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I personally just aged out of the game at the end of Wrath. Started Grad school, serious relationships....etc. I'd be willing to bet that quite a bit of the vanilla players had similar experiences.

You know. I think life just got in the way for me. I played pretty diehard during BC, WotLK and into Cata. But, in the middle of Cata I graduated college, moved, got a job, married. I picked it back now that I have a family as a casual. Glad WoW still exists.

I played through Cata, but biggest issue I remember was MMO fatigue. These people went hard on WotLK and let things pile up in real life, and could no longer justify how many hours MMO's can take. They would show up to raid and just snap over the little things. Have seen the same thing this time around in Classic.

I was quite the noob playing wrath in middle school, but I remember feeling really upset when I saw the old world being destroyed in the cata trailer

"No king rules forever, my son." The last words Arthas hears on the mortal plane were also a foretelling of WoW's future. Personally, I think Wrath is objectively the best expansion because as you said, it wraps the story of WC3. I had a lot of great memories from original Wrath like spending two weeks circling Sholazar Basin spamming a macro to find Loque'nahak and as soon as I tamed him, sending a screenshot to Big Red Kitty (a VERY prominent Hunter blogger at the time). I was excited for Cataclysm. I knew there were going to be a lot of changes, but it had been many, many years since the game launched. I for one welcomed the change. I wasn't hung up on Vanilla and TBC like so many others. I wasn't a Wrathbaby, either. I started playing at the end of Vanilla before TBC came out. Heroics in Cata were delightful. I had leveled my Pally and tanking Cata Heroics? Some of my favorite memories from that time. Getting a good group who could do Stonecore was such a great feeling. Halls of Origination? It was basically a small raid and had optional bosses. It was great! I enjoyed the leveling for the most part, though Hyjal was the superior option to Vashj,ir IMO. I'm a HUGE WC3 fan, so seeing what happened to Hyjal was both horrifying and delightful. I really wasn't a fan of Twilight Highlands, though it was nice that they filled in the map a bit. Same for adding Gilneas and making Azshara useful. Though, there is something to be said for a zone where almost no one goes that's a beautiful Fall setting. Then the filthy Goblins came and ruined everything. :p Dragon Soul was tedious. It had its moments, but overall was just a slough. It wasn't like, AQ40 bad (to me), but it certainly wasn't BT or ICC. I'll certainly play Cata Classic if they go that route, but Cata WAS the end of the Classic era, and it makes me question how far they're going to go with expansions. I feel like Vanilla, TBC, and Wrath were the Classic era. Cata, MoP, and WoD (for good or ill) were the Reorganization era. Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands have been the "Systems" era with each entry getting more and more tedious as they went on. I enjoyed Legion and it was the most fun I had in the game since Wrath. I appreciate all the work you put into these videos and they are always a highlight when they pop up in my feed!

I mean, I think it's also really worth talking about why the growth stopped at Wrath

When they killed wall jumping, people still found ways around it without cheats, but with cata they destroyed alot of cool zones and replaced it with that new amusement park type feel. And flying made it even smaller and removed the whole interacting with people in the world. It worked in tbc because draenor was so small. And even then you saw almost no world pvp. And that actually made the world feel alot smaller, it had more obvious stuff going on, but like the barrens just felt more vast before. Think about old blackrock mountain... the design of it was so cool and complicated and it felt so much more authentic somehow. Same with the dungeons, it was not about the trash, it was about moving through blackwing lair and the buildup to getting to the terrace. I liked the leveling experience of vanilla because it was still clear that certain foes where not to be messed with on your own.

No mention of the nerfing of the leveling process? You were able to level your character very, very quickly without ever dying with individual play

I think there's a bit of a difference between a reference in a quest name that kind of fits, and setting a whole mission line to mimic a movie.

Call me a sentimental sap, but for me, it was definitely the change to the world that delivered the biggest blow to my morale. We'd spent like 5-6 years getting to know and love the original Azeroth and to have it suddenly become a different world with all the zones you used to know now turned into something else was a big blow. I lost almost all motivation to ever alt and go through the revamped zones, because they didn't feel like Azeroth anymore. Azeroth 2.0 just wasn't the same. I continued playing for a while after Cata, but eventually it just wasn't fun anymore. Deathwing didn't just break Azeroth, he also broke my spirit to play more. I was tempted by Classic for a while, but I'll wait and see where that goes first. I'm personally a bit pessimistic about it, because I see no good ending to that particular track. If they keep going expansion after expansion, then they're just rehashing their own game at an increased pace and I don't see the point of that. But if they stop at a certain expansion, they face stagnation and no one wants to be stuck playing a dead end MMO, I suspect. Might be fun for a while, but once you've had your fill and there's nothing new coming, the only thing left to do is look for something else to play. Not really sure what the long term goal of Classic is (if any), but my nostalgia not yet so strong that I need to relive those glory days. Maybe some day, but not today. Who knows where that will end up 5 years from now. I expect it to crash and burn eventually, but maybe I'll eat those words and they'll surprise us yet. I wouldn't know how, but hope keeps fools coming back, right?

I played from launch all the way through to Cata in a hardcore raiding guild and also a casual one too. In both cases the game content became equal, if not secondary, to the comradery and community that existed between people sharing a pastime and a lot of their time together. I have far more fond memories of general shenanigans (MC farming, DM runs, new char leveling, etc) with my guildmates than I do of the raids. I think there are far too many factors in such a large player base to pinpoint what exactly caused the downturn, but some do stand out to me from my experience. The two biggest reasons that I experienced during the WoTK into Cata phase were life, and LFD/LFR. A lot of people I knew had families, careers, were leaving school, etc and priorities shift as they do in everyone's life. But I think that the LFD/LFR system was a double edged sword. Now many more people could access raid content, which was good, but that necessity to rely on other people that you had built relationships with in order to see that high tier content was gone. You no longer needed a guild to raid or find people to do dungeon runs. And if you are only doing something on your own and not sharing in that joy and hard work with others that you know, it gets stale and boring very quickly. WoW was, at heart, a game that was built with a strong emphasis on community from the outset. Obviously guilds still exist, but LFD/LFR removed the NEED for them for people to experience WoW. I witnessed both of my long time guilds slowly dwindle as people either left or started just doing content on their own. If I jump back into the game, as I briefly did during MoP and BfA, I find myself just leveling by myself, doing dungeons by myself in LFD, and before I even see the first raid tier I am bored, none of the people I knew back then still play, though I am friends with some still to this day and stay in touch through FB. There were nights in Classic WoW where some of us wouldn't even be doing dungeons, we'd be screwing around in one of the major cities. It became a place where friends halfway round the world could interact in real-time, just hanging out as friends would IRL. For me personally, once the game lost that dependence on community to push forward through the difficult content, it lost most of its appeal.

Wrath set some expectations that Cata immediately undermined, not least through its sharp difficulty increase. My hardcore Wrath guild collapsing from drama midway through ICC is what reminded me that what I enjoyed about WoW was not anything remotely resembling overcoming a challenge (on my own or with others), but rather it being a unique experience that also doubled as a sequel to Warcraft 3. Wrath felt like a great middle point for me between a regular game and a story experience, but Cata was definitely the point when I realized just how little the latter bit was being catered to anymore. Couple that with the Warcraft 3 story being concluded well enough with Arthas's death and especially with early dungeons and the first 10man raid tier being cataclysmically hard and it's no wonder that pretty much all the like-minded people I wanted to play with left almost immediately, and I followed suit by the end of the second month. You can try and undo Cata's mistakes, but you can't undo something far bigger than WoW that ultimately coincided with its downfall: the evolution of online gaming and the internet as a whole. I've mostly just stuck with casual singleplayer experiences and smaller scale cooperative multiplayer experiences ever since, and I don't regret it one bit.

My group of friends started playing WoW when we were 14-15. So by the time Cata came out, we were getting into our 20s. I feel like a lot of people that jumped on the WoW train or started hearing about WoW in school was towards end of classic, start of TBC, and they would be in this same age range. I remember when I first started playing WoW, I was surprised on how many older people played the game. I think it was older people who played Everquest and stuff, for the most part, kids and teens didnt have access to a decent PC/internet. The internet wasnt a big thing to parents back then, so most of ours still had dial-up and awful PCs. I like to believe everyone just grew up around the time Cata came out.

I played from the end of 2004 until sometime during Cataclysm. The breaking of the world was a huge spiritbreaker, but wasn't the entire reason I finally quit. 1) the world stopped feeling alive. As each expansion came out, they added some QoL features that somehow worsened the experience. You could now queue for a group, from anywhere and be off and running in moments. Instead of having to recruit in general chat, meeting up at the dungeon entrance, etc. Player interaction was dying. 2) talent trees got dumber and less interesting 3) the decision to remove certain things that vanilla players had cherished, like class-specific questlines. I played on a pvp server in vanilla as an alliance warlock. I had to go to the Barrens via Booty Bay for my succubus quest. I set my alarm for 3am to wake up and go to the Barrens while most of the playerbase was sleeping lol. I know some of you will think that's dumb but it was an exciting experience for me.

Personal experience, because my guild broke apart during that time: - university was finished by many. Most of us started with Vanilla and BC when we were still in High School or freshman in uni. Progress rading takes time and the raids are just too big for a 2 hours evening. You have to spend at least 2 times 4 hours a week, which doesnt allign with people with real work. - there was a massive increase in difficulty. PUGs werent possible anymore with bad players and even 5 men dungeons were crushing compared to 5 men wotlk dungeons with t10 gear. You still can experience this when you level a new char and visit cata dungeon queue or time walking. - long content drought for casuas. until Hyjal got invaded and changed the by the evil Darnassus druid (Firelands), there was nothing you could do. The LFR raid with the horrible loot system put the nail in the coffin. Who didnt experience it: guild grp with 5 mail wearers join LFR. all roll need and trade the stuff between them. As a solo player you had to compete against this. Basically you had a 1/6 chance to get the item, they had a 5/6 chance.

Honestly I would say two main factors: 1. We beat Arthas, who could be thought of as the "big personal antagonist" of WoW at the time. We were personally involved with his story in WCIII so with him dealt with it felt like the end of the story for many people especially those who played WoW because of WCIII. 2. Honestly just social media made WoW obsolete for many people. WoW's big hook early on was it was also part social media platform when people could communicate and socialize. Sure there was MySpace and early Facebook but they were more niche things than social media is today and around the beginning of WoW's decline was when Facebook and Twitter really took off and started to become mainstream. People like to say things like "LFG made WoW less social" but the truth was if WoW was really as social as people thought it was, people would making their own premade groups before queueing more often than not. Even in Classic I am willing to bet dollars to donuts people talked more on Discord than they did in game, because WoW as a social medium is dead. You communicate with guilds out of game on Discord, you join communities on Reddit or Twitter, no one seriously uses WoW itself for socializing as they did when the game launched. edit: I'm not saying factor #2 is the ONLY cause of sub losses or how the game became less social over time, but I am sure there was a significant demographic that was lost because of it and it may of kick-started the domino effect of the game focusing less on socialization. It's a lot more complex than what I initially stated, I only pointed it out as an overlooked factor at the time.

When I came back to WoW I did not understand what I was looking at. The game's art style in Cata onwards is completely different. A massive fundamental change in the way the entire game looked but especially the character models. The move away from simple clean fantasy world to very anime characters with cartoony over the top busy aesthetics everywhere. I did not like this, this wasn't the WoW I remembered, this was a different game. Learned to ignore it over time but I always pined for the old design. Panda probably pushed people who were annoyed by this look over the edge.

Cataclysm changed Azeroth, which was never ever fully fleshed out from the beginning.

I think it was messing with talent trees, simplifying the game, streamlining leveling too much in each zone, and not everyone really liked Deathwing compared to Arthas. It felt like they were trying to do everything they could to pull in more players by making it easier to play in Cata, but also making it much harder as well which was strange and it all backfired on them hard. By the time Mists came out they further simplified things via talents and whatever and tried to pull people back with the faction war and it just didn't work.

I think it's still mostly attributed to the game going past 6 years of age and people feeling that the Lich King dying was the conclusion of the game for them. This was largely the reason most of my friends stopped playing. It had little do with perceived quality of the game going down or things to do in the game, which I think is largely untrue and unfair tangent that a lot of people go off as to why WoTLK was so good. The formula of the game barely changed within those 6 years, Cataclysm was largely the same and a lot of (my friends anyway) just wanted to play other games. That's not to say other areas aren't a point of contention though. I think them radically changing dungeon difficulty from 'hard' (and I use this term loosely) in TBC to what we saw in WoTLK, and then a complete 180 in the other direction probably turned some people off. Personally think splitting raid sizes to 10/25 was the best decision they ever did and one uniform raid difficulty in WoD was probably the worst decision they ever made. I still think there would be a downward slope, but the decision to hard line on 20 man raiding when WoD came out was (IMO) one of the worst changes long term. I personally loved how classes played from WoTLK up until Legion and I loved the revamped world in Cataclysm. However, I can see why people yearned to see the old world when it was effectively erased and some dungeons removed. One of the best changes they could implement in Classic Cata (if we get it), is just having a bronze dragon flight member to see the world as it use to be, like they have on live. I feel like people want to attribute some massive design change or philosophy as to why WoW dipped after WoTLK. For me I think it's just as simple as the game had been out for 6 years, the LK was dead, and a lot of the people who were playing MMOs had aged out of it a bit (nearly everyone I raided with in Vanilla was 18-24). We slowly lost people over the years simply because of family obligations and less time to be dedicated to raids and I think that's why Blizzard made the QoL decisions they made. Marketing will generally teach people about product cycles, and WoW isn't going to be an exception. Again I'll stress that Blizzard may have hurt themselves on some micro levels here and there by changing things that weren't popular. But I think the simplest explanation is that a lot of players aged out and had been playing it for 6 years. Anybody who wanted to play it would've already played it and it's obvious by jumps in subscriber numbers that a massive amount of people come back with each expansion before realizing scheduling issues won't keep them long term. Newer players or younger players obviously being pulled to and from different game modes around that same time, as things like LoL/DoTa 2 were popular leading into popular series like BR games.

I've played Cataclysm a ton. I used to be a raid leader during T11 and T12 HC progress in our guild. I loved the raiding back then. For the time, these were the most exciting and difficult encounters by far in comparison to anything else we got in the past. When it comes to Arthas... I think there are two factors, first, the guy was kind of relatable. We saw his struggle and you can see many people talk about whether the culling was a good idea or not, even though the author of scenario clearly states that culling was a bad thing. The story still bring a lot of friction in people's heads and that's good. People wonder about it, it's morally grey, and that's what people like in stories. It's also a fellow human. We know why he's mad, that he wanted to help their people and in blindly chasing that goal he lost track of what's good and evil. It stopped mattering to him at a certain point. Deathwing is just a "big bad" and a dragon, end of story for 99% people. I can believe that somwhere there's probably some tragic lore connected to this guy, but that doesn't matter. If there was such a story, it had to be exposed to the players, and if it wasn't, the players have all the rights to assume it's just a boring bad dragon. I kind of hated T13. All these "old gods" and what not were always boring to me. That's already too much "power creep" in the story. I feel like dragons should be the ending point, they should be the strongest. Right now WoW feels like anything can destroy the whole world with a finger snap and ultimately we fight them off with friendship and magic. lmao.

At 5:35 that quote is based on a line from the movie "They Live". Duke Nukem used it but it was paying homage to that movie when they did.

Played Cata from start to finish and yeah it it did felt quite different from wotlk. New zones, new talents, flying.. all of this things had a big impact on how the game felt.

Really great points WillE - MMO fatigue for sure. I would add that the internet had solved the game essentially so by Cata time there was a DBM for everything. So it went from that lore and exploratioin feel to more of a min/max which I think makes new players feel so behind the census can only go down. Good stuff my man!

I remember struggling to keep a good heroic farming group together, as pugs were out of the question if you wanted to reliably finish a pre-nerf Cataclysm heroic. Eventually everyone in the group got tired of random punishing boss mechanics for such meagre rewards. I wonder if the response to pre-nerf Cataclysm heroic dungeons should have foreshadowed how increasing raid difficulty in SoM would be received; Some people loved the challenge, many people hated it enough to play something else.

I remember Cataclysm feeling thin on max level content. The first big patch featured those two troll raids recycled into dungeons, trying to stall under they had more stuff ready. Firelands was great but small, the planned Abyssal Maw raid never surfaced, and the Deathwing raid was mostly built from recycled assets. I think Blizzard simply bit off more than they could chew with the old world revamp, and it cut deeply into development time for other things.

In my personal life the timing was bad as far as the amount of time I had to spend playing then. On top of that the guild I was in fell apart, and I never really found a group of people like that again so I shifted more towards doing PvP for the next few expansions (although I did love the more difficult heroics at the time). Some of the people who I knew that were still around were satisfied with doing LFR after it came out "because it gives purples." I suppose that removed some of their incentive? It was the start of a really a lonely time for me; a big open world that I don't explore and lots of people in it who were all strangers.

One of the things that I think really harmed my Cataclysm experience was what happened to scaling as you leveled from 80 to 85. Every time I leveled up, it was like I had lost 3-5 levels worth of power immediately. I remember popping from 81 to 82 in the middle of a "kill X things" quest, and had a much harder time with the rest of the SAME enemies than I did before that level up. It felt awful.

I think one of the biggest problems with Cata was the disjointed nature of the new zones. It was the first expansion where zones were not physically connected. It felt like the expansion lacked a cohesive narrative and legit end-boss bad guy. Probably there was a lot of let-down after how satisfying ICC was a cap to WotLK. I was not a fan of the Azeroth makeover. I would have much preferred they just added flying and left it alone otherwise. Ultimately, I made it to WoD before I dropped out of the retail track, but Cata really was the beginning of the end for me (granted a long, drawn-out end). A number of factors led me to quit, including too many changes to class mechanics, class homogenization, questing on rails, neutering professions, increasingly alt unfriendly, and more. The thing that finally made me drop my sub was realizing I was spending most/all of my time playing minigames (pets, etc.) and no longer playing an RPG. They simply killed the game, for me, through a death of a thousand cuts.

Cataclysm, to me, in an interesting one. I missed the launch of the expansion, got back in during Firelands, The leveling, compared to what had some before was great, and I kept leveling alts to see different zones. That also let me try a lot of classes. One thing I loved and hated that they removed it in WoD, was the different ressources for the 3 warlock specs. I'm pretty sure Cata is also when they added the shadow orbs for Shadow Priests, which were a welcome addition. We still had some remnants of Stance Dancing for Warriors, which made the class a bit more complex. We also got Holy Power for Paladins, and some great AoE healing for them, really improving the way they played. This is also when DKs got necrotic strike, giving them something very unique. Although, I do despise that Blood DPS was no longer an option at all. It went from viable, to difficult, to a meme, to really good at full gear, to out of the game within 2 years. Overall, there was a lot of change to classes, some for the better, some not so much to my personal taste. Content-wise, it wasn't as bad as WoD, the first tier from what I played through and heard at the time, was maybe a bit overtuned, especially for 10-man, as you mentioned, but mainly somewhat dull. The main complaint I would have would be the setting of the raids. I felt very suffocated in them, and the bosses kind of felt uninspired. It didn't make much sense to me that Cho'Gall would be a higher level enemy than the Lich King, for instance. We defeated Nefarian 5 years earlier, and had defeated seemingly much greater threats since, even killing Onyxia a second time less than 2 years prior. How were the 2 of them back on the menu again? Al'Akir kind of made sense, as he was a big elemental lord we had never seen before and made sense as a boss, but I just didn't gt how he was a threat and why we had to kill him. Especially considering Ragnaros was already back after we killed him 6 years before. Again, why were we just recycling old bosses, and how were they now stronger than we were after defeating the Lich King and his armies? Even the troll patch was recycling content with washed down versions of old instances, and we actually lost access to those instances being replaced by 5 man dungeons, and removing cosmetics from the game, despite Cataclysm bringing in Transmogrification. Finally we got to Death Wing's raid, and we got some weird timey-whimey bullshit, that made it unclear whether we were defeating him in the past or in the future, if the one we were killing was in the future but travelled there from the present, or if the present one would just live on until that future. The fact is we got to the raid through the caverns of time, and all the dungeons were in a possible future. Thinking about it now, I don't even know if that means Deathwing is actually defeated or not. I'm pretty sure from the following story that he is, but I have no idea how that makes sense given that once again, we got to the fight through the caverns of time. See, the story of that expansion tried to be smarter than it used to be. So far we were just clearing a hit list established by the RTS games. Deathwing was one of the last big names on that list. Once they ran out of big names to kill they looked and Shen and went "oh, remember the pandas? Yeah, that's all we have left, let's go kill those." and someone had the foresight to say "maybe killing pandas wouldn't sell so well. What if we made them playable instead and helped them out with their troubles?" And then someone had to call in an actual writer to make up a continent for the pandas and somehow weave them into the lore. MoP is the first expansion that tried new things lore wise, and introduced new big characters. It's just unfortunate that we would always defeat them within 1 patch... They weren't planting seeds, they were just buying new ferns and we were immediately tearing them to shreds like poorly behaved cats. Cataclysme was just running out of breath on characters for us to kill, so we ended up killing many we had already killed, and some uninspired minions of theirs. PvP was in a bit of a weird spot, but not terrible. RBGs were pretty fun, at least from a DK main's perspective. I do however agree that the big gaps in gear were becoming a big problem. I had a friend constantly insisting on doing arenas with me but he had no PvP gear. Sure, he had full raid gear, but he was still getting absolutely torn to shreds. The grind to properly gear every alt for PvP felt way too long. You already had to spend days leveling the character, which in real time meant weeks, and then you had to grind another few weeks of gear just to not get completely destroyed, and then some more to get the actual arena gear and be competitive. Now you might argue that such was already the case since TBC, and I would agree, except that by this point we were caught in this cycle again for the 3rd time, having to finish leveling the alts from the previous cap, or from scratch, then going through 2 full cycles of gear farming to be on par with other characters. As you also mentioned, we'd seen what balanced PvP looked like thanks to LoL and other games. It became pretty clear that it didn't have to be the way it was. MoP wouldn't address that yet, either, and WoD would put a bit of a dent in it, but not enough to make it painless. Then we even lost PvP vendors for a while, but that's another issue entirely and unrelated to Cataclysm. If memory serves, this is when health pools became a bit excessive for the first time. By the end of the expansion you had people running around with several hundred thousand life points. Kind of similar to what's about to happen again in Dragonflight, actually. This also came with some spells and abilities hitting like wet noodles because they didn't scale up at the same pace as our health pools did. Casting Lighting Bolt on a shaman for instance was just funny in PvP. All the damage was in the meatball. Lightning bolt tickled. I will say, though, PvP must have been pretty good still, because we saw a massive rise in popularity of PvP players on Twitch and KZfaq. I would say that the real issue was in the systems, but not really. We still had bad luck protection with badges, we had PvP vendors, we had rep grinds that could be done with tabards or farming raid trash mobs. They added gear catch-ups in the form of dungeons, some of which were actually really good and gave some rather esthetically pleasing gear options. Transmogs, guild levels, mount tabs, pet battles, RBGs, reforging all came in with Cataclysm, and some of these have fallen out of favor over the years, but others have kept many players in, and still playing old content to this day. Reforging also made a comeback at some point. I think we had gear upgrades with badges for the first time, too. So maybe Cataclysm's image was really just sullied by the last patch, which lasted for way too long, had the worst end boss encounter possible, after a full expansion for PvEers of just killing things we'd already killed or had forgotten existed because of how insignificant they were lore-wise and presumed dead. Add LFR on top of that, taking away the prestige of raiding and raiding gear, because now everyone can have access to it without getting past the bouncer first, and the removal of ZA and ZG to drop 2 dungeons for catch up gear instead of giving us the Neptune raid we were promised, and the memes of Ragnaros with legs, and suddenly it makes sense why people would have a rather negative memory of the expansion, seeing as most of them did mostly PvE, and whenever they would step into PvP to check it out they would get absolutely torn to bits because of the gearing system for PvP.

I remember the increased dungeon difficulty being a huge turn-off for the majority of my casual guild. My main endgame in WotLK was spamming Heroic Dungeons with a couple of guildmates and some PUGs that we grabbed from RDF. On weekends, I would participate in raids. We had a main progression raid team and a couple of alt raids on the weekends. Cataclysm completely changed that. The item level discrepancy between dungeons and raids was insane. This was the first expansion I remember where the dungeon gear available from the patch drop was inferior to the raid gear upon release. This is also the first expansion I remember where the dungeon boss difficulty was on par with normal raid boss difficulty. The troll heroics cleaned out the remnants of my guild that had stuck through the initial phase. After my guild fell apart, I joined a raiding guild because that's all that the game had left to offer. I remember trying to get some guildies in 378 gear to run troll heroics with me. They couldn't do it. It was crazy to me that content that was awarding 353 gear was too hard for players who were in 378 gear. I remember being extremely frustrated because I had been pugging the troll heroic successfully for months even in 353 gear. It felt unfair that raid content was so rewarding despite having such easy fights in comparison. Most raid bosses in Cataclysm boiled down to stack, heal, debuff, and take turns running out of the stack or hitting the "win" button. By comparison, the dungeon boss mechanics were far more complex.

I think alot of people quit because the heroics and first tier of raids was too hard for casual players. I had several people in my guild that struggled with it, got frustrated and quit.

Personally I believe WoW's downfall was a consequence of the expansion-invalidate model. Every expansion invalidates the entirety of the world and the expansion prior to it. That is a very nasty game design loop as you get 3 or 4 expansions deep. It becomes too easy to login to wow and ask yourself "What did I get out of all this?" At least with Era, I still use the gear I spent a year raiding for, I get to resub for a few weeks and mess around and farm stuff and have some fun. I feel like these moments help me build more value from the time I spent getting all the raiding gear. But in retail? Psh. As soon as you get the good gear it will just be replaced by better gear and that cycle will continue on endlessly. Screw that

I played Kata at launch - indeed leveled to 85 within a day or so after launch and jumped right into the reworked SFK using LFD about 10 minutes after I maxed that level. (Side note - the predistribution over the internet of the game for the first time made it the smoothest launch ever to date, but also denied the news hype of seeing folks camped outside a Walmart or Game Stop to get their game). At the time, I was leading a guild that had been one of only 10 to have killed the Lich King on our small pop server before Kata dropped and we had built the guild up to a 25-man guild for Kata. I recall a lot of sentiment from everyone about a desire to put the hard back into Heroic Dungeons, and Blizzard did accommodate that for sure. That made pre-raid gearing a bigger grind than folks had experienced for a while. Add to it that Blizzard also made regular raiding much harder so the easy intro raids like Naxx, where prepared raids could clear on the first go and thereafter badge farm, were no longer there. as such, it was just a lot harder and less forgiving to raid, and demanded much more time than anything since Vanilla, and an aging WoW population did not have that time. I started to meet fewer folks who had a life and also played WoW and instead met more and more folks who were living on disability or some other method of survival that let them just play WoW all day - which is what was basically required for success on a timeline in which folks had become accustomed to achieving it. Thus, I think that at least for PvE raiding, MMO fatigue was a huge factor, and folks who had raided through at least 2 expansions were in need of a break. I remember specifically thinking I needed to do more with my life than WoW.

I felt like the "we beat the game" moment was Legion. Everything after that feels like picking at scraps on a carcass.

I know I can only speak for myself and a few close friends, but what we experienced was something of a perfect storm. Several players were affected by the recession in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and had to drop off for a while. At the same time, guild leveling and lfr caused many players to gravitate to larger guilds. As a result, many returning players found that the sense of community had been fractured, and didn't really have anything anchoring them to the game anymore.

Cata prepatch was really fun. We were given new skills and I loved it (especially shaman's earthquake ability). Then they killed the old talent tree and it was meh from then on.

Great video WillE, personally i loved the story behind cata. And i am what u would call "a filty casual" because i never raided on endgame due to the lack of time needed so for me the lfr was a plesent experience! Alas, as the weeks rode on i was missing the real joy about wow. The meeting new players in strange locations randomly and just talking and having a laugh, maybe help each other with a quest and "fingers crossed" adding a new friend to the list. Thats where cata died for me. I fully understand the more seasoned players feeling that wow died at the end of wotlk and for me it did as well. Tho i had a blast when legion released! For me playing as a gliding dualbladed rouge on speed was an amazing immersion! Ps: If blizz is reading this, drop cata, mist and warlords and just bring dh as a playable rase😁

The "Duke Nukem' quote is originally a quote from the protagonist in John Carpenter's 'They Live'.

Mostly agree with your points. Especially the big difficulty spike at the start and that the lore just wasn't as compelling since we didn't have so much setup from warcraft 3 like we had with Arthas. Also I feel like every game has a natural point where it starts dropping from its peak even when nothing especially bad happens with it because there is always that group of gamers that just play the new exciting thing and then move on.

What killed cata for me was the massive change to things like how some classes played. For example, I loved playing priest. Squishy Rouge prime target was just my thing. I came in around the middle of wrath, so when cata came out it hurt immediately how slow my class had became. RIP flash heal to win, but I think what really hurt was what I and others lost without getting a real chace to do. As a priest, I happened to come across on accident the items needed for benediction. I went on to doing the majority of the required stuff. Turns out a critical piece to finish and get it was removed in Cata. This always left a bad taste for me.

As far as Cata "dumbing down" the trees there are some points to consider: 1) much of that got moved to passives or glyphs. We're talking about much of the "0.1 sec reduction in cast of X spell per point" or "1% chance to crit" or "reduces mana of Y spell." You had to take them so it wasn't a choice. Sure, getting a talent point every level feels good, but other than that this iteration really didn't change much about how you interacted with trees or reduce any actual choices. 2) Glyphs did work in this expansion and sometimes meant choice where the old talents they replaced never did. Case in point, Ele can either cast Lightning Bolt while moving or get a percentage damage increase. That is a legitimate choice and fight specific. 3) Everyone's kit got bigger with new spells and practically every rotation became more complex. Because of that it certainly doesn't feel as if anything is "dumbed down" when playing. TLDR: There are complaints about Cata but this one is a bit overblown IMO.

I played Cata, and I loved the increase in difficulty. I remember doing Heroic Grim Batol and thinking it wasn't going to last, since my PuG was struggling to clear trash. I wasn't wrong. But a major reason I think WoW started to fail wasn't mentioned in the video, and it's simple: Blizzard started to fancy themselves good story tellers. They are not. Cata was the 'whole zone storyline' expansion that led to the theme park quality retail still has. You were no longer playing your character, you were following bread crumb quests to the next set piece. In TBC and WotLK I cared about taking down Illidan and Arthas, sure, but not enough to read quest text. And sure as hell not enough to care what Grunt Captain A was doing in Expansion Starter Zone B. But in Cata I had to listen to a goblin pilot complain about the Warchief in an unskippable zepplin ride, or fly on a green dragon around a zone listening to exposition that I, again, couldn't skip. The story was garbage, the writing was garbage, and Blizzard not only stuffed it down our throats, but acted like they were Hemingway for doing it. Also, whatever idiot thought that writing in Garrosh as being the new Warchief was a complete disgrace. I was not the only Hordie who was actually completely offended this poorly written, idiot character was suddenly supposed to be my leader. I then had two full expansions where everything was centered around the bastard. How COULDN'T WoW lose players, especially Horde players, because of stuff like that.

I played Cata and actually really liked that the old zones got revamped. It made the world feel more alive. After all, I'd already done all the questing through the old zones multiple times and they hadn't changed in 3 expansions. It didn't seem like those old zones were even being used anymore. I did end up quitting WoW and not coming back till Classic mostly because of my RL situation. Finished college, got a job, started a family...I just didn't have time for an MMO anymore. Now I'm established again and was able to come back for Classic/TBC/WotLK and it has been a lot of fun. Will probably stick around and ride the wave til it disappears.

I think long development cycle and lots of competition really is what caused subs to drop a lot. The last patch going for nearly a year when other games were coming out was a huge deal from my experience - People I'd been playing with since TBC had unsubbed to go play LoL or Day Z, and others were just getting older and doing other stuff with their lives.

This was around the time I remember seeing Ghostcrawler pushing a narrative about the "illusion of choice" in regard to talents, glyphs, gear... because everyone's just gonna jump on the internet and find the best build. Turns out a game's whole purpose is giving people choices, an illusion, a sandbox to exist in and interact with the boundaries; removing choices felt like removing a lot of content from one of the biggest forms of character customization. The world remake: removed the old content. Huge gamble, and it did not pan out. There was something made-by-template about most revamped zones. Insert vehicle mechanic every X quests. Have 3 starter quests, 3 quests after those, then final boss quest. Felt like you were on a conveyor belt... And personal gripe, why boast a new stat (Expertise), then only have it incorporated in 80+ gear. It looked like a fun new thing to play with, and they were already redoing the old content.

I never played wow before classic. I started at classic launch and have been on and off ever since. My friends who played back in the day say they loved Cata, and would love to see Cata classic come out. I'm all for experiencing the game as it was released back in the day. There's no way it will be an authentic experience, but I still would love to see the game as it came out bit by bit.

For classic they honestly should add cross server lfd and lfr for old content, classic and tbc now that we are in wotlk. Its extremely difficult to find groups for that old content since most people just rush through it to Max level. And northrend will also turn into such a chore you have to get over to get into Mt hijal if we ever get a cataclysm classic.

This is a great video in how pre-Cata differs to Cata and was kind of the beginning of overcasualisation, I wonder if anyone's made retrospective videos like that for future expansions and how they changed from the previous one, like Cata -> Pandaria for example. WoW's game design focus shifts are always intriguing to me.

Where is the tree at the end located?

The "I'm here to do X and Y, but I'm all out of Y" thing goes back to a movie called "They Live", not to Duke Nukem, though one could argue that Duke Nukem made it more popular. It's something like the "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" song, which a lot of people (including me at first) think is from the Simpsons, but was used regionally well before that, and the Simpsons just brought it to a wide audience. "Tonight we dine in hell" is supposedly a real quote by Leonidas (translated though, obviously) from before the actual Battle of Thermopylae. At very least, the original source, Herodotus, says that he said it. That was not made up for the movie, but they used what was in the ancient literature. On that note, "Our arrows will block out the sun / Then we will fight in the shade" is also classically sourced, and has been quoted in other media, not just repeated in the movie. I first saw it on a Magic card, Elvish Archers, from the first Magic set.

Favorite version of PvP feral druid was from Cata. Removed a lot of the clunkiness from Wrath. Dueling was extremely fun throughout the xpac which to this day is one of my favorite things to do when balance/challenge is there.

I think what really keeps people coming back and playing is having a lot of stuff to do. With Cataclysm, you stood in Stormwind or Orgrimmar, queue'd for dungeons for Valor cap, and got Have Group Will Travel'd to raid. Apart from professions there just wasn't that much to go out and do which hurt them really bad.

For me and several others I know that quit the game at the same time. It was a few things. 1. Talent changes that eliminated cross tree usage. Forcing you to use one skill tree only. Really rigid. 2. Crack down on macro's and ability to make any that were worth it. 3. Forcing you to have virtually all skills used on its own button. 4. The change for Dk's from frost as tank to blood. Didn't make sense then, still sucks now. Turning a tank into a vampire is just stupid. Why have healers? 5. The over simplification of the game to attract more players in more places around the world. 6. Many of the hard grinds that we hated but kept the game worth the effort were reduced or eliminated. 7. Many many other small things that after a while just made the game not fun. Like listening to every complaint in the forums and thinking the mass of complaints had any legitimacy.

IMO you missed a big point with this omission: The max level cap increasing by five instead of ten. Cata was poorly received because there were only five more player levels to get, thus rushing the leveling process and getting players to endgame, which you did touch on a little tbf, and endgame just wasn't sufficient to keep interest high. Cata was just a nothing-burger of content for most players. That sharp drop is from players reaching max level and realizing that almost all the expansions content was for early game changes and the world revamp, which had nothing to do with max level characters. Plus, the idea of leveling a new character just to see the revamped Cata content and then getting stuck in the same Outland and Northrend they had just spent years in was much more of a chore than a fun prospect. This problem wouldn't be addressed until the introduction of Chromie Time, and by then it was way too little and way too late. It was this realization that players had, that no matter what came in the future, they would have to play through everything they had already played through just to try and new character or have a new adventure. IMO, that's what 'killed' WoW: the self-realization by the playerbase that the game was destined to be repetitive.

Ok, if we're taking this one step further with the PvP, League didn't just do a number on Warcraft, League did a number on Blizzard in general when it took the fight directly to Korean PC Bangs. The shift from Starcraft RTS to League MOBA happened very, very quickly and it was part of Riot's gameplan to make sure that it was installed in as many PC Bangs as possible for when the Korean servers went up, which is why they were delayed until after every other main region.

I played heal shaman and blizzard significantly changed the healer gameplay experience. You were no longer able to compensate player errors because you barely had enough mana to heal the expected damage. It felt absolutely awful and i quit early cata after having played the game for 7 years.

I think you're overstating how difficult the heroics were at the beginning of Cata. Sure, they were mechanically tougher, but the playerbase was also completely braindead by that point thanks to wrath heroics being complete AOE fests after the ulduar patch. The average player had become so bad at the game by that point that getting someone to interrupt a spell was too much too ask. Cata gave you a literal damage buff for interrupting enemy spells, and players STILL wouldn't do it unless you yelled at them enough.

I got a midroll ad in the middle of your sponsorship section.

It's a combination of multiple factors: - Way too many resources spent remaking the leveling experience, which left the endgame completely emaciated. - Lore letdown with new boss seemingly pulled out off nowhere. - Only 5 levels and 5 zones (of which three were mandatory) became tedious and repetitive when grinding alts. In particular you had to grind rep with Deepholm thanks to having the shoulder enchants, and most other reps had early tier raiding gear. - Heroics were too hard for Queue-based players that had gotten comfortable over-gearing and steamrolling heroic dungeons in WOTLK. - Tier 11 raids were completely broken for 10 man raiding teams, which when combined with making 10 and 25 man separate but equal meant disaster for the new 10 man's while 25 man's basically steamrolled. - No reason to leave Stormwind/Orgrimmar outside of farming materials for professions. No dailies worth doing, no world quests, and rep was gained through dungeon runs thanks to the tab system.

they need to tie in the sub to the xbox game pass. would bring a lot more players to the game

I never understood the problem people had with the world changing. They say it's a living thing. Living things grow, shrink, take damage etc. I honestly loved worldwide flying and new orgrimmar. Classic org isn't bad, Cata org is just better.

The only thing which I agree why Cata was bad is its zones "upgrade". Not because I believe the vanilla zones had better quest, but because it doesn't feel like an upgrade, they feel like one-patch zones. The pace of lvling and rewards were improved, but that's about it. Other than the zone revamp, I believe Cata was just an expansion that people back then weren't ready for. I asked many people who stopped at WotLK that why they didn't continue in Cata. The most commom answers are Lich King and that the game has become too easy for them. The Lich King reasons are because believe it or not, many people aren't familiar with the story before Warcraft 3. They claim that Lich King is the OG villain, yet he is younger in the storyline than Deathwing. I heard way too many times that Deathwing was pulled out of thin air and is an alien to the WoW story. And that the game has become easier... well what can I say, that only implies many people considered lvling as the main content and didn't even scratch the surface of the endgame. And the rise of subs at the beggining of WoD. People really are that simple: show them orcs from the hood being beefy and ruthless and they will start subbing. Show them Pandaren and they will start yelling it's a disgustig Disney Kung Fu Panda. It's still the problem with today retail and that's why I say the "down to earth theme" of DF will not save WoW.

Hey WillE, awesome video. You bring up so many interesting and impactful concepts.

I've said it before and i will say it again, half of what "classic" refers to is the "classic" map. cata started the drop because it removed the majority of the of the nostalgia content, the stories the original writers made for the zones and it just happened over night. i think there would be a lot more success if all the zones evolved into the cata revamp, when you're leveling through zones doing quests to "purify pools" and things like that the zone should progress, then the cata change can happen after a certain point in quest lines. pulling out all the content people spent YEARS getting used to was abruptly changed and the new zone lore felt cheaper

the only things i didnt enjoy with cata was the modernizing of the world and not having to put the majority of your talent points into a certain spec first before being able to have points in multiple trees. Im pretty excited and hopeful we get a classic cata after Wotlk, i really enjoyed the pvp and raiding back when cata was current

"and did not look back" featuring a Samira clip, I see what you did there :D

Imo, part of the reason for the decline was Cataclysm was a legitimately hard expansion... mechanically it was harder than any of it's predecessors in casual content (heroic dungeons being generally top tier for casuals), and this didn't sit well with a load of them so they quit.

For me it was probably two things. First thing that happened was the breaking down of the community. I started playing in WotlK and at the end of the expansion I was part of a small raid group that I really enjoyed spending time with. Looking back, we weren't terribly good but I enjoyed the socialising and chatting on TeamSpeak even after the raid. We continued for a bit in Cata but eventually the group broke up. I still had a few friends in WoW, including a Paladin who I ended marrying in real life, but over the years there were less and less people to talk to. The second thing that happened was the story of WoW. That is a lot more recent and has definitely culminated in Shadowlands. I no longer get the sense of wonder with the story and more often than not, I'm left disappointed. I was still interested in the story in the early Shadowlands, but over the past year there's been a massive feeling of: "Why bother?" I have very little interest in Dragonflight and it might very well be the first WoW expansion that I will not purchase. This all makes me rather sad because I do have wonderful memories from WoW and my life would be very different without it. I would not have met my husband, and my daughter would not exist if it wasn't for WoW. But like a big ol' dumbass once said: "Times change."

It's quite simple, after 6 years of WoW being a certain way (UI, community, world travel, questing system, pvp, looting, mechanics, etc) all of a sudden the game, world and everything else was overhauled in one patch. Everything was streamlined and took the social community away. It gave dungeons, raids and pvp a detached feeling. There was also an automation to leveling and ever since Cata power leveling became the priority. The questing experience was now last priority.

Wait im confused, for me on Venoxis (German server) we do have the dungeon finder tool to create groups as shown in the video, why does he keep saying we dont have one in wrath?

Because the iconic character people had been dreaming of killing for a decade was now dead. Because Deathwing was seen as new, hastily written lore with no backstory (although he is mentioned often in both TBC and LK.) Because the heroics were to hard for people used to breezing through that type of content before.

It is quite a shame that Dragonsoul was so bad and Cata as a whole is remembered bitterly. Cata had a bunch of Quality of Life improvements that made the game a lot of fun to just play. When Wrath Classic launched, a running gag in my playgroup for a bit was to ask « wasn’t X in Wrath? » to which the answer inevitably is « nope that was Cata »

As someone who played the game solo mainly due to anxiety of grouping/interacting those early Cata heroics are my best wow memory. The difficulty plus being able to click a button to queue for them made it the first "difficult" content I got to play in groups. The first couple of weeks were brutal, but I remember finally being able to clear Grim Batol and that crab boss at the end dropping a 2 hander that was a big upgrade feeling so good.

Well, Cataclysm changed the vanilla Azeroth that I grew to love very dearly into something completely different that I didn't really like. For me it destroyed something fundamentally important in world of warcraft.

I think the main issue is that the player base cottoned onto the fact that the "better gear you need" is only a patch away. Even currently in WoTLK people are saying, don't worry about that rare item, in the next patch it will be plentiful.

I have a guess. I think that Vanilla and TBC had pretty much reached all the people who were curious and willing to play more traditional MMOs. I also think Blizzard realized this. So their solution was to make Wrath in a way that minimized or removed a lot of the Vanilla elements. This did server to attract non traditional MMO player. Problem was, they alienated a lot of the traditional base, and those people started to leave. That's why the growth numbers started to plateau in Wrath. It's not that people stopped coming in. It's that the number of people leaving and the number of people joining were almost equal. Then Cata came out, when Blizzard was trying to return to TBC style heroics. This made the Vanilla purists happy, but upset the "Wrath babies". Unfortunately for Blizzard, they had put themselves in a position where there was no walking that line, and they had to pick a side. They ultimately made the choice to go with the new school players. Which meant the old school players started to leave. The TotalBiscuit video he made when he left WoW sums up the feeling of the old school crowd perfectly I think.

"I'm all out of souls" is a They Live reference. Also referenced by Duke Nukem

love your stuff, like, a lot. one small point: please, dim those brite white screens just a bit, they're quite painful

Blizzard was acquired by activision while wrath was in late development. Together they streamlined the wow experience (talent tree, etc.) and took out a lot of what people had come to love, in an effort to simplify and attract more subs.

Hard disagree as somebody who lived old wrath and BC talent trees the size was absolutely what I lived about it along with the serious choices of which enemies to specialize against. I mean as an opd Rogue you could eithwer go Ambush sub vs clothies and suffer vs plate or go for Bleed / Hemo sword builds and specialize against warriors amd to a lesser degree palain. It was real meaningful choices by having talents to take a skill from baseline to preferred

You nailed it with the line "Killing Arthas was the end of WoW." It took me way too long to get my LK kill, and when I did, I felt like i'd beaten the game. After that, Deathwing was a disappointing villain; although some of the mechanics of his final fight (like fighting on the back of a gigantic dragon!) were interesting, but overall the expansion felt like Blizzard phoned it in. The thing that really cemented it being over for me was logging in and seeing "offline for 30 days or more" for all of the people on my friend list, some of whom I'd played with since Classic.

You explained the reason at 15:00, no one wants to spend days repeating the same quests to be able to do PVP.

For me it was because they broke Shamans and to be honest, I still haven’t forgiven them for it. The shift from MP5 to Spirit really seemed broken when the week before I was main healing LK and then couldn’t even heal a reg dungeon without constantly going oom. Then there was also the totem revamp, and I felt like a glorified mage.

Thing that people tend to forget is that the raiding scene really changed in Cata as well. It semi started in Vanilla with ZG but through Wrath they had created a casual raiding base with Kara, ZA and then the 10 mans in Wrath. With the Cata changes the 10 mans got much harder which meant guilds had to go from just taking anyone they thought was cool and being able to clear content to actually needing to be able to build a good raid team. Rather than doing this many casual raid guilds just quit and then you saw 25 mans split and fracture which didn't help either. Eventually they would add LFR to kind of combat the problem they had created but it didn't have the same community feel, so while it has seen lots of use, I'm not sure that alone means it was good thing. Combine that with all of the other changes, old world, talents, end of an era with Arthas, cut content, etc. looking back I'm not sold anything would have kept it at the same levels let alone actually kept growing.

I’m one of those people that actually loved warlords of draenor. It was the first time since the games release that I had multiple max level characters. Also it was the first time I played horde…

As someone who played over 1000 hours in F2P retail, before switching to a private WOTLK server: Cata fucked the zones up in a non-fun way. The original ones feel WAAAY more adventurous than the "destroyed" versions, even with the lack of flying points (which is a bit of a pain in the ass). And you can't say I'm nostalgic, because I started playing retail 3 or 4 months before *Shadowlands* started.

For me and my friends, we all quit because of the difficulty of the heroics. Heroics in Wrath being a chill way to gear up for raids was a good thing. The difficulty was not insurmountable of course, but just made it not fun. Healing especially was too stressful. I also think this was the beginning of too many "dance dance revolution" type of mechanics being thrown in to the encounters. The actual levelling content was a lot of fun, and I even enjoyed the underwater zone. Having flying at the start was great too IMO.

I will have been playing wow for 20 years in 2024. I got my statue after 10 years, and hope I will get another after 20 years. I am so VERY glad for all my memories with ALL the original expansions and original vanilla. Classic has it's perks, but what classic has really done is make me appreciate all my memories of original and retail. I really had a blast with things like dungeon finder and even raid finder.

Good things about cata: Rated battlegrounds Darkmoon fair revamp Art design of armor Worgen Goblins Raids and dungeons were ok Negatives: Talent tree revamp, classes getting more homogenized, the feeling of power progression lost with the new talents, less opportunities to create unique fun specs for hyper specific scenarios. Item reforging: just another thing you had to waste gold on while gearing, it also took away the uniqueness of items. Transmog: not only did items lose their unique stat profiles due to reforging, they also lost the visual component due to transmog. You can no longer judge player power based on how someone looks. Makes getting upgraded feel less impact full since you will just transmog its appearance . Nothing matters about items besides the ilvl. Raid finder: ruined the feeling of progression when the final tier of the expansion can be done day 1 with pugs not even from your own server. Revamp of old zones: killed the charm and vibe of the old areas . There was no need to do this. With heirlooms and the exp squish leveling up alts was not an issue. Totally uneccicary change. It made the old areas feel more theme park, less sandbox. The story felt all over the place. Deathwing was an alright villan but his appearance seemed totally random. Same thing with all the characters who turn evil from old God corruption. Also Tauren shaman made no sense, I understand they are technically "sunwalkers" yet that also seemed totally random and out of nowhere.

For me, it was the sudden shift to making the game easier. WOW was fun because it was relatively difficult, you actually had to think about how to fight and manage combat resources, now you just spam your most powerful spell and 80% to 90% of enemy mobs just die. I remember back in the days of wotlk how proud I was when I first managed to max out every toon in my main realm after months of grinding, now a realm of max level toons takes maybe a week.

Literally the only memory that sticks out to me from Cata is the day they announced Pandas. It felt like I was being trolled. Other than that, the expac was a total dud to me.

I think the difference in pop culture references in Cata and previous expansions, and why people bring up the ones in Cata as a mark against the expansion, is that before they were usually either names of random NPCs or quests, though there's some exceptions like the long questline in Un'gor Crater that was a reference to the Legend of Zelda games (but Un'goro was a zone you never really needed to even quest in). In Cataclysm you hade the major questlines of zones all players of their faction would pretty much be required to visit revolve entirely around pop culture references. Having a quest name refer to a popular film is one thing, but having the main plot of a new zone with crucial lore reveals consist of you playing through a parody of Indiana Jones just cheapens the whole thing.

Personally, the biggest negative of Cata was the destruction of old Azeroth. There were many times when I'd just sit and fish in Auberdine or Astranaar or just roam around The Barrens and Stranglethorn to enjoy the ambience of the zone. It seemed almost profane to destroy the places that so many players had "grown up" in favor of trying to make Cata's presence known. A close second was the truncated leveling - there were many times when end-game play got to be tedious that a payer could roll a new character and go back and enjoy the slow grind of being a noob, being excited for a drop that added +1 to your agility, etc. In Cata, all of a sudden half the lower-level quests were gone, and you could level out of a zone before you even got half its story line. The game felt like a fast-track to raiding whether you wanted it or not, and lost the magic which was living the story all the way through. They could have put optional paths for fast-tracking for those players who just wanted to roll new toons and get them to max level fast, and left intact the normally-paced game play that attracted many subscribers in the first place. It was like they were writing the content only for power-players and forgetting their roots. I still play, but my guild is empty these days and it's just not the same.

I loved when Looking for Raid came to Cata because I could actually do the content that I used to only be able to watch youtube videos of. I was a huge noob when I was a teen but I had fun. People really seem to hate on it but dont consider that noobs want to do the raids too, even if its just for fun without loot.

I had a friend who was a dedicated WoW player who quit the game for good over the nonsense with the talent tree. She was role player and had designed her main character to have a personality; she had chosen her talents to support her vision of who the character was instead of optimizing for combat. From her point of view they had taken away her character because it wasn't the same person.

I loved cata. I started playing somewhere in vanilla, dabbled a bit in TBC, but all fairly casual. I didn't play for most of WotLK because I was traveling a lot. Then I got this new boyfriend and while we were settling down I started playing again a month before Cataclysm. The new bf started playing too and we moved in together and had an absolute blast together throughout Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria and most of Warlords of Draenor. But then we started making babies and we stopped playing. I've started back up just now as the kids are 3 and 5 and my evenings are free and there are hardly sleepless nights anymore. Mists of Pandaria and cataclysm are my absolute favourite expansions. I liked vanilla and TBC just fine. But during cata and mists, I played with my now husband and we had a very cool guild. When we weren't playing, we'd talk about the game and what we wanted to do next and stuff. We'd go on holiday together, talk about WoW a lot (among other things of course) and then come back with some sort of plan to make this and that alt together. It was a great bonding experience for us. And I think when people go on about vanilla, TBC and WoTLK, they had a similar experience. Every piece of the puzzle clicked and they enjoyed themselves immensely with a good guild and/or a good real life partner, friend or otherwise. And there was enough time in their lives to really get into the game and enjoy it. But the people that experienced that in the first few expansions were ready for the next thing by the time cataclysm started, just like my husband and I were when Legion was about to be released. I'm fond of cataclysm the same way other people are fond of vanilla. Even though I played before cataclysm came out, the pieces of the puzzle just didn't fully click for me until cata. The biggest mistake I think Blizzard made, was probably not trying hard enough to get new people in the game back then. if they had, the numbers wouldn't have dwindled as much.

the outside influence is actually a great point, at the time I was only playing Cata with like 1 or 2 of my friends compared to 8-10 in wrath, so the influence to play all the hit new games was immense. I remember I still enjoyed Cata a lot though, but the only distinct memory I have was with my best friend, we log in on release and we see half our abilities gone off of our bars... Very sad day for sure, they didn't dumb down the classes exactly but they removed a lot of fun buttons from Wrath. Overall, Cata was ok but I probably wouldn't play it again.

The main reason behind people believing that we defeated the big baddy in Arthas, is majorily because he was human. It's relatable to ourselves, that's why he was the biggest boss. The demons behind him aren't as comprehensible as the turning of good to evil in humanity. Resonates better with everyone overall!