Cataclysm, and Why I Like It

I'm a geek. I admit it, and I'm okay with that. And for those of you who aren't quite so far gone as I, you may not have heard that in the recent past, the newest expansion for World of Warcraft was released - Cataclysm. There's been plenty of discussion by fans and haters and everything in between, but this is my take.

...And if you don't care about WoW, or at least my views on it, you may as well stop now. You'll be bored out of your mind within two paragraphs. :)

First, a little summary. World of Warcraft currently consists of two worlds - Azeroth and the Outlands (formerly Draenor). Blah blah, stuff happened, blah blah, and then the great black dragon Deathwing awoke and broke from his lair on the elemental plane. When he burst into Azeroth, he weakened the walls between Azeroth and the elemental planes, releasing a plague of spirits and elementals; and the shock of his arrival caused massive destruction. Earthquakes, tidal waves, floods... Whirlpools, mountains falling and rising, etcetera. Deathwing himself damaged or destroyed numerous locations on two of the three continents (the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, but not Northrend, which was generally unaffected). On top of that, his allies and dupes - mortal and otherwise - are assaulting both the Horde and the Alliance in a wide-spread offensive on countless fronts... And chaos is everywhere.

Yay marketing-speak and advertising. :) But anyway... When it comes down to it, they took a huge amount of what people were used to about the game and turned it on its head. Enormous changes were done on many - if not most - aspects of the game, and people are still getting used to everything being so different. Some people hate it; some people left specifically because of the changes; and some people were on the fence, at least when it came out. I hadn't heard anyone actually happy about the changes... Until they were done. Now? A lot of people are loving it.

There are some really quite valid complaints. The most common one is that healers got the short, mucky end of this stick. Mana regeneration got nerfed all to hell, meaning they run out and stop being fully effective much more often - I've had instance runs where the healer runs out of mana on every single pull. Even worse, while hit-point and damage numbers are shooting up (at level 80, I had about 50,000 hit points and a 40k single attack was both cripplingly strong and almost unheard of; at 85 with my gear as of last night, I have 120k hit points and 40k single strikes are commonplace from even normal monster pulls in instances), their healing spells did not get significantly stronger. This means it can take several times as many spells to heal the same percentage of a character's health, just making the mana problem that much worse.

There are other complaints, too. Several characteristics were removed entirely; gear was simplified; Jewelcrafters and Enchanters who had large numbers of old patterns got screwed when they suddenly became duplicates, with no compensation; the talent trees were completely re-done, with talent numbers being cut in half, in some cases reducing variety severely; and even some favorite features (Druid tree form, anyone?) are now just gone. Levelling, too, is slanted more towards speed - several classes had key abilities shunted to much lower levels (druid Cat form from 20 to 8 is the example I keep hearing, but there are others), experience bonuses are rampant, and power-levelling is faster than most would believe if done right. And on top of everything else, all the old quests were simply removed - all the level 1-60 quests were replaced with new lore for the new state of the land, as Azeroth was brought up to the current time. Even that the level cap only went up 5 - from 80 to 85 - instead of 10 like the first two expansions is a common complaint.

On the other hand... The crew at Blizzard put an incredible amount of work into this, and it shows. First, the effort put into revising Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms just blows me away. The zones are all just flat-out better. They're better-designed, more interesting, and just fun to go around and explore. Little nooks and crannies with interesting things are everywhere - made better by flying mounts now being usable in the "old world".

To expand on the revised zones, most of the quest lines are different too - re-written from scratch in most cases. The writers obviously had fun with this, and it shows. The quest lines range from tragic to comedic to epic, and I'm repeatedly impressed with the quality of them. I hit the level cap after doing one and a half zones (Mount Hyjal and part of the Twilight Highlands), but even if I didn't have other reasons I'd want to do all the quests in the other zones (Vashj'ir, Deepholme, and Uldum) just to see all the storylines. The Harrison Jones storyline is something I would have been incredibly sad to miss, for example.

Another thing I'll throw out there, though, is that the boss fights in instances are *fun* again. In Wrath, they got too simple - crowd control became quickly useless, and tactics were mostly unnecessary. The boss fights are downright hard again, and heroics take effort and work. They'll still get easier with better gear - they always do - but to me right now it looks like they'll still be harder even when gear maxes out... And better yet, they're just *interesting* again.

My favorite boss fight so far has to be the very very end of Deadmines Heroic. There's an extra boss in Heroic - Vanessa VanCleef, the daughter of the (now deceased) former head of a band of thieves. When you meet her, she has a little monologue where she talks about how she isn't as good in combat as her father, but she's *much* better with poisons... As she then uses mind-affecting drugs to throw you into a Nightmare. You run through a gauntlet of stylized, nightmarish versions of all the earlier bosses in the instance - dodging fire and ice to fight the Ogre mage in an inferno hell, holding off massive and strengthening waves of spiders to fight the Goblin engineer, dodging rotating walls of lightning to fight the Foe Reaper, and saving the Worgen Admiral's family from rampaging Worgen only to fight the Admiral himself as he murders his wife in a berserker rage. Then you actually fight Vanessa after descending through the personal hells of all the bosses, fighting wave after wave of foot-soldiers as she runs around and causes havoc in the group - and periodically needing to swing on ropes away from the deck of the ship to escape the huge explosions she sets off in an effort to trap and kill you. It's frenetic; it's difficult; and it's fun and interesting to go through. I'm truly impressed by whoever scripted that whole sequence.

As a last note... Possibly the best quest line I've done so far, by the way, isn't even in one of the new zones - it's in an old zone, with three guys who weren't there before the expansion. A gnome, an orc, and a dwarf are sitting on a little hill in The Barrens, drunk off their asses, next to the enormous scar Deathwing left in the land; and if you go talk to them they talk about the day Deathwing came. You talk to them one at a time as they tell you the story of how they drove Deathwing away, and the quests are carried out from the point of view of the one currently telling the story. First, the Dwarf talks about how he went down the scar, punching things and breaking through rock walls, until he got to Deathwing and punched him in the face - throwing him to Kalimdor. Then the Gnome corrects the Dwarf as he talks about how he used his world-shrinking device (...Yeah, gnomes have a lot of jokes associated with them) to make himself huge, then hunted through the clouds for Deathwing... Only to realize Deathwing was hiding in the sun! O.O So he, of course, grabbed Deathwing by the throat and threw him to Kalimdor. Then the Orc tells the *real* story, about how he hopped on his motorcycle - rescueing one of three girls or a Blood Elf guy in the process - and drove up the scar, dodging rocks, until he gets to the far end... Where he remembers his motorcycle can fly, and he flies up onto the mountain to fight Deathwing in a knife fight. The fight is interrupted, however, by a dwarf running up and punching Deathwing and a giant Gnome stalking past...

Trust me, it's funnier to walk through. :-P If you play and haven't done it, do it. It's worth it.