Cataclysm, Epic Fail Expansion?

We’ve all thought it from time to time before, during, and now that it comes to a close. Was Cataclysm Blizzards first failure expansion to WoW? I don’t think one can easily sum up the whole expansion as a failure but it certainly had its hardships and got many things wrong to what it may have gotten right. To most, the whole pass/fail standard of it would be subjective and differs depending on who you speak to. What people look for out of WoW would greatly influence their decision of course but lets look at everything Cataclysm has done and you be the judge. Incidentally, this very discussion has been ongoing for a few days now on the WoW official forums and has drawn response from one of the main Blizzard Blue forum presences, Nathaera.

Let’s look at what Cataclysm brought as far as notable changes to WoW first. Things I list in Green I consider a positive, things in Red a negative to make it simple. Again, mileage may vary and you might disagree but this isn’t your blog so if you feel strongly enough about it, start your own blog and talk about it .

Worgen and Goblin existed in the WoWverse (WoW Universe) for some time. In fact since vanilla both have been a staple in the game. The main difference in most cases is Worgen were usually depicted as slobbering bloodthirsty unintelligent beasts with humanoid characteristics. There were some tales of Gilneans near Shadowfang Keep in the townsfolk below the castle, where by day game play hours they were friendly human NPCs and in the evening they were Worgen who would aggro like any normal hostile entity in the game. Goblins on the other hand were everywhere running most of the neutral cities scattered throughout the continents and even beyond (Outlands). Now, I may be a bit boas due to my L-O-V-E for the Worgen race, but still, I’ll try to be as impartial as I can. Overall I liked this decision with the new races, we needed a few more to play since the last 2 races were added back in BC and it gave more variety to play. I will say honestly though that the Worgen model design, particularly females was not as good as it could have been. The males look great, the females look…awkward. Figure-wise they are fine, facial expression though is poor. Why do I need to walk around with my teeth bared constantly in a mouth that looks as though I couldn’t completely close it if I wanted to. Plus the lack of customization is a downer, my hairstyles are limited and so similar there’s hardly a point to choosing one as well as the lack of a tail…wtf, even Wolvar have tails!

This one is basically a draw because it was a good idea done badly. I think the good and bad are split pretty evenly down the middle so it cant be completely considered a failure or a positive. The talent system before was a mess, but it was a customizable mess in the sense of your character could be your own. How you spent points was yours and while it might not have been “ideal” in the raid sense of WoW, it was still workable in many respects and added to the sense of personalization in your character. This was great, but the talent system had a TON of bloat. When I say bloat, I mean sooo many points that just did stupid stuff or were just underpowered for what they needed to be and points that you had to waste to get to things that were good. The bad part of the revamp in Cataclysm was the sense of being too linear. You no longer had ways to customize your character and were basically pinned into a set spec till you almost maxed out the talents in that tree and then got like a handful to do with what you wanted. Unfortunately because of the changes to all the talents, even that handful you got toward the end had to be spent in specific spots depending on your spec or it was noticeable in all areas of game play. The system as it is in Cata now felt more lined up with entry level WoW players who may have felt daunted in spending talent points and kind of attempted to simplify it TOO much so that it became annoying to more veteran players or even new players who had spent time with WoW for a bit to be annoyed by it. The giving of certain abilities right away upon choosing a tree though was excellent in you no longer had to wait till around level 40 to finally feel like a Resto Druid or Enhancement Shaman.

Honestly the homogenization of classes that was done all around this expansion I think plays a large role in why people have been dropping off WoW in subscriptions. People want to be able to customize their character to themselves. When you remove that ability from the game or at least make it harder to do where there really isn’t much of a difference between one hunter and the next, or one druid and the next, there’s little appeal to play that character anymore. We play this game for fantasy and an alternate reality, regardless what the end goal of enjoyment might be. If we have to be like everyone else that’s more like the real world and the real world isn’t fun for most of us, its a grind.

I’ve bitched about this ever since Cata was released and I intend to keep on bitching because it was just a really awful way to counter inflated character stats in combat situations. For starters, health from WotLK to Cataclysm on average increased by 5 to 10 times where a typical geared tank would walk around in 40k health in Wrath, now in entry level Cata would be around 120k or so health. On the flip side of that healing from 80-85 only increased in potency of spells by about double. So basically a Rejuvenation tick would land for about 1.2k and now in Cata lands for about 3k a tick with the potential to crit yes, but still, hardly a comparable increase to the increase in health pools and boss/raid damage. Mana regen was another thing to be hit with this redesign and it was also poorly thought through. In addition to a lower amount of regen and stats that affected it being changed, there was a “homogenization” of all heal classes to include Druids to a more single target long cast approach where basically almost all heal classes were forced into re-learning how to play in Cataclysm. So 5yrs prior to playing my druid in a healing capacity, I now had to learn from scratch again due to the mana cost increases on what Blizzard decided was “lazy” spells that provided quick heals. In addition, while these spells were quick and cost a ton of mana, they didn’t really heal for that much either. Honestly I could go on and on about this and I know this is a particular topic of debate on the WoW forums as well but I consider this part of Cataclysm the largest failure of the expansion because basically it was too much all at once. I understand an expansion was needed to do it all as patches couldn’t work through such a redesign, but this was a poor way in making healing “more challenging” as they claimed people wanted. Honestly I felt healing most WotLK fights was challenging enough especially in Heroics but then again I don’t consider myself a hardcore raider so perhaps that’s who they were listening to when they came up with the plan and the complaints about it being too easy. All in all taking away most of the uniqueness of the healing classes in how they heal save a few differentiating spells was just a terrible idea and it made for more frustration on a lot of healers. I get the idea of wanting to prevent advantages of one type over another in regard to raid attendance and invites, but it was poorly thought through.

Before you start rolling your eyes or think this is merely QQ, it isn’t and let me explain. The Raid Difficulty amplification in Cata, or what I like to call the “Interrupt or Die Raid Design” is something that hasn’t made its appearance since Sunwell. I will start off clarifying a few things who don’t know me or <Twilight> well enough to understand where my view on this comes from. To explain some, what we define as a casual guild that we consider ourselves is probably different than what most would consider casual. I don’t factor in the total raiding time each week into the term “casual” at all. What defines how we look at that term is how we raid in that we never discriminate per class, only role. So if the proper number of healers, tanks and DPS sign up, regardless of spec and role provided they can do those roles properly and adequately for that raid, we take. This differs greatly from most guilds casual or hardcore in that they typically try and “stack” the raid for classes and it helps them overcome fights. Certain classes do bring advantages over other classes or just not having them puts some disadvantage on the raid which is why a lot of hardcore guilds raid 25. You simply get a better class mix on 25 than you can achieve on 10. In addition to that aspect, we don’t take the same people week after week. We rotate participation, so who was present for a learning wipe-a-thon on a boss one week may not be present the following week and someone who hasn’t been to that fight will be along instead. This means the learning curve for our raids takes a bit longer, especially on complex fights because we need to spread the experience around till we get it down. So in addition to trial and error, we are also schooling new players to the fight almost every week for some time on new bosses.

Now that I clarified what we considered “casual raiding”. this Cata change kind of goes along with the healing change as the 2 of these changes together were just disastrous at the start if the expansion. One or the other alone may have been fine, but paired this caused a good deal of frustrations and people becoming fed up with raiding early on in the expansion. As a guild leader I saw this first hand in the drop off of signup participation of raids. We had no trouble at all filling a 25 raid in the new raid instances for the first few weeks, Baradin Hold to start then attempts at BWD and BoT thereafter, and within only a month or 2 we could scarcely get 12 people on which forced us to drop to a 10 schedule. This was due to the whole tight tuning mentality of the fights where 1 mistake by any one person almost surely resulted in a failure. Healers felt overstressed and taxed, DPS felt pressured to keep numbers high with tight enrage timers all while trying to avoid everything plus the kitchen sink in most fights. We went from a few mistakes allowed here and there with possibility for recovery if acted on quickly to not even 1 mistake even with quick thinking attempts at recovery and being a casual nature guild where spec, class and play time isn’t a requirement on anything we do, it hurt us severely. Most of the entry level raids in Cataclysm felt over-tuned and not at all entry level like the WotLK raids did. It felt as though as soon as you jumped in the kitchen sink got thrown at you and you had to survive the chaos with one arm behind your back and a blindfold attached. Which also leads me to mention the 1 combat rez per boss fight attempt. Again, overkill with the other changes. How many people were really exploiting this in boss fights honestly? I never read anywhere prior to Cata of some world first or even server first bringing a ton of druids to do a Rebirth Rotation or anything like that. Meanwhile it further adds to the unrecoverable mistake situation of raid fights. Having multiple combat rezzes available makes learning the fights easier since mistakes aren’t the death knell of the raid that try. It also relieves some pressure on the raiders in that they don’t feel as if they screw up slightly, have excessive lag or a disconnect they will screw over everyone else in the raid.

The whole afterthought of massive nerfs to each prior tiered content was also a bust. Complaining to the developers about the lack of friendliness to casual players the raids had on inception resulted in a response of “oh you can just do it once we nerf it then” which is kind of like a parent telling the youngest child “You can have your older siblings clothes once they are done with them cause we don’t want to spend money buying you your own clothes”. No one wants sloppy seconds, and raiding was something even doing it as uniquely as we do, we were successful at it in Burning Crusade which is when most would consider raids “hard” compared to WotLK. It felt like the majority of the raiding content was aimed at the hardcore 10% raider instead of the 2-3 day 1-2hr a night player like it was and when people would complain about it to Blizzard they would be skinned and eaten alive on the WoW forums by not just the forum trolls but at times some of the Blue posters as well adding to that feeling of isolation and frustration which inevitably caused a lot of players some of whom were longtime WoW gamers to quit and move on to other games.

What happened to the BC and Wrath concept of “newer gear will evenly and casually nerf prior tier content”? Back in the last 2 expansions there was no need for the huge -20% across the board content nerf on raids because the next tier of gear would automatically make the previous content easier. Who thought this was a good idea to just swing the nerf bat wildly and randomly pick things to nerf? Yes I said randomly because we have a -20% across on all T11 content on NORMAL only, heroics left as-is, then Firelands gets a -20 to -25% nerf to both normal and heroic. Consistency anyone? If these encounters were properly tested and tuned accordingly these nerfs wouldn’t be necessary and if gear was itemized and scaled properly, the same as past nerfing philosophy would hold true. Right now gear between tiers is sadly minor stat increases, nothing significant. The leap from heroic items in BC to T4 was HUGE making it a basic no brainer in upgrading, now the stats are so close together we see a minor increase in upgrades, only the item level jumps a lot.

Now, I am all for difficulty, and I like a challenge, but the “interrupt this spell or wipe” concept of raiding is too frustrating to be enjoyable on any level. In addition, making fights where sooo much is being thrown at you at once and randomly (Elemental Council in BoT, Contructs in BWD, even to a certain extent Ragnaros in Firelands) doesn’t make it more challenging and “fun” it just makes it frustrating and annoying and so less people will do it. As evident by the needed nerfs to Firelands long before the next tier of content was to be released in 4.3.

Let me explain this one some. What I mean by this is that Cataclysm felt very linear, from the questing, leveling, new zones, talents, etc. Everyone basically has to follow the exact same path to get something done and you aren’t allowed or able to deviate from that path at all. In addition, it felt very “this is how we think you should play our game” from Blizzard which oozed through in patches, changes and more so in WoW forum postings so much so that it seems Ghostcrawler needed to get a PR agent to filter his developer posts. You could literally hear the arrogance in his words within the first few months of Cataclysm on all his postings which just infuriated already upset and frustrated players. The whole concept of having to do one set of quests to unlock others was just aggravating. For instance, to unlock the daily quests for Therazane, you had to basically do every quest in Deepholm and that’s just obnoxious to have someone do 110 quests to get to an important rep. Going back to re-do all the older zones to work in the same way, again, obnoxious. I liked leveling where I could grab a bunch of quests and just go grind them all out and turn them all in at once. I liked the option of skipping the quests I didn’t like as much and just doing the ones I did, case in point, Stranglethorn Vale. I hated that zone before the Cataclysm changes, and so I would kinda cherry pick what quests I would do there to swing by in levels and move on to the next zone. There really isn’t any way to do that in any zone anymore. I can see the value in doing things that way for new players, it keeps things from getting too confusing and overwhelming but at the same token, it dumbs down the Loremaster achievement considerably which kind of annoys me considering I worked for that one before the changes.

The whole “you will play this way” concept just doesn’t work. The best example I can give on how telling consumers how they can use and enjoy your product and how it doesn’t work is most recently Apple and the whole iPhone 4 antenna debacle. “It has signal issues because you aren’t holding it properly.”…yea…didn’t go over very well for them and they had to cave to complaints and give free cases away. Unfortunately for Blizzard a few free cases aren’t going to bring those subscribers back.

In addition, Cataclysm class redesign felt an awful lot like Guitar Hero where you had to push the right combo of buttons in the right order at the right speed and if you did that, you win. DPS classes had rotations in the past so this was nothing new, but Cata seemed to give a rotational sense to healers and tanks as well which is just…dumb. Doing that takes away a dynamic aspect of the game in raids and groups where now skill falls more on your latency and ability to click faster instead of knowing your class well. I felt like what was awful of arenas in quick fights, deaths because you or your arena partner(s) missed a Global Cooldown and so on were put into PvE game play and it sucks to be perfectly honest. I stopped PvP because I hated that and here I feel like I have to endure it in PvE now.

For me, Raiding isn’t the overall goal of WoW. I enjoy doing other things like questing, non-grindy feeling dailys, special events and holidays, heroic dungeons, achievements sometimes (another rant for another day though), and just everything you can do in the game. Unfortunately, I have sort of watched the content delivery in WoW trickle out of an eye dropper compared to Burning Crusade. Now, granted, I wasn’t around for Vanilla release and my understanding is for some time, Molten Core was it and it was a grind from hell till BWL and ZG came out some time later followed by AQ and Naxx v1 so I guess the start of WoW has been that way. In BC though there was a TON of content to run at 70. You had Kara to kick start your raiding off and it was difficult but if you ran your heroics before you could gear up enough to make it easier, then came Gruul and Magtheridon, then came SSC and TK: Eye, after that was Hyjal and BT, and right before WotLK came Sunwell which seemed to be an appeasement for the bitchy hardcore raiders who cried about being bored with BT. All of this was in the game by the first 6mos of release of BC and while some didn’t work properly (hello Lady Vashj repop on kill) and other stuff it got fixed fairly quickly. The zones in BC were HUGE and Sunwell even added a whole new zone (small) but full of new dailys. WotLK came along, same deal, good amount of raids right away, some small tho Naxx was pretty large and it offered entry level raiding. Ulduar came not too long after, and was an awesome raid. The content, bosses, layout, detail on the inside, everything was fantastic. Again, zones were huge too and by the time I hit lvl 80, I still had all of Icecrown and even other zones I still hadn’t touched in leveling to explore more lore in and do content.

Here comes Cataclysm and we were told only a few new zones because WORLDBREAKER DEATHWING! and that content in the “old” zones would be redone and provide things to do. Nope. Definitely things to re-explore and all, but the content revamp actually made a lot of the older zones feel smaller and some even insignificant. As for 80-85 zones, again, small and lacking. Instances were lacking, only a handful and while short which is nice, the restructure of healing and class balances made doing them lengthy with a crap load of trash pulls between each boss. Vashj’ir in concept was kinda cool, but it was probably the largest and convoluted zone of all the new zones. A pain in the ass to navigate through, even with the special [Subdued Abyssal Seahorse] and just felt annoying. As far as raiding went, we had 3 instances to do, all supposedly equally balanced which they were definitely not. This made it hard to get things done for casual guilds like us where we would down maybe 1 or 2 bosses in BWD, then hit a block of DPS lacking, healers under-geared or just a learning curve on the fight. Jumping into Bastion which the first fight is LOLRANDOM each week making it difficult to be a constant kill when the damn fight changes week to week meaning its hard to teach and learn the fight when you think you get it and “Oh, hey, that isn’t happening this week, this is now… /dead” which okay, I get the concept, but for a first fight of an instance…extremely stupid. Especially when there was no “entry level” raid in Cataclysm. Here we are having to rock blues again from heroics (which is fine, that I liked, epics should be earned) and I’m getting my ass handed to me as soon as I walk in because its over-tuned for hardcore 10%ers.

Next patch we get Firelands which feels like recycled Molten Core right down to the ungodly rep grind and umpteen trash pulls within it which then gets nerfed hardcore come only a few months after its release because it was over-tuned as well. Lets also not forget the recycled troll raids into heroics either which makes me very sad because I liked ZG and ZA as they were as raids. Raising them to 85 level and keeping them as raids, yea, would have sucked too, but I think would have been a bit better as it would have given more raiding options as opposed to the Firelands grind. The content just feels lacking this expansion where originality seems to be frowned upon or something in development and when originality does creep in its so “revolutionary” and “new” it tends to be bugged to sin and not work right (*cough* Atramedes *cough* Lord Rhyolith).

Story lines in Cata were also more prone to being left unfinished. We do a whole zone of Naga and leading up to what looks like something involving both another old god like C’Thun or Yogg-Saron and Lady Azshara herself finally and the storyline just ends abruptly with Neptulon being hauled off at the end of Throne of the Tides. The same can be said for a lot of things added to lore like Gilneas, a sense of to be continued permeates through the starter zone ending quests and yet…nothing, not even a crumb.

Then we move on to the artificial ceilings and how blatantly obvious they have become. Gear and upgrade points are doled out through what seems to be the same eye dropper as content is delivered. To artificially extend the content, and yes, its clear that’s the reason Blizz, secret is out, there is a cap on how many points you can earn each week. This cap is incredibly ill thought as while it might extend content and keep a leash on those guilds who would race through content, it disadvantages those people who can’t max points each week. If those folks end up falling behind their friends due to real life situations preventing play, they have a hard time catching up again. In addition to that, there is a severe discrepancy in how many points players get awarded for different things. T11 heroic content, the stuff that is still hardcore and hasn’t been touched by nerfs still yields garbage for points upon completion compared to T12 normal content. In many respects, a lot of the heroic T11 fights are a lot harder than the regular T12 stuff, especially considering T12 was already nerfed.

When you put these kinds of stupid limiters on things like guild rep each week, points earned each week, etc, it makes the game incredibly grindy. Yes limiting it makes content last longer, but most of the casual folks aren’t going to finish said content, get bored and eventually quit playing because in the end we all play this game to have fun, not feel like a second job or that no matter how hard we try we will still hit some sort of invisible wall that slows us down from reaching our goals.

Finally, some of the promises of more Guild involvement in Cataclysm…yea, didn’t happen. In fact, the guild reputation and leveling system actually created more of a sense of individual competition than a sense of overall camaraderie because a lot of the guild “achievements” were based on individual effort and not so much on the guild as a whole. The reputation system caused a severe issue in recruitment, people didn’t want to give up the grind they worked for to join an unknown guild even if they were unhappy. The guild instances and raid weekly accomplishments were a start but I think I saw that somewhere else first…where was that again…oh yes, in Rift along with other guild related group efforts that still aren’t in WoW. What about guild quests, guild group dailys and so on? Most guilds already raid and instance together so this isn’t giving us anything different or new to improve or bring guilds closer together and give a sense of deeper involvement.

So to sum up here, when it comes to Cataclysm as an expansion, I can honestly say without question “I AM DISAPPOINT!“. Having played WoW for as long as I have, this expansion was a very big let down and felt half-assed and rushed throughout. Even now sitting on the cusp of 4.3′s release, it feels almost too soon. Kind of like “Deathwing already?” It felt like getting to Illidan and The Lich King took a lot longer and more earned along the way and this just feels cheap and rushed which if I could use 2 words to sum up Cataclysm, those would be the 2 I would pick, “Cheap” and “Rushed”. The quality compared to prior expansions was just sub-par, and I know it takes a lot to create and maintain a game like WoW, but when you raise the bar of quality and standards to what BC and WotLK were, granted both had failures too, Cataclysm just doesn’t even hold a [Kobold Candle] to either.

Yes Cataclysm revamped a lot of the core of WoW, but I think it was too much all at once. Had it been broken into smaller pieces on each core overhaul, perhaps it would have come out better, but overall it felt unfinished and still does.

Can you qualify Cataclysm as a pass or fail? No, I don’t think you can. Because either phrase is finite and WoW isn’t over yet and should never be “finished”. I will say comparably though Cataclysm got much more wrong than it did right than that of prior expansions and sadly as well as confusingly, Blizzard seemed to almost toss things they claimed to have learned right out the window with this expansion as well. I don’t get that at all, if you know what has worked in the past, why ignore or go against it? I have to wonder if maybe the development team became so arrogant with this release they felt overconfident to do whatever they wanted and low and behold it blew up in their faces of course. Perhaps that’s what was needed though to get them back on track again. To Blizzard, if anyone there reads this long rant of mine, WoW has the potential to continue to be great, and if the plans for Mists of Pandaria are any indication of whats to come then the right track might be back in sight again, but please don’t lose focus and get lazy because Mists is your last shot at it. If you screw up that expansion, WoW will die out fairly soon thereafter because gamers are fickle, when you disappoint them once they will abandon you and seldom give second chances. The only reason you kind of have a second shot at redeeming the steaming pile Cata kinda ended up as is because of a loyal fan base of players like me. Please don’t disappoint again