A small hamlet of dedicated souls who are each uniquely in love with this off-cycle expansion. The way Waroz describes it, Hades sounds like a paradise. "Cataclysm is in my opinion one of the best PvP expansions when it comes to balance and class viability," he says. In this case, it was the PvP-he explains to me that the abilities and talent trees interlocked in a shockingly robust way that coaxed him away from the raids and the dungeons he used to enjoy. Like Wilcalaf, the specifics of his obsession are charmingly granular. He found his way back to the expansion after being turned off by 2012's follow-up, Mists of Pandaria. Waroz, a 21-year old from Finland, is one of them. The biggest Cataclysm private server is called Hades, and it averages a population around 500 to 1,000 players. Everything you think you understand about World of Warcraft-its legacy, its shadow, its future-is all a matter of personal perspective. That's the thing you learn when you spend some time with the Cataclysm faithful. Eye of the beholderĬataclysm is in my opinion one of the best PvP expansions when it comes to balance and class viability. "The moment I completed Dragon Soul on LFR, it was like my need of progress through the content in other difficulties was significantly lower." This was one of the major changes that makes Cataclysm his happy place, and I suppose that reveals the rest of us as very, very masochistic people for hating it. " made me unconsciously stop raiding," he says. After years spent grinding away at the oppressive requirements of high-end Warcraft raiding, suddenly he was free. Wilcalaf, of course, shares that lineage, but he still regards LFR as something that radically changed his life for the better. "How can we let the peons into Blackwing Lair? What a desecration of leetness!"Įntire zones like the Barrens were devastated by Deathwing's sundering of Azeroth. It was one of the smartest changes Blizzard ever made, but it of course it summoned a certain vinegary destestation from the True Gamers of the world. Blizzard moved in this direction after it became clear that about two percent of the citizenship actually had the gear, time, and drive to delve into C'Thun's sanctum. Instead, Cataclysm was his golden age, and his reasons for that might sound blasphemous if you're a certain breed of grognard.įor instance, Cataclysm was the expansion that implemented the Looking For Raid tool, which famously allowed casual players to experience endgame content at a dampened power level. Then again, Wilcalaf tells me that he too has played since vanilla, and while he has a fondness for those early days, it's nothing he feels the need to revisit. Obviously I know that Cataclysm is now almost 10 years old, and a decade is plenty enough time to foster a sense of wistfulness for pretty much any cultural artifact, but it's still hard for me to imagine that expansion existing in its own rose-colored epoch. I mistakenly blame my hardcore slippage on a vague dissatisfaction with the spirit of Blizzard's game design, and I'm fully aware that makes me the absolute worst kind of WoW fan. So that's what makes Wilcalaf's devotion to the expansion so interesting to me, a proud World of Warcraft elitist, who hasn't clocked time in a serious no-life raiding guild since Outland. Now, your only hopes to hunt down those memories lived on clandestine vanilla private servers, or the forthcoming universe-resetting World of Warcraft: Classic. But for the most part, when people opine about Cataclysm's shortcomings, they fixate on how the old world-the World of Warcraft they grew up playing-was permanently pruned from the map. The level cap was boosted to a half-stepped 85, the final raid was a harebrained mashup of existing assets, and the storyline was confused at best and cringeworthy at worst. So, not only did Deathwing sunder the geography, he also somehow managed to leave behind better flight paths, defanged elites, and simplified questlines in his wake.Ĭataclysm was a controversial expansion for a ton of other reasons. By 2010, World of Warcraft was a juggernaut with a huge community of casual players, and the company needed to dispel some of the ornery elements baked into the game's early DNA. These setpieces were visually impressive-perfect back-of-the-box screenshots to sell the Warcraft denizens on a new dire threat-but functionally, Deathwing's reign of terror gave Blizzard the canonical justification to revamp the vanilla leveling loop.
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