If you’ve never heard of World of Warcraft by now, you probably don’t use the internet, look at TV, or know a gamer. It’s the most successful MMO in history, and created by the coveted Blizzard Entertainment. Cataclysm marks the release of World of Warcraft’s 3rd expansion, this time headed by the world destroying “Deathwing”. Who flies over Azeroth and decimates anything in his path, which also sparks the war between the Horde and Alliance. Sending them into a frenzy to capture whatever territory they can, no matter how devastated the world is… the war is still in Warcraft.
• With Cataclysm came the change of many things, but the most noticeable is the new quest structure for Azeroth. If you’re a veteran of the series for the 6 years that it has been out, then you’ve probably played through all of the old content. With Cataclysm things have changed most for the better. With a lot of the quests replaced by interesting character development, where players actually make an impact on the world. You will also be treated to storyline cut-scenes that will make you wonder what’s going to happen next. The vast quest improvement is something that makes WoW all the more appealing to the new and old fan base.
• The changes to skills while leveling up is a godsend. During the old days of World of Warcraft, a lot of classes had to struggle with skills that weren’t ideal. For example… Warriors were pretty much terrible before level 60. While Druids and Priests were forced to spam one cast, until about level 30 or so. This has changed for the greater with the talent tree changes, with players constantly gaining useful skills that will help them level. Instead of feeling totally garbage until you’re level 10, you’ll immediately become a powerhouse and get some interesting moves. This overhaul also gets rid of some of the more useless talents, making choices much easier depending on your play style.
• With these changes come some more interesting runs through dungeons. Let’s just say that the days of infinite mana is no longer around, and healers have to choose when to keep people alive. This also brings back the days of vanilla, when players were asked to actually coordinate Crowd Control abilities on mobs. It makes this much more difficult than what players have become used to, and I believe that’s a good thing… since the words “Welfare Epics” will cease to exist.
• On the long list of improvements to the game, are some changes to the graphics overall. Mostly how the world has been devastated by Deathwing. If you’ve been playing the game since it released almost 6 years ago, you’ll immediately note the changes to Thousand Needles and Loch Modan. Along with little additions like a few model changes to Thrall and Garrosh Hellscream, with some vast improvements like the total overhaul of Orgrimmar. You can even go swimming in the much more realistic water, while basked in the glorious new lighting effects.
• Leveling from 1 – 60 is fantastic and a great improvement over the past. Yet as soon as you get into the 60 – 70 range… you’ll realize how garbage the Burning Crusade quests really were. After experiencing basically your own little storyline for leveling, you finally run into Burning Crusade where nothing seems to be any fun. This is really going to hit home for people who’ve been playing the game for years, but I can bet that even someone brand new to the game will notice the difference. It’s just astonishing how bland Burning Crusade is compared to the 1-60 and 80 -85 experience. While 70 – 80 isn’t nearly as bad as Burning Crusade, it isn’t nearly as epic as leveling from 1 – 60 either
• While the leap backwards to the old days of Vanilla WoW seems like a great idea. In a variety of ways you’ll wish that it wasn’t laid out so horribly. For instance the way that professions work, especially once you get into the level 80 – 85 range. If you’re a miner or a herbalist, you’re going to suffer for your craft. There aren’t nearly enough nodes available at the moment for you to sufficiently push through your profession. Not only that, it’s so grindy that some professions actually force you to rely on dailies to earn your plans. So you’ll not only be fighting through waves of people for underpopulated nodes, you’ll also have to contend with a daily wait to get your next plans or timer release.
• Let’s get on with the major issue that I have with the game personally. That would be the god awful PVP system that is currently in place. The recent addition of Rated Battlegrounds sounds wonderful on paper, walk into a BG with 10 or 15 people and profit… right? WRONG, if you’re not an organized group in Rated BG’s you’re just wasting your time. You are going to get raped and what is the prize for losing… “NOTHING… YOU LOSE…. G’DAY SIR!”. That’s right, if you don’t win a game at all you get zero points… and that’s after spending 30 minutes waiting for people to join.
Of course I’m not done with PVP just yet, I want to talk about the way that things seem to have changed… but no they haven’t at all. Healers for instance can still stack resilience and remain healing gods, the #1 offender of this would be the Paladin class who can keep damn near an endless supply of mana while healing. Not to mention that most classes survivability is off the charts now, so if there is a team with 5 healers… hell even 2 healers to your none. You do not have a chance to win the game at all if you’re not geared way above them. This type of mentality is on accentuated by the stack-able Crowd Control that players can use.
It seems like the diminishing return penalty has been severely reduced, since a Warrior can chain stun and knockdown a player. While dropping a fear right after, then a Warlock can pop another fear on him, while hitting you with a stun, then a death coil. By the time you’ve had time to get out of any of this… wait who am I kidding with that statement. There is no getting out of that at all, you’re pretty much dead. Yet this is somehow skill based game play in World of Warcraft, where the consequences of stacking multiple CC’s on someone is considered great. Of course you didn’t have to time any of these moves, you just push the button wildly and kill the person who’s stuck.
It hurts all the more when you realize that you cannot queue up for Rated BG’s without a full team. So you’re forced into the lowly bracket where you have to get the freebie blue gear, unfortunately even in the non-rated Battlegrounds… you can still run into Pre-Mades who realize that having 4 healers is a great way to win. Yet somehow when you arrive into the BG, you’ve been paired with all DPS in greens with no resilience. While facing down bad ass teams who’ve already got over 2.5k resilience points and gear. In addition to all of the struggling, you only get about 80 something points for winning a BG. Which would not be a problem if you did not have to wait for 30 to 45 minutes to get into one. That’s right… this is even a problem for Dungeons and Rated Battlegrounds also. 45 minute wait just to try to play with other people, and you might wipe or get destroyed in less than 2 minutes. Ridiculous!
• I want to also talk a little bit about the brand new Tol Borad PVP/PVE zone. The #1 issue I have with it… you cannot fly inside or outside after you’ve finished PVPing. Which… just completely boggles my mind when I think about it. After years of asking for Azeroth to be a place where players can fly, it is finally possible to do in Cataclysm. Yet for some reason there are still areas where you cannot fly? Like Silvermoon and Tol Borad, I just don’t get it at all. The #2 issue is that Tol Borad is just a horribly designed PVP area. For one team to win all that have to do is hold one tower out of 3. Now I know that sounds like it isn’t hard, but it is when the other towers can still be capped. So all the offensive team has to do is run around in circles zerging tower areas until the time runs out… that’s just boring.
Let’s also talk about some of the changes inflicted on the old Battlegrounds from Wrath of the Lich King. Imagine waiting 30 minutes in a queue for PVP, only to be thrown into Boss and Vehicle style areas. Strand of the Ancients forces you to kill ultra fast vehicles before they can make it to the walls. However… these vehicles lifespans have been buffed to match the ultra speed. Not only that, actually getting hit by one of these vehicles will inflict 20k damage to you along with knocking your character back. It becomes even more unbalanced when your team lacks a series of snare/root having classes that can keep these vehicles down.
So if the other team gets two Mage’s on their team, and you’ve got a series of melee classes… you might as well call it good game in less than a minute. Did I mention that people can sit inside of the vehicles unable to be harmed the entirety of the match? So they can just shoot out random snares, and AOE effects, so that you can’t keep up with the already high speed vehicles. But don’t think I’ve forgotten about Isle of Conquest either, which comprises of you doing very little but trying to beat the other team into the keep with vehicles. When you do make it in there, you finally get to fight the big boss with 10 million health. He has an Area of Effect ability that can kill an entire room full of people also. So it almost makes him seem like a raid encounter as opposed to something in PVP. It’s just… horrible.
World of Warcraft has made some great changes to the world. Completely going back and redoing all of your old content takes some guts. When you’re leveling up through the new zones, or taking down one of the new heroic dungeons is where the game shines the most. Where it doesn’t shine is how much it hasn’t change under the hood, and how much of a grind some of the things have become. When we asked for a more difficult game, we weren’t talking about turning World of Warcraft into a 24 hour queue wait. We were thinking more along the lines of logging on and having some fun and getting out.
Blizzard hasn’t fooled anyone who has their eyes open with the new look, a lot of the game play is significantly the same under the hood. Which isn’t what we were told when Cataclysm was being pushed out, so far as soon as you get some good amount of gear… things start looking really familiar. Luckily the game has added so much new content in an expansion, that it is hard to realize it is just an expansion. A very massive expansion worthy of a B- from Geeks of Gaming.
*This grade is during a month and a half play time, from the patch of the new world 1 – 60 content, and to the official release of Cataclysm.
