10:22 small mistake: reforging got removed after MoP

I’m going to play cata classic for a very simple reason: at the beginning of tbc classic, I found a great guild of chill people, organized leadership, respect for real life obligations and it’s just been such a blast to hang out with them on Tuesday and Thursday nights for the past four years.

best time was at the start of the expansion. Those heroic dungeons were amazing.

When questing I loved the Harrison Ford and the temple of Uldum that zone pulled me in so good that I cleared it quick lol.

Dude the reforge mechanic was amazing!

Woah congrats on this video blowing up! Well done!

I’ve played on numerous private servers for Vanilla, TBC, Wrath, and most recently Cataclysm. Cataclysm is without a doubt the best overall game out of those 4. The only weakness is the last raid and the last boss. Other than that, the classes and gameplay are so fun, the leveling like you mentioned doesn’t have the vanilla charm, but undoubtedly is better designed and is just better than “go kill 8 bandits and collect 6 items” for ever. The first two raids are both absolute bangers, and PvP. Holy shit cata PvP is so good. Honestly, there were numerous times in this video where I had a thought and seconds later you spoke those thoughts. It was like listening to my own consciousness. Spot on video and I believe cata classic will surprise a lot of people only if they can swallow their pride and give it a chance. I cannot wait to play this again.

You are not correct about talents. The abilities you got at level 10(almost all of them), were exclusive to their talent tree in WotLK and they were very deep down in the trees, so you couldn't get most of them even with a hybrid spec. Talents in Cata were polished and they gave you core abilities earlier so that your class can feel like itself before hitting max level. The problem is that they didn't compensate to make mobs harder while leveling 1-80. I've tested it myself, mobs need to have 2x more HP and 1.5-2x more damage in Cata to be engaging while leveling.

Cataclysm will launch Thursday June 6, 2024 on global release.

Cataclysm was fun. As a heroic (mythic difficulty) raider, I enjoyed my time during Cataclysm. Heroic Spine and Heroic Ragnaros was a huge challenge. However, I wish they added scraped content. As great as firelands was, i wish they would add the scraped Underwater raid. Anywhoo, enjoy it :)

I absolutely loved Cata and can't wait to play it again! Great video too o/

I’m excited that was my first experience in wow, I didn’t have an account or a pc til Warlords came out. So I would go over to my buddys house and his brother would let me play on his pc while he was doing his homework and other stuff. I can’t wait I’m really happy to play that as current content.

Honest and Direct. GREAT video. Subbed.

Can’t wait for cata! love this video and all of the points you touched on are very valid

Warlocks have demonic circle in Wrath too. :)

Nice vid bro and really like the joke on the begining😁

Yes cata was great. And yes you should play it.

If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t reforging removed at the end of MoP before WoD instead of Cata?

Ayy a video where opinions are treated as opinions and not facts. I didnt play the raids in Cata, but i hardcore farmed the rep to get geared up for HC dungeons, and had a blast doing those. They were a challenge for sure. I'm not sure if i remember this correctly, but i feel like i had fewer dungeons to farm rep in with tabard, than dungeons that were available for HC or whatever. I have a feeling i ran like 2 or 3 dungeons on repeat, but im not sure why. Anyways, thats the only thing i remember not really liking, but that might have been my own choice xD. Nice vid

solid video love the cata content so far!

I do agree that for the most part, the squishing down of talent trees and choosing one spec from level 10 with unique abilities was a good thing. But, as a Rogue player, having played all of Wrath through, it does put some unwanted limitations on certain specs and classes. In P1, I had an Assa spec for bosses for pure ST damage and an Assa AoE spec, where I could take Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush with an Assa hybrid spec and really gave Rogues the freedom to play the spec they wanted. In P2 and Ulduar, there was less emphasis on trash damage and more emphasis on boss and cleave damaga, so I had an Assa and Combat spec depending on the fight. With P3 and ICC, I went Combat MS and dropped the Assa ST spec and went back with the Assa AoE spec. You can pull off some crazy numbers with that AoE spec and I'm a bit sad that unique specs like this won't be a thing anymore. My Shaman alt is Enhance MS and I don't have an OS, and I haven't touched the talent tree since I reached level 80. Which is probably what you'll see for most players. So I would say; yes, good for the most part, but much more restricted and you'll likely see only streamlined cookie cutter builds.

Now I feel like I should play WoW for the first time. This game looks amazing!

Great video, thanks!

cata was the expansion I played the most, but don't have a desire to re-live the memories. i stopped raiding shortly into mop and then preheat, max and a few others joined the guild i was in lmao. missed out on that :p

I like WoW very much from Vanilla to MoP :) So i want them as Classic playthrough also.

I loved cataclysm back in the day, it wasnt perfect but it was still great

I remember during the fireland's raid back when Cata was current for my feral druid in our raid I was the only one and Fandrall dropped the Fandrall seed pouch which makes you a fire cat whenever you want on the first kill it was so awesome the guild was like nice man grats.

best part of this vid is that u didnt mention frost spec

Honest question from retail only player - how would you rate the overall speed of the game compared to WotLK? I'd love to get into classic more, but I cannot even level up to max cuz I'm bored. As far as I understand (never played Cata in my life) the questing is way less of running simulator, more connected?

I am so excited for Cata Classic!

Great vid well done bro

Good video, CATA HYPE!🎉

It's funny how different the perception of Firelands is today, compared to back then. Yes, Ragnaros was an amazing encounter but Firelands is also the shortest raid tier we've ever had (TotGC not included). It is the definition of a one-boss raid with everything but Ragnaros being really easy. If the raid had had 3-4 more bosses and the difficulty had been more evenly spread across the encounters, I think it would be deserving of its reputation. But as it stands now, I don't really get it.

After Wotlk, online Cata and Legion kept me playing the whole expansion cycle. Looking back it nailed excactly what you are pointing out: Leveling was fun, playing was fun, dungeons and raids were in the sweetspot between demanding and clear and not the stupid kickandrush Ugga-Ugga-Shit they are today. I loved the athmosphere in every zone, even the somewhat clunky-to-play nazjatar (on the other hand it nailed the spot to have problems navigating through a hostile underwater-zone you are not supposed to be as a landwalker) and it was the last time enjoyed pvp.

One drawback with flying few talk about is the fact that flying mount killed world exploration (getting ontop of things you are not supposed to with clever jumping). That was the worst part.

Always loved Cata, back then and later on private servers. One of my favorite expacs. Can't wait.

Thing about reforging was, if I remember right, introduced mostly because of the hit rating stat. Hit is absolutely useless once you have too much of it and reforging (and gems) were there to help sort that out. In WoD, when reforging was removed, so was hit (and expertise). Really wasn't much reason for it to exist anymore. But that's just my 2 cents.

I loved Cataclysm. Okay, I hated the underwater zone, but the rest was great.

They said they're going to allow talent mix matching not long after they announced Cata classic

Then people complained about the talent revamp now they went back to making tons of talent type trees. I am surprised they are going on with classic expansions beyond WOTLK. If they make it to Legion I'll play. Legion was the Las good expansion. I can collect all the artifact skins all over again and smash all 36 mage tower challenges per spec again!

What I felt back then coming off of the climax with arthas who's story we have followed since wc3 , was that deathwing, as a blizz game consumer onlycame out of nowhere. For me at least. After reading the books and getting into the whole lore of course makes it different however at first it felt anticlimactic. Still a great addon though

The thing with not being able to put points into alt trees until you have put 33 points into your main tree has little to no effect at max level, but while levelling it is noticeable and annoying. As an affliction warlock I would much prefer to be able to reduce the cast time of my shadow bolt before getting haunt. But I can't get cast time reduction on shadow bolt until level 69! That's so restrictive. They need to change it so you can put your points wherever, but you are limited to only 10 points in alt trees

I loved Cata. I do feel like MoP was better, but Cata was a hell of a lot of fun. Thanks for the content, subscribed.

Why is this video on my feed? I already plan on playing Cata Classic! Loving TBC and WotLK too

Im hyped to try Cata for the first time. It has everything to be a good expansion

I absolutely loved Cata, which pretty much was the period in which i joined Blizz. Before that i only had played in private servers up to cata and with some bugged out game builds. I loved everything in cata, the dungeons, the raids, the gear and quests, especially that Quest in the Badlands where you have an Orc, Dwarf and Gnome each tell a different story about how they defeated Deathwing when he flew by.

i’m extremely excited, my only gripe is that we still have to buy skills from trainers, i hate that shit

Cataclysm was also the last time we see WoW's iconic title reveal in the end of each cinematic

Devs have said they're implementing LFR, unless they've gone back on that. The gist was that they learned from RDF not to make those kinds of changes. Was in one of the dev interviews around SoD announcement/release.

The tabard system is the same as wotlk which is fine it worked and was great

Im in frost dk duel wielding or 2h you think 🤔?

I love the old world, hell, I probably love it more than the Cata world, but it has been utterly outscaled by class changes in TBC and Wrath, to the point Wrath old world leveling feels like retail leveling, except slower.

And dungeons were super hard to start. People had to relearn to properly do them rather than the gogogogo smash all we do now.

I appreciate the Cata love in this vid it was by far my favorite time in WoW. I think all the hate it gets is just a meme at this point and when ppl get inside they’ll find out how good it is

they just got to make the mobs harder in qeusting, but i do like the flow of it

Cata 5 man's were the best. Even the normal versions weren't a pushover.

I've been speculating that many cata/mop haters will be changing their opinions after playing classic.

Warlords will always be my favorite expansion despite how unpopular it is. I think people have forgotten how good the leveling experience and raids were. Compared to earlier expansions, WoD may have had less content overall but what was there was memorable. We can all agree that the prior expansions had a lot of poor filler content.

Should i just wait until Cata releases? Or start with Wotlk until it releases?

firelands is half of tier 12 if u didnt know. the abyssal maw was the water side of tier 12. blizz didnt get to finish making it back in the day which is why t12 is a let down in my eyes. hopefully tho blizz will try and do something with it come classic cata

What killed Cataclysm is the hype we was on coming from Wrath of the Lich King. If Cataclysm was to come before Wrath of the Lich King I'm sure we would be talking about Cataclysm in a much more positive way

I just think for me is the player base way of playing wow raids. With gs, wclogs kinda killed any interest in cata raiding. As raids get harder, players tend to be more selective and wclogs doesnt help. You can do the mechanics right but suck at optimal dps. And people will boot you. Personally wondering how many players will be there after firelands

Nice job m8

bro straight up said all the things that made wow a theme park mmo now is a good thing. Opinon disguarded.

Cataclysm is the last classic expansion, it's WotLK+. A better WotLK in every single way, except it had 1 fewer raid tiers and no proper equivalent to 10 Man Normal Raid difficulty in WotLK.(LFR was not it). Cata had peak class design until SL/DF. Cata improved raid and dungeon depth and quality and brought them to a new level. Cata had a dungeon tier for each raid tier and they were awesome. Heroic dungeons were awesome(both pre and after nerf, they were just awesome). Tier 11 and Firelands are two of the best tiers ever. Dragon Soul was good, but had 2 bad encounters. 10 Man raiding was amazing in Cata(and MoP). The PVP was amazing too, it was peak PVP until SL. Talents were finally polished(though you were locked in a tree, which can easily be fixed). It had the best itemization in WoW, all the stats were done perfectly, the item progression while leveling and end-game was just right. Then you add Reforging on top of that. Cataclysm literally has the best pre-expansion(1-60) leveling to date, no other expansion ever bothered before or afterwards.It also made 1-60 great, though they should tune it harder(2-3x higher damage and 2x more HP for the mobs to compensate for the player being more powerful especially with the strong items you got while leveling, compared to pre-Cata where 1-50 you got barely any good items). 80-85 leveling was also very good, the best expansion leveling up to that point, it was surpassed by MoP and then WoD. We got the Molten Front, which was a great progressive open world activity.(WotLK had none). Tabard reputation was polished. They made it very well and the rewards were actually well thought out and great. Badges were polished into Justice/Valor The Guild system was great. Not a big fan of transmog, but it is there. Glyphs were improved. Again just amazing overall, it's not perfect, but it's on par with WotLK and TBC. So far every expansion has its strengths and weaknesses, some expansions have more weaknesses, than positives like MoP and SL, but Cata was great.

They confirmed LFR is going to be in Cata Classic. They already have LFD in WotLK after saying they wouldnt add it

Cata itself wasn’t bad. It’s just when the philosophy of choices made by blizz started changing

So many bandwagon bandits "Cataclysm bad" with no actual reasoning. Can almost guarantee 95% didnt even play it back in the day or were too young. Saying "its when wow lost all its subs" doesnt mean the game was bad, there are many factors that go into why the game lost subs.

1:15 There's no "...post Wrath." needed here. It was one of WoW's best expansions period. Full Stop for extra emphasis. 2:50 I'm split on this myself. What the people in the latter group here fail to realize, however, is that it is flying that allows us to fully appreciate the majesty and beauty of this world we all love. 3:45 Just a small bit of constructive criticism: there is no need anymore to hold Wrath up as some mythical 'gold standard' of WoW gameplay. We've seen how Wrath plays again with fresh eyes very recently in Classic - and, dare I say, it was only marginally harder and more complicated than Classic, so still very easy content overall. (FWIW, I think Cata marked a huge shift in how gameplay mechanics, raid bosses, and just combat in general was approached in WoW and I, for one, think Cata's gameplay is far beyond anything Wrath or before had.) One caveat to this: it can more understood/forgive/glossed over if you're comparing it to Wrath from an 'era' standpoint, rather than a 'Wrath was the best ZOMG and everything else is trash lulz' standpoint. That is, of course, provided you're also comparing other 'eras' to the expansion you are talking about. 4:45 100% agree. As I noted in my last point, Cata gameplay was far ahead of what came before. It was like the devs just put off fully developing combat for 3 expansions. I will add that, as I said previously, I love Cata's mechanics and gameplay. It feels methodical from a planning perspective, but also feels action-oriented and fast-paced while still maintaining plenty of choice in combat. It is the perfect style for a real-time RPG combat system, imho. 18:00 I mean, DS wasn't THAT bad. It was no ToGC or Sarth or Ruby Sanctum or Hyjal: all TERRIBLE raids and much worse than DS. The mechanics were fun, the fights were colorful; the main problem was the last two fights thematically. We wanted to fight a big dragon, not pop some of it's back pimples and then pick it's toenails off a rock one by one. (Sidenote: this is the first place I could actually see the WoW Classic team - in collaboration with Metzen himself - actually make a brand new fight or two that fixes an entire instance.) That said, yeah, this will be where the Classic decline happens, especially since the next tier is Mogu'shan Vaults, which is pretty skippable in and of itself. 20:30 As you may have guessed from previous statements, I do not share the rose-tinted goggles vision of Wrath. It was mid overall with a couple great raids and a good questing experience. Cata, on the other hand, had two bad bosses as the final two of the expansion while everything else was literally great. The sad thing about the final patch (Hour of Twilight) is that other than the aforementioned issues with DS it was a great patch with really cool lore and some amazing set-piece and npc-centric dungeons and so many people seem to have missed that.

To be honest I only disliked reforgin a bit, because it felt really min-max-y, if thats understandable. It was by far not a bad feature, I just felt like it shouldn't be necessary if the player had a better control over their item drops :/

will there be fresh servers ? Othwerwise i wont play it

How was healing? Was it brain dead easy meant for GFs like from classic-wrath?

Pls more wow videos!!!! Awesome

The biggest problems with Cata are Dragon Soul was a terrible raid, the open world content after reaching level cap was lacking, and tol barad was garbage.

5:35 THIS

I’m just ready to own in lvl 79 pvp again 😅 if you know you know

Holy power is the reason I stopped playing paladin. I hate the new talent trees. The raids are good except the last one with deathwing. I myself gonna play to try out the questing and dungeons, but not interested in raiding or PVP.

Well... i can just go and play it rn xd no need to waste a year on stuff that's get deleted soon anyway like all previous classic's.

Evidently I have a different recollection of Cata cause I remember it being complete ass unless you played hunter mage or warlock because that was literally all that was required in Cata for DPS with pally and priest healers and dk tanks every other class was shit and unpleasant to play

I don’t get the point how lfr destroyed raiding l, it made more accessible for casual player base that paid for content

I think one of the reasons cata was bad because just like WoD the lack of content from patch 4.3 until the release of MoP. It lasted for a year and people got bored because of it. Wrath at least have ruby sanctum so that players have something to do until the release of cata but cata itself doesn't have that.

Please GOD give us the current xmog feature the cata version was definitely janky and a pain to have to horde pieces in the bank

its when it all started for me. IF everyone else gets there nostalgia, then why the hell can't i have mine?!

the main thing thats actually putting me off playing cata isn't the expansion itself. I actually like cata & MoP especially what's putting me off, is the lack of players on wrath/cata servers, the issue with inflation, gold buying & botting as well as toxicity. I came back to wrath classic quite late after quitting a month into it. it was difficult to find groups People want you to be insanely over geared to do even the most basic of content. So I just stuck to pvp instead. The community (or lack there of) kills it. the gameplay wont be an issue, its the player base that min-maxes the FUCK out of everything, as classic players do it to absurd levels to the point where its not even enjoyable. We're seeing it even in SoD now with gnomer. people are refusing to take certain classes or people even a tiny bit under geared even though gnomer is easy.

I've come to realize the only thing I didn't really like about cata was some class changes also so friends quit and the stuff I really hated came in MOP so CATA hype MOP is shit XD

15:33 dude... based on what? any official statement on the subject?

why you should play shadowlands classic

I've been patiently waiting for Cata Classic literally ever since they announced Classic vanilla in 2018 lol... I'm finally happy to wait for a Classic expansion.

I dont agree. There was very few content in Cata, especially later on. Just look on how many bosses/raids were there in total. I think its the fewest ever? Heroic dungeons are pointless 1-2 months into the expansion. I liked Cata but can safely say looking backwards its one of the worse expansions out there.

Delay Cata please, i need more shadowfrost shards

Heres the issue for me. I dont think its worth doing, playing Vanilla Classic was great because it was the games origins so to speak, but going passed that, i played a week of BC and none of Wrath, i doubt im the only one, the point of Classic was to revisit the game during a time when the company didnt care about monetisation, when the devs were unempeded in there passion they poured into the game. Activision and Blizzard were partnered by the time Cata came out, Cata is a literally representation of the game people loved being ahnilated. Think of Deathwing as Activision, coming in and quite literally shattering Vanilla Warcraft, with Cataclysm zones rising to take its place and build a foundation for what is now Retail World of Warcraft today. It doesn't matter what everyones reasoning is, its always in the back of everyon3s minds, Cataclysm is not Classic Warcraft and it never has been

Cata through Legion was the peak era of WoW. All the expansions before Cata were just an undeveloped beta test.

Video for birds tbh

I'm going to give Cata another FAIR shot, but I'm growing tired of all of these "Why cataclysm was actually AMAZING!" videos when the expansion lost over a million subs before Dragon Soul even released. I'll say your vid is better than most and at least tries to not come across as passive aggressive against those of us who don't look back on cata fondly, but none of these videos really mention anything new and all make the same mistake of trying to convince classic players to play cata by highlighting cata's modern changes like streamlined combat and questing. The clunkiness of vanilla and TBC are part of its charm, and taking that away by letting my mage have a pet at level 10 when it can already 2 shot mobs doesn't really excite me. I also find it odd how WoD is still shat on today yet cata is praised as the misunderstood expansion when WoD's dungeons and raids were so much better than cata's in my opinion.

IMO there's only one great version of WoW and that's Classic Vanilla. I would play TBC again but I will never play anything past TBC ever again as it's just Retail Minus.

IThere will be lvl boost and wow coin it’s basically retail im definitely not gonna play this

Lol good luck 😂😂😂 d.o.a😊

The only way I'm coming back to WotLK and Cata is if they remove the token. But they wont.

love cata, dont love the classic mentality... boosts and just rush shit nah im good

The momentum of WoW had slowed down during Trial of the Crusader when the numbers stopped growing because people started leaving. It was the worst raid and raid tier ever.