Why Cataclysm was my favorite expansion.

[Nyel]

I think the world revamp has been pretty great... sure I somehow miss the Vanilla Azeroth but the revamp was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in an MMORPG.

[Mackem]

I admittedly miss thousand needles the way it was dont know why lol!!

My expansion order is
wotlk > bc > Legion > cata > panda > wod >

[DeusX]

Cataclysm was awsome.
I liked so much the heroic dungeons. Not only there were really nice designed with an impact in my memory but also with some level of difficulty. I enjoed very much doing the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero meta. It was a blast!
I haven't felt toward dungeons the same since then.

Regarding raids, seems people judge Cata only based on DS. We seem to forget the other raids which were really nice. Fighting Nefarian, Cho'gall, Sinestra... The air boss did not impress me much.

I did not mind world redesign. I actually liked coming back to the capital cities and making use of the old continents. In Legion I go back only to use the AH, but it's a different theme, so it's fine. But from time to time I don't think it's bad to take the fight back "home".

And I super enjoyed Uldum. Awsome space, full of color, intesting variations in enemies and quests. The other zones were not so bad. Broken Isle is not bad either, Argus I don't like but I understand the theme.

[Teri]

I'm not sure if you understood what I meant.
It got to the point there wasn't 25 people at the level cap to raid with unless your saying they should go to a 25 man raid with 10 players?

25 total level 85 online on a faction? seems like an extreme case, altho some realms do show very very low numbers on 1 faction even today, but cata obviously had no cross-realm groups.

Seeing how EU-EN realms like Twisting nether/kazzak/tarren mill show like 16000-24000 to ~140 ratios horde v alliance (wow progress raid numbers, not population) blizz has no indicator at all to show realm population accurate.

I can still believe dead realms always been some issue, and MoP tried to fix some of it, but it's high time for another merge/connected realm phase.

Not to move off topic too much but I also believe the concept of 1-realm guilds/auction houses is vastly outdated. Outside of maybe the niche that's called mythic raiding.

[Deleted]

That wasn't what was happening on my server. People were leaving their 25 man guilds and forming 10 man guilds. Hell even guilds that had been fighting for World Firsts were dropping to 10 man only.

The point is without the realm pop problems they wouldn't have made 10 mans in the first place so they wouldn't have then had 25 man guilds breaking up to form 10 mans.

25 total level 85 online on a faction? seems like an extreme case, altho some realms do show very very low numbers on 1 faction even today, but cata obviously had no cross-realm groups.

Seeing how EU-EN realms like Twisting nether/kazzak/tarren mill show like 16000-24000 to ~140 ratios horde v alliance (wow progress raid numbers, not population) blizz has no indicator at all to show realm population accurate.

Unbalanced low pop servers meant if you were on the wrong side you could have done a who and ended up with less than 25 capped players. The problem had made itself apparent during WOTLK when you would have a few people at wintergrasp facing a full team on the other side. It got much worse during cata.

[Pony Soldier]

I had a decent time with Cataclysm and I liked most of the story until it got to the point where Thrall became Captain Planet. I liked the whole end of the world feeling with Deathwing flying around Azeroth causing earthquakes and such. Fighting the Twilight's Hammer was interesting and fun. The whole Firelands stuff was cool too. I also thought the final boss battle was really creative, I loved the idea of fighting on his back like that and then fighting him for the last time when he crash lands to the ground.

Like I said I just didn't like what they did to Thrall. I feel like right there is when they ruined him. Instead of turning him into a hermit they should've kept him as the badass Warchief he always was but now as an improved shaman leader. HE should've been the class hall leader not us.

If I had to put my favorites in order I think it'd go like this:

WotLK
Legion
MoP
TBC
Classic
Cataclysm
WoD

[Paperfox]

To me Cata was the beginning of the end. The revamp of the old zones was a net loss. I used to think that WoW contained two games: getting to max level, and then gearing up. Cata gutted the leveling game.
Removal of the talent trees was bad too. Before that, the game allowed you to make bad choices, and then correct those as you learned more. Fast-forward to now and the choices are just as irrelevant - if not more so - than the trees.

The new zones were good, to me they are overshadowed by the loss of old world content.

[donjn]

Where do I start?

Cata was in fact, the worst expansion Blizzard has ever produced. I understand the OP is trying to say, but I think Cata is where things started going downhill..

Lets start off with their decision to revamp the old world. As if 12 million subscribers was not enough, they decide to take the winning formula, and kill it and start over.
Azeroth questing was completely revamped. It was made linear. You do one zone at a time and that zone had one story to follow linearly. The old style was great because each quest hub had its own mini story, not the whole zone. I understand if they wanted to streamline things but a complete overhaul? They even re-did some of the beautiful music. Why?

And so many off the beaten path cool things were removed. The cool trip to the top of the Twin Colossals in Feralas? Gone. Forget exploring because if an NPC did not send you, there will be no quest were you are going. Breadcrumbs were the meal of the day..

Soon problems appeared. People were discovering with heirlooms and getting a ton of XP in battlegrounds that they were out leveling the zones they were in. Now this is bad enough, but with the quests being so linear, and prerequisites all over the place, if you wanted to skip ahead to some quests later in that zone you couldn't; you would have to do grey quests first. For example lets say you start Felwood at the bottom. You do a couple quests with heirlooms, do a couple BGs, pretty soon those quests turn green and even grey. So you think, okay lets just skip some of these quests in the southern areas and go up north closer to Winterspring and do the Northern Felwood quests. You find a quest hub and discover no quests. Whats even more shocking is that the quests in southern Felwood were not even related to northern Felwood. Yet they were required because Dave Kosak (Mr. Quest On Rails) did not want you to exit his train.

Feeding your pet as a hunter was removed. No more poisoning weapons as a Rogue. All these cool little RPG elements, removed. Phasing became so overused that it looked downright silly. To this day, Ashenvalle has ballistas firing at nothing, moving by themselves because they were destroying things in an earlier phase. You have endless zones of fake NPCs fighting each other, one side never pushing, no characters dying, just eternally fake fighting each other. Ammo was removed which can be good or bad. I thought it added something interesting.

Then Blizzard basically decides to hand Alliance a big middle finger. Auberdine, one of the most peaceful and mysteriously beautiful cities, gone. Ashenvalle, overrun by horde. The Park in Stormwind, gone. Southshore, gone.

Regarding talent trees, I liked mixing and matching. I was never a min/maxer and never will be. At least we had a choice.

[Deleted]

cata removed everything that made past WoW WoW.

[Seramore]

Not to move off topic too much but I also believe the concept of 1-realm guilds/auction houses is vastly outdated. Outside of maybe the niche that's called mythic raiding.

It's only outdated because over half of the servers on this game are dead. If realms actually get merged and the list is thinned down, auction houses will be fine again.

[Deleted]

I almost puked all over my screen when i read your first point.
Cataclysm talent trees killed customization...forever.
They pretty much forbid hybrid trees and imagination and liberty.

Forever since all we have today is a watered down version of a talent tree without any kind of life.

just stop it.... you never had any fucking customization with the Old Talents... you either had the Way you SHOULD Spec or you were an Idiot and didnt know any better. You have by far more options now than you ever had before

[Armourboy]

The point is without the realm pop problems they wouldn't have made 10 mans in the first place so they wouldn't have then had 25 man guilds breaking up to form 10 mans.



Unbalanced low pop servers meant if you were on the wrong side you could have done a who and ended up with less than 25 capped players. The problem had made itself apparent during WOTLK when you would have a few people at wintergrasp facing a full team on the other side. It got much worse during cata.

The population low during Cata was somewhere still in the realm of 10 million, let's not act like this is WoD where the game was dropping nearly a million a month.

The first 10 man was made in TBC, with Wrath being the first time it had it's own progression. It was done not because of low population servers but because it was very popular out if the gate in TBC with Kara and then ZA.

In Cata it was changed to be the same gear as 25 mans, which meant they upped the difficulty, which not only destroyed casual raiding, but also pugging across the board. LFR was created to fill the void they had created with these changes.

Servers with plenty of population were seeing 25 man guild's falter as well, there is a reason Blizzard started to try and find ways to prop 25 man up. It didn't matter what the population of the server was, people weren't going to be assed to deal with 25 people when they could get the same gear with 10 people.

The change in systems, the change the world, and just the rather uninteresting content caused the population decrease. Population decrease didn't cause the content to suck, it was rough to start with.

[Kyriani]

Unlike many, I enjoyed Cata. With that said, I think Cata would have been better if they hadn't just outright removed the vanilla world and instead let it (and the old quests) be accessible via a keepers of time npc like Theramore. I had always wished something like that had existed for the Eastern Plaguelands and Naxx40 to preserve the content that existed there (quests, naxx items that didnt make it to wotlk naxx, Atiesh, etc).

[Themanintobuildafire]

Only reason I loved Cata is I was able to become a WoW millionaire for the first time, I had skipped WotLK, so I essentially got all the content of Cata+Wrath to do and it was pretty exciting. Also I had A LOT of friends playing at that time and that was cool.

[Deleted]

just stop it.... you never had any fucking customization with the Old Talents... you either had the Way you SHOULD Spec or you were an Idiot and didnt know any better. You have by far more options now than you ever had before

lies, for PvP and World content there were a lot of viable hybrid specs available. There was some customization for a few classes.
There is no way in hell a talents of nowadays bring more customization than an actual well made talent tree with a ton of options.

[Littleraven]

I feel like cataclysm gets more hate than it deserves but it was a bit of a mess. I have fond memories of it anyway though because it was the expansion that I was deepest into raiding in. My guild at the time was semi hardcore and we had a great group of people who ran the content every week. I'll never forget being server first Glory of the Firelands and getting my corrupted Firehawk.

I also loved that they finally opened up a lot of the closed off areas and allowed flying in the old world. I do miss the original zones and wish they could have found a way to keep them intact but oh well. Had some good. Had a lot of bad as well but I still enjoyed it.

[Seramore]

just stop it.... you never had any fucking customization with the Old Talents... you either had the Way you SHOULD Spec or you were an Idiot and didnt know any better. You have by far more options now than you ever had before

any sort of branching outside of your main spec is taken away

yeah, lots more options. Let's keep pretending that you didn't have just about the same choices when it came down to extra talent points, and that Blizzard didn't take away talents that would be baked into your talent tree and put them into a new tree where you can only choose one thing from each tier. Blizzard took away aspects of a spec that would have originally belonged to it, and gave you the illusion of choice.

[Eazy]

It was still better than MoP.

Yeah, sue me fanbois.