Did Cataclysm improve WOW

[lifesucksadapt]

First off i'd like to say that I am an EX WOW junkie and I quit a short time before Cataclysm came out, I had several level 80's and I was just getting bored of all my daily routines, when I started new characters or switched factions that still couldn't break up the monotony. I was fed up with it and I left, 5 monthes later im starting to miss it a little bit but I am in no hurry to go back, the one thing that im curious about scince I didnt stick around long enough to find out; was Cataclysm any good? Was it worth all the hype? Did it open the floodgates for the idiot parade?

 

[Orekoya]

Define improvement.

 

[Hop-along Nussbaum]

Have not played WoW in almost 2 full years. Prior to that, I played for almost 5 years. I don't miss it at all. And I have friends that play the new expansion, and have seen nothing that would make me want to come back.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

I've heard that some of the beginning to mid quests in the vanilla area of WoW were changed for the better. Aside from that improvement, nothing much changed even with the addition of two new race; which, IMO, were unnecessary.

 

[pezwitch]

I got tired of the guild drama and end-game grind in BC so I quit before Lich King came out. My husband bought me LK and Cata as an early Christmas gift.

Was Cata worth it? Yes. Cata made WoW fun for me again.

I enjoy the changes to Azeroth. (Uldam is my favorite new area, the quests are amazing). But my favorite feature is that it is easier to solo now. It is also easier to play casually. OK, I kinda miss the epic multi hour Warsong Gulch battles, but the timer really has made it easier, I can sign on and play a battleground for half an hour and then sign out and do something else.

It's been a couple of months and I'm still enjoying it.

 

[Wierdguy]

Besides the 10/25 man shared lock out thats killing my guild/server at the moment... cataclysm works just fine. Normal modes are balanced well enough for the casual/semi hardcore players and hardmodes provide a good challenge for those who want that.

I dont know much about PvP, but what ive heard is a few balance issues and some irritating waiting for rated battlegroups, but otherwise that works fine too.

 

[adrian_exec]

I have mixed feelings about Cataclysm. It did improved the leveling experience by a lot. I had a blast leveling new characters in Cataclysm, unfortunately once they were hitting max level the boredom and monotony that you explained was also hitting me very hard.


I also quited Cataclysm after 2 months of release and yes I feel the same way, the game felt more like a burden, hey I must enter WoW to do the dailies, hey I must farm some gold to get those shiny new epics. This wasn't something new for me since I've quit WoW several times because of this exact same reason and when I heard about Cataclym I actually had hoped things will change, but they didn't they remained exactly the same.

And on top of that the achievement system seems to have turned everyone into elitist pricks. I would know since I leveled a lot of new characters in Cata and it was very hard for me to get this new characters into groups or guilds cause I didn't had the appropriate achievements. *sigh*

 

[Therumancer]

First off i'd like to say that I am an EX WOW junkie and I quit a short time before Cataclysm came out, I had several level 80's and I was just getting bored of all my daily routines, when I started new characters or switched factions that still couldn't break up the monotony. I was fed up with it and I left, 5 monthes later im starting to miss it a little bit but I am in no hurry to go back, the one thing that im curious about scince I didnt stick around long enough to find out; was Cataclysm any good? Was it worth all the hype? Did it open the floodgates for the idiot parade?

A lot of people will disagree with me, but honestly I think Cataclysm was something of a flop as far as the established player base goes. It's just not the kind of flop you tend to notice due to WoW being "the only game in town" on it's level for an MMORPG.

The big feature of re-doing the newbie areas and such was interesting, but you got most of that for free without the Cataclysm expansion. Cataclysm basically added another 5 levels of play, which was fairly drawn out. They also increased the difficulty of raiding and heroics, which isn't a bad thing, but seemed to be done to stretch out the content even more than usual than any real desire to improve the game, becaue there really wasn't all that much
that was really innovative along with the difficulty spike.

Maybe it's just that after many years my guild finall collapsed and I can barely get up the energy to get on a couple of times a week (and I was burned to begin with), but I'm just not all that impressed. What's more I seem to have noticed the same attitude among many others when I'm on. Even the praises and fanboyism seem a bit strained and lacking a lot of the usual enthusiasm.

While I can't predict anything with certainy, I will say that I think WoW is as vulnerable as it's ever going to be to a rival, which is why I think "Old Republic" has a good chance of stealing and keeping a lot of it's player base, assuming it hasn't neglected the endgame which is what will keep people playing. Nothing will kill WoW in a true sense, but I wouldn't be shocked if they started combining some of their servers within a year of the release of "Old Republic". Of course then again depending on how it turns out they might very well get this same player base back with "Project Titan".

 

[Jim Grim]

The quests are a lot more fun now, but at the max level it's pretty much business as usual.

 

[SinisterGehe]

It is better than lich was for sure, but the traditional grind and repeat cycle still continues. You can't you really remove that. But there is much more things to do, scenery is beautiful, lot to exploring. 1-60 is lot of fun, Outlands and Northend blow ass.

 

[Samechiel]

Have not played WoW in almost 2 full years. Prior to that, I played for almost 5 years. I don't miss it at all.

This.

What finally got me to quit was that I looked around and realized I wasn't having fun. I hated running instances over and over and over for gear, I had no interest in PvP, endgame was absolutely repulsive to me... I was just in a cycle of 1) make new character 2) hit max level 3) repeat. I even tried RP servers and it was the same thing, only with an abundance or rediculous Mary Sues running around cybering in public places.

I would basically log in on a non-healing, non-tanking character so as not to be bothered, ignore my guild so I didn't have to raid, and scurry off to go hunt for minipets because that was the only thing that gave me pleasure any more. I couldn't bear to keep giving Blizzard 15 bucks a month for that.

If WoW suddenly became F2P, though...? Yeah, I could probably go back.

 

[adrian_exec]

It is better than lich was for sure, but the traditional grind and repeat cycle still continues. You can't you really remove that.

That is true, it's hard to remove the grind but here's a subtle example on how Blizzard could have reduced this.

Why didn't Blizzard made the Shoulder Enchants account bound? Why is it that every time I level a new character I was forced to make quests in Deepholm just to get those shoulder enchants. We had the same problem in Wrath with Sons of Hodir, it took Blizzard months to fix this problem and now in Cata they repeat the same mistake.

 

[lifesucksadapt]

It is better than lich was for sure, but the traditional grind and repeat cycle still continues. You can't you really remove that. But there is much more things to do, scenery is beautiful, lot to exploring. 1-60 is lot of fun, Outlands and Northend blow ass.

I can understand that, they said they were changing EVERYTHING and I guess they meant it for sure, during lich I enjoyed outland but when I got to northrend it was frustrating because all the lands were so similar. What I enjoyed about Outland was the diversity in land and creatures, that is just my opinion though, I would love to come back to see all the changed regions.

 

[Blights]

It's better than WotLK was, but I still think back in Vanilla and BC was where WoW was at it's peak. I think it's gone on long enough now, and the fact they're creating a new MMO is a good sign.

 

[Me55enger]

Think of it as a massive patch several years delayed and some doggie treats for the higher ups.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

It made the goblins playable. Yes, yes it did.

 

[Marowit]

definitely - it's made the 1-60 experience pretty incredible. The undead 1-25ish questing area blew my pants off.

That said, my main problem with wow is that it's been around for 6 years, and the mechanics have been meticulously deconstructed by us geeks.

No longer do you see people making gut feelings about their spec, or what they think would be helpful. Instead you see people going and looking up top PvP/PvEers and copying their specs/geming/gearing as well as running spreadsheets, and on, and on.

It's not so much the game is that much easier (other than XP/Rep tweaks), but there are very few unknowns about the game anymore - which saps the magic and perceived difficulty the game use to have.

This, at least to me, makes the game quite linear as each class/spec has an exact way of being played that is easily determined on any number of websites - or even with certain addons that flash the button you should even press!

So, if I picked up Vanilla WoW and picked up WoW-Cataclysm and played them for the first time side by side I'd be all over WoW-Cataclysm and Vanilla would sit on my shelf next to Rift.

 

[KalosCast]

*roll hunter*
*use aimed shot to kill everything in one hit from 1-80*

Nope.