Last week, I talked about some of what Blizzard did right in the Cataclysm expansion for WoW. However, that list is dwarfed by the list of things that went wrong, or fell short of players expectations, during this expansion. So, this week I will talk about the biggest short-comings of this sub-par expansion.
The first short coming of Cataclysm was the addition of the new battlegrounds, Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks. As a player who has spent quite a while on the PvP-side of WoW, I understand that PvPers get much less new content then PvE players, since new content is usually only in the form of new battleground maps at the beginning of expansions. This means that these new maps should be new and exciting for players. However, this was not the case for these two battlegrounds. These battlegrounds had the same basic objective as Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin, two of the oldest battlegrounds in WoW. This made players get bored with these maps much quicker then they would have if they had unique objectives. Overall, these battlegrounds just felt lame in compared to the unique maps that Blizzard usually gives players at the beginning of new expansions.
The second worst aspect of this expansion was the Tier 12 Firelands raid. Almost everything about this tier was poor. First of all, it only had seven bosses, one of which players have already killed in Molten Core, Ragnaros. This short boss list and having the final boss not being someone new makes the raid already feel a little unexciting before raiders even set foot in it. The next problem with this raid was its difficulty. The final boss was in no way too difficult, rather the bosses leading up to him were too easy. This led to many raid teams having 6/7 of the bosses down in a short time, but then they would hit a brick wall at Ragnaros. This is very stressful for players since they usually want to feel some sort of progression between raid weeks, yet it is hard to progress on a boss which is much harder then anything else they have had to kill. This led to the worse part of raid, the nerfs. I have no problem with Blizzard implementing nerfs to help raiders see more of the content. However, Blizzard gave the entire raid a twenty-percent nerf in a single day, which not only made Ragnaros a little more do-able, it also made the other six bosses ridiculously easy. The entire tier felt choppy, and poorly thought out which is why Firelands is probably the worst raid in the history of WoW and the second worst thing to come out of Cataclysm.
Finally, the biggest problem with Cataclysm was the leveling experience from level 80-85. This does not mean I thought the quests were poor. In fact, it was probably the most fun I have had leveling in a long time. The problem however, was it was so short. In less then a day players could reach level cap. This makes the enjoyment of questing smaller since players blow through areas so fast they never really get involved in the stories Blizzard is trying to tell. This also leads to players with many quests undone at level 85, so they either completely miss out on those stories, or have to return once they are 85 to finish them. Though it may not seem has a huge issue, it is a problem that affected every player who reached level 85, which is why I think the feeling of leveling from level 80-85 is the biggest flaw in Cataclysm.
Cataclysm is probably thought of by most players as the worst expansion that WoW has even seen. However, most of the problems players faced were simply scaling issues in raids or questing, which is promising because it shows that Blizzard is still implementing good content for players. It is also promising that the next expansion holds so many new features for players to try out. Cataclysm may be a low point for WoW, but the game shows much promise in the future.
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