Cataclysm or Mists of Pandaria?

[Aruhen]

If I could pick just one tier then Tier 11 > all of MoP imo. Overall Mop beats out Cata for me. Dungeons in Cata we're some of the best out there till they introduced the 4.3 dungeons which I found boring cause of gimmicky crap. God I hate gimmicky crap.

[Haywire5714]

People can bash cataclysm as much as they want but 5 mans we're definitely a lot better than mops 5 mans, even though za, zg we're rehashes, HC's were actually fun to do and made sense as a valid way to work towards character progression. Gearing in mop for new characters or alts is just messy, a time where I found too many alternatives seems to feel a bad thing.

Having said that, mop raiding content was definitely better than cataclysm's.

Oh well, just my opinion.

That's the majorities opinion; nobody denies that the 5 mans were better in Cata. But I also think that people forget how horrible it was to do dungeons in Cata with an LFD group which was what people did a lot of the time. TBC had a good dungeon model for players who wanted a challenge, but it alienated the players who didn't have a lot of free time to play WoW.

Blizzards solution was heroic scenarios, the difficulty of which consists of not standing in fire; however the dps/healing/agro requirement is non-existant which removes from the difficulty and the enjoyable aspect that was present in the Cata and TBC heroics.

Blizzard stated that they want scenarios to be doable with a flexible comp. With this limitation in place it is impossible to make them anything like what the Cata and TBC heroics were in terms of difficulty.

What does Blizzard need to do to fix this? They should probably just split challenge modes into 2 options:
- The 1st option does the bronze, silver and gold thing with transmog as a reward
- The 2nd option rewards better loot than the regular heroics, along with a lot of VP at the end, a chance at a mount and requires a premade (perhaps some dungeon boss achievements?). The difficulty will remain the same as the traditional challenge mode.

This way they can keep the regular heroics for people who want to que up, they can keep the timed version of Challenge modes for the people who enjoy it, and they can provide dungeon content for people who want an epic experience with a pug or guildies. This wouldn't even take a lot of work to implement since they wouldn't be adding any new content.

[Nitros14]

Dragon Soul is the worst raid ever released so Mists of Pandaria wins automatically, Molten Core might be worse if it was released at the same time but they didn't know what they were doing when they released it. No excuse for Dragon Soul.

I loved Throne of the Four Winds and Blackwing Descent though.

[Mormolyce]

Speaking of which, I never understood why people liked Firelands, it had like two interesting encounters (Rhyolith in concept which translated into horror in practice, and Ragnaros in both concept and practice), while the scenary was really dull (barely any details added to the map, same red ground texture everywhere aside from ragnaros' citadel, no feeling of infinite fire plane like you'd expect of Firelands, instead it felt like raiding on some kind of small Nagrand floating island.).

I feel this way a bit myself, although I did always like flying on Alysrazor (but mostly I got stuck on ground duty QQ).

- - - Updated - - -

If I could pick just one tier then Tier 11 > all of MoP imo. Overall Mop beats out Cata for me. Dungeons in Cata we're some of the best out there till they introduced the 4.3 dungeons which I found boring cause of gimmicky crap. God I hate gimmicky crap.

I actually liked the HoTs after the agony of ZA/ZG (which were brilliant when they launched but after running them a hundred times... /wrists).

[igame]

It's like being asked if you like syphilis or gonorrhoea more.

[Deleted]

MoP encounters are better, but I liked the atmosphere in the Cataclysm raids better (specifically BWD and Firelands; kindly forget Dragon Soul existed when comparing the two).

But as a healer, Cataclysm raiding was more fun. MoP healing overall feels closer to WotLK than to Cataclysm. Tiny health pools with people bouncing between 20% and 80% every second, kept alive mostly by smart AoE heals. The last phase on Garrosh illustrates this all too well. Most of the time, playing a healer in SoO feels more like you're being in a HPS race against the boss than like you're actually healing people. Raid members drop dead in a global cooldown and the only thing you can do about it is to spam even more smart AoE heals.

So far, TBC and Cataclysm have been the fun expansions to heal in. vanilla and early MoP were okay, while current MoP and WotLK are by far the worst.

I agree with you.
Healing mechanics were very good during Cata. But to be honest this is the most positive thing that comes to mind about Cata compared to MoP.
I guess I did like some 5 mans in cata. Them being hard/harder taught people to not despise wipes this much.

About Firelands. Can the overall love for the raid (7 bosses for 7 months remember?) be because of the introduction of LFR in the next tier? Firelands was the last raid, where not everyone could complete with the click of a queue button. Being a raider meant something during that time. I think I miss that a bit. Nostalgia and perceived epicness away, there wasn't put much effort into FL.

I didn't hate T14 either as many people seem to do. It felt great progressing through it for the first time (normal), although I must admit HC progression was a pain with the structure of the raid.

[Mibzo]

What I really like in MoP raids is the entire design of the raids, I really like the places.

[Vargur]

T12 and T15.

[Temp name]

MoP easily. Much, much, much more enjoyable to raid, many more enjoyable bosses and most importantly, I got to actually raid.

[Molestron]

Cataclysm was epic shit. Not sure how anything else will sink to such depths as cata.

[Glorious Leader]

In so far as raids are concerned Mists but all they did this expansion was make raids (and they still turned out fucking shit) so i'm not surprised the quality is better. Everything else cataclysm was VASTLY superior.

[Arbs]

MoP for sure, the best part of Cata was Herioc Rag thats all.

[Chickat]

MoP, certainly - that being said, outside of a few particular encounters (Zor'lok, Dark Animus, Blackfuse) I still have fancier memories of T11.

Speaking of which, I never understood why people liked Firelands, it had like two interesting encounters (Rhyolith in concept which translated into horror in practice, and Ragnaros in both concept and practice), while the scenary was really dull (barely any details added to the map, same red ground texture everywhere aside from ragnaros' citadel, no feeling of infinite fire plane like you'd expect of Firelands, instead it felt like raiding on some kind of small Nagrand floating island.).

I thought Firelands was gorgeous. That and The molten front are 2 of my favorite places ever to just stare at.

[Serenais]

MoP so far didn't have any really bad raid, which can't be said about Cataclysm - Dragon Soul was just not the way to go. Cataclysm did have Firelands, which was almost on the other end of the raid quality spectrum, and I quite enjoyed Bastion of Twilight, but... Dragon Soul, especially due to being the last raid of the expansion (and thus the one we were stuck with for the longest time) simply dragged it all down. As for MoP, the opening raids were OK-ish, though nothing really outstanding. Throne of Thunder was better than those (though, I really really really could do without a troll tier for about an expansion by now, thank you very much), and I am really enjoying Siege of Orgrimmar, so... MoP, wins, didn't trip the whole race, though it may not have had as promising a start as Cataclysm.

[Toiran]

MoP has had some of the best raiding of all, FAR better than Cata, Firelands looked pretty but was basically a giant check out our new particle effects, also we got world bosses back in MoP.

I hold MoP as the best expansion, by a fair bit overall for all areas, raids, story, graphics and art, music, questing (minus pvp, I don't pvp anywhere near enough to have an opinion),

SoO and Garrosh has been an excellent final tier to rival Sunwell. (I've got such a soft spot for Sunwell I don't think I can allow anything to beat it, even if it actually does).

[Skroe]

MoP has been the best 3 tiers of raiding WoW has ever had.

There have been better individual tiers and amazing fights for sure (Heroic Rag 25). Sunwell will always be near and dear to me. Ulduar too. But in terms of an entire expac? Blizzard really out did themselves on the basis of the expansion. MoP has been the most consistently fun and challenging raiding I've ever played.

[nekobaka]

I dont really see the two comparable largely due to Cata being anemic in content overall and seeing a decline in content quality that the developers tried to fix in MoP. I liked T11 and T12 with DS just being a PoS. MoP got more development resources and focus on raiding to try and equal or top WotLK raids and are showing the pressure to continue to improve players responses from T14. Now a WotLK vs MoP raid comparison would be far more comparable given that WotLK is the metric of which MoP is being held up to.

[iDrunkenheal]

I dont really see the two comparable largely due to Cata being anemic in content overall and seeing a decline in content quality that the developers tried to fix in MoP. I liked T11 and T12 with DS just being a PoS. MoP got more development resources and focus on raiding to try and equal or top WotLK raids and are showing the pressure to continue to improve players responses from T14. Now a WotLK vs MoP raid comparison would be far more comparable given that WotLK is the metric of which MoP is being held up to.

That would be difficult for me. Wrath is when I started playing the game. I was full of wonder and exploring everything. Now I just raid. As far as raiding goes MoP hands down is the best expac especially with flex mode added.

[Feindy]

mop, but only soo makes mop better. the rest of mop sucks though and i dont mean raids only

[judgementofantonidas]

cataclsym.

it at least attempted to raise the bar above what wrath babies had become accustomed to.