A Year of Cataclysm – An Incoherent Look Back

Note: this is somewhat of a mind-dump. Please excuse any poor grammar, circular arguments, or poorly-thought-out-conclusions. I promise I wasn’t drunk when I wrote it.

This week marks one full year since Cataclysm was released.

It’s been a weird year. For me, it means for the first time experiencing an expansion from Day 1. While I played during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, I did so with either no experience of the game previously (BC-era) or coming in midway through (LK-era). As such, the delivery of Cataclysm presented me the opportunity to witness the shift in the WoW community’s perception of the game, itself, and the company which makes both possible. Some of these observations were made as an outsider looking at a particular part of the community I was excluded from, while others were made while I was wading waist-deep through the experiences themselves.

The Early Weeks

I was on holiday back home in Australia when Cataclysm arrived; while the digital download enabled me to dip my toes in, I was naturally restricted from spending too much time in the new content until I was home around mid-December. By then, people were already raiding, experiencing the end-game content, and exploring the newly-raptured Old World of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.

These days were marked with comments on the increased level of difficulty, particularly (in my experience) the new 5-man content. The community had made itself clearly heard during Wrath that the dungeon content therein had been too easy. People had been pleading for a return to the “good old days” of BC when CC was required, dungeons took longer than 15 minutes, and “real skill” was needed.

What we ended up with were dungeons being run by an audience of users who were not familiar with CC, or how to utilise it to its maximum; dungeons which took much, much longer than 15 minutes to complete; but unfortunately a lack of “real skill”. There were outliers, of course; experienced players who knew what they were doing, but the general WoW player base are simply competent (and I count myself amongst them) at what they do, and as such were not prepared for the increased workload that these dungeons were presenting them.

Case in point: an early 4.0.1 run by some guildies, experienced players amongst them, who took FOUR HOURS to complete a Heroic Deadmines. Compare this to Wrath where groans would be heard when Halls of Reflection popped up on one’s screen because it might take 30 minutes, if the group failed in that first room.

Some of these things were hard – until you understood them. (Another example: my own run through Deadmines taking 3 hours the first go ’round with a guildie; we were queued again later only to get Deadmines again, however this time we ran through it in just over 40 minutes. The only difference: we knew what to expect, and how to do it.)

Thus was my first experience with a new expansion summed up: a huge brick wall of difficulty to the face after levelling through zones which individually were fun, but as a whole were not part of a coherent, joined-up story.

The Inbetween Months

New Zulroics landed, Firelands arrived and Molten Front dailies presented to us. These three things signify what is, in my mind, a fair representation of an end-game which proved lacklustre to me.

Zul Aman and Zul Gurub were interesting when I first stepped foot into them as 5-man dungeons, however they presented another learning curve but without a story. Unlike Deadmines – we can see what culminates from the story that played out in the Westfall quests – or Shadowfang Keep (similarly, but for the Silverpine Forest quests), or even Grim Batol (with its historic ties to the Deathwing story), the Zulroics were rehashes of existing content without a specific place within the Cataclsym story made clear. Just something-something-Trolls.

Why were we there? Why would we want to spend time in them? The gear looked ugly, with few exceptions, and the encounters were – until, again, you understood them – unforgiving and the groups which forced their way through them during the early days became ugly, lacking in empathy, and hateful of anyone who had even the whiff of casual about them. To this day, the groups I find in Zulroics are plainly different to those in non-troll heroics. Even if they could be the same people.

I claimed for months that these heroics were cursed, and I still stand by this.

The Molten Front dailies sounded exciting on paper, but proved to be a grind which even I grew tired of within a week. It was around this time that I began feeling like the game simply wasn’t what I expected anymore. Instead of quitting, I began running silly little projects: levelling alts, doing a “Thrifty” project, doing flying tours of enemy cities, and trying to solo old content. Switching things up enabled me to get out of my funk and enjoy the “main” game again: running heroics, levelling, and also dipping my toes into raiding.

The Raiding Months

My guild started raiding late in the expansion, comparatively. It was this expansion where I finally began paying attention to the raiding scene, and in particular what was going on with some of the progression guilds on my server. It was exciting. This huge, big-bad content I hadn’t seen, plastered over MMO-Champion, YouTube, in the podcasts I listened to. It all sounded awesome, and I wanted to be a part of it.

The guild poked the initial bosses in BWD a few times to varying success, but it wasn’t until I pugged into a group which cleared BWD, Throne of the Four Winds and (almost) Bastion of Twilight over a weekend that I may as well have run through the streets screaming “I WANT TO RAID!”. It was addictive as hell. While my guild’s runs through ICC in late Wrath had been exciting, seeing all this content all of a sudden was an enormous rush.

And then Firelands came out, and we were still in the previous tier, raid-wise. I poked at it a couple of times with another guild, or on trash runs, but it wasn’t the same. I was burning out on raiding not because of the encounters themselves, but from dealing with people who weren’t of the same mindset. I’ll put it plainly: even in what’s meant to be a friendly setting, dickheads will be dickheads. ‘Nuff said.

This brought us around to the news of the next expansion, and the explosion of ill-will towards Mists of Pandaria from some segments of the WoW community and squeels of delight from others, the impending release of 4.3 and all of the new things it was presenting to us, and the oft-unmentioned: that we still have 8-12 months of Cataclysm left to “live” through.

So it has been a full year so far.

The new raid tier is here. The Raid Finder is allowing anyone to experience the content, all they need is a little gear. The normal mode fell quickly, and heroic modes begin this week. The new 5-man dungeons proved to be of no challenge, but were fun, refreshing, and presented some neat stories which tied in neatly with Deathwing’s end story.

I feel we’re at a moment of calm now. While there are sectors of the raiding community who’re bemoaning how easy Dragon Soul is – and I can’t recall how long it took the top guilds to clear through Firelands’ normal modes – the heroic modes are still to be dealt with.

(An aside: it was with great amusement that I saw someone on the official forums bemoaning Dragon Soul as a “raid that mediocre guilds will be able to clear in a week” – on checking that poster’s guilds’ progression, they have only gone 4/8 so far. Snark)