Bashing Cataclysm...why?

[owbu]

My main problem with cata was the lack a clear design direction.
The 5mans were great, but then were nurfed to the ground, because there was nothing else fore casuals to do. Fireland normalmodes were great, but when we started heroicmodes, those were nurfed to the ground too leaving only ragnaros as a brick wall. The DS 5mans were unbelievable easy, DS was harder, but had one of those debuffs, which made everything till spine boring, while spine was undoable (for my guild) without the whole debuff.
It was just trying to fit to all player types at once and made all types (not everyone) unhappy in the process.

That and the lack of content, which was the result of the new old zones (which were great, but no one did them, because dungeons were faster, since you didnt need to travel all over the world everytime you leveled) and potentially all the wasted time they put into catas big feature "path of the titans".

[Frozen Death Knight]

Cataclysm brought some decent changes to the game (rated BGs saved the game for me), but the problem is that the end game was not up to par in comparison to WotLK, which had tons of content and was also better designed simply because they could focus on developing for that continent. The old world revamp was necessary, but the problem is that this revamp proved costly when Blizzard simply was unable to work on the lvl 1-60 experience as well as creating about the same amount of end game as in previous expansions. They spread their resources too thin and it shows. It becomes even more apparent once you start looking up what plans they had for this expansion that never came into fruition.

It may not necessarily be horrendous, but the expansion got more misses and hits in the long run, which makes it still leave a sour taste in people's mouths when thinking back on the game at that point.

[ringpriest]

Quests:
Quest design has pretty much been linear and uphill. If you can overlook the phasing, the Cata questing was pretty much straight awesome. Some quests are better than MoP quests. I still remember grinning from ear to ear with the Vezax lookalike started casting "wedding crash". If you have a problem with questing in Cata, it's gotta be that you did the quests too many times or something. Flying with Flintlocke is a high point of this game.

I really, really hated Cata questing. I was used to being able to poke around, explore, do quests I liked and skip ones that I didn't. And then came Hyjal. A railroad of epic proportions. I couldn't do anything but stay on the tracks, and I didn't like them very much. I leveled my main in Cata with a mix of questing and instances. I don't remember any quests that made me grin. (I don't recall the two you're mentioning either, to be fair.) I do know that after leveling my main, I skipped questing on all my alts and leveled them via BGs.

[Osmeric]

I don't remember any quests that made me grin.

Mylune didn't make you grin?

[lupii]

Personally:
*The Disjointed and incomplete storylines of the zones, as well as their flow
*The centralization of services to Storm/Org, leaving the other citys all but abandoned
*The punishing early heroic dungeon content
*The severely slow flow of Archaeology
*The repetitive nature of DS (Went from LFR, to Raid, to Heroic Raid....personally)
*The fact half of the expansions storyline was outsourced to about 4 novels, leaving non-readers in the dark to the purposes of the content
*Getting Vortex Pinnacle 9 times out of 10
*Vashj'ir, might have been redeemed if they didn't also cut out its applicable raid content
*Alliance Gilneas storyline being given half of it to Horde side
*The overcomplication of many specs (Every warlock spec ever, IMHO. You try managing 12 things to do mediocre dps)
*4.1 Trolls...getting reworks of raids into dungeons and leaving us with a cliffhanger till MoP
*The lack of WOW factor with Deathwing...he showed up...once in Hyjal and once in Twilight Highlands
....I could continue...

I will say, howevere, that I enjoyed their reworks of old levelling content. It is just a shame that they sacrificed a lot of the end-game potential to do it.

[NoxiousHearthstone]

Every new expansion, people bash the previous one. Prepare to see the same thing occur after Mists of Pandaria is over. It's a neverending, self-feeding cycle that's bound to occur as older players get bored to tears of the game.

[hablix]

the end result was a lacking xpac but the idea and lore behind it is way better then what i am seeing in MoP which is killing the same old panda lore bosses which the panderans killed ages ago without any outside help ,
and while we are not doing that , we tend to thier farms while they sit and drink beer all day..

That actually sounds kind of... awesome. Dare I say, legendary?

Every new expansion, people bash the previous one. Prepare to see the same thing occur after Mists of Pandaria is over. It's a neverending, self-feeding cycle that's bound to occur as older players get bored to tears of the game.

A few people ITT have made similar comments, to which I reply: Cataclysm is different. One need look no further than subscription numbers for evidence.

[Ragashii]

Casterclysm made a lot of mistakes, you don't really have to be a genius to put two and two together. When you think about how many people actually raid in this game (not a lot) and then think about the ways they have to cap valor since they don't raid...It becomes obvious pretty quickly what the majority of the playerbase had to do instead. So when you put TWO instances in a separate que, and make them the only way to cap something...people burnout really quickly. They also remember how they got burned out because it became such a negative experience. People remember negative things for quite a while. Then you add in Firelands, which was a good raid but the amount of bosses left people little to do. That and well, for the people that didn't raid they still had to do those same two instances to cap. A lot of the bad rap casterclysm gets is from that period of time, at least in this posters mind.

[McNeil]

To this day, I still don't get why Deathwing simply killed Thrall and the Aspects before the Ultraxion fight. They had yet to charge the Dragon Soul, so Deathwing could've just striked while they were busy charging the thing. But why didn't he? He could've teamed up with Ultraxion.

The lore in Cataclysm was just bad...

[Darkelementz]

I liked the change in cata where it was more dependant on uptime compared to vanilla and BC (you have to spend all your time on the boss), but it did seem recycled. Reusing ony a THIRD TIME and nef a second was annoying. Spine was a really neat encounter, and madness was terribly boring and unfitting to be his end. I liked it but then again, all I did was raid stuff. Liked it more than wrath though

[Whiskra]

Cataclysm was great up until sometime February/March 2011. It had fairly challenging heroic dungeons (which were brilliantly designed I might add), decent raids where I finally felt like I couldn't take normal mode for granted, a feeling I hadn't felt since... I don't know when. Questing was ok, but still a step up from previous expansions.

Then it just fell flat on it's nose. Blizzard released the most half-assed patch since sometime in Vanilla with 4.1 which featured 2 old raids remade into 5 man heroics which were about half as challenging as the previous heroics. They did this with the promise to keep more siginificant updates and patches smaller and more frequent, a promise they certainly couldn't keep, which made players run Zul'gurub/Zul'aman and 6 months old raids during the whole spring and summer until Firelands sometime in september that year, which again was a decent, but extremely short raid.

At this point, Blizzard realized they have constantly been losing subs since February, and nothing they did could seemingly prevent it. They make content challenging as people have requested, and people still leave. They make the game easier, people still leave because the content is too lackluster.

So they pretty much decide "fuck it" and rush forth with the final raid and tier of the expansion, Dragon Soul in desperate hope of keeping the subs from plummeting, throwing all the work they'd potentially put in an Abyss raid out the window, and put that work force into Mists of Pandaria to get that expansion out as quickly as possible so that they could move on from the current disastrous expansion. Of course, Dragon Soul was one of the worst raids ever created, without any soul (heh) or real effort put into it, obviously half-assedly slapped together just to prevent customers from unsubbing. The only saving grace was the introduction of LFR, which kept, if I may say, a more "sheepish" part of the fanbase in the game for a while.

Still, Blizzard underestimated how much time they needed to finish MoP, and released Dragon Soul horribly preemptively, making it one of the longest tiers in the history of the game, at 9 months, without any extra raid like ICC had Ruby Sanctum to fill the void.

Just about everything that could go wrong with post-release production, went wrong. I don't know what Blizzard were thinking, but it's obvious something wasn't entirely right in the company at the time.

[RicardoZ]

I think cataclysm was just really misunderstood. People just did not get the concept of centering the first half of the expansion around revamping the leveling process. Cata was the first time I really leveled alts and did so with multiple toons across both factions and continents and had the time of my life seeing all the stuff they changed and updated the world to reflect the changes in lore.

The rest of the expansion certainly was not without its shortcomings (namely that horrid molten front daily grind and the way the Vashjir zone was designed), I can recognize that,but just for the fact that it was literally an entire redux and update of everything in Azeroth I have to rank it pretty high on my list of favorite expansions, just behind Wrath.

In the interest of fairness I should note that I have been unsubbed since a couple of months before mists came out so I have yet to fully experience pandaria,but from the outside looking in I'm not very impressed with it.

[Sivick]

Every poll and thread here where expansions are compared, Cata gets worst opinions or close to it.

Im really interested why ppl didnt like Cata.

For me, Cata wasnt best expansion (wotlk and tbc are), but still, I cant say it was bad. It had great 5-man heroics (loved DM prenerf), we got old world flying, rewamp of old world zones.
Only bad thing were raids, DS in particular, maybe cos it lasted too long.

What do you think?

The reason people don't like cata is because they spent so much time revamping the old world that they skimped out on making new content. Not that I don't appreciate the redone zones, but 5 high level zones?? and did you spend any time in them? No, you like most people did your quests and then sat in your capital city for the entire expansion. Also, as powerful as deathwing was.... he was a lame villian, especially when you compare him to illidan and arthas and the history they brought in. For a Warcraft 3 player like me, those were so epic. Cata was like "and suddenly a dragon appeared! Prepare to be Thrall's lacky for the rest of the expansion!" In the final fight on Icecrown Mr. Hero pally got frozen in a block of ice and you fought arthas down for the vast majority, AND you got to deal the final blow. In Cata's final fight you got to wack Deathwing on the knuckles and watch thrall shoot him in the chest. huzzah.

[announced]

cata wasnt a bad expansion.. but it wasnt great either. blizz spent so much time redoing questing zones.. which was needed but it took away time for quality raids.. the first patch were fine.. BWD BOT and TOT4W were decent.. then u get a mini patch with 2 heroic dungeons.. for hours on end.. very sad lol.. Firelands made up for it cause of it being awesome.. but 4.3 was pure garbage.. ds was a terribly designed raid.... the bosses were really stupid.. easy to kill... the mechanics made no sense and most fights were really bugged and still are to this day.. heroic spine was the worst being a pure mage stackfest.. . the whole DS raid was a huge disappointment. Deathwing was built up to be an amazing villain and he really didnt go anywhere.

the only good things that came outta cata were revamped zones, the firelands, and raidfinder (debatable)

[Zemiki]

I remember when Cata was released it was hell for healers. We had a hard time and people didn't quite understand. They'd try to facepull without giving us time to mana up and out casting times were so slow you were dead before you got a heal.
Then when we wiped they'd yell at us. I didn't dungeon till Blizz fixed it, I refused to get yelled at due to their incompetence.

[Blarglord69]

I didnt mind cata but i didnt like how lfr was dropped on dragon soul

[Repefe]

WotLK ... casual raids everywhere. Ppl building their reputation as pug raid leaders making weekly raids at certain time. Cata ... ppl getting destroyed in 5 mans. Healers suddenly going from spam spam spam to being mana starved 24/7. Raids are even worse ... no entry level raids. All the casual pugs from WotLK ... forget about them. Nobody can pug that shit.

[Deleted]

Cataclysm had SO. MUCH. POTENTIAL. It could've been thé best WoW expansion without a doubt, but somehow due to a trillion of things it just crashed and burned hard.

It introduced a lot of great things, it brought Azeroth up to speed with the current events and there was a lot of great lore... However, it was just... A waste honestly.
The main idea behind the revamp of 1-60 was to close and wrap up a lot of questions and quest lines, instead it did the opposite.

Sigh.

Regarding the revamp of the 1/60 zone, I think blizzards kinda kicked themselves in the butt.
Because the leveling was so fast and made easier (tons of xp in dungeons through the quest you no longer have to find, they added npc at the start of the instances for those quest), it was actually quite hard not to out level any zone you were questing in. Also LFG cut out a lot of travel time that would have been used for (re)discovering the new zones. And of course heirlooms.
A revamp like that combined with a slower leveling process (TBC or even Wrath, at least pre-heirloom) would have been magnificiant. Instead It would seem they put a lot of effort into something that dit not get the chance to have the exposure it deserved.

[Djuntas]

I still think the re-vamp to lvling, should have been like 1-30 inn vanilla, 30-60 inn TBC...or something like that. Lvling would make abit more sence then.

I personally stormed trough all the questes pre-cata launch for achivements. The zone's were pretty good, but it was clear it took away focus from end-game, witch lacked heavly once Cataclysme was like 3-4 months old.

[Deleted]

WotLK ... casual raids everywhere. Ppl building their reputation as pug raid leaders making weekly raids at certain time. Cata ... ppl getting destroyed in 5 mans. Healers suddenly going from spam spam spam to being mana starved 24/7. Raids are even worse ... no entry level raids. All the casual pugs from WotLK ... forget about them. Nobody can pug that shit.

Things are not what they seem ! It is not cata 5 mans that destroyed players, it was Woltk 5 mans that did it. In Wrath people learner to play easy mode :

- extra powerfull healer, can heal through 99% of any kinda aoe/damage bad players standing in bad stuff. Big heals toping players easily, mana issue ? lol what, who's mana an old friend of yours ?
- no more threat issue, no longer have to care about, focus fire, knowing what target is the tank target, using CC or even interrupt. Wrath of the lousy Aoe King
- overly easy raids like naxx and sartha no adds.
Guess what the pug that raided Sartha and Totc normal mode every weeks kinda failed at Ulduar (even in normal mode, even if outgearing the raid with t9).

And then Cata came. If cata would have been the expac right after TBC or vanilla, cata would have been a lot nicer even for noobs and newbies.