Why bash Cata?

[Obtuse]

I've played non stop since 2009 excluding DS (took a Diablo break, thank you AP) because it honestly was the worst end raid they've ever come up with. Minus Warmaster; for some reason I always dug that fight. Overall though the Cata content feels like a blip in the grand scheme of things.

And that's not to say that there weren't great points to the expansion, it just doesn't stack up when you compare it to BC, Wrath or MoP.

And I would choose 'pay to play' MoP

[Paladin885]

From launch there were problems. Casuals and people used to pugging Wraths super easy raid content found life difficult in lvl 85 heroics where you had to CC, tank, and heal... or you wiped every single time. Healers could not spam or they OOM'd and druids hated it because they used to pre-cast heals but that would cause aggro issues. Tanks QQ because they couldn't pull entire rooms who 5+ mobs without dying. It was a mess... but I loved it. Got rid of the fails, even if they unsubbed.

Raiding was more team oriented. The days of Gold DKP runs was behind us (*sad panda face*) and that left the general population who used to run ToC or the daily raid bosses without anything to do for most of the expansion.

Dailies were spread out evenly but were tied into questing as you leveled. This basically meant you could start our honored with a faction (or reveared if you were lucky) when you hit lvl 85. If not, just put on the tabard and done. That personally was a love/hate relationship. I loved that I could actually have time to get exalted with the tabard but I hated that it took little to no effort (or a single daily quest).

T11 and T12 were the pinnacles of Cata. Launch and T13 were the downfall. If anything Cata is shaped like a bell curve with the X-axis representing time and the Y-axis representing fun.

[wych]

In a different way, they have scraped WoW down to a very simple form but with things like achievements. There may be 'more', but it's all simpler and boring.

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However you need to justify it to yourself.

I'd disagree about it being simpler.

My rotation involves more spells than ever during raids, I have to look out for more mechanics and I have to do a lot more to my gear before I can use it (luckily this is being removed).

Boring is subjective, back in TBC my rotation literally consisted of hitting a macro over and over and over and over again, that was boring. that was simple.

[Dormie]

I don't have to "justify" it to myself. Given the option of, "Go play vanilla for free." or "Pay to play MoP" it seems fairly clear what the overwhelmingly huge majority choose.

Yea, they chose to quit.

[Lolsteak]

Dragon Soul & ZA/ZG ruined Cata for me, Dragon Soul was one of THE worst raids to date and i've had more than enough trolls to last me a life time.

[Dormie]

I'd disagree about it being simpler.

My rotation involves more spells than ever during raids, I have to look out for more mechanics and I have to do a lot more to my gear before I can use it (luckily this is being removed).

Boring is subjective, back in TBC my rotation literally consisted of hitting a macro over and over and over and over again, that was boring. that was simple.

There's a lot more to this game than rotation and boss fights.

And even so, content for a lot of people is LFR, mechanics don't exactly matter. And I've only been playing Shaman and Warrior lately, but they are definitely no more complex of rotations than they used to be. It's whack-a-mole

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The overwhelmingly huge majority of WoW players quit during MoP?

Really, who is trying to justify things here?

Where'd I say in MoP. I mean since BC. And yes, since Wrath/Cata, people have quit. You can blame part of it on age, but don't act like gameplay changes had nothing to do with it.

[UndrCover]

While I share similar misgivings regarding Firelands and Dragon Soul with other players, I thought tier 11 was the best tier to date. And this is in spite of the initial 10 vs. 25 balance being way off in heroic mode; the fights were just really fun.

[wych]

There's a lot more to this game than rotation and boss fights.

And even so, content for a lot of people is LFR, mechanics don't exactly matter. And I've only been playing Shaman and Warrior lately, but they are definitely no more complex of rotations than they used to be.

Raiding is the ultimate end game of WoW, I think the idea that it's simpler and boring should hold up there if you are going to use it as a point.

You're taking the easiest difficulty of raiding, a mode which is entirely avoidable, and using it to prove your point. If players want challenge the complex challenge is definitely there.

Why is adding a choice for players a bad thing?

The difficulty and complexity is there if you want it, and the easy road is there if you want it.

I find that much better for the players as a whole, and completely disregarding the difficult version to make a point that the game is easy doesn't stand up.

[militaryspartan]

What this illustrates is that the forum posting community is not representative of the wider community. There's a tendency for forum posters to inflate their own accomplishments and disparage others. "X was too easy, I was bored, it sucked" is part of this syndrome.

Granted, and that's part of the reason why I believe that Cata was so horrible. They listen to all the wrong people (but to be fair they can only hear what is being said).

Since very late Wotlk and especially since Cata, Blizzard has had this weird pendulum like development attitude, where they swing from one extreme to the next. And it just hasn't worked out. With BC and Wotlk we had moderate amounts of feedback, stuff we asked for was added, but Blizzard held its' own standards and didn't push too far, just enough that players were having fun.

Now they seem stubborn; defending everyone one of their decisions with a rusty axe......only to cave and overreact. Pandaria's a pretty good example of this, from a crap ton of CC in PvP to grinding out PvE with dailies and 4 difficulties of raiding. I find it very ironic how they constantly said that the split 10/25 man lock outs made players feel like they had to raid. Now I see some raiders scrambling to LFR, Flex, and then Normal/Heroic.

[Korru]

Baine died
King Magni became a statue
Thrall became a Mary Sue and Garrosh took over
The game became annoying
The game lacked content
Content got cancelled or downsized
Recycled Content
The game started to get streamlined
The story sucked
Deathwing sucked
The expansion had potential but it fell flat on its face and everyone laughed at it.

[cyqu]

In all threads about new expansion I see lots of pll bashing Cata. Many pll say it was worst expansion ever. I did play since May 2005 and I strongly believe it's second BEST expansion after BC. Why? Everything about Cata was PERFECT. I'll explain now why.

1. Leveling, core of the start = amazing fun because you COULD fly. Wanna not start level in one zone? Choose another. Leveing in Hijal is amazing, I still have a lot of fun lvling there on my alts. Uldum, nice storyline and fun quests. And that quest when you kill 1000 gnomes... PRICELESS . Not only that. They revamped old zones so nicely that it became fun to lvl new toons :P. And they added so many "EPIC FUN" quests. Like Sylvana's one. Or the one in badlands. Without Cata we would still grind old boring quests.
Now to people who say, flying mounts=no pvp. I had tons, TONS of fun world pvp in Vashj'ir and TB. In fact I killed so many people in world pvp during Cata I didn't kill since vanilla.
2. Dailies. Never, never felt like something you HAD to do. And esp those in Hijal were amazingly fun, there were even dailies which were easier to do as healer.
3. Lore. Involving Thrall, one of the main lore characters. Even though I didn't enjoy much doing "Thrall specific quest" on many alts, doing it first time was very inspiring.
4. Raiding. Actually Cata was first time when I started raiding very seriously. Because content was worth it. Remember emotions when you had to jump to lava on Nefarian hc.
5. EPICNESS. Yes. It came to unreal level in Cata. Do I need to explain why?
6. Dungeons. DUNGEONS WERE FUN. You needed some afford to complete stuff and when you finally completed them, you felt so good.

My point is, I see no reason why people hate that expansion.

1. Hyjal is the only path to level, as vashjir is a garbage time sink, and not even a pleasant experience.

2. If you wanted better gear to raid in sooner,you should have been doing dailies, just like in MoP

3. Don't know much about lore so I can't say anything on this, except that I thought it was all crap.

4. T11 was alright I guess, but other then heroic rag the entire expansion was pretty poor in terms of raid content.

5. Yes please explain

6. I hope you are referring to the heroics during the first week or 2 of the xpac before they were needed I to the ground. Because after that point the dungeons just became a massive joke.

[willowe]

1. I actually didn't like the leveling up part. In Wrath and MoP, you have a coherent story: "arthas" and "the sha," respectively. In Cata, it was "Deathwing Is Apprently Everywhere" and it started getting silly when he was making his minions take the form of Goblins in Uldum and waking up Elemental Lords in Hyjal. Then you had Vash'jir, the single worst zone ever created in a MMORPG.

2. "Re-make Everything!!!!" Let's see: Raids had Raggy v2, Ony v3, Nefarian v2. We got a re-hashed ZA and ZG. It felt like they just stopped giving a shit and ran out of ideas for new bosses and dungeons.

3. Dragon Soul. It wasn't the worst raid, ever (Heart of Fear takes that prize!), but it was pretty much the Power Rangers Zords Raid. You had the left leg below and on top Wyrmrest (boss 1, 5), the random anuses in the ground for the other leg (2, 3), the left arm of "randomly in EoE for boss 4," the right arm of gunship v2, the body of well...riding on a body, and Deathwing's Head. It was the least coherent raid ever. I liked some of the fights, though.

4. Lore. All Horde All The Time! WOOOOO! Actually it was more like "what is dipshit Thrall doing this month!?" From helping him realize he didn't need to be emo and cut his wrists (4.2 questline) to escorting him on his non-epic Mount to "save the day" in Hour of Twilight, it got really annoying. It also made me wonder why, in the years since we last put up with his stupid slow mount in Escape From Durnholde, he never paid the few gold to upgrade to "not painfully slow and annoying."

5. Grim Batol. Throne of the Tides. Seriously two worst dungeons they've done, ever.

That said, I did like:

1. Pre-nerf Heroic Dungeons. Blackrock Caverns and Vortex Pinnacle are two of their best dungeons, ever. Halls of Origination's length was actually quite awesome compared to the usual "kill 3 bosses every instance" and the 4.3 Heroics were awesome, Well of Eternity especially.

2. Transmog. Duh!

3. Looking For Raid. I work a schedule that changes weekly. I can't commit to a raid schedule because of that. Therefore I was almost unable to get any sort of "good" progress into raiding on my shitty bottom-third server. FL was an almost non-existent PuG on Tanaris US during 4.2. LFR fixed that. Yeah it's casual, but it's raiding I can do. Flex, too. Which is why WoD sounds so amazing...

[heerobya]

Cata did have some great heroics, but Dragon Soul raid was pretty bad/boring and lasted a bit too long before MoP came out.

I think just when compared to BC and Wrath, Cata fell pretty flat.

[Dormie]

Raiding is the ultimate end game of WoW, I think the idea that it's simpler and boring should hold up there if you are going to use it as a point.

You're taking the easiest difficulty of raiding, a mode which is entirely avoidable, and using it to prove your point. If players want challenge the complex challenge is definitely there.

Why is adding a choice for players a bad thing?

The difficulty and complexity is there if you want it, and the easy road is there if you want it.

I find that much better for the players as a whole, and completely disregarding the difficult version to make a point that the game is easy doesn't stand up.

We were talking about reasons for Sub decline, I said the game has simplified as a whole. You brought up raiding. I'm talking about the game as a whole.

[ombramo]

Cata, to me, looks as if blizzard lost a huge amount of it's budget......but they didn't...it seemed like the wanted to cut every single corner possible but they didn't have a proper end game laid out at all

[Felarion]

My reasons why i think cata was worst expac:

-Underwater Zone
-So damn long waiting for raid patch, not to mention only 7 bosses after so long wait was bad joke
-Dragon Soul. Last Tier that last damn long with again only 8 bosses with re used terrian and re used models.
-Deathwing fight was so lame... You fight tentacles instead actual dragon.

[Throrion]

Uldum, nice storyline and fun quests.

I find it rather telling that out of all the zones you could have chosen as examples for your case, you choose the one which is basically one overtly one and horribly awkward Indiana Jones pop culture reference with the most cringeworthily animated ingame cutscenes in the game.

Not only that. They revamped old zones so nicely that it became fun to lvl new toons :P. And they added so many "EPIC FUN" quests. Like Sylvana's one. Or the one in badlands. Without Cata we would still grind old boring quests.

The problem is that they revamped the 1-60 quests after there just was an ENTIRE YEAR with absolutely zero new content where people had all the time in the world to level all the alts they wanted. And then they didn't even release a new class to give people a reason to actually play through the new quests. It was exceedingly stupid design.

Now to people who say, flying mounts=no pvp. I had tons, TONS of fun world pvp in Vashj'ir and TB. In fact I killed so many people in world pvp during Cata I didn't kill since vanilla.

You didn't have world PvP in TB. TB was little more than a BG and also a single zone.

2. Dailies. Never, never felt like something you HAD to do.

There was generally nothing outside of instances which felt like something you had to do. Because there was NOTHING. Cata had the smallest endgame out of any WoW expansion. It was laughable, especially if you compare it to MoP.

3. Lore. Involving Thrall, one of the main lore characters. Even though I didn't enjoy much doing "Thrall specific quest" on many alts, doing it first time was very inspiring.

It was cute in the beginning. Once they basically made him the protagonist of the entire expansion and gave him a Green Jesus complex and made the whole story revolve around him (and forced him down the Alliance's throat as well), it wasn't very "inspiring".

4. Raiding. Actually Cata was first time when I started raiding very seriously. Because content was worth it. Remember emotions when you had to jump to lava on Nefarian hc.

Oh yeah. The raiding model where they actively TOOK AWAY options from the previous expansion and gave people less options for things to do at endgame compared to WotLK. Nice.

5. EPICNESS. Yes. It came to unreal level in Cata. Do I need to explain why?

... yes

6. Dungeons. DUNGEONS WERE FUN. You needed some afford to complete stuff and when you finally completed them, you felt so good.

Dungeons were the most miserably poorly designed feature in the history of WoW. They were targeted towards LFD pugs but balanced for guild groups with good gear and communication while giving worse rewards than heroics in WotLK OR TBC. The fact that they were so difficult meant that no tanks and healers wanted to pug them. Which resulted in 40 MINUTE queues for a normal heroic for a dps. Oh yeah. That sounds like fun.

My point is, I see no reason why people hate that expansion.

Okay. I just gave you a bunch. I can also inform you that Cata 4.0 singlehandedly caused WoW's subscriptions to start dropping, and to suffer the largest subscription losses in the smallest period in the game's history. And that it had a lot to do with the reasons I just listed.

[zoefschildpad]

I loved tier 11, probably the best tier I played, but I didn't really like firelands and though I barely played dragon soul, that clearly wasn't people's favorite either.
The levelling was extremely disappointing 80-85, it was too short (though that is hard to balance) and there was no consistency from one zone to the next. WotLK and MoP did that much better. Dungeons were difficult at the start because mobs had more health and more damage, which just meant that dungeons took longer, which is hardly interesting gameplay and just made the whole thing take twice as long.

Oh and there were dailies in Hyjal? I had no idea... There must not have been a reason to do them...

[Deleted]

Because T11 was the worst piece of crap ever unleashed on this game.

[Wondercrab]

I've always maintained that it was because Cataclysm didn't change the game up like any of the other expansions. There were no new features that actually affected the way you played the game right up until the final content patch, and by then it was almost too little too late.

Things like the quality and accessibility of raids/dungeons are debatable, but for the most part the expansion simply gave us more of what we already had without changing the way in which we engaged with that content. No compelling new modes/activities, (does archaeology count?) systems or features that had a meaningful effect on gameplay resulted in an expansion that felt very tired very fast.