveal trailer I thought it would have been the best Expansion ever. The reason why Cata lowed for me is because of the cut content, rushed and lack level 85 content(I understand the 1-60 and I wouldn't say lack since we got Molten front, Tol Barad, LFR and what not.) But if I had to rate Cata I would rate it 7 out of 10 because of the New Graphics, Races and the Redone 1-60. In my opinion it wasn't the worst expansion in my opinion, just rushed and cut content.

  20. #60
    Deleted
    Cataclysm was easily the worst X-pac for numerous reasons, and it was dissapointing since it had been heavily hyped after a lot of people had become jaded with WoW in the later stages of WOLK.

    By biggest problem with Cataclysm was the game continuing the trend of making things increasingly easy. Levelling became super fast, dungeons were nerfed into complete facerolls, rushing people through tiers.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •