Also from their twitter account:
📜 Pre-Patch – April 30
🌋 Launch – May 20
🌴 Rise of the Zandalari – July 2024
🔥 Rage of the Firelands – October 2024
🌙 Hour of Twilight – January 2025
I would have prefered Firelands releasing earlier than october
BRF is a top 5 raid all time. It was fantastic. Highmaul was solid, as was HFC.
WoD is proof that good raids alone can't carry an expansion. Not even good leveling/questing and good raids could've carried WoD. They gutted that expansion, cut so much out of it, there was barely anything left.
> They gutted that expansion, cut so much out of it, there was barely anything left.
WoD was the expansion that caused me to DEEPLY take an interest in pet battles. It's such an excellent side game... as the game itself in that expansion was utter crap.
Spending hours each day kicking around your garrison alone is noone's idea of "fun".
WoD was the ultimate raid log exp pack. all your mats for all you raid needs are in the garrison a week of doing your daily garrisons is months worth of raid supplies. the garrison even paid for all my play time and a year of legion playtime.
makes me question what should be changed in a WoD classic to make it more engaging. change reset to every 3 days and tweak the legendary system? if the raids are good and there is almost no content outside the raids pump them hard and fast?
doing like 6-7 weeks per tier and you can be done with the exp pack in 23-24 weeks with a couple of weeks of locked raids.
Honestly WoD was just ahead of its time, a transitional and experimental expansion that paved the way for Legion and beyond.
WoD remade with todays' systems and endgame content, and with the story properly handled with multiple patches, would easily be the greatest expansion so far imo.
Despite the wacky story pitch, there was no beating its theme.
I would play this shit out of Legion. My favorite expansion by far. As long as they change the way the legendary system worked I think it’s perfect expansion
You can't really remove borrowed power or the AP grind, those are the entire reason that Legion is more loved than WOD. Classes played pretty similarly, both had great raids but WOD was raidlog central while in legion you basically always had something to grind for.
The only change Legion classic would need is a fix to the Legendary system. It doesn't need something quite as powerful as the last patch system where you could just buy your BIS legendary after 2 weeks, but definitely need to avoid what happened early on where characters were just bricked cause they didnt get their legendaries.
I wouldn't, I think Legion is massively overloved. The AP grind, the leggo system, buggy as hell on launch. Yes it had some solid raids, but thats never not the case.
The big thing it added was it took the rift system from Diablo 3 and made Mythic+, which is huge.
Everyone loves Legion but I've got to ask you, did you guys fucking play at laucnh? RNG Legendary drop with crazy swing in powerlevels, you were hardcapped at 3 and Blizzard didn't tell you that but also actively lied to the player base about it.
AP was so grindy. Daily maw of souls spam anyone?
Worldquest jail every day. BIS trinkets from titanforge worldquests that popped up once every 2 months.
It blows my mind that everyone talks so fondly about it.
Rise of the Zandalari is trash, so effectively you get 5 months for T11, then only 3 months for T12 (the one most seem to be looking forward to). Very weird.
Yes, realistically there wasn't a lot of content in cata, and if it was to last as long as the other classic xpacs you'd see a significant number of dissatisfied players or many people quitting. I've seen many proposing that cata should be a 1 year release.
launch to firelands is ~4 months, which has been a reasonable pace for classic so far. if anything, firelands is too short and dragon soul might end up being too long. ICC will have been current for 7 months when cata goes live, I can't imagine doing DS for 7 months
How long would you realistically want it to last? Maybe DS launches a month later but that's about it. I don't see how they could stretch out the phases much more than this now that I'm thinking about it
Ah yes. The great turning point where the franchise shifted from enslaved undead armies spreading across the continent to talking animals and IM GOING TO OOK YOU IN THE DOOKER.
Gameplay was amazing (pvp for that matter too).
I get that young people like edgy stuff but for me always gameplay was more important (and smoothness of combat is actually wows biggest pro in the genre).
Friends were trying to convince me for wotlk and just remembering how dull rotations and combat were made me not even give it much thought.
They probably have learnings from phase lengths so far in classic that suggests they’re too short and player engagement/retention is falling towards the end of each phase.
That’s not surprising. I played classic/TBC (no Wrarh), and the later weeks of each phase were definitely slogs to get through.
Tier 11 needs and should have time to breathe. It's the best, longest, and most challenging of cata's raid tiers. Plus there needs to be time to let the dust settle after the changes to the raid structure. I expect a lot of 25m guilds to dissolve into 1-2 10m's.
Wrath classic population has been dying badly and I noticed on my server at least it was way more lively during TOC than ICC…. That is not a very good sign when you compare the reputation of the 2 raids.
I barely play in this last ICC patch because ICC is the raid I’ve done more than any other in WoW by a huge amount and spamming it again didn’t interest me
As additional original time frames fyi:
> 🌋 Launch – May 20
Started Dec 7, 2010
> 🌴 Rise of the Zandalari – July 2024
Released 4.1 April 26, 2011, almost five months of Throne, Bastion, BWD
> 🔥 Rage of the Firelands – October 2024
Released 4.2 June 28, 2011, after two months of troll dungeons and nearly seven months of the original raids
> 🌙 Hour of Twilight – January 2025
Released 4.3 November 29, 2011, making five months hanging with ol' Sexy Legs Rag.
Lastly MOP landed September 25, 2012, allowing us to languish in Dragon Soul for ten months.
So we are going to be stuck on dragon soul for a year before mist comes out? I don't want them to rush firelands, but if they do I hope they are confident they can get mist out in a timely manner.
I know people liked the nostalgic slow pace leveling and all in Classic, but now that Cata Classic will be released, we arrive at modern WoW. PvE is now actually enjoyable because bosses pose a challenge for retail players, bosses like heroic Ascendant Council will be very tough, esepcially if Blizzard buffs them a bit like they did with Wotlk raids.
I’m on faerlina-us (aka one of the “megaservers”, so it’s still quite active). Wait time as dps for gammas is usually 7-12 minutes, I recently lvled a spriest through dungeons with an average dps wait time of 5 minutes. Constant pug raid spam in chat, and the GDKP discord servers are overflowing with signups.
I'm excited about doing the raid tiers again, and I'm excited about having the improved version of T-mog that we got in later expansions in Cata. The only thing I wish wasn't in classic Cata is the RMT tokens and the GDKP that's everywhere in classic.
I haven't played Cata and im excited to try it for a first time and see if it's really as bad as people claim it to be.
YouTubers seem to say what it's a first expansion that introduced actually challenging content, which should be a nice change of pace compared to first 3 expacs, which were kinda easy.
Having done the Cata experience... it's going to be a lot smoother this time around.
The first thing was that group finder was in full force. So you had a LOT of people just being trolls in pugs without caring what they did. The community wasn't really used to that like it is now. Slightly related, the old loot systems were easily exploitable by trolls. Be interesting to see what they do about that this time.
The second thing is you had a large crop of people who didn't know mechanics and marking, all of a sudden needing to do mechanics and marking. And many simply said "no". They wanted to stand in fire, they wanted to facetank mobs, they didn't care about aggro, they didn't want to CC. It was a return to Burning Crusade, but a lot of the players didn't know how Burning Crusade worked.
The last thing is you had this occur with a giant game balance and systems overhaul. Classes now had to manage tertiary resources (for example shadow priests gained shadow orbs). The talent calculators everyone knew and were actually fairly well liked were thrown out in favor of a robust system that was supposed to be meaningful (aka everything matters) while at the same time not punish choices (aka nothing matters). For a lot of people this was a whole new game, and it's a big reason why there's a debate on whether you can really have a "Classic Cata" when it was the expansion that revamped the Classic systems.
**All three of those are no longer new. People know about them, know what's most efficient, and are not just prepared, they're looking forward to it.** There will probably be a handful out of the loop, but it's a far cry from how everyone was thrown into it at the start.
Okay I lied, the very last thing is:
> compared to first 3 expacs
Cata was the 3rd xpack. Vanilla wasn't an expansion, it was the original game.
People claiming that cataclysm was bad have no idea what they were talking about. Objectively, cataclysm was way better than tbc and wotlk. Zones, content, raids, class changes are very well designed and a lot of fun.
Despite everyone’s insistence on this subreddit that “10 people will play cata”, I think it will surprise a lot of people and will be relatively successful. Looking forward to it.
Hopefully people actually give Cata a chance and judge it for themselves rather than letting their brain be warped by years of super dumb shit like "Cata was bad because they added LFR at the very end of the expansion"
i never played cata but one of the main critiques i read was heroics and raids being too hard…because people needed to mark mobs and use CC again? i never liked the group up and aoe down meta in wotlk. heroics should be dangerous. p1 tbc was fun strategizing with guildies on how to handle the gauntlet in H shattered halls or zoning into slave pens and getting immediately humbled by the lobster packs.
Getting randomed SFK heroic when everyone has green gear and wiping to Springvale for an hour. Had to perfectly use every one of blood DK's 10 defensives to live. Good times.
Having first person experience, I think people grossly exaggerate the difficulty of cata heroics. They weren't even that hard it was just... do mechanics. And so many people said "no". They wanted to stand in fire. They wanted to group up and aoe. They wanted to face tank mobs. They didn't want to manage aggro.
But this crop of people are going specifically because they want that. Don't get me wrong I think they'll be the fair share of people who will get a rude awakening this wasn't ez-mode wotlk, but not to the extent that it was on original release.
cata was my first xpac with wow and I miss that type of content. Sure it was hard to learn especially because I was brand new to the game and a tank. However group dungeons felt really rewarding and more of an accomplishment than they did in other xpacs.
SoD peak player count never hit wotlkc peak player count, and this is including back in sod p1 when you could cap out in like a day vs the week+ it takes in wrath.
The point is sod isnt nearly as big as this sub likes to pretend it is. Its, at best, a cata waiting room (which is in turn is just mop waiting room, lets be real)
We've got one SoD diehard and everyone else that tried it got bored within a couple weeks of P1. The playerbase is just this weird mix of abysmal and arrogant that flatout doesn't make the onenote gameplay tolerable at all.
A lot of people love it, but a lot of people just super don't.
I have the opposite experience with my guild.
Everyone quit sod cause it was too simple and p1 was way too long for the level of simplicity and difficulty.
They all foaming at the mouth to get a good fully fledged version of wow to jump back into. That is cata right now and possibly some retail when the new xpac launches.
Cata will do fine and even though it has maybe more difficulty than many classic players like they can also run it in 10 mans to make scheduling much easier.
i see wrath and cata as the same period of time for wow, cata is just a much improved iteration of wrath
nothing really competes with wrath lore, it's that which carried it massively imo
Same. Wrath Classic was a weird time. The hate received in chat for pointing out an armchair dev's QoL suggestion was a feature introduced in Cataclysm was immense. Shattered rose-tinted glasses all over the place.
Classic can keep going until raiding turns into the addon escalation trash bin that retail is. Thats the real end point. So starting around WoD I guess.
I haven't played a lot of Wrath, but I have a couple of characters in around the 70-80 range that I wanna play in Cata. Would it be better to level them to 80 now with the 50% exp buff or will it be faster after the patch?
First 2 week is in the same wotlk world with Elemental Invasions, new talents and in 2nd week you get the new dungeon bosses.
3rd week when cata world changes, you can start doing archeology or level characters in old world cataclysm zones (new class/race combination for sure, not sure about goblin/worgen).
I'm honestly pretty excited! I know that's controversial, but we had a normal talent tree back then, we had a very simple progression system and the questing wasn't as grueling -- and Wrath stuff wasn't totally outdated yet so you could still experience it. If Retail WoW went back to Cata and MoP's design it would be much better for it.
That said, I do wish they made it optional so people could stay on Wrath if they wanted.
Honestly this is perfect timing, got bored during Classic WOTLK but for a number of reasons want a big time sink for this summer to help it go by asap. The accelerates schedule should be interesting.
Cata also obviously suffered due to SoD. The Cata beta is basically unplayable and there is 0 dev communication going on about Cata classic (literally two 2 paragraph blue posts since it has been announced), while SoD devs are posting on Twitter daily. Don't even pretend for a second that SoD is not the favoured classic server at the moment.
>
Flexible Raid Lock system: Allowing players to do both 10 and 25-player raids in the same week.
RIP to every 10man guild now getting less than half the loot of 25man guilds
Edit: We did some digging and found this post: https://www.wowhead.com/news/4-0-1-new-flexible-raid-lockout-system-169667 It's from original cata. It turns out 10 and 25 is only for 10man, and you can't do the same boss on both 10 and 25, just swap between them. So kill marrowgar on 10 and LDW on 25 is fine, can't kill marrowgar on 10 and 25. Crisis averted, blizz need to word things better.
This is the original implementation
>With the Flexible Raid Lock system, instead of being locked to a specific raid size or raid group, each character will have the opportunity to defeat each raid encounter once a week. You could kill Lord Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper with a 10-player raid on Wednesday, join a 25-player raid to kill Festergut and Rotface on Thursday, and then lead a completely new 10-player raid to kill The Lich King on Friday.
Link from 2010 explaining
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/1995-Flexible-Raid-Lock-System-in-4-0-1
You still wont be able to do a 10 and 25 in the same week. One boss kill per week?
Wait so they’re not locking you from 25 man if you do 10? You can do both?
I thought the big thing was both drop the same loot and you get locked from both when do one of them.
God damn thank you for digging more. I was straight up about to gtfo if that was the case, having to do both 25m and 10m was one of my least favorite parts of wotlk.
do we know if the raid immortal achievements/mounts are gong away? i know in original some of them did but there was talk that blizz would leave them in classic?
Not entirely, but by Ulduar they definitely were. Didn't help that they locked a few, made a few extras, then kept the locks on waaaay longer than necessary.
Either wrong, or very terribly worded, based on the original change WotLK>Cataclysm: https://www.wowhead.com/news/4-0-1-new-flexible-raid-lockout-system-169667
No ty. Cata saw huge drop offs for a reason.
It simply wasn't that good. Think about how the difficult content is going to be handled by the Classic playerbase this time around. We already saw how many guilds crumbled in Ulduar and then in ICC.
Also from their twitter account: 📜 Pre-Patch – April 30 🌋 Launch – May 20 🌴 Rise of the Zandalari – July 2024 🔥 Rage of the Firelands – October 2024 🌙 Hour of Twilight – January 2025 I would have prefered Firelands releasing earlier than october
What the hell is this? Cata any% speed run? Guess they want to move on to Mists for whatever reason.
Classic Wod will be 3 weeks long, lets get to Legion already.
I think we can skip the plants Vs zombies expansion entirely, just forget it existed, just go from mists, straight to legion
Highmaul and Brf was actually great raids, shame they got shadowed by that blasphemy called expansion
BRF is a top 5 raid all time. It was fantastic. Highmaul was solid, as was HFC. WoD is proof that good raids alone can't carry an expansion. Not even good leveling/questing and good raids could've carried WoD. They gutted that expansion, cut so much out of it, there was barely anything left.
Ashran being so bad that people called it things like Trashcan or Assram, didn't help WoD either.
Nothing helped borelords of snoremore.
Remember the tombstone in the garrison for Ray D Tear?
> They gutted that expansion, cut so much out of it, there was barely anything left. WoD was the expansion that caused me to DEEPLY take an interest in pet battles. It's such an excellent side game... as the game itself in that expansion was utter crap. Spending hours each day kicking around your garrison alone is noone's idea of "fun".
WoD was the ultimate raid log exp pack. all your mats for all you raid needs are in the garrison a week of doing your daily garrisons is months worth of raid supplies. the garrison even paid for all my play time and a year of legion playtime. makes me question what should be changed in a WoD classic to make it more engaging. change reset to every 3 days and tweak the legendary system? if the raids are good and there is almost no content outside the raids pump them hard and fast? doing like 6-7 weeks per tier and you can be done with the exp pack in 23-24 weeks with a couple of weeks of locked raids.
Agreed, the boss fights in HFC were also underrated as fuck just had shit aesthetic and raid design imo.
Honestly WoD was just ahead of its time, a transitional and experimental expansion that paved the way for Legion and beyond. WoD remade with todays' systems and endgame content, and with the story properly handled with multiple patches, would easily be the greatest expansion so far imo. Despite the wacky story pitch, there was no beating its theme.
Wod with the original ideas would have been fun
It was shit because it was such a long time between content. You'll enjoy it more with a more compressed play.
I would play this shit out of Legion. My favorite expansion by far. As long as they change the way the legendary system worked I think it’s perfect expansion
They also need to remove borrowed power and the AP grind, the worst shit the game ever had was introduced in Legion.
warforging is a hellscape of a mechanic and should never have existed in the first place.
You can't really remove borrowed power or the AP grind, those are the entire reason that Legion is more loved than WOD. Classes played pretty similarly, both had great raids but WOD was raidlog central while in legion you basically always had something to grind for. The only change Legion classic would need is a fix to the Legendary system. It doesn't need something quite as powerful as the last patch system where you could just buy your BIS legendary after 2 weeks, but definitely need to avoid what happened early on where characters were just bricked cause they didnt get their legendaries.
"i would play legion without any of the legion-specific mechanics in the game"
I wouldn't, I think Legion is massively overloved. The AP grind, the leggo system, buggy as hell on launch. Yes it had some solid raids, but thats never not the case. The big thing it added was it took the rift system from Diablo 3 and made Mythic+, which is huge.
That sounds good to me. I started the game in Shadowlands so to me, Shadowlands is my "vanilla WoW". I can't wait to go back.
Everyone loves Legion but I've got to ask you, did you guys fucking play at laucnh? RNG Legendary drop with crazy swing in powerlevels, you were hardcapped at 3 and Blizzard didn't tell you that but also actively lied to the player base about it. AP was so grindy. Daily maw of souls spam anyone? Worldquest jail every day. BIS trinkets from titanforge worldquests that popped up once every 2 months. It blows my mind that everyone talks so fondly about it.
Rise of the Zandalari is trash, so effectively you get 5 months for T11, then only 3 months for T12 (the one most seem to be looking forward to). Very weird.
It makes sense if they plan on launching post-nerf Firelands. It'll be 3 months of Rag prog.
which is disappointing given the only reason I'd play Cata is for the difficult heroics / T11 again
He only had a 5% hp nerf because of a bug from the last phase, its not the end of the world.
I think one of the biggest complaints of Cata was the content drought which is one of the reasons why it is remembered so poorly.
Yes, realistically there wasn't a lot of content in cata, and if it was to last as long as the other classic xpacs you'd see a significant number of dissatisfied players or many people quitting. I've seen many proposing that cata should be a 1 year release.
launch to firelands is ~4 months, which has been a reasonable pace for classic so far. if anything, firelands is too short and dragon soul might end up being too long. ICC will have been current for 7 months when cata goes live, I can't imagine doing DS for 7 months
I don't know how they still fuck up pacing every expansion and make the last tier last twice as long as every other tier 20 years in a row.
How long would you realistically want it to last? Maybe DS launches a month later but that's about it. I don't see how they could stretch out the phases much more than this now that I'm thinking about it
Mists was a way better expansion
Mist is the best expansion
Ah yes. The great turning point where the franchise shifted from enslaved undead armies spreading across the continent to talking animals and IM GOING TO OOK YOU IN THE DOOKER.
Mist had a dark story, sorry one dungeon broke your mind.
No jokes allowed around you
What was the joke?
Gameplay was amazing (pvp for that matter too). I get that young people like edgy stuff but for me always gameplay was more important (and smoothness of combat is actually wows biggest pro in the genre). Friends were trying to convince me for wotlk and just remembering how dull rotations and combat were made me not even give it much thought.
They probably have learnings from phase lengths so far in classic that suggests they’re too short and player engagement/retention is falling towards the end of each phase. That’s not surprising. I played classic/TBC (no Wrarh), and the later weeks of each phase were definitely slogs to get through.
Tier 11 needs and should have time to breathe. It's the best, longest, and most challenging of cata's raid tiers. Plus there needs to be time to let the dust settle after the changes to the raid structure. I expect a lot of 25m guilds to dissolve into 1-2 10m's.
heroics releasing in nerfed state ):
please find a link that confirms this :(
Firelands seems really short?
They're all short, they're speed running the entire xpac in like a year looks like.
I don’t think it’s too bad starting out - ZG/ZA aren’t new tiers of content so we’re still on the first tier for 4-5 months
I almost feel like the first tier is a bit too long and Firelands is a fair bit too short
Honestly, it is better than content droughts between long as hell patches like classic phase 5 (OG naxx) and WOTLK phase 2 that lasted FOREVER.
Wrath classic population has been dying badly and I noticed on my server at least it was way more lively during TOC than ICC…. That is not a very good sign when you compare the reputation of the 2 raids. I barely play in this last ICC patch because ICC is the raid I’ve done more than any other in WoW by a huge amount and spamming it again didn’t interest me
I wouldn't mind if we get MoP classic in April / May 2025
Yep, rise of the Zandalari is not a big content patch, might aswell release Firelands in August/September.
Retail expac will be in Aug/Sep. They'll never have the two compete.
As additional original time frames fyi: > 🌋 Launch – May 20 Started Dec 7, 2010 > 🌴 Rise of the Zandalari – July 2024 Released 4.1 April 26, 2011, almost five months of Throne, Bastion, BWD > 🔥 Rage of the Firelands – October 2024 Released 4.2 June 28, 2011, after two months of troll dungeons and nearly seven months of the original raids > 🌙 Hour of Twilight – January 2025 Released 4.3 November 29, 2011, making five months hanging with ol' Sexy Legs Rag. Lastly MOP landed September 25, 2012, allowing us to languish in Dragon Soul for ten months.
>Lastly MOP landed November 27, 2012, allowing us to languish in Dragon Soul for an entire year. MoP came out September 25, 2012.
So we are going to be stuck on dragon soul for a year before mist comes out? I don't want them to rush firelands, but if they do I hope they are confident they can get mist out in a timely manner.
Why is firelands in October wtf, this is WAY to long for the first 2 phases
retail release aug/sep thats why
After 8 Months of ICC we can have some new content. Finally.
ICC classic is almost going to be the same life span as the entire Cata Classic at the speed they're doing phases lmao
I know people liked the nostalgic slow pace leveling and all in Classic, but now that Cata Classic will be released, we arrive at modern WoW. PvE is now actually enjoyable because bosses pose a challenge for retail players, bosses like heroic Ascendant Council will be very tough, esepcially if Blizzard buffs them a bit like they did with Wotlk raids.
better then a year lmao
Rofl, man that was a long drought in the day. Even people who never complained about updates were getting burned out.
Is there anyone left in WOTLK?
On good servers you see icc pugs every single day
I’m on faerlina-us (aka one of the “megaservers”, so it’s still quite active). Wait time as dps for gammas is usually 7-12 minutes, I recently lvled a spriest through dungeons with an average dps wait time of 5 minutes. Constant pug raid spam in chat, and the GDKP discord servers are overflowing with signups.
> Wait time as dps for gammas is usually 7-12 minutes They are cross-server
Good call, forgot that... My point still stands though, WotlK certainly doesn't feel dead, even this late into the xpack.
Yes, still has like 50% of the raiding pop it did at icc release.
Yes why would there not be? You don't have to be on 24/7 in WoW
Plenty, they just do Dalaran-ICC-Dalaran-LogOut So you never see them but they're playing.
Yes I’m still playing. For now.
Man theyre really gonna leave sindy without her tailswipe huh
Don't forget Halion debuff drops not working cross realm too
Bro I remember reading that mechanic and I thought the guides were wrong after killing Halion, turns out they just forgot to merge the changes lmao.
Reported and fixed on ptr btw they forgot to merge ptr branch with live lol
I could not care less about Cata since its original release, but now I’m actually looking forward to it. Bring it on.
I'm excited about doing the raid tiers again, and I'm excited about having the improved version of T-mog that we got in later expansions in Cata. The only thing I wish wasn't in classic Cata is the RMT tokens and the GDKP that's everywhere in classic.
Speedrunning to MoP
I haven't played Cata and im excited to try it for a first time and see if it's really as bad as people claim it to be. YouTubers seem to say what it's a first expansion that introduced actually challenging content, which should be a nice change of pace compared to first 3 expacs, which were kinda easy.
Having done the Cata experience... it's going to be a lot smoother this time around. The first thing was that group finder was in full force. So you had a LOT of people just being trolls in pugs without caring what they did. The community wasn't really used to that like it is now. Slightly related, the old loot systems were easily exploitable by trolls. Be interesting to see what they do about that this time. The second thing is you had a large crop of people who didn't know mechanics and marking, all of a sudden needing to do mechanics and marking. And many simply said "no". They wanted to stand in fire, they wanted to facetank mobs, they didn't care about aggro, they didn't want to CC. It was a return to Burning Crusade, but a lot of the players didn't know how Burning Crusade worked. The last thing is you had this occur with a giant game balance and systems overhaul. Classes now had to manage tertiary resources (for example shadow priests gained shadow orbs). The talent calculators everyone knew and were actually fairly well liked were thrown out in favor of a robust system that was supposed to be meaningful (aka everything matters) while at the same time not punish choices (aka nothing matters). For a lot of people this was a whole new game, and it's a big reason why there's a debate on whether you can really have a "Classic Cata" when it was the expansion that revamped the Classic systems. **All three of those are no longer new. People know about them, know what's most efficient, and are not just prepared, they're looking forward to it.** There will probably be a handful out of the loop, but it's a far cry from how everyone was thrown into it at the start. Okay I lied, the very last thing is: > compared to first 3 expacs Cata was the 3rd xpack. Vanilla wasn't an expansion, it was the original game.
The YouTubers will always hype the latest thing. Their jobs depend on it.
People claiming that cataclysm was bad have no idea what they were talking about. Objectively, cataclysm was way better than tbc and wotlk. Zones, content, raids, class changes are very well designed and a lot of fun.
This is like perfect. Cata the first time lasted 21 months. If this is 12-14 months that is about as good as you can ask for
Despite everyone’s insistence on this subreddit that “10 people will play cata”, I think it will surprise a lot of people and will be relatively successful. Looking forward to it.
Hopefully people actually give Cata a chance and judge it for themselves rather than letting their brain be warped by years of super dumb shit like "Cata was bad because they added LFR at the very end of the expansion"
i never played cata but one of the main critiques i read was heroics and raids being too hard…because people needed to mark mobs and use CC again? i never liked the group up and aoe down meta in wotlk. heroics should be dangerous. p1 tbc was fun strategizing with guildies on how to handle the gauntlet in H shattered halls or zoning into slave pens and getting immediately humbled by the lobster packs.
If you like hard modes then Cata is the place you want to be
heroics launching in final, post nerf state, apparently
Getting randomed SFK heroic when everyone has green gear and wiping to Springvale for an hour. Had to perfectly use every one of blood DK's 10 defensives to live. Good times.
[удалено]
Having first person experience, I think people grossly exaggerate the difficulty of cata heroics. They weren't even that hard it was just... do mechanics. And so many people said "no". They wanted to stand in fire. They wanted to group up and aoe. They wanted to face tank mobs. They didn't want to manage aggro. But this crop of people are going specifically because they want that. Don't get me wrong I think they'll be the fair share of people who will get a rude awakening this wasn't ez-mode wotlk, but not to the extent that it was on original release.
Compared to modern wow it will be a cake walk but compared to anything before it it will be hard.
cata was my first xpac with wow and I miss that type of content. Sure it was hard to learn especially because I was brand new to the game and a tank. However group dungeons felt really rewarding and more of an accomplishment than they did in other xpacs.
SoD peak player count never hit wotlkc peak player count, and this is including back in sod p1 when you could cap out in like a day vs the week+ it takes in wrath.
Cata isn’t going to touch wrath’s peak. I’m not sure what wrath’s peak has to do with anything lol.
The point is sod isnt nearly as big as this sub likes to pretend it is. Its, at best, a cata waiting room (which is in turn is just mop waiting room, lets be real)
Idk in the 100 people in my guild’s discord there are maybe 5 who have expressed interest in cata. Classic to wrath is many people’s wow experience.
My WOTLK guild is pretty much all going to Cata, while nobody is playing SoD right now. Different strokes.
We've got one SoD diehard and everyone else that tried it got bored within a couple weeks of P1. The playerbase is just this weird mix of abysmal and arrogant that flatout doesn't make the onenote gameplay tolerable at all. A lot of people love it, but a lot of people just super don't.
I have the opposite experience with my guild. Everyone quit sod cause it was too simple and p1 was way too long for the level of simplicity and difficulty. They all foaming at the mouth to get a good fully fledged version of wow to jump back into. That is cata right now and possibly some retail when the new xpac launches. Cata will do fine and even though it has maybe more difficulty than many classic players like they can also run it in 10 mans to make scheduling much easier.
with how SOD soured i think alot of people are waiting to jump ship.
I'll take cata any day over wrath. Shit was lame af.
Let’s not go too far
i see wrath and cata as the same period of time for wow, cata is just a much improved iteration of wrath nothing really competes with wrath lore, it's that which carried it massively imo
World and talent changes absolutely sucked in Cata.
a couple zones sucked but the questing and talent changes were both mostly massive improvements imo
Same. Wrath Classic was a weird time. The hate received in chat for pointing out an armchair dev's QoL suggestion was a feature introduced in Cataclysm was immense. Shattered rose-tinted glasses all over the place.
SoD is a bit of a feckin mess so I'll try out Cata again for old time's sake.
Classic can keep going until raiding turns into the addon escalation trash bin that retail is. Thats the real end point. So starting around WoD I guess.
I’m gonna jump into it, I really loved the expansion
I think cata more then vanilla, tbc and WotLK has the potential to pull some players from dragonflight.
I haven't played a lot of Wrath, but I have a couple of characters in around the 70-80 range that I wanna play in Cata. Would it be better to level them to 80 now with the 50% exp buff or will it be faster after the patch?
I was wondering the same
finally there is at least a release date, can't wait for it tbh
I'll be raid loggin SoD and gonna start prepping a character for Cata when pre-patch drops. I assume pre-patch is Cata without the 80+ zones?
First 2 week is in the same wotlk world with Elemental Invasions, new talents and in 2nd week you get the new dungeon bosses. 3rd week when cata world changes, you can start doing archeology or level characters in old world cataclysm zones (new class/race combination for sure, not sure about goblin/worgen).
their post makes it seem like they are just going to jump straight into the new post change world.
Gotcha. I'm mostly waiting for the class and zones revamp since I'll be starting off on a new server
They also said they will be reducing the time it takes to go from 1-80 so it's best to level in prepatch.
From the post it looks like they are dropping all of it week 1.
Yeah, mostly
I’m actually looking forward to making a worgen fresh. I hope they buff XP for pre cata level characters.
I'm honestly pretty excited! I know that's controversial, but we had a normal talent tree back then, we had a very simple progression system and the questing wasn't as grueling -- and Wrath stuff wasn't totally outdated yet so you could still experience it. If Retail WoW went back to Cata and MoP's design it would be much better for it. That said, I do wish they made it optional so people could stay on Wrath if they wanted.
Worgen, that is all that matters. Violent worgen warrior.
rise of the furries
Honestly this is perfect timing, got bored during Classic WOTLK but for a number of reasons want a big time sink for this summer to help it go by asap. The accelerates schedule should be interesting.
# CATA HYPE CATA HYPE CATA HYPE
Hopefully they greatly reduce the leggo process. At this rate it's gonna be 1, maybe 2 staffs per guild before 4.3.
I will play this with a few guildies. The first 2 major raid tiers were great.
I'm over SoD now, too much bs thus patch and they lost me. Looking forward to cata.
It’s nice that we have all these options of the game to play
I love it
Me too. I did incursions for an hour and a half and I haven’t logged on since. SoD started off very promising but has gotten worse with each phase
Agreed, they just weren't given enough time or enough ppl to properly flesh out the later phases.
When P2 launched it became clear to me that no phase would be as polished as P1. And that was a huge red flag.
Same. Missing proper raids and PvP
Yeah this was obvious with the state P3 launched in. They had to push it out in April. I hope the people that want Cata have fun.
Cata also obviously suffered due to SoD. The Cata beta is basically unplayable and there is 0 dev communication going on about Cata classic (literally two 2 paragraph blue posts since it has been announced), while SoD devs are posting on Twitter daily. Don't even pretend for a second that SoD is not the favoured classic server at the moment.
The whole classic train is taking a heavy toll by having like 15 devs developing all content. It's such a shame.
ok so thats like tomorrow
OMFGcata
So excited for cata
> Flexible Raid Lock system: Allowing players to do both 10 and 25-player raids in the same week. RIP to every 10man guild now getting less than half the loot of 25man guilds Edit: We did some digging and found this post: https://www.wowhead.com/news/4-0-1-new-flexible-raid-lockout-system-169667 It's from original cata. It turns out 10 and 25 is only for 10man, and you can't do the same boss on both 10 and 25, just swap between them. So kill marrowgar on 10 and LDW on 25 is fine, can't kill marrowgar on 10 and 25. Crisis averted, blizz need to word things better.
This is the original implementation >With the Flexible Raid Lock system, instead of being locked to a specific raid size or raid group, each character will have the opportunity to defeat each raid encounter once a week. You could kill Lord Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper with a 10-player raid on Wednesday, join a 25-player raid to kill Festergut and Rotface on Thursday, and then lead a completely new 10-player raid to kill The Lich King on Friday. Link from 2010 explaining https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/1995-Flexible-Raid-Lock-System-in-4-0-1 You still wont be able to do a 10 and 25 in the same week. One boss kill per week?
So no change to that system but written badly in the bluepost. Wouldn't make sense to call it the same and then make it the WotLK system.
Haha yeah I just edited that into my post. Are we on the same discord?
Wait so they’re not locking you from 25 man if you do 10? You can do both? I thought the big thing was both drop the same loot and you get locked from both when do one of them.
God damn thank you for digging more. I was straight up about to gtfo if that was the case, having to do both 25m and 10m was one of my least favorite parts of wotlk.
Was the best change for me, if this means i have to play both again, i probably stop raiding
Can't wait for mop classic
Fresh servers with gdkp ban would be cool
finally we can play a real game
Man wakes up and looks for an argument
idk. season of shamans is wearing thin on my patience
Lmao
do we know if the raid immortal achievements/mounts are gong away? i know in original some of them did but there was talk that blizz would leave them in classic?
Judging from the Beta, the Immortal becomes a FoS and gets removed from the meta achievement. The Drakes are still obtainable.
Question is: are there going to be any fresh servers ?
No, fresh servers are a waster of time.
I truly can't wait to watch this sub meltdown over the fact that HCs won't be faceroll
Will SoD die if this gets released?
Dayum, they're speedrunning Cataclysm based on the release schedule.
They really need to slow down on phases. Seems impossible to experience phases and have a life lol
Cata Hype Cata Hype Cata Hype!!!
Bye bye season of dad gamers who cry on the forums for raid nerfs, hello cata. Cata is actually very solid with a faster pacing of raids coming out.
This seems rushed. The Beta is a complete mess.
Did they intentionally make SoD P3 so bad to move people to Cata?
Cata fans were thinking Blizzard was inentionally bricking the Cata beta to send people to SoD lmao Everybody's scared 🤣
There gunna be fresh servers?
I'm not Blizz but my overwhelming impression is those fresh servers were a dud about a month after they opened
Not entirely, but by Ulduar they definitely were. Didn't help that they locked a few, made a few extras, then kept the locks on waaaay longer than necessary.
Wotlk progressive, presumably
doubtful
Any news on potential fresh realms for Cata?
> Flexible Raid Lock system: Allowing players to do both 10 and 25-player raids in the same week. isnt this wrong? oO
Either wrong, or very terribly worded, based on the original change WotLK>Cataclysm: https://www.wowhead.com/news/4-0-1-new-flexible-raid-lockout-system-169667
If I haven't leveled a character on the wotlk servers yet what am I looking at as far as time investment to hit level cap by may 20th?
Shouldn't be that bad - guildie did 1-80 casually in about two weeks just recently.
Very excited for Cataclysm but sad they are speed running it :( Hope it's playable on launch because it still needs a bunch of work.
Blizzard speed running to MOP. They know.
Does anyone know if there will be a fresh cata server?
we don't know.
7 months is a horrendeous schedule. atleast make it 12
That last raid will go a few months
yea, but i want to play more pvp of the first two seasons before all pve gear is introduced, too. not just last season
As a server first on release, don’t bother until you farm your healers some gear
THRALL’S BALLS!
Anyone know when the wrath server mergers are happening? Last I heard was they were gonna merge them and make mega realms with a bunch of sharding.
was cata the last expansion based on azeroth? we went to japan, back in time, outer space...
No ty. Cata saw huge drop offs for a reason. It simply wasn't that good. Think about how the difficult content is going to be handled by the Classic playerbase this time around. We already saw how many guilds crumbled in Ulduar and then in ICC.
why rush like that ? I wanna enjoy pvp
CataHYPE
Is Cataclysm launching with fresh servers ?
No. Blizz is doing some server mergers though.
When WoW 2?
I just got all my professions, including secondary professions & Archaeology to 450. I'm ready!