As the clock ticks down to the launch of another expansion and I prepare to power my way to 90 fueled by beer, Full Throttle and a steady supply of Wheat Thins and Easy Cheeze I can’t help but reflect back on Cata one last time. What were my favorite parts? Least favorite? Regrets? Let’s take a quick look back at the expansion that was…
Cata was the first expac that I took a real interest in gold-making and made a real push for the gold cap at one point. I would have had it easy if I hadn’t taken an even bigger interest in mount collecting. I had reached a little over 900k and was getting pretty excited to hit gold cap when one day I saw someone advertising some a woolly rhino in trade, typically these turn out to be scams but this guy was actually a max level toon and I ended up losing a bidding war with another guy who was willing to spend more than me. I was pretty bummed until the guy selling whispered me and said he could get another if I was interested, after some haggling I ended up buying 5 mounts in total from him for half a million gold. I had never spent that kind of ching before but those on Keal’thas can attest, TCG’s don’t come around very often so I had no regrets. Since then I haven’t flinched to spend gold for mounts and hope to one day own all of the TCG’s.
Cata was also the first time I went rep crazy though that was more a product of the guild achieve being bugged and a guild needing one individual with 55 reps instead of 55 reps spread amoungst it’s members in order to get access to the pet. I took the time to grind the reps necassary to get that one knocked out and am looking forward to a bunch of new reps in MoP.
The first raids out of the box were entertaining though it was quickly becoming obvious that the 10/25 shared ID was a giant joke with idiots on both sides arguing that their raid size was “harder”. Both BoT and Blackwing proved fun while Throne to me came off as gimmicky and Al’akir proved to be the first incredibly obvious proof of how incredibly difficult it really would be for Blizzard to make a fight the same difficulty for 2 different raid sizes. Al’akir bordered on impossible for 25 man raids while almost laughable for 10-mans. Ugh, I hated that fight. Firelands proved to be a well thought out challenging raid but in the end it turned out to be 6 easy/semi-challenging fights and one omfgwtfisthisshitHARD fight. Heroic Rag was sssssooooo much harder than the rest of the instance it left guilds in the shitty situation of KNOWING they would roflstomp the first six then struggle the rest of their raid week to field enough raiders to even get any quality attempts on him because everyone knew it would be a wipefest. Then came Dragon Soul. Biggest piece of garbage raid ever. Rehashed models, unimaginitive mechanics, fights that simply weren’t fun. Add to it the fact it was super short, linear, and the math finally showed that 25-mans were actually tuned to require more throughput per raider and this godforsaken raid crushed a lot of peoples will to even log in. gah!!! I’m really looking forward to MoP just to see if DS will be the new paradigm or if they will get back to interesting raids. If the new raids turn out anything like DS MoP will recieve a quick retirement.
Rogues got a legendary, actually, TWO legendaries to close out the expansion. They turned out to be the cause of a bit of drama and some of my enjoyment was sucked from the game because of it. I will end Cata needing exactly 1 clear of 25-man DS to complete my daggers…guess what my guild did the last week of Cata…took the week off. I will go into MoP knowing I will never have the orange pixels. I’m not upset, just a tad bummed. It was fun trying to beat rogues with the daggers prior to 5.0.4 but then the buff they recieved left me simply staring up at those lucky enough to receive them. Maybe next time.
Well, goodbye Cata, hello Pandaria. Good luck to those of you going for server firsts and, to everyone, let’s hope this expac is not WoW finally jumping the shark like many are predicting. I think Pandaland will surprise us, at least i hope it does…
-Chig
PS: Getting up in the middle of the night just to play a video game will officially be on my Murtaugh List come the end of the week. Just sayin’…
