Was Cataclysm the best expansion?

[Ethule]

Threads are not allowed to be personal opinion so I pose the question to you all... Was Cataclysm the best expansion?

I believe it was BUT THATS JUST MY OPINION. So what do you think?

[Amarys]

Assuming it's not a troll post, it was not. It was one of the worst and started the player population decline.

[Hitei]

Assuming it's not a troll post, it was not. It was one of the worst and started the player population decline.

Technically Wrath started the downtrend by almost completely flatlining the subscriber growth.

[Tiev]

I liked the levelling and the first heroic dungeons in Cataclysm. Not a fan of much else.

[Ethule]

False. We got amazing heroic lineup, introduction of RBGs and 4/5 very killer raids. We also got Transmog and goblins. It also gave more race options for classes and a new azeroth to explore. Mmmm

[Tziva]

Cataclysm was my least favourite expansion in terms of playable end-game content. For most of the expansion, I just felt like there wasn't a lot to do at the level cap and I found myself often logging in only to chat with guildies with nothing really that I wanted to do.

Tier 11 was great, but Tier 12 needed a sister raid, and I actively disliked most of Tier 13 (some fights were fine in a vacuum, but there were multiple ones I disliked, the cut scenes were obnoxious, and the final boss fight was anticlimactic and disappointing).

That said, Cataclysm added a lot of really great systems. We got transmog and reforging then, and I believe that is also when they built out the more robust guild support and guild achievements. This is also when they added Archaeology. I didn't have much interest in the new races, but the intro experiences for them were well done. I also thought the world revamp was good, although I understand why that was contentious and I do also miss some of the old quests and storylines; I kinda wish they'd add the pre-cata quests and zones either to Chromie-time or by putting that one NPC you can talk to in the zone like they have in places like Darkshore and Uldum.

So while I give some props for all of that, it didn't really make the expansion more enjoyable to me in terms of actual activities that I could partake in. Warlords, another very unpopular expansion, at least had really good raids, which put it at a superior era for me just based on that alone.

[Mysterymask]

Cata had it's problems and it's a far cry from best expansion

>From a game design look allowing flying from the start caused the world to feel small and questing to feel disjointed and trivial

>Honest to God lack of any real endgame there were daily quests that were never done cause spamming dungeons with a tabard was 100x more efficient speaking of which

>Dungeons were POLARIZING while I assume a decent chunk of the MMO Champion audience loved the harder dungeons for more people they just up and quit never to return making the casual experience a lot worse especially coming from Wrath's pull the entire dungeon and hit fan of knives once model

>Speaking of casual experience dying Guild Levels were introduced which I still believe to this day was one of the biggest nails in the new player experience coffin in this games history. Smaller guilds struggled due to not being able to level quickly and a lot of exploitative players recruited newbies in masse forming sweatshop guilds to farm gold off of the players questing. There were other issues too but those were probably the most painful ones

>Finally lets talk about Dragon Soul a subjective opinion mind you but here we have the first raid made practically entirely in reused assets with Spine being pretty high in people's worst fights of all time list. Also Deathwing blowing up into fairy dust after thrall does a Kamehameha

[Aucald]

BfA bumped Cata down from my least favorite expansion to the second least. Cata had some strong features, but these were almost entirely offset by a muddled story, a number of bad gameplay decisions, and lackluster raiding content (especially in its final arc).

[Lora]

cataclysm was literally the worst expansion to date kekw

[Rendark]

Cata was ok. Not as bad as people say but far from the best.

[DechCJC]

Not only no, but fuck no.

[Chilela]

Thanks to recent expansions, Cata's gone from the worst to basically roughly middle of the pack for me. The one thing I can really say about it as a positive is that its talent system is probably my favorite of any iteration of WoW. If it didn't lock you into putting a certain number of talent points into your chosen spec before you could invest in other specs, it would have been perfect. As I recall, it cut a lot of filler talents, and getting major abilities for your spec at level 10 felt pretty great. For the rate of leveling, the rate of new talent points was pretty solid.

Outside of that, though, it was very much hit-and-miss. The world revamp is a microcosm of this. There were some home runs, such as with Silverpine or Stonetalon, but there were some duds as well, such as the changed Stalvan chain in Duskwood. The new zones were in a similar boat. I actually really enjoyed Vashj'ir for what it was, even if the questing was enough of a pain in the butt to pretty much always run Hyjal given the choice. Uldum would have been solid if it didn't go full Indiana Jones reference. Raids were alright, even DS would have been okay if it didn't last so long. Although Deathwing is easily the worst final boss of any xpac to date. RBGs were a nice, if not niche addition, and Transmog was one of the best new systems in the game's history.

[Athorha]

A casual would probably have the most fun with the time they can commit in BC or legion.
Hardcore player in Wotlk, Cata or WoD, no power grinds means you can class stack and not be burnt out, which lets face it with the speed clear meta of classic, is what players should be doing by doing, running splits so by next tier they can steamroll hardmodes with proper class stacks.
For the middle group Cata MoP and Legion are accessible, one has a power grind but also much more supplementary stuff.

Idk how to classify a best expansion, but Cata sort of falls into that place of offering a bit of everything at a decent quality, but not being at that mastery level in any metric, at least now comparing with what you see in other expansions.

[Varx]

Idk about the best expansion but 4.3 was the best patch of all time.

[Afrospinach]

Threads are not allowed to be personal opinion so I pose the question to you all... Was Cataclysm the best expansion?

I believe it was BUT THATS JUST MY OPINION. So what do you think?

It was definitely the most ambitious thing they have ever done with the entire world getting remade with probably the biggest class overhaul in wow history and that never gets any praise/recognition.

I just think the fanarking with the fundamental class mechanics was a big misfire, that is pretty much when the game became unfun to play.

I also was not happy with the rapid heroic nerf.

cataclysm was literally the worst expansion to date kekw

I definitely think WoD and BFA were markedly worse.

WoD was like an unfinished, unrealised project that someone gave up on halfway through.

BFA was the "lets throw everything to the wall and see what sticks" xpac whereby it ran afoul of the "most assured way to be boring is to say everything" mantra. A trend that I am afraid the current game designers are hellbent on continuing. Everything now is just one stupid cheap thrill after another. I find it very lazy to be honest and it is ironically probably a lot of work to come up with all this endless vapid bullshit.

[trapmaster]

cata wasn't so bad but there was def not much. I would take MOP or WOTLK over any xpacs.

[Dakhath]

Cata was good until Dragon Soul, the intro raids and Firelands were pretty solid.

[Relapses]

Firelands is the best raid they've ever released (and probably ever will release) so I'm down with this take. I don't put it as high as WoD personally because I jumped around a lot between guilds and got omegacucked for the Legendary by virtue of being a sad dark blue guy (Shaman) but it's pretty close to my favorite.

[Jinpachi]

Technically Wrath started the downtrend by almost completely flatlining the subscriber growth.

FFS one in every fucking group. It started with wrath, tEcHnIcAlLy, because it couldn't go any higher. So yeah, you WOULD see a flatline. Cata was shit, and people left in droves because it was shit, and by every objective metric it was bottom-tier as an xpac.

[Tziva]

I definitely think WoD and BFA were markedly worse.

There were definitely a lot of things wrong with both WoD and BFA, but for me WoD pulls ahead by having superior raids. Raids in BFA were more hit-or-miss for me, but also had very enjoyable M+ which got hours and hours of replayability for me.

Obviously personal opinion on expansion rankings is going to be influenced by what content people prioritise and their opinions on other aspects that they find valuable (story, systems, etc). Even for all the problems that have been in some of the expansions since, Cata is still the one era of the game where I was not enthusiastic to actually log in and play. At the end of the day, that's really the most important factor for me.

Technically Wrath started the downtrend by almost completely flatlining the subscriber growth.

I really don't understand why anyone thinks this is particularly important to how good an expansion is. Do people really think "boy I am enjoying this questing experience, but subscription numbers are trending down so this expansion sucks" or "I don't find this gameplay compelling but this expansion set record sales so it must be good." Trends in sales and subscriptions can be influenced by so many factors are self propelled by previous trends. Subs are always trending downward despite patch fluctuations but that doesn't inherently mean every patch is worse than the last, it largely just means the game isn't regaining new players despite attrition, which is pretty normal for a game of this age regardless of its quality. This debate for how one personal interprets player trends just seems like a largely meaningless nitpick.