How did Cataclysm Change World of Warcraft part 2/2
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- čas přidán 8. 09. 2024
- The second part of my look back at Cataclysm.
Today we cover subjects like the PvE side, PvP, more expansion features and the areas to be criticised.
Enjoy.
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Music used, In order:
Vashj'ir Music: • Music of Cataclysm - V...
Mount Hyjal Music: • Mount Hyjal - Cataclys...
Stonecore Music: • Deepholm and the Stone...
Outro - A small track from Winterspring, "Winterspring 5"
www.youtube.co.... @27min
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Biggest disappointment was Gilneas. Beautiful city, amazing atmosphere. And it's only a brief starting zone *cry* Hoping one day they make it a real hub city or questing area.
Now that Sylvanas is gone, and the factions are supposedly at peace, they really should...
Actually true, I barely mentioned it in the video either, its just so forgettable unfortunately
Element Mill I hope that as well. Even worse, goblin starting zone does the same shit.
@@mistwrath5957 Oh, one thing that really bothered my "OCD" is that you can select the goblin zones on the map but they are shown as empty. And since there is no way to get there aside from the goblin starting quests, goblins are the only characters than can have a truly fully filled map.
Or a BG that would be nice too, but they seriously need to fix the PvP aspect of this game right now...
Cata heroics at launch were some of the most fun I've ever had in the game.
SkeletonBill shit was brutal
Apollo wow, good cata private server with a pretty decent community
I completely agree it was so much fun. Best 5 man content according to me.
Totally agree
Exactly it was best 5 man content ever :)
They did do the Fall of Lich King kind of monument though for Deathwing. there's a giant fragment of his chin hanging near the portals to the Cata zones and talking to the guy standing infront of it shows the cinematic.
God, early cata heroics where the best part of Wow for me. I still hated LFG, but those dungeons where so challenging. Grim batol was such a fun dungeon, all bosses where fun and hard. And uldum was the same, those were some good and fun mechanics.
They they nerfed everything into the ground. RIP.
The only good part about cata for me
YES! As a healer you went OOM almost every fight! Good times. I walked away two weeks into Dragon Soul
@@lesterdiamond12 I was healer aswell. Holy shit the amount of flame i got the first two weeks before people realized every healer now had to think about mana (which was barely a thing in WotLK).
Cataclysm was brilliant until people cried about it being too hard on heroic and ruined it
TheVertamin Early Grim Batol was crazy
Rip Mankirk’s wife 2004-2010
F
*Mankrik
But for real, who marries someone called 'Beaten Corpse?'
@I will make operational deflector shields legal! whoooooooosh
I'm one of those weirdos who liked the old world revamp. It made leveling alts so much faster since I could follow a pretty straightforward questing path and experience the story of the world after Deathwing broke it. One of the first titles I earned after Cataclysm dropped was Loremaster.
faster != better
@@kevintyrrell7409 Not always, but I liked the zone-wide storylines that added enough quests to get you through.
I enjoyed fishing for stonescale eels at Azshara (The Bay of Storms). Removing it sucked because my main can't return for a visit.
some of the zone had really awesome questlines, stone talon for horde was really great, and azshara had an actual quest line there.
People can't let go of nostalgia, but it's not true of just the game, it's true for too many things in the real world. They want to cling to some weird nostalgia, and touching it in anyway is seen has "end of the world" bad.
@@kevintyrrell7409 Some of the zones were god awful before the rework. And that;s not counting the levelling deadspots a normal player would run into. Hands up who actually did the Pre-AQ Silithus questline.
The rework smoothed a lot of the jank from early WoW.
I started near the end of BC so Wrath was my main stomping ground and while it was active I *think* I did every possible quest on my main from vanilla to LK (with one exception, I never finished Shadowmourne!).
Before Cataclysm there was so much leftover stuff that very few people did (or even knew about/remembered). There were some strange things: old level 60 quests in Eastern Plaguelands telling you to kill stuff in Naxxramus, cloth donation NPCs for the AQ war effort in each capital city, silithyst PvP in Silithus, old quests for dungeon tier sets and the amazing quest line to open the gates of AQ that sent you around the world (summoning a raid boss dragon into Moonglade was amazing). Soloing Azuregos or MC felt like an achievement! On top of this there were class specific quests: the Paladin and Warlock mounts, the special items for priests and hunters in MC etc. The old raid version of ZG going was very sad for me.
Yes, it was all old content but I missed it when it was gone. Cataclysm made the levelling experience more interesting again but it felt like we lost something.
Biggest reason I hated Cata. Completely removed a massive amount of old content and attainable achievements from the game.
Heroics were overtuned? Hell no! They were amazing. Strategy, CCs, communication, it was amazing. You actually had a sense of accomplishment after you completed it. I believe, that’s how heroics are suppoused to be.
They were very doable with a group of friends but they were definitely over-tuned if you were goin the LFD route
Who the fuck cares about "a sense of accomplishment" from killing trash?
Special little snowflakes, I swear.
Early Cata heroics were great! It felt like an achievement when you finished them.
One thing that was not mentioned was how much easier the levelling was. Character tuning was completely different. Where before you had to be careful when questing so not to pull too much, now everything died quickly and did little damage. This was where you just gathered up a bunch of mobs and aoe'd them down, then ran to the next back. Some liked it because it made everything quicker. I felt like it removed all sense of achievement, especially since questing was so much more streamlined as well. Run to quest hub a, pick up all the quests, run to the area, kill all the mobs, run back, run to next area. Again everyone is different but to me it felt automated and unengaging. Cata was when I quit WoW the first time.
I absolutely loved cataclysm. I remember when firelands raid was coming out. And I so wanted to get into that. I remember having to do the heroic dungeons for gear. And they where tough. I remember to even be considered for a raid spot. I needed to have 346 gear. Which what the heroic dungeons dropped. So I had to grind them like crazy to make sure every slot had heroic dungeon gear. And then when Zul'Amon and Zul'Gurub came ou and you get 353 gear. You knew you would get chosen for a raid if you had item level 353 instead of 346. So I had to grind those dungeons aswell. And they where crazy tough. But by doing these tough dungeons. You learned game mechanics and some raid awareness. Which helped you tremendously in a raid. I loved it. I felt such a sense of accomplishment completing the heroic dungeons, especially Zul'Amon and Zul'Gurub. The firelands raid was so awesome. That definitely was a great time for me in wow.
Thank you very much for the content mate, my cat is very sick and this is a much welcome distraction
That really sucks. I hope it gets well soon ❤️
I hope your cat makes a speedy recovery!
Please take it to a vet, and I hope it gets better soon
@@levv7258 we just got back from the vet, he fell down 4 stories and broke both his ankles. We paid for his operation and now he's in recovery thankfully
Hope your cat feels better soon mate
When LFR came out i was a huge fan of it, why you might ask, I was in a dead realm, on the under-represented faction, and in that realm and side, there were only 2 raiding guilds, and they weren't looking for new raiders ever really, Plus, I was in a guild since i had started way back in wrath, and it felt like betrayal leaving then, but then one day in patch 4.3, i realm transfered to a high pop realm and oh boy, was it a change
So I'd say that, LFR in Cataclysm actually offered something to people in dead realms with no guild, like me, the chance to actually raid, I remember when the first wing came out i completed it 8 times, because it felt like raiding
I was subbed from classic through cata, and I have to say, some of my fondest memories are from cata. My dad and 2 brothers came back and we rerolled through all the new content. Then, we focused primarily on pvp at end game - had a blast! The pvp meta in Cata was definitely my favorite of all time.
I already wrote this a few videos back, but I'm gonna say it again: I liked everything about Cataclysm and I think people make it out to be way worse than it actually was
I loved everything about cata with the exception of dragon soul, the 3 dungeons before it were epic tho
Cata made me quit wow in few weeks
@@nakki123 Why?
@Igerus Absolutely agreed. I mean the second half of Dragon Soul was mediocre, but still 1000x times than the entirety of Trial of the Crusader(the worst raid ever in WoW). Otherwise, Cata had the same problem as WoD and that's lack of content and content draught. 4.1 had no Raids and 4.3 went for very long, still, it had 1x more tier than WoD.
I quit during Cata, can't remember exactly why possibly because a lot of my friends quit the game at that time too, but I did quite enjoy the first raid tier.
You forgot that they cut so much content from cata. Dragon soul got rushed out! They had plans for the 4 elements raid, fire was firelands, Air was that alakir raid, but they did not manage to make the earth or water raid!
The now 4 levels of Raid difficulty we have has caused 1 absolutely insane issue for Blizzard: player power increasing by up yo 12x (Legion from Launch normal dungeon gear to Mythic Antorus gear at the End) and in BFA, roughly 10x. That is not sustainable. To put that into perspective, the average DPS/HPS increase in recent expansions is equal to what it was from AQ 40 in Classic to 25HC ICC in WotLK (-the ICC raidbuff). That is obsurd and unsustainable and they will just need to keep number squishing every expansion or every 2'nd expansion.
I don’t play retail, could u give an example of an average dung geared player dps and one mythic geared. For comparison.
The first number squish was the moment the real WoW died imo. Seeing 500 crits after seeing 350k crits was heartbreaking and horrible, and all the past content became a joke even while leveling. The intent was good but they just could not implement it in a decent way. Also we went from 100k hp at the start of MOP to 500k hp at the end, there was no real need to do that even with so much different iLVL content.
Yeah gear inflation is insane atm. Start of BFA 10k dps you are doing good .. now at the end people are literally hitting millions with corruption and doing 200k+ openers. Each patch is like a hard gear reset
@@WillEmmo I do 30 k dps and that's considered low end and I have pretty good gear 457 on my WW monk. First time entering Nyalotha on LFR no less, boom! getting kicked immediately because I'm one of the lowest dps with 36-40 k dps. I mean what the hell man!
@@WillEmmo If I remember well, legion was the worse. In legion prepatch everyone had around 50k hp, hitting max level it got up to around 200k, by the end of legion the average hp was like 1 or 2 million.
man spine of deathwing was so hard back then....if you saw someone with the full firelands gear set you knew they were the REAL DEAL. love the content brother
There was a lot of good stuff in Cata, I think it's unfairly maligned because of the Dragon Soul patch which was a lousy raid and introduced LFR. The rest of the expansion was pretty good.
I bet Warlords video will last for 2 minutes if we take all the content in consideration
I remember doing a BoT pug in Cata a few months before the release of Firelands, I’d done very limited pugging in late Wrath but it was that BoT pug in Cata that got me into raiding… we managed to clear the whole place and I got a ton of gear because other puggers couldn’t use it, including the axe off of Cho’gall and I was hooked. Come Firelands I started raiding regularly with my guild and did so up through Legion. Great memories, great times and great friends. It makes me sad that I’ll likely never see that again, though I may with the various Classic xpacs, I’ve largely abandoned retail and I’ve been enjoying my warrior in TBC and I’m definitely looking forward to Wrath and ABSOLUTELY want Classic Cataclysm.
dungeoun heroics were the best in cata, EVERYONE had to think about what they were doing , tank ran in .... wipe. dps not cc ... wipe . healer not dispeling ... wipe. it was awsome, hate it when it got nerfed
they were still awesome after the nerf and come on, Tier11 and Tier12 were epic two of the best tiers of all time, I'd say better than Tier 13, Tier 14, Tier 16, Tier 10 and of course Tier 9(but what isn't better than Trial of the Crusader, the worst raid ever), better than Uldir and Emerald Nightmare as well.
Vortex Pinnicle and Throne of the Four Winds are some of my favorite instances appearance wise. It is a real shame that those two instances are the only time we see the Skywall.
Oh oh! I can't wait for you to talk about Mists! Mists of Pandaria is to this day my favorite expansion and I remember my time questing, listening to the music and just absorbing the rich lore fondly :)
Loved the world changes. Was a nice change of pace after Vanilla questing and a lot of the zones felt a lot tighter and streamlined as the quests flowed one into the other. Was easy as heck to level up characters but I think I got distracted easily and never 'finished' this expansion. Did nearly all the heroics but had little time to do any raiding.
This was one of the expansions that unfortunately I felt like there was a lot to do but I didn't have all the time in the world to do it all.
Just having a statue is not good enough because there's more story in a raid than just the end cinematic. Also Blizzard may have thought 50% of the content going into a patch only being seen by 1% of players was a bit silly. I don't see what the problem is with having LFR next to all the other difficulties.
Stonecore H was a nightmare.
Yeah, but it made an impact enough for you to remember forever. Did its job 💚🌻 plus...slabhide mount
Ozruk the Tankbreaker!
These videos are so good! Lots of great memories here. Thanks a lot Willie!
Two things which weren't mentioned. 1. "reclaiming" the gnome and troll city in the prepatch which never came to fruition. I was total expecting a Gnomergan city and a troll city on the troll islands but all it turned into was a new starting quest are for those races. Quite the let down.
2. This may apply to other classes and class archetypes but I know from a healer perspective : Healing was flipped on it's head. Especially for paladin and resto shamans. I was a paladim, I went from having 4 heals or so that I knew well (FoL, HL, BoL, HS) to having 7 or 8 (New ones being Divine Light, Light of Dawn, Holy Radiance from what I can remember). FoL was reworked to be mana INEFFICIENT, a ability I loved.. HL wasn't our big hit hard spell it was the moderate "spam me for efficiency" spell. Then, the stat priority was different needing mastery and spirit when in Wrath I wanted huge amount of int. And the holy power, I just went from a simple class I knew well to a class I knew nothing about and it really turned me off.
Cata was just too ambitious, too much change, especially for people who knew their leveling routes and knew their classes well as they were before Cata. To have all that built up knowledge lost and to feel like the home you grew up in was gone (O.G. Westfall is BIS) was too much for a lot of people including myself. Cata had great lore, but I was a TBC baby and didn't know the characters. Now I do thanks to classic but a lot of these people were a big "?" from me. Deepholm was awesome!
A subscription absolutely should guarantee access to everything in the game. Especially in world where the vast majority of games don't have any such thing.
My opinion on LFR is exactly "I don't mind" :D
As a father of a baby I really don't have time for organized raiding, but LFR can still be fun once or twice, and now in BFA there were actually some fights which were sort of challenging this way, especially the two in Crucible of Storms (one of my favorite mini raids). I don't think it really hurts the game, especially since the gear you get is so low ilevel that it's barely worth it aside from experiencing it once, and maybe transmogs.
@@Houndguardian always wonder why people on one hand ,,dont have time to play" on the other hand plays mmorpg, like in the name of mmorpg you have at least two hints, that this game will be time consuming.
Then demand to change the game, so they dont need to waste hundreds of hours to play the game.
Not in this certain situation, but overall I often hear from same people, that WoW dont feel same and its sad that they are getting items for free.
On the topic, what is wrong with LFR/LFG? It kills MMO in MMORPG, you just click one button and get ported with team to instance. There is no need to talk, no need to interact with other players. I had fights, where through whole instance I was the only one to talk and some dps even said to stop typing.
There jsut are soo many great RPG, that you can play alone and time won't be a problem. ekhm, Witcher, ekhm
@@Houndguardian They play WoW because they enjoy it. What makes you entitled such to police peoples reasons for playing a game?
@pierre persson you are the one screaming insults on left and right.
What is the point of playin mmo when your interaction with other people is literally same as if they were NPC.
What differ mmo game from single player from your POV, when you port to instance, have 4 NPC's that spam abilities. Sometimes you get better NPC's, sometimes you get worse. But overall all you interact with people is action house. Then what is the point of playin mmo rather than normal rpg?
AS LONG AS THEY ARE THE MAJORITY AND THEY BUY STUFF FROM BLIZZ THEN THEY GET TO DECIDE.
ye, thats why we got less and less acc after WotLK (introducing LFG), and patch 4.3 is called as one of the worst patches in game :)
And dont be suprised, when the game will be made literally for chinese marketplace, cuz hey, there is over 1 bilion of potencial players
Alexander But essentially, all LFR gives is transmog and tokens for essences, there is no gear inflation with that. The ilvl is so low (iirc on par with heroic dungeons) that it’s not optimal for gearing at all, nearly all other source is better and faster, even world quests. I get that it “kills the social/immersion aspect” to get instantly, but LFD already opened that can of worms.
Super excited for the Mists section. I was so down on that expansion but it ended up saving my love of WoW.
MOP is the most underrated expansion imo, aside from the linear leveling zones in Pandaria the other content was decent and diverse. And even tho we had like 1.5 years of SoO, I still enjoyed the 100th run in it. It was an amazing tanking experience, challenging as healer and dps. (Normal or HC ofc). I think it's just mainstream to hate on it so ppl just do it. I have played all through MoP without a shred of regret, not thinking at all about unsubbing. When WoD started I immediately would have unsubbed after 3 months, if not for the WoW Tokens that my lil toons got for free afking in the garrisons..
@@CarKiller92 I’m so jealous of you, I couldn’t convince my parents to spend fifteen a month back then so I played like 5 months total in mop and never did major end game content, then I quit a month into wod because it felt so horrible to play, now I just wish I could have played my favorite game more before wod ruined it
@@TheMastermind729 hehe, I felt like that about TBC and WOTLK, only managed to play those on private servers.
@@CarKiller92 except you had great expansions to play, I was left with WoD… and then Legion (which people like but I don’t because it pruned classes even worse than wod)
Can't wait for Cata Classic. If they make some changes such as no LFR and keeping hard dungeons, it could be incredible.
They could also not implement flying in the old zones. After the overhaul there is ample flight points and quests are less spread out. There is literally no reason to have flying in Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdom.
Early cataclysm and classic have been the two times i enjoyed wow the most. The heroic dungeons werent TOO HARD. They were fuckin perfect. Hard, impossible even at first. It felt rewarding when you manage to clear one of the harder ones. And the heroic achievments were amazing both fun, hard and rewarding.When everyone cried and blizzard nerfed it to shit.
And the first raid tier in cataclysm was AMAZING all three raids were cool and fun in their own way. I still think back to my first al'akir kill ON NORMAL - that shit was pretty tough for a pretty young me.
After everything got nerfed and everything (outside of raiding) was trivial i quit the game shortly before firelands. I came back for one week to check out raid finder and dragonsoul realized we killed deathwing with 1/3 of the raid just standing afk to get loot and i quit the game again and never looked back (untill classic at least).
Cataclysm was the last expansion i played and in the first few months for me personally it was the best the game has ever been.
I hope classic will continue all the way to cataclysm because i never managed to clear the entire first raid tier, and i feel like i missed out on firelands. And if classic continues after that i will probably just let everyone else enjoy that.
As someone who runs raids for the lore, there's a big difference between being involved in a fight (even an easy, watered down version), and interacting with a plaque on a statue.
i made my own comment about people being elitist assholes for wanting LFR to not exist. i'm glad you get to see the game, just because i raid heroic doesn't mean you shouldn't get to see it, even a watered down version of it ;). keep enjoying your stuff and fuck anyone who acts like they have an exclusive right to aspects of the game you paid to see.
Honestly great series for someone like me who is first playing WoW for Classic and is wondering what the very convoluted feeling mess the "normal" game is.
I felt the dungeons were just fine at the start, the issue was the players. Everyone still had 'go go go' mentality from how easy Wrath was, no one wanted to stop, learn mechanics, and learn how to better themselves. I got into plenty of good pugs that took their time and those are some of the best dungeon runs I've ever had in WoW. Nothing like what we have today.
Cata was my favorite xpac. It still had the button bloat the dungeons were fun. But the best part was my guild did everything together
Cataclysm was my favorite expansion, Death Wing is my favorite character
I loved wrath the most but man some of the spells and abilities cata and on were amazing.
Yes, finally someone who actually knows and understands how awesome Cata was, but also knows the flaws, I mean I watched your first video and I don't feel like repeating myself, but Cata was excellent, but had 2x major weaknesses: Content Draught in 4.1 and 4.3, with just 3 tiers and the second half of Dragon Soul being mediocre.
Otherwise, Cata has the best class design, tied with WoD(and potentially shadowlands), Tier 11 and Tier 12 are some of the best raids of all time, PVP was awesome, gear was awesome. Dungeons were awesome not only because of the challenge of Heroic, but in general, they were a step up mechanically and gameplay-wise from WotLK, same with Raids a big step up in mechanics and gameplay.
LFR IMO is good, but they use it wrong. LFR should NOT be part of the progression towards Normal and Heroic(and Mythic) Raids. It should be for casual players and should go like this:
Casual players: Normal Dungeons(and Heroic in Retail) -> LFR
Non-Casual players in Cata: Normal Dungeons -> Heroic Dungeons -> Normal Raid -> Heroic Raid
Non-Casual Players In Retail: Normal Dungeons -> Mythic Dungeons -> Mythic+ 0-6 -> Normal Raid + Mythic 7-10+ -> Heroic Raid -> Mythic Raid.
Though I'd say that they should remove Heroic Dungeon and Raids and in Retail as they are pretty much just a number's game, as since 7.2 MOST Heroic Raid Bosses have either literally had the same mechanics and higher numbers, or had 1-2 extra watered-down mechanics that barely make a difference and is just a gateway to Mythic.
They should remove Heroic and buff the numbers of Normal Raid difficulty by 5-7%, or add in the hard mode that was in Ulduar that will give the same ilvl gear, but with gem sockets, whereas Regular Normal won't give socketed gear.
Heroic Dungeons are well pointless in Retail.
It's here! My prayers has been answered. Time to watch this :D . It wasn't the day after, but i'll take it.
I feel the 3 last dungeons were a nice idea, to see the war of the ancients was cool, also the end of time was an intresting idea of fighting against faction leaders. So since one of the bosses was Sylvanas that dungeon now its story might have a seudo retcon?
Warrior pvp back in cata was the funnest thing I’ve ever played
You forgot to mention that Cata was the xpac that expanded the heirloom system and now seeing twinks breaking low level bg's was a more frequent thing
Plus it was the first expansion to include F2P to level 20. Which made all these level 20 twinks gear themselves to the teeth for bg
@@asAbsolute yup the starter edition was my first wow experience
Exclusivity is a necessity for a game that breeds competition. You could not have said it better. But I expected you to say that during WOTLK already :)
I’m actually gonna say this. I feel as much as I praise ghostcrawler comments on the game and his philosophy, I think he was wrong about heroics. People will say they love the actual difficulty but all it did was made people quit because if people aren’t having fun, they ain’t gonna stick around. Now compound it with class design, some leave the expac entirely. But even then, what ultimately killed cata was the overtuned raids and lack of gear options. Before, the raids in wrath were doable with a casual guild. In cata? It ultimately killed a lot of guilds because some fights were just that difficult because you didn’t have the right gear. Which leads to one of the biggest problems affecting all versions of wow starting in wrath: lack of gear options. Simply put: in order to get gear you had to do dungeons and raids. The fastest way? Doing dungeons and raids. But what about rep and professions? Well for rep, it was better to do dungeons anyway if they had a tabard attached. If they didn’t, you had to do dailies. And even then, the gear you got is not enough to make a full set. Which is fine but imagine for a second: you worked hard all this time to get some really nice gear and it doesn’t mean jack shit. Bad enough to hand out gear but it’s awful when your hard work means nothing if the raids and dungeons were overtuned to hell. It’s this dynamic as to why cata had a huge drop off in subs. They catered to the hardcore and the game suffered for it. That’s why they had to make LFR because they went too far. One point I forgot to mention was the focus on collective effort rather than the individual. It’s always a balance and going far in either direction hurts and cata forced it in the collective effort. Guild perks, harder heroics, the fact that getting malestroms was an effort in of itself, and that progression of ones character came to a screeching halt because of the two things I mentioned before has hurt Cata as a whole. Thankfully, mists solved so many issues with the game that I regard it as the best expansion of wow. Yes even more than wrath.
oh cata the expansion were i started to pvp seriously, so much love, so much memories! i miss pvp
Legendaries in Cata were the best. You got chosen to do your quest first, which meant if you had one, you were chosen by your guild/raid team. Until the end where most mages had one. Rarer items are better because they mean something. If everyone has a legendary its just another piece of loot.
I'm playing on a really close blizzlike server (wotlk 3.3.5) server with a 12k (max pop) population 24/7. (If you donate 10 euros you can skip que.)
The PvE and PvP is the best out of all the expansions in my opinion.
How blizzard even thinks that the boss mechanics was ignored is beyond me, Even if you are BiS some earlier raids like ToC 10-25 heroic can be a pain in the ass. Also i can't say that "the fights all felt the same" is 100% correct. First wing of ICC is pretty tank and spank. After the first wing it gets really interesting.
Now i can see how "Equipment was replaced and forgotten to quickly" is a thing in wotlk. But they have to put some blame on themselves, if Bosses didn't drop tons of BoE that can be sold on auction houses players would have to be forced to grind through heroic dungeons then naxxramas etc.
Cata dungeons were the best! I wish dungeons were that hard now
I played healer for the first time during Cata Heroic dungeons and it was some of the most fun I ever had playing WoW, tbch. I really wish people hadn't shit on Heroics as much as they did at the time. They were hard, but rewarding. I never enjoyed content just for its gameplay as much as I did then. Ulduar and ICC are still the real crown jewels, but theres a lot of scenery and lore reasons that made those cool.
Nice vids these, I loved Cata. Will you be doing a PVE DPS Tier list at some point?
Ah man, the Tol Barad exploits. I remember server forums being used to set up the rotation schedule and to plan out when to stand on the bridge in order to help mitigate the lag and ensure as many people as possible got the rewards.
As I mentioned in a comment on your Wrath video, I stopped play WoW one or two months into Cata. The class changes to my Hunter was so hard for me to get used to. But the thing that broke me was the daily zone Tol Barad, I simply stopped one day and thought to my self, why am I doing this, if I'm not having fun, so I took a long break from WoW, came back in Legion hit max level got bored again, and quit.
I have no interest in playing BFA, but Shadowlands might bring me back, but the one thing I hope for is TBC, that would get me back into the game 100%
You hyped for tbc now?
@@Bobobox95 Yes, very much!
I don’t really remember people cheezing tol barad. I had a great time with it
Everything before 4.3 was fantastic to me, except for two things: First, I would have liked to see the water counterpart to the Firelands raid (would have been nice in that tier to have another raid). Second, I didn't like Tol Borad as much as Wintergrasp. With 4.3, it added LFR and a raid tier with reused assets and one of the worst end of expansion bosses ever. Comparing it to ICC in the previous expansion and there is no comparison. It's such a shame it ended the way it did... to this day it has some of my favorite heroic dungeons, and it was nice to have challenge brought back on top of the fact that most classes became more complex to play. I've since gone back and played about every iteration of WoW on private servers, and I think Cata gets a lot more hate than it deserves.
LSD2 (lock, resto shaman, boomkin) with double legendary staff.
Triple dps (ret Pala, rogue and hunter)
Yay...
Also double legendary rls
Oooh gurthalak voice of the deeps how I miss thee.
lfr version was better than most normal weapons lol that damn tentacle did crazy damage
Cata pvp was sick. Even if there was no real end game content during the last patch, pvp was so good that i played it all along, with some pve. The expansion i enjoyed the most for pvp
Lfr was great. Its like the best possible learning tooling. Gives you a chance to experience raids on alts without just burning your lockout. I loved tanking lfr because i could experiment with gearsets or techniques with 24 randoms, that i could then bring to my proper guild raid. Rip
I hope they add mythic timewalking or something so we can experience these old dungeons the way they were
LFR ruins the game for casual players in ways they don't fully appreciate, it's a true case of "you think you want it, but you don't". I remember when I first started playing WoW back in TBC, a friend of mine who already played the game saying that he "didn't think he'd ever see Illidan". That was so cool to me, the idea to me that there was something out there so epic and demanding that only the most elite would ever even get to SEE it firsthand, it really got me interested in the game. It goes without saying that this feeling is completely missing from the game these days. Yes there are mythic exclusive boss phases sometimes but that's nowhere near the same level of coolness.
obtaining the legendary staff in cata was good fun, got it on my warlock in Dragon soul but the quest chain was good fun
I feel like the cata heroics being just below TBC heroics in difficulty was PERFECT considering how well equipped each class was in Cata compared to TBC.
Edit: remember, aoe no longer broke sheep and hunter traps so cc was infinitely easier in Cata compared to TBC
As far as world design I think Vanilla is great aside from quests that made you walk literally 1 million yards.
TBC was weird because outlands felt super disjointed from the rest of the world but outlands itself was a great experience.
WotLK blizzard really fucking nailed the world design here, Northrend fit with the Vanilla world perfectly and was an excellent experience on its own too.
Cata the new Cata zones were fantastic but like many others, the redesign of the Vanilla zones and quests left me feeling alienated from the experience of the game that I had grown to love over the several years I played. I stopped subscribing to the game the same day MoP was announced. There's a heavy dip in subs near the end of Cata and I am partly responsible. I respect the ambition of what they were going for but at the end of the day it was a net negative for me personally. At that point in the game I think many subscribers were just enjoying the comfort and familiarity of the game and shaking up some of the games most iconic zones the way they did turned off a lot of the "dedicated casuals".
Early cata was pretty tough. Last time any challenge was in WoW outside of pvp. WoW became as one button win as diablo is.
The Cata 5mans weren't hard because of the tuning. The TBC HCs were tuned harder. What made Cata 5mans hard, was that they were the first 5mans to have proper tactics, where every boss was a "mini raidboss" with many abilities and stuff to do, as opposed to Classic/TBC/WotLK 5mans where the bosses were tank and spank 99% of the time.
Cata class design is still to this day tied with MoP for best class design ever, and the raids were all fantastic. I do think Dragon Soul is remembered worse than it actually was aswell. Everybody was so disappointed with the 2 Deathwing fights, and the lazyness of Blizzard making the 4.3 patch (the entire raid was just reused assets, both the evironment and bosses). However, once you look past that, all of the other bosses had the same "Cata quality" as T11 and T12 in terms of actual mechanics and boss design.
If Firelands had a few more bosses of the same quality, and Dragon Soul (and 4.3 in general) had some actual unique art and models, AND the Deathwing fights had been done slightly better, Cata would easily have been one of the best expansions ever.
I have always said that Cata only lacked quantity. In the quality department, it set a new standard. Everything they did (except for the two Deathwing fights), was so well designed, and made WotLK as a whole look like the work of amateurs in comparison.
Can't wait for more of these!
Can't wait for cata classic
I thought cata heroics were a high point! So hard and yet fun and rewarding! No dungeon journal? Try communicating with your party/guild/realm for mechanics and tips!!!
Yes absolutely, I miss going blind into dungeons and raids... nowadays it's the biggest minus of raids... The whole raid has to be spoiled to me, so that I learn the mechanics beforehand... like why? :/
MoP and Legion where the pinnacle for me. I enjoyed bfa simply because of the worgen graphic update and the early story like kul tiras wasn't too bad but then they went full fever dream brought in the old gods when initially it was a horde and alliance conflict but now the horde and alliance is teaming up I think....yeah bfa was the death nail for any reason for world pvp. Shadowlands was the coffin being buried, horde and alliance BFFs for life now and that's cool I guess
Was a holy paladin in most of my career, went into Cata expecting to have about the same experience I had in WoTLK. I vastly underestimated the barriers to entry in Cataclysm and struggled massively. When I got to the first raid, even the basic mode, just the first boss was brutally overpowering and just a few heals wiped my character out.
Cata turned me off from the game enormously and I almost never went back or attended another raid. Cataclysm totally upset the way that I expected the game to work and I was turned off until I cautiously gave MOP a try. And was disappointed and annoyed even harder.
the one thing I want to know is if something is grey for you or you a god to it the one thing I hate about retail the most is the moment something turns Grey you go from doing your average damage of like 5000 damage on a fireball to suddenly doing hundreds of thousands of damage with a fireball I hate having God Mode turned on right now in wrath if I wanted to I could go to deadmines and one pull the entire thing if I'm not careful I could die in retail if I wanted to I could go to the last expansions hardest raid one pull the entire thing then leave for the whole day doing IRL things and come back several hours later and press one button arcane explosion and the entire raid will be dead I hate that everything is so unbelievably easy except for the place that is at your lvl
I feel like LFR in cata wasn't that bad, pandaria is when it got WAY out of hand.
Man I miss valor points. Such a simple and easy and fun system
I'm actually surprised you didn't mention (what is for me the true death of WoW) that happened in Firelands. The MASSIVE 25% nerf to all bosses except Raggy. I still remember we had just killed the first boss on HC before this change, the following reset we went on to 1 shot 4 more HC bosses and within 3 weeks were farming 6/7 bosses but we never got raggy...10,000 guilds were on Raggy HC but only 1000 managed to get a kill. I loved Firelands, but this nerf made it horrible cause it was so boring and not a challenge
Ideas for fixes to the negatives of Cata
The world revamp could be fixed with a character who can toggle it on and off for leveling in every major city for those who want to level in the old zones
Talents i don't think they need a fix (its so rare to see people with a weird spec)
Flying this would be fixed with the toggle of the old/new world
Dungeon HC difficulty that's not a problem with the skill level in classic even with HC+ (maybe ad a barrier to entry for HC other than just ilvl)
Deathwing fight isn't going to be that bad because the patch wont last for that long in classic
Guild/Goldfarm well remove the passive gold?
LFR just don't implement it (possibly give the gear in HC+ dungeons in the last patch
its just some fast ideas and thoughts so don't destroy me in the comments XD
I watch these videos, and I find myself saying "yeah what a cool addition" has turned in to "ugh, I remember when they added _that_"
I stopped playing around Cata but it feels like it was a very good expansion. I even discovered Totalbiscuit via his videos on cata beta.. Rip :(
Great series. Interested to hear what you say about MoP since it my favorite and it gets a ton of hate because pandas. The pvp was great in my opinion. Look forward to it
Not sure on your point about a spectator mode, If I wanted to watch a raid i can go to youtube. If i want to play a raid, but dont have the time to comit to a guild that does full raids, I can do LFR. The problem isn't with the addition of LFR, its with the rewards for doing it so that it isnt worth the time for full raiders, but also so there is a draw for part time players and isnt just dead content. I think its a problem that they have been wrestling with since LFR was released and it might never have a satisfactory answer. My 2 cents: maybe some transmog skins of gear that actually drops from the raids, or if there is a guaranteed mount from the raid then LFR players could get that for finishing it, or a recoloured version of either of these?
Cataclysm was a lot of fun and most of the people who talk shit on it are the same ones who talked shit on WoD, Legion, and BfA. They’ll also talk a mess of shit on SL even though they’ll be the ones spending an unhealthy amount of time on it
Cata changed my life and it also made me quit retail wow for good.
We certainly don't need 'tourist mode' anymore. That's what Twitch is for!
I need cataclysm classic to become real so I can finally play this game again forever. I HATE the private servers. Plus, it's not based in America so it's tough to actually progress a toon there as far as raiding
One thing you got wrong about wotlk u dont get locked if u zone in you get locked if you kill a boss and if you group with a group that killed a boss you can choose to leave
Wait a minute. Was that warrior pvp clip tolodk? I haven't seen that name in so long
Cata didnt have a pruning problem and the dumb talent system we have in retail today. Way better balanced than MOP with their OP monks
This expansion was such a freaking holy crap...
20:36 "A subscription doesn't entitle you to everything in the game." I 1000% Disagree, and I think more disagree with that than do. When Money is involved you are allowed to be entitled to content you've paid for. Being locked out of, having content removed from, etc. Is a slap to players who pay and try to achieve things and fall short just to have it yanked away and removed from the game. Games are meant to be fun, not synonymous to real world strife. You should never feel punished playing a game or not being able to play during short brief periods (even when you still pay). Exclusivity breeds competition only when it is relevant. When it is no longer relevant, unlock it to other players to try to earn. Especially when it is story based content like MoP Story quest for Legendries removed completely.
Honestly, I miss the functionality of glyphs, the reforging, and my goddamn Kill Shot! I will never forget that wonderful skill, Blizzard, never!
Cata had 5 raids just like wotlk. kids still yelling "No End Game!"
What was the prot/holy/retri pala build at the end of WotLK that you were talking about? I have seemed to misplaced the memory of such thing
MOP.... Hmmmm that was when I finally quit WOW. IT JUST WASN"T RIGHT!
The first strike was the "Lycans". I was killing them in DarkShire, now they are my friends?
I would love to hear the LORE about that!
Best Expansion by far!
loved the heroics in cata too bad both my main classes became unfun for me to play so stopped after a month or so
man lfr gultharak was better than most weapons u could get unless u had the heroic or normal version of it
Cata heroics is why I quit for several expansions. Also I was main war which was garbage at the beginning.
Those Ghostcrawler comments aged very well.
Blizzard continued to do everything they shouldn't according to Ghostcrawler and the result is pretty much exactly what he predicted:
i) most of the raid difficulties are being face rolled and outgeared from the start
ii) mechanics don't matter (in most difficulties) because it's really hard to die and even if a few people die it's not like there are any tight dps checks to meet
iii) gear becomes meaningless if the acquisition of the gear is trivial and the useful life of an item until it gets replaced is days instead of weeks or months
As far as Cata heroics are concerned, I think WillE got it the wrong way around. They weren't too hard. They were a sign that LFD should be removed from the game then and there, because Blizzards assumptions (see Ghostcrawler comments) were obviously wrong: They couldn't just ramp up the difficulty and expect that players would adapt. The system would fail (no one queues anymore because the reasonable players play in guild groups) so the content of any pve queuing system always needs to be braindead easy.
As for transmog, I have to admit this was a true "you think you'll like it but you won't" moment. I was so excited to keep using my favorite gear appearence...until I realized that it made the acquisiton of new gear less enticing if the new gear doesn't look even more amazing (chances are it won't).
Me and most of my friends quit in Cata because of a bug in RBGs where even if you won it counted as a loss. Most of us loved RBGs and were the top pvpers on the server, but this bug was just so annoying that it ruined everything for us.
Nice video billy ! But i wasn't able to find you in this one.. Where do you hide Billy?