Cataclysm Classic - What changes would you want?

[khazmodan]

They'll keep the poison and leave the great stuff out. I sure have faith in that.

Truer words have probably never been spoken...

[PenguinChan]

Mostly the changes that come with classic automatically (better paced content releases, consistent tuning instead of weekly panicnerfs) and changes they made to Wrath already (removal of lFd/r systems, shared lockouts between normal and heroics).

Dragonsoul, just like TotC, also needs to get some RP skips to be enjoyable.

And if they want to super convince me to come back, they can restore a bit of the lost content.

Should make for a short xpac, but as far as I remember, most of Catas content was actually decent to great. It just didn't have the polish it needed.

LFD and Raid Finder are going to be there in Cataclysm, much like how the dungeon finder is going to be in WotLK by the ICC patch. I don't get why people think these things aren't coming when the devs themselves said they're implementing things patch by patch as it were back then. Such a silly viewpoint - they already backtracked on their statement in the one video about WotLK classic lol.

[munkeyinorbit]

Remove LFR, introduce RDF, tweak Dragon Soul, keep everything else the same as it was back then. Excellent expansion.

If there was an LFR it would only be for DS as it didn't exist for the other raids. Not too big of a stretch to not have it at all. Maybe instead of RDF, we can have LFD like retail.

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How dareth thou besmirch Legion?

To be fair Legion was the first xpac that I was genuinely bored with. It might have been the AP. It might have been the classes. Maybe it was the WQ. It should have been the best expac ever but it was kind of meh.

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Cata heroics were really not that hard. Incredibly overrated by players who started playing in Wrath.

Hard is subjective. I only pugged heroics in cata and there were some interesting times but they weren't difficult imo but if you're looking for comparisons to other xpac heroics then yes. They were hard.

[Aurora]

The 10/25 change completely destroyed my realm which was very healthy for 25-man raiding in Wrath but all of those 25-man guilds (literally every single one) collapsed and spun off into smaller, enclosed 10-man guilds for Cata. It tore the social fabric of our realm apart and the it never recovered.

I'd be interested to see a version of Cata where this doesn't happen, and they maintain 25-man raiding as the sole way to obtain the best gear.

Otherwise no interest in it, it'd just be reliving the start of WoW's decline.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I didn't really have a problem with Cata aside from the monster content gaps. People hate on it way to much. PVP was good, most of the raids were great, the 5 mans were solid, classes werent bad, professions still had punch...

What hurt Cata imo was it cost them a lot of resources and time to rework the world so everything else just got put behind schedule and thus things took a long ass time to work out.

[Hambo94]

Never really understood that tbh. It's not as if it took anything away from the game. People who want to manually group for hard content are still able to do it. Why be mad about a feature they were never going to use anyway?

It encourages non participation and lazy behaviour. I literally cant count the amount of times ive been into LFR and like 50% of the people are literally AFK expecting others to kill the bosses for their free trash gear. Why cant they just pug a normal?

[Dadwen]

To be fair Legion was the first xpac that I was genuinely bored with. It might have been the AP. It might have been the classes. Maybe it was the WQ. It should have been the best expac ever but it was kind of meh.

Legion IMO can burn in hell and I will always vote it the worse expansion, deleted my favorite thing from the game RSV hunters and added in scaling (I hate scaling in just about all games but blizzards version is the worse pile of crap version I've ever seen in any game ever). *those two things alone made it easy to uninstall and not really care about it, got my hopes up with LK classic but looks like the dips in charge have to put their "shitty" touch on it and IMO not worth destroying my good memories of it by playing their vision of it and their pillocks err pillars

[Hambo94]

Raiding was fine and healthy until the 10/25 bullshit fiasco. It created a huge rift in the community it literally shattered thousands of guilds created balancing nightmares and was finally resolved once they created a single difficulty size for mythic. They had a perfect niche in Wrath and the way they are handling it in Classic seems to be a viable solution without having to shatter larger guilds into 10-man guilds. If they repeat the same mistakes they made in the past Cata will be a shitshow just as it was back in the day. I'm hoping they just develop off of Wrath and make a real Classic+ and not make those same mistakes again. Dragonsoul was garbage anyway and let's not even talk about that underwater zone that must not be named.

My experience was the opposite. I always had a better experience being able to just 10 man raid with friends, the second 20 man hit it just became an elitist mess. Its impossible to get 20 friends together, you have to recruit randoms and put in that work. I want to just rock up with 10 close friends and raid.

That was my experience in Cata, there was tons of super tight knit healthy 10 man guilds. Most of the 25 mans struggled because its just so hard to get 25 solid similar skill players.

Dragonsoul was true garbage to the highest order, literally a 1/10 raid. Vashji'r I strongly disagree, one of the most interesting zones they'd ever made, it just suffered from lack of UI tools to help find quest objectives in a fully 3d environment.

[tikcol]

Harder dungeons, heroics and first raid cycle

[Al Gorefiend]

It encourages non participation and lazy behaviour. I literally cant count the amount of times ive been into LFR and like 50% of the people are literally AFK expecting others to kill the bosses for their free trash gear. Why cant they just pug a normal?

Exactly this. There was no punishment for being a lazy teammate. That's why LFR failed for me, If you actually put your ass into it and push meters you will come out on top every time, nobody else cares (except the people also pushing meters, usually only like 5 others)

[Perkunas]

My experience was the opposite. I always had a better experience being able to just 10 man raid with friends, the second 20 man hit it just became an elitist mess. Its impossible to get 20 friends together, you have to recruit randoms and put in that work. I want to just rock up with 10 close friends and raid.

That was my experience in Cata, there was tons of super tight knit healthy 10 man guilds. Most of the 25 mans struggled because its just so hard to get 25 solid similar skill players.

Which forced all that awful homogenization in order to create a competitive 10 man scene. You couldn't really have proper niche roles when you only had 10 raid spots. Paladins had to be changed to AoE heal as well as all other classes, support DPS lost a lot of their utility, basically it made the game far less complex and less interesting in the raid scene.

[Hambo94]

Exactly this. There was no punishment for being a lazy teammate. That's why LFR failed for me, If you actually put your ass into it and push meters you will come out on top every time, nobody else cares (except the people also pushing meters, usually only like 5 others)

Ive literally gone through the final wing of Argus in an LFR and wiped for like 2+ hours because like 16 people were AFK. They'd either auto attack the entire fight, or auto attack then stand on purpose in the cone attack so they get killed and make it look like they're just bad players. I was group leader, explained the tactics at first, eventually realised they were all AFK and started doing vote kicks, one by one for people giving them chances to put in effort or get kicked. Eventually the group got stuck in a state where the LFR wouldnt 'fill' the rest of the group that was missing and the group essentially became stuck with like 15 players and we all just had to leave. Every single one of those AFK'ers should have received punishment. Its completely unacceptable to waste others time for hours on end.

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Which forced all that awful homogenization in order to create a competitive 10 man scene. You couldn't really have proper niche roles when you only had 10 raid spots. Paladins had to be changed to AoE heal as well as all other classes, support DPS lost a lot of their utility, basically it made the game far less complex and less interesting in the raid scene.

Thats fair, im not going to say you are wrong in that regard. Part of that is because raids got harder and harder though to the point where you need all those niche things and maximum coverage of the abilities in the game to beat content on mythic. My guild never had problems doing 10 man HC in Cata and we cleared everything being within the first few guilds to clear. Some stuff was hard some was easier, I never saw the problem personally.

Theres something that is objectively lost though by forcing 20 man groups. Like I said, I cannot organise 20 people I know together, even if the people I know also ask around their friends. Thats not what I want. I dont want to have to organise and recruit for a guild anymore. Ive done it for years, I just want to rock up with 9 other buddies, all be competent and all have fun.

[Perkunas]

Ive literally gone through the final wing of Argus in an LFR and wiped for like 2+ hours because like 16 people were AFK. They'd either auto attack the entire fight, or auto attack then stand on purpose in the cone attack so they get killed and make it look like they're just bad players. I was group leader, explained the tactics at first, eventually realised they were all AFK and started doing vote kicks, one by one for people giving them chances to put in effort or get kicked. Eventually the group got stuck in a state where the LFR wouldnt 'fill' the rest of the group that was missing and the group essentially became stuck with like 15 players and we all just had to leave. Every single one of those AFK'ers should have received punishment. Its completely unacceptable to waste others time for hours on end.

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Thats fair, im not going to say you are wrong in that regard. Part of that is because raids got harder and harder though to the point where you need all those niche things and maximum coverage of the abilities in the game to beat content on mythic. My guild never had problems doing 10 man HC in Cata and we cleared everything being within the first few guilds to clear. Some stuff was hard some was easier, I never saw the problem personally.

Theres something that is objectively lost though by forcing 20 man groups. Like I said, I cannot organise 20 people I know together, even if the people I know also ask around their friends. Thats not what I want. I dont want to have to organise and recruit for a guild anymore. Ive done it for years, I just want to rock up with 9 other buddies, all be competent and all have fun.

I mean I'm raiding right in BCC with 25 I will raid with 25 in WrathC and I just hope they don't do Cata at all at this point. If they go to Cata Classic I'd probably just sit it out for Retail at that point.

[Kagthul]

I wouldn't want it. If it was to come, then I'd only want to see the new 80+ zones, raids and dungeons introduced with no LFR/LFD and no lockout on the talents (Cata introduced specialisations which locked you to a minimum talent spend in your 'main tree' which complete ruined any possibility of build variances and solidified the cookie-cutter experience)
.

It also cut a bunch of abilities fromt he core class off into spec-only abilities.

Like, as an Afflock you totally lost all the fire spells. Because, you know, having a single school was awesome.

Its not like you might want to cast Incinerate or Immolate to bait a counterspell or something.

Cata was the literal end of the Classic design philosophy and gameplay. It shouldn't be released.

[Ringthane]

Dragon Soul, Flawless.

Uldum, the Indiana Jones ripoff. Flawless.

[Kagthul]

What defines classic?

The basic design philosophies.

Cata introduced the foundations of NuWoW.

Handholding, not letting people pick "bad specs", gutting player choice for homogenity, etc. The new talent system (that they are finally abandoning with Dragonflight) started in Cata.

From Vanilla -> TBC -> Wrath there is clear design lineage, both in zone design, encoutner design, and system design. TBC and Wrath were basically just Vanilla + More. Cata changed that entirely.

And its not really something open to debate even though people here seem to think it is.

The designers themselves have gone on record confirming that Cata was deliberately developed differently and that all of their design priorities had changed from what we would consider "Classic" WoW.

Its why Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) eventually left Blizz. He saw basically immediately after launch how much of a shit-show it was turning into and GTFO'ed for greener pastures. He didnt want to change their design philosophies and systems; he was ordered to by executives. The "New" talent system only debuted so late in Cata because it simply couldn't be finished in time for launch. It was always intended to launch with NuTalents. They just couldn't meet the deadline.

Cata isn't Classic. Its the begining of modern WoW. Thats not really an opinion so much as it is confirmed fact by the very people who developed it.

[NezihYusuf]

The new talent system (that they are finally abandoning with Dragonflight) started in Cata.

Know your facts precise my man. The talent tree you've been playing for 10 years is from MoP. Not Cata.
Greg Street left blizzard after the development of MoP, not Cata.

What Cata did, changed the world map (a bit, arguable). Gave us Deathwing content. Maybe we got some new nodes to talents along with it upon Wrath.
That's it. No innovation, no nothing. You can say THIS is also something bad.

Another thing bad about Cata was the sad excuse last raid for content. It doesn't even deserve the name "Dragon Soul".

Now MoP was a good content, but that talent system still couldn't cripple WoW before Celestalon (a guy who told Greg Street the game is sh*t and became a class designer) came in and ripped classes apart in WoD.

More of that happened in Legion, with Ion's promotion to Sr. Game Designer from Encounter designing, and Tom Chilton's departure. Artifacts tried to rectify that situation and couldn't help. New talent system alone couldn't really kill the joy we had. But everything after that cumulatively dragged the game into a very bad, boring, toxic place.

Also people who were kids and teenagers back then, are grown people now. Most of them left the game, and we're dealing with new-age a-holes who don't care about anything, let alone respecting another human being, who don't know what they're talking about and yet, they make statements in presidental level confidence.

[Khaza-R]

Iam fine with you copy pasting it, no worry.

What is classic? What makes something not classic?

Really no way to come to a complete consensus on this term but basing off its earliest inception it basically means an era of WoW which didn't attempt to streamline everything.

I think a better way to answer this question is what is considered NOT classic

LFD, LFR, stat normalization, class homogenization, masteries, CRZ, sharding, etc. These are generally (meaning not by all) seen as antithetical to the core of the game as release in vanilla.

[Al Gorefiend]

Uldum, the Indiana Jones ripoff. Flawless.

Uldum was fun though. All the zones were fun, maybe except twilight highlands. The only Indiana Jones ripoff was hiding in the treasure chest to be safe from the explosion, because that terrible new Indiana Jones movie became a meme. The character you quest with was Harrison Jones yes, but he's been a character a bit before Cataclysm, and his quests are only a quarter of Uldums full story.

[Bigbazz]

I was only ever #no changes because I didn't think Blizzard would be able to make changes without messing it up.. But for Cataclysm, it's just a steaming pile of turd expansion that needs to be more like #more changes. I'm not sure if I could actually find myself sticking around to even play Cataclysm with that class design and balance, and those godawful boring dungeons.

I think unless they did something radical and interesting, I'd stop playing or go back and play some SOM version of TBC or whatever. Probably just stop playing to be honest, I got my fill of TBC. Cataclysm was the worst expansion, even tho BFA/SL were shit too.