What was it about Cataclysm that caused so many people to begin unsubscribing from WoW?

What was it about Cataclysm that caused so many people to begin unsubscribing from WoW?

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too many to list

For me it was a combination of friends leaving and classes changes.
I just realized there was only a corpse of the game I liked.

On a more technical note, the last straw was the change to druid shapeshifting.
They basically removed the ability to cancel slowing and rooting effects with shapeshifting.
Even if they buffed ferals damage, that small change was the very reason I picked a druid as my first character.

Looking for Raid destroyed server communities
The beginning of the homogenization of classes
Raids were really boring and/or easy
New elements like Path of the Titan were quickly dropped

That was just a few.

It was **that** patch.

When it first came out there was some butthurt about the revamped zones but a lot of people preferred it to WotLK as the difficulty in endgame was back at TBC levels. Then WotLK babbies complained it was too hard to do stuff so Blizz made it piss-easy. You could literally PuG the final raid of the game and heroics required no sort of CC or tactics besides spamming 1212121212121212.

It was at that point people realised that WoW was never ever going to be anything challenging again and was just going to be "free shit lmao, everyone's a winner!". Now most people in the new expansion have multiple legendaries.

It's shit.

before cataclysm you started as fucking nobody, doing minor shit like helping farmers and hobos in westfall while wearing kinda realistic poorfag low lvl armor and you slowly progressed to naruto tier space magic fights, in cataclysm you fight illuminati twilight conspiracy from the start, there is elemental crap (tornados, lavas etc) in every map and it's really out of place, it wasn't wow anymore but bizzareWoW

Is WoW a fun game for single player?

Cata was by far the most damaging expansion in WoW due to what it did to the zones.

WoW sold itself on its world, it's what, even today, draws people in, so to fuck with it on a level like that was just idiotic. Even now, if you don't level boost, you've got 60 levels where you've got people acting, in every zone, like Deathwing is some hot shit, and we're all gonna die.

Storywise - we got shit like Deathwing after badass tragedy of Arthas.

Gameplay - too many thing to list, srsly

overall - people liked barrnes and other areas, they litteraly destroyed them

Not to mention shit like LFR or some other changes that made WoW a fucking botnet just like Diablo 3.

I bet you can now play this game without even wirtting a single word on chat.

Fuck you Blizzard.

On a similar note, heirlooms are the absolute fucking worst. I got really nostalgic for WoW a while back but upon creating a character I was immediately greeted by 3 guys all decked out in blue-quality gear and riding mounts at level 1. Fucking shit immersion-braking stuff. The game isn't an adventure any more.

Even without that change you would have people acting like Onyxia was still a threat or that Naxx was still floating over EPL even though canonically it was back in Northrend. The problem with updating the zones isn't that they changed them, it's that they created the idea that the world could change to reflect what has happened over the events of WoW. Unfortunately they haven't done another revamp like that since so it sticks out even more than if they did nothing at all.

>They basically removed the ability to cancel slowing and rooting effects with shapeshifting
as a druid main this was really fucking gay

the dungeons were to hard for scrubs off the start and then deathwing raid was out for way to long

Before Cata, the narrative was linear. You theoretically could do everything in Vanilla, and then move to BC, and then Wrath. From every point afterward though, it was a clusterfuck. The original story got taken out, 1-58 took place after Wrath, then you go back in time to BC, and then Wrath, and then after that.

They realized it was a mess for new players, since they implemented level boosting. They basically gave up.

Still though, changing the world I think inherently was a problem, since they did things so haphazardly. I mean they literally drew a dick into the map of Badlands.

>Raids were really boring and/or easy

What the fuck is a "Diablo 3"

wow is alright for single players but absolutly amazing on multiboxing

MOP was actually the moment where things dropped off and it was solely the pandas. Blizz even confirmed this themselves.

singleplayer wow is d3

Dragon Soul was the most lazy, uninspired thing I've ever seen in a video game.

Didn't MoP actually recover some numbers? By the end of Cata, shit was bleeding out fast.

Heroics were too hard

They did nerf them in 4.1

The Hpal change of reactive to pre-emptive healing really killed the game for me. Even though I continued to play, achieving 2200 in rbg's and server 2nd in H-DS, I didn't like the class direction. The years on my Paladin started to feel wasted because of it. Giving every class more spillover spells made each class seem less and less unique. This is when I started multi-classing. Destro locks were pretty fun.

Dragon Soul was fine, it was genuinely fun and challenging to progress through

Blizzard's "no, seriously, this is the LAST time we'll let the last raid of the expansion stretch on for over a year, trust us!" shtick tends to be the problem

This is the stupidest thing I've ever read

>There are people who stay foreverly subbed to an expansion instead of playing for a while then unsubbing

How do you do it?

>the dungeons were to hard
>Heroics were too hard

I hate you fucks, you ruined the game.

>Shift the full focus to endgame, making leveling a trivial borefest with zero challenge or thought required, but that STILL takes a while like before
>The endgame isn't actually that good

What a shame, because talent trees had made a huge step in the right direction with less "Gain X% muscles and magics" and more "When you do this, gain this effect".

MMOs are awful as actual games. Just due to the tech needed to make them work, they'll always be subpar when it comes to gameplay. In the past they made up for this shortcoming in two areas;

1. Socialising and playing barbie dress up. Even terrible MMOs can't fuck this up, and it's why dry turds like FF14 are popular.

2. Feeling like you're living in another world. This is the one every single modern MMO fucks up, WoW changes included.

Despite being more casual at the time of it's release (I remember playing EVE at the time and EVERYONE was shitting on WoW when it launched as casual garbage) it did a whole bunch of things right. The combat felt weighty, you had to rest after a few fights to eat, class perks like teleportation felt meaningful, lack of teleport-to-dungeon-instances as a primary means of leveling, no cross-realm, gold being a useful resource, talent trees you couldn't easily respec, etc. They're arbitrary but all these thing add up to trick your brain into thinking your in another world with it's own rules.

They're all bad things for gameplay, and it's easy to excuse any one of those things being removed, but the gameplay is always going to be bad anyways. It shouldn't be the focus of an MMO. Building a world should be the focus. Just look at the sub numbers. They might've started falling in Cata but it was WotLK where they plateaued - where they added dungeon queues and cross realm and all the other shit. Cata was just the nail in the coffin for a lot of people.

>LFR
>Cataclysm
Wrath started LFG and yet it's heralded as the greatest expansion.

>That tiny gasp for a last breath at WoD

Yes, and LFG isn't LFR, what's your point

That you're a retarded faggot with double standards.

Blizzard had a chance with WoD. They genuinely could have given the game a second life.

They didn't though.

literally worse than WoD

The VAST majority of low level players are alts. Very few new players are joining the game and even if they do there's no guarantee they'll stay and level to end game. With that in mind, who is Blizzard going to cater to, the rare new subscriber or the multiple lifers already paying 15$ a month?

was alright tbqh

They didn't because everyone working on WoD got moved to Overwatch, along with the budget. WoW is made by D-Team now.

>LFR is the same thing as LFG because it's the same concept applied to different things

I guess DKs are the same as Warriors because they can use 1h and 2h weapons, basically the same.

The complete removal of community fostering for the sake of convenience. Blizzard catered the game to the whiniest children on the forums. Their addiction research showed that people like chasing higher numbers. This is why the only thing to do is raise numbers. There are no more tiers of progression to work towards nor friends to make on the way.
Fuck Activision.

You didn't play WoD if you think anything is worse than it.

>delete the original world
>people attached to the game for 5 years don't feel attached anymore
>WHY ARE YOU UNSUBSCRIBING

What about Nostalrius?

Lich king was supposed to be the last boss and the normies quit.

>tfw waiting for the next big MMO that isn't a korean grindfest or weebshit

Its never happening, is it? I was too young to git gud at WoW and by the time I was smart enough to be successful they added pandas and other gay shit and my server was hemorrhaging players so I quit.

LFG was fine, it was cross-realm that ruined the game in the long run

>removing more content than it added
that's basically it

This in conjunction with the level scaling in Legion and the class trials almost being like a starting zone leads me to believe that in the next expansion you'll be able to level 1-120 entirely in the new area. Even if it's something like invasions now where you get a set of world quests each day and then your choices are go back to the old areas or wait until tomorrow the result would be a much smoother leveling experience than jump around. Plus it would play into their "we want you to log in for 30 minutes a day, but gate everything behind time so you have to stay subscribed for months".

check back in the next 2-4 years and see what the thousand RvR/sandbox MMOs are like
lots of western MMOs in development

would've loved an ArcheAge without the Korean shit or divided attention toward PVE raiding

No, DKs are the same as Warriors because they're both boring as shit to play with the same amount of abilities.

They should cater to actually good game mechanics. If you're making leveling an absolute joke you might as well make people start at max level.

was fuckin trash tbqh

Nice UI

>friend who never played wow wanted to try it out with me
>he plays prot warrior
>queue up for dungeon
>the healer and his dps fuck boy talking to each other in Spanish or something
>they keep running ahead and pulling mobs to my friend
>he gets confused and tries his best to tank every mob
>dies because no heirlooms
>healer starts screaming he isn't going fast enough and leaves
>new healer and dps join and instantly "LOL" when they see his regular green/blue gear and leave
>had to ask my guild to come help
>some hunter still keeps pulling extra mobs to him.
>a few days later he already uninstalled the game

The community certainly isn't winning new players over.

Am I the only one who enjoyed the map revamp? It made levelling new characters fun again, up to lvl 60 at least. Seeing the story progress, meeting old characters, shit like this. Honestly I'd be happy if they decided to refresh Azeroth again in the new expansion.

Dragon Soul was fucking awful

>reused two Wrath zones in Dragonblight and Eye of Eternity
>reused assets fucking everywhere
>only 8 bosses for a final raid tier
>Spine is the worst fight Blizzard has ever made
>Madness wasn't much better

Not one fucking original asset was in that piece of shit raid.

i enjoyed seeing the Forsaken expand their empire

Blizzard actually does cater to new subscribers, and returning subscribers, by doing the level boost stuff.

They just can't fucking be assed to fix their old shit.

Dungeons are shit now, even at high level you're expected to just weigh down your 'w' key and run through the instance mashing the same three buttons over and over again until it's over.

No talking, no thinking, no stopping.

and after all these years its fuckin cancer to farm for mounts

That's some of the saddest shit I've ever read. Those people should just go play a MOBA or something if that's how they feel about the game.

It was novel for like, a month, and then you realized all the destroyed shit would stay destroyed.

How fucking long did it take for Stormwind to stop being on fire?

Forsaken quest zones were pure videogamekino. Only good bit of the revamp.

too casual

elysium is where the fun is at now

This song single-handedly made Cata worth it:
youtube.com/watch?v=QzhRRgcAbdI

My only gripe was that Magni was "killed" in a ritual, but he's back now and is Azeroth's husbando so it's alright.

WoW's soundtrack has never dipped in quality. Those guys still do great stuff.

What WoW needs are NPC wives, I want a Panda wife

>Stratholme is still on fire

I think Blizzard once explained that away by saying it's magical fire.

Homogenization began in Wrath, as well as LFD which was the precursor to LFR. The seeds were already sown.

>9 months for Firelands
>Heroics and raids get nerfed because waaah too hard

it was a bit too evil for the sake of being evil though, but what can you expect from Blizzard writers after '07

had some fantastic lore points though

>not ERPing with a pandaren player
Cmon now

Pandaria doesn't exist in my headcanon so I can never communicate with Pandaren on any character.

WoW doesn't have server communities and it never has

Cataclysm was absolutely horrendous but it was a necessary evil. The quality jump from vanilla > wrath content was fucking obscene and felt like basically a different game (which for all intents and purposes it was). They fixed that with cata but then realized they had no end game whatsoever and there was nothing to do, so they made heroics hard again to try and squeeze some longevity out of it and completely missed what made heroics good in TBC so you ended up with this slow, shitty slogfest of already poorly designed dungeons like grim batol and stonecore and tons of people got burnt out fast.
Add to that raiding got decasualized until Dragon Soul, so people who got used to their ez mode ICC suddenly found themselves unable to raid for 2 tiers and there was nothing for casual joe to do so they quit in droves
So now we have a decent early game before it gets shit again for the first 3 expansions and then gets tolerable and the timeline is all sorts of fucked up for a leveling character, but they'll never fix it because of how badly cataclysm failed

I want to live out pure male human on female anthro romance, every Panda out there has disgusting fetishes or a futa cock

Yeah even WoD had great music:
youtube.com/watch?v=OK0L1MhMlYY

That cinematic made a friend of mine who loves Orcs come back. I still feel terrible knowing how the expansion turned out.

The Horde side stuff here was nice, but anything Forsaken-related simply wasn't fun as Alliance.

Like, you will never see what happens to Gilneas if only play Alliance. After level 12, a Worgen is more or less a Night Elf.

Single player wow is FFXII

I didn't think they were too hard, I thought they were just what the game needed

albion online will save us

WoD I think actually had the best music WoW's ever seen. There was some amazing stuff in there.

youtube.com/watch?v=qKP1-Xqwuis
youtube.com/watch?v=x0k_T72hjdw

The Worgen zone was pretty neat by itself, at least--minus the "Worgen is now some druidic meme" retcon.

Are we posting WoW stuff?

The music is FANTASTIC alone.
But the highly orchestrated samples did not fit with any of the gameplay, and so I'd say the music was pretty bad [in the game].
Whereas with TBC and vanilla all the music is more ambient and fitting with all the noises you come across in a zone.

In no particular order:

- LFR
- Replacing talents trees with what exists now
- Caving into the Wrathbabbies when it came to dungeons
- Severe devaluing of resistances
- Reforging
- The beginning of homogenization
- Removal of 2v2
- Awful PVP design in general
- While a lot of zones were improved (specifically in the way of quests), it fucked up a lot of zones, too

I'm sure there are a couple more, but that's what I have off the top of my head. It did have the best set of leveling zones ever, though. Leveling in Cata was glorious.

>Korean
Chinese MMO grindfests are the next thing

Gilneas I think is genuinely one of the best looking zones in the game. It kind of annoys me that you don't really see assets used from it in any other part of the game.

>talents
thought this was pandashit thing where they homogenitated everything

End of MoP was lower than end of Cata I believe, and Cata had a higher start than MoP

I really liked the track that played in the train dungeon that got real dramatic, I cant find a video of it anywhere for some reason

What was the point of Magister's Palace back in TBC? What did it bring to the table? I never used to run it.

the end end of an expansion is always a low-point. then people come back to try the next one.

except in the case of mop most people didn't because cata sucked and >>>pandas

I recall there being some dank loot for mages but I never bothered to run it because it was one of the "harder heroics" or something and just kept on raiding instead of wasting time.

Download the SPP if you're looking for single player.

Yeah the map revamp was fine till it stayed stagnant. With phasing you would think they would have updated zones as you progressed through the questing.

I don't think its possible to revamp again, people can only really accept the same world so many times. After South Seas, since we are done with the Legion "for now" and we will deal with the Naga and lead up onto the Old Gods again, we have to go on the other side of the world.

stepping stone dungeon and also a fairly difficult heroic, part of the cancer that was progression skipping though.

Just checked out the trailer, seems sort of neat. The sandbox and roleplay elements have to be really good to make up for those graphics and lackluster looking combat.