I played WoW for six years and loved it. I downed most raid bosses while they were still relevant, achieved very high-rank PVP (and later Arena) titles, and was even satisfied as a casual player for over a year when my work schedule was rough. Then the Cata beta came along. Over the course of nearly half a year, I dutifully tested every bit of content available and experienced more of Cata than most people have on live, even now. And I hated it so much that I permanently left the game.
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Having participated in previous betas, I was struck by the difference in tone this time around. Developers rarely responded to constructive feedback, no concerns were ever addressed with in-game changes, and the bug reporting and suggestions feature was broken for months. The game was clearly going to go live as the developers envisioned, reality be damned.
So what did beta testers take issue with and the developers ignore?
1. Questing. The quests are fun, but mostly only the first time around as the new "on rails" design requires each zone be done in the exact same order - no choices, skipping, or jumping around. Leveling is also too quick. It took longer to get from level 70 to 75, let alone 80. Even at a leisurely pace, it takes only days to get to...
2. Level 85. Cataclysm raid bosses are split between several raids, but don't be fooled - Naxxramas alone featured more bosses than all Cataclysm raids combined. Cata also has the fewest at-release dungeons of any expansion thus far, profession-related quests which pale in comparison to previous expansions, and few daily hubs. You get to 85 too quickly, and then there's nothing to do besides...
3. Heroics. They are too long for too little reward. For a mandatory (for progression), daily task for the entire expansion, two hours is an outright chore (and it's often still over an hour in epics). Dailies on multiple chars + raid-prep gear grinds = recipe for boredom. But the biggest problem with heroics is...
4. Healing. Universally maligned during the beta, all five specs now have identical playstyles where one spell is spammed ad infinitum. Worse yet, going from greens to epics (and healing groups in epics), the playstyle DOES NOT CHANGE. You cast the same stupid spell even more often, while your other spells remain inefficient to the point of near uselessness. To ensure hour-long queues, Blizzard also targeted the other vital group role...
5. Tanking. Tank cooldowns are now along the lines of "Reduce damage by 10% for 10 seconds" - you don't even notice you've used a special ability. Skill- and control-based mechanics were replaced by DPS-like rotations, but without the DPS. The changes to tanks and healers were part of a bigger problem...
6. Homogenization and loss of replay value. If you have one tanking or healing class, you have them all. The differences are superficial, and with few talent and glyph choices, even DPS classes all provide essentially the same experience. Every instance is the same, every character is the same, every day is the same - the game feels like a second job instead of an escape. There was only one thing left to screw up...
7. PVP. The imbalances are worse than at any point in WoW's history, and that's saying something. Tol Barad is an unmitigated disaster, with mechanics that were so poorly thought-out that it's mind-boggling. The "new" battlegrounds are quick clones of Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin (Battle for Gilneas even displays AB node names at the start of games, to make it clear just how little work was put into it). Rated BGs are regular BGs with 90-minute queues.
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The hype coming from Blizzard simply does not resemble the reality of the game. The talent/glyph revamp made things more cookie-cutter instead of less. The healing revamp, done because some specs relied on only 2-3 spells, has all specs relying on one spell for 75% (based on log data in epics) of total healing. Granted, there is more variety when raid healing, but that's only a small portion of your weekly game time.
The worst hype is that Heroics are "harder." Heroics are longer, but the mechanics are simpler than ever. The perceived difficulty is from the removal of error recovery. Recovering from mistakes (which even the best players make) was actually the most fun you could have in a dungeon and the true test of skill. In Cata, neither do tanks have the cooldowns nor healers the output to make up for any mistakes, and most instantly kill you to begin with.
Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes. They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community. The devs are in a lose/lose situation now, as they'll lose players if they don't make changes, they'll lose players if they do make changes, and there will be caustic bitterness in the community no matter what.
Epics fix nothing (I tested end-game in both heroic blues and raid epics) - the game feels like a grind because it was DESIGNED that way. That realization made me give away the gold (and bank contents) on every char, cancel my subscription, and delete the entire install (and all related files). I am only writing this review because Amazon keeps suggesting Cata to me and the rating is far too high. It deserves one star for the Goblin starting zone and that's it.
After so many years and so many attempts by other companies to create a "WoW-killer," it is a hilarious irony that WoW has itself become a WoW killer. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm'
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