#boycottchina
5.1 was rehashed ZA/ZG instead of Firelands, if you were actually a raider of any sort this patch was useless. Gear from normal raids was 359, Heroics 372, and these dungeons 353.
Uldum being a story revolving around Indiana Jones.
Abyssal Maw Raid was scrapped
Firelands and Dragon Soul were pretty short raid Tiers, and in generally considered pretty crap I hear (Apart from Ragnaros and possibly someone else in there)
Attempted repeat of a year of ICC with DS, and without a Hailon.
Ret Paladins. Dear God why did I persist through 4.0 - 4.2?
Also the difficult dungeons and heroics which existed during Cataclysm Beta were nerfed to the ground. When live hit they weren't that bad.
Not going to lie, it had a few decent things. Transmog, adding LFR for non raiders and new Battlegrounds were welcome. Also the Revamped 1-60 was pretty good, even if it was just a Horde Campaign with the Alliance rolling over. Only problem is a lot of the shipped content and some of the base content seemed to suffer.
WotLK had the minor screw up that was 3.2. Whilst it was loathed, it had both a raid and a dungeon so something for everyone. Also 3.3 gave us some fantastic heroics. 3.1 was Ulduar. For the Game's Anniversary we got a revamped Raid. Main things I remember of dislike about Wrath was the new Battlegrounds.
But my favorite thing about Wrath? Mammoth trains in Dalaran xD
Dristereau - Axxolentus - Infernus - Sequentia - Nulo - Desterrar
Silvermoon - Shadowsong/Aszune - Tarren-Mill/Dentarg (SL Mage Tower: 29/36)
I think u will find a very large amount of hardcore players left the game. The evidence of this is that the top guilds are struggling to recruit, Paragon dropping to 10man is a massive indication of the lack of top players still playing Wow.
It wasnt just the content why they left, they didnt like how endgame raiding had totally changed.
By putting the focus on 10man raiding and encouraging smaller groups, smaller guilds etc Blizzard managed to lose alot of the top players who were 25man raiders. The 25man raiders were once seen as the top guilds on every realm, they were the prestige of each realm, but when 10man got elevated it managed to break this structure at the same time. The consequently helped to break down every realms community also. New guilds popping up and closing down daily effected every realms community.
I will say the only saving grace for the expansion was the introduction of Transmog, the 4.3 heroic dungeons, and the introduction of LFR. It still wasn't enough to keep people for hating the expansion overall, but it helped soften the blow. I found more joy in doing old content and finding old armor sets on my main with transmog in mind then I did actually playing dragonsoul, which itself was a god awful final raid (except the deathwing encounter)
#boycottchina
Cataclysm caused the decline.
I don't always hunt things, But when I do, It's because they're things & I'm a Bear.
My main issues with Cataclysm:
-Terrible villain. Deathwing was the definition of a Saturday-morning cartoon villain. At least the accusations of that against Arthas in Wrath were explained eventually, Deathwing's weren't.
-Terrible end raid. Dragon Soul was fairly unoriginal, and badly designed, especially for an end-game raid. It also lasted for WAY too long an the percentage of guilds who were able to fully clear heroic 8/8 was extremely high.
-Weak Alliance storyline. Don't think I need to explain this one.
-Disconnected 80-85 zones. The only connection between these zones was Deathwing in some form. That's literally it.
-Blandly designed raid environments. Not talking about the fights themselves, but I found BWD, DS, and even parts of FL very poorly and blandly designed.
-5.1 introduced 2 dungeons that we had already seen as raids, and one was completely rehashed.
-Horrid ending. I still say that the end of Dragon Soul was one of the worst endings I've seen in a video game.
-Too much Thrall. I like Thrall, I think he's a good character. But in Cata he was just way too involved everywhere (best example: 4.2 Thrall questline)
-Central hub and portals. Everyone camped out in SW/Org 24/7 and just used the portals to get everywhere.
-Disconnected storylines everywhere. Leveling zones ended in cliffhangers, main characters suddenly disappear, 80-85 zones disconnected.
-Uldum was a giant Indiana Jones reference.
-Abyssal Maw raid, War of the Ancients raid, Path of the Titans, all scrapped.
-Old world revamped, a ton of old content completely removed.
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PEPE SILVA, PEPE SILVA
Well for me it was the revamped world that favored Horde story lines over Alliance. I don't care that Alliance lost but how it was presented. The lack of phasing to show even the smallest Alliance victory. Alliance constantly getting shafted in seeing story lines or the end of story lines. To top it all off they bring back Malfurian, which is supposed to be the most powerful mortal, make him work with Horde even though he shouldn't and make him take a back seat to over exposed green Jesus.
I think Cataclysm was amazing for the leveling aspect of the game. Old world content was horribly out of date, and they'd learned a lot of ways to make it more entertaining since then. I also enjoyed how they fixed healing (spamming flash heal all day wasn't fun for me). However, I remember a lot of people felt like the barrier for entry on heroics was too high.
They'd probably have been better off breaking up heroics into a couple categories at release to prevent fresh 85s from getting heroics like Grim Batol. Heroic Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines were really easy for most groups, but when you got Grim Batol you could be sure there would be at least a couple people taking the deserter buff right away (luckily I was a tank/healer usually, so the wait wasn't long to get replacements).
Overall, I think they wanted to offer more challenge outside of raiding, but instead of doing something like Challenge Dungeons they tried putting it in the normal progression path and it upset some players.
I dont care how many times thye redo something, old content is old. I had no fun at all in cata only good thing was that you could level 80-85 in like 8 hours tops. Which was its only saving grace over MOP which takes for fucking ever.
The 10/25 normalization also pretty much destroyed pugging as we knew it. The difficulty in getting a successful pug together shot through the roof, and it became almost entirely the playfield of dedicated raiders only, whereas in WOTLK, it was fairly easy for a non-raider who wanted to just try something out, to get into a pug if they at least had the gear and had shit set up right.
Frankly, I'm super confused as to if Blizzard even really knew what the hell it even wanted to do with Cata, and who the hell were they listening to :x
God, I so agree about that terrible ending, if you mean the actual video ending. It was like... That's it? It's basically this, but in WoW video form: http://blogs.ocweekly.com/heardmenta...usters_end.png
Gotta say Cataclysm had good moments and bad moments, like any other expansion. But when the moments were bad, then damn, rock bottom. Yep, I'm talking about DS.
The pros of Cataclysm? Well, revamping the entire Azeroth was AWESOME. This change was seriously needed, and when Blizzard decided to finally do it, they nailed it. I can feel safe by saying my top 3 "best quests in WoW" are from revamped Azeroth. Top 3 best questlines as well. I also really loved the starting set of dungeons (being difficult and so on), first two tiers of raiding (Ragnaros is one of the coolest fights ever) and two quite nice BGs.
DS is the sole reason this expansion is considered a failure. Okay, patch 5.1 wasn't fun, but the troll instances were "meh", not below that. Same about 4.3 dungeons - it's hard to REALLY hate them, they were just boring and became more and more when it was the only good source of valors. I also consider transmog a bad idea, even tho I'm one of the biggest user of that - but I still prefered times when you could measure somebodys awesomeness just by one glance. DS was the rock bottom of raiding, and such a scar on a not-so-bad expansion, that it shadows the whole thing.
DS worst raid ever and lot of weeks to farm it, fireland and ragnaros would had been a much better final boss/raid of the expansion
Firelands was an awful raid apart from a few fights
DS was awful from start to finish (that deathwing fight..really??)
Warlocks became fucking annoying to play
Here are my issues with cataclysm...
Revamped old world:
The revamps of the old world in Cataclysm did nothing for end game, and the speed at which people leveled in dungeons meant that most people took the easiest route to level and just leveled in LFD dungeons. gg.
Leveling :
Leveling from 80-85 wasn't as good as WoTLK questing. Vashj was, from all accounts underwhelming and awkward. Hyjal was ok but pretty forgetfull. Deepholm was average. The last two zones uldum & twilight highlands were decent.
Raiding :
The first tier of end game was strong, lots of bosses, a decent difficulty level. Firelands was from all intents and purposes alright with a major cockblock for most guilds on Rag. Dragon Soul is what most people remember because it was out for so long and the constant nerfs just made it bad. Also it felt very anti climactic. Alot of people hated killing deathwings fingernails instead of actually fighting him 1 on 1.
LFR :
The addition of LFR for alts extended dragon souls playability however it was a flawed system on introduction and because of DS's time out it got pretty stale pretty quickly.
PVP :
Overall in cataclysm the PvP was generally, a mess, with alot of balancing issues.
I personally deem cataclysm the worst expansion the game has had, and MOP has done alot to fix the issues of cataclysm.
Hi
Cataclysm imo simply killed the social aspect of the game.
The merger of the lockouts leading to 10 mans being the format of choice, if you didn't finish the raid in 25 that week well drop to 10 man and finish it with the elite few.
And at some point those elite few just say goodbye and make their own guild.
No karazhan or naxx 2.0 raid at the beginning to give new players a proper introduction to raiding.
very small raids where you do not have a proper excalation ladder of difficulty, killing a lot of casual guilds.
In the end if no casual or pugging guilds exist you end up with an extreme gap between the raiding guilds and the LFR crowd with no natural stepping stones in between, making the jump from casual to more serious raiding bigger thus lowering the ability to recruit for semi-hardcore and hardcore guilds.
5.1 dungeons for valor capping...
DS you could get ready for it and "complete it" and being content clear in 2 weeks... and then it streaches out for 11 months.
Deathwing rips the world in half and well then stays away for 1 year probably sipping bacardis on some beach. Blizzard tried to elevate him to be some big baddie but he was never really around giveng you a certain sense of treat. On the other hand Arthas did make several appearances in wrath reminding you that he was still around.
I personally did not like the revamp, even without heirlooms you breeze through the zones and level 50-58 just feel pointless from a strict gear perspective. And yes I am a person who likes getting a new nice sword to make my char stronger but when you know that at 58 you go to outland and get "uber" gear well it just feels like a giant fart.
Only good thing transmogrification, well everybody likes to dress their char in their favorite pixels
I would almost say I like LFR for the convenience to go into a loot pinata instance, but considering what the concequences of LFR I really do not like it as a feature, and somehow I would hope that they would just remove it.
But in the end what I hate about cataclysm is that the changes implemented in cata with 10/25 man shared lockouts and later LFR. Destroyed the need or want to guild together or have some kind of social interaction. And that is for me very important in an mmo. Now a days it is just a glorified single player game and a single player game i can finish in a month, a game that you play together with other people that i can play for months and years.
p.s. off course people complain about the raids, compare how much time you spend levelling a char to how much time you spend in raids. So maybe raids are only 10% of all the things in cataclysm, but if you spend 90-95% of your game time in them well...
p.p.s. if we are not supposed to say how much we dislike cataclysm what then are we supposed to do. Praise cataclysm although we hate a lot of things that where implemented in cata???
Last edited by mmoc30cfcfeceb; 2013-04-30 at 02:29 PM.
People are going to focus on negative and the most recent "new", which was ds. Ds was a horrible way to end the expansion. Most people dont put into consideration the old zones being revamped as part of content when this question is presented to them, and sadly it was probably the best thing implemented in the expansion. And raid finder has to much mixed feelings, generally speaking its either hated or loved.