Blizzard will milk the cow as long as it gives milk. Quote me on this if you like.
They have pretty much zero effort and make money anyways. Keep the train rolling until all passengers get off.
Blizzard will milk the cow as long as it gives milk. Quote me on this if you like.
They have pretty much zero effort and make money anyways. Keep the train rolling until all passengers get off.
Yeah nah, they'd have a better milking opportunity by setting up a perpetual loop between classic/bc/wotlk and repeat because its those expansions people think of when it comes to playing the game when it was "old-school". Cata is a weird inbetween along with MoP, I cannot imagine that they'd release Cata, it's not like their goal is to re-release every expansion. Classic is for the nostalgic MMORPG players who wants that old WoW experience, Cata remade azeroth, for one. MoP was when a lot of people felt like this wasn't Warcraft anymore.
I won't pretend to know how much work actually goes into preparing these old expansions, but they also have to take player interest into account, and splitting the classic players that are left between semi-dead WotLK servers, and Cata servers that doesn't have nearly the same pull-factor, would probably just kill classic overall.
They asked the playerbase if there was interest in WotLK and they delivered, but I dare say that people who thinks one step further than "new stuff" will say that no, Classic ended in WotLK and that's that. They'll probably have "Season of Mastery" servers that quickly goes through Classic/BC/WotLK and some legacy servers that never changes, but no more than that.
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
Cata would give us back 10-man heroic raiding, which is something I've been missing since the end of it in 2014. This and MoP would be a lot of fun at least for me and my old group. I guess we'd still be playing retail if 10-man mythic raiding existed. After our 10-man raid was destroyed by Blizzard, we gave 20-man raiding a try during WoD (successful) but didn't like it and quit retail raiding altogether a couple of months after our mythic Archimonde first kill.
Personally, I have no interest in ever doing tbc again after experiencing it. It’s not designed for casual play - lack of catch up and terrible tank design cripple it.
Cats however is closer to wrath in things I think are important - you can skip dailies, it’s got 10 man raiding, good catch up, and no massive issue with tanking.
So sign me up for cata over tbc or classic.
MoP is where things started to get bad, with the daily farm in the first tier, and the legendary quest. Also didn’t add any dungeons after launch because they had lfr. That’s also when they started constantly redoing one of my classes - disc priest - so that it was unrecognizable (the other, blood dk, was destroyed in wod).
Last edited by SpaghettiMonk; 2022-11-07 at 11:27 AM.
Im fine with Cata Classic if we get permanent Wrath Era realms as an option with FREE CLONING not 15 euro of atleast 1 char to Cata Classic.
what else are they supposed to do other than continuing with Cata > MoP. Just stop here when wotlk is finished and start over to vanilla again? Thats a mistake, it will be a dud. give it another 7-8 years and people might wanna do a vanilla > TBC > Wrath over again. The only logical way to do this is to do Cata with changes and then MoP with changes. The demand for that is a lot higher than Vanilla again.
They cooould do a totally new expansion instead of Cata, but the resources and the time to create a whole new expansion is so big that is just not on the cards im afraid. They would of had to start making that during Classic Vanilla already which they obviously didnt.
Cataclysm will surpise a lot of people, especially Classic andies. Best opening raid tier ever, excellent balanced PvP, RBGs, interesting revamped talent trees (I liked it even though I know it is a well known negative feature for most people), class gameplay and new spells, HARD HC dungeons, new great leveling zones...
Cata Classic would be fine with heavy changes, MoP needs very little changes, and, well, I'd re-play WoD as well, with nerfed resource income from Garrisons and all cut content added as well. WoD had best leveling, amazing zones, fantastic music, top-notched PvP with maybe best and most fair PvP gearing system.
For me, game started to become unrecognizable in Legion and after. Artifact power / Azerite / Anima mandatory grind + level squish and leveling changes were the ones that, imho, killed the world.
For years after years, we got used to the linear world progression: Azeroth > Outland > Northrend > Cata zones > Pandaria > Draenor. But then came the 10-60 nonsense, you can get level 20 in Northrend and level 50 in Outland and so on, along with all the dungeons. I'm sorry, but lvl 20 Warglaives of Azzinoth or lvl 60 Gnomeregan just don't make any sense, as the whole new inversion system. There is nothing I hate more than this, and, except the obvious trying out Dracthyr, I doubt I would want to level an alt ever again on retail.
I want MoP warlocks and dont care for cata so honestly hoping they skip it.
I want WoD ret back, for PvP
Amazing super versatile piano with so many tools and two ways to clear roots and vast number of ranged attacks. WoD was the only expansion when I was able to beat high arena XP Mages one on one and get a prominent spot in Rated BG teams (Ret was unwanted in Cata, not widely accepted in MoP, but became desirable in Wod).
Even Wrath ret is second to WoD's.
I think its mostly that it didn't really add much beside the world changes. I liked the world changes at the start, and flying in them was nice, but aside from leveling you didn't really get much out of it and there wasn't anything else notable (no new class, no remarkable systems, and unlike WOTLK the story/mysteries weren't really compelling).
I compare it to BFA and SL that didn't really add much to Legion, at least in my eyes, and took away some of the good designs, and were thus not all that well received.
I think part of the issue with the revamp is it was essentially abandoned.
They readied the old world for flying, great. But then never gave you a reason to go back there and interact with old zones other than a very rare quest or taking a trip for nostalgia. But even that, they ruined half the zones so not like you wanted to fly around Ashenvale and have that fire elemental scream at you.
I think the revamp and Cataclysm as a whole would been better received if all that work for was naught.
T11 was one of the most broken tiers of raiding the game has ever had, and not in a good way, half the encounters didn't work, and the ones that did were so badly tuned it was a farce.
you can tell you never played back then because PVP was anything but balanced, it was so imbalanced it required 3 mini patches of balance tuning passes in the first few weeks alone to tone down some of the bullshit burst dmg possible with the new mastery stat, and thanks to the whining little bitches that swarmed the pvp forums it was the first major patch that blizz nerfed and fully reworked frost mage mastery so it basically did fuck all in pvp because ppl complained so much about how 'OP' it was (in reality it wasn't, ppl just weren't capable anymore of situational awareness).
RBGs were flooded with bots and paid boost teams getting people to grand marshal/high warlord that MMR brackets were fucked beyond all repair, i lost a match once where my team had a rating of 2540, against a team with an average rating of 2300 because they had one person on the team who had literally never done a single BG before so had the 'hand holding' MMR backend shit on a team full of 2.5 rated boosters meaning that i lost so much MMR from that loss it would take me about 3-4 wins in a row to get back at which point i stopped playing the game mode and gave up on anything outside of casual PVP for the entire expansion.
you misspelled 'boring' and 'cookie cutter' talent trees, they removed all of the 'flavour' talents from the 'classic' era trees and now the only talents left were talents that were mandatory for making builds work and the talents that added 1-2% more crit/haste/*insert other stat here* bullshit, the illusion of choice.
the heroic dungeons weren't hard, they were well tuned, it's just that the vast majority of the playerbase were absolute potatoes when it came to PVE content that required them to use an ounce of grey matter to progress and as such it was forced into being nerfed so the random LFG auto queue pug group could complete them, which they weren't originally tuned for, it was obvious that they were meant for premade groups of people who knew how to play and that if you wanted 'easy' dungeons you did normal mode, but everyone had been conditioned to blitz through wrath dungeons because of just how out of whack ilvl scaling and player power had gotten during wrath that it became the new standard everyone expected.
hyjal was a nice levelling zone, i'll give you that, deepholme was a relatively new experience being 'underground' for the entirety of a zone was something never seen before, but vasj'ir was a fucking mess not to mention that it required a huge amount of tweaking from blizz to make sure people stopped getting motion sick from the under water effects, or getting other medical issues as a result of the under water perspective issues, uldum was just a meme of a zone with literally nothing there outside of getting rep for recipes and the prime location for archeology, twilight highlands was too massive of a zone with too little going on and once cleared had almost no replayability, the zones were a mess and levelling was a joke, i got to lvl 85 within 4 hours of playing on release night, it took the piss it took me longer to get my first epic item of the new expansion that it did to reach level cap, so no, levelling wasn't great and the zones were questionable at best.
First two tiers of cataclysm were the last time they made content without substantial time gating built in to keep people playing longer. They made it hard and hoped that was what was going to keep people playing.
When it didn't work, they went to time gating, so we got awful legendary quest lines for the next two expansions, LFR was added in at the end of Cata, they added in MoP dailies (then backed off when they were a complete failure).
To me, the end of "classic" wow comes at the start of MoP when LFR and the legendary questline basically replaced dungeons as catch up content, not Cataclysm. The last tier of Cata was the last time you could run dungeons for a few days, get a decent set of gear, and go raiding.