Wow has lost its touch. Is cata responsible?

[Ualaa]

I find you just need to get excited about something.
This generally happens, by choosing a new composition or a different aspect of the game.

If you've never cleared heroics, making a team for heroics and watching their progress through content... and seeing some content become farmable that used to be automatic wipes every attempt.... that could be exciting.
There were posts of teams that were essentially two healers + one tank + two DPS, clearing most of the content fairly early into the expansion.
And these kind of teams are definitely very different.
There was the two shaman team, which Riptide x2 and Earth Shield on the tank, as absolutely mindless healing, combine that with two of each totem type for covering all the desired caster buffs... and you only need to concentrate on movement or whatever the trick is, in a given fight.
Or the two Paladin healer teams, where each will Beacon a DPS and then either alternate (for lasting longer) or both heal (for raw healing power) the tank; same idea as above -- with Protector of the Innocent and Beacon, the group is essentially immune to AoE.

If you've never done a lot of competitive PvP, then blowing people up can be fun.
Either with a caster team or an all melee team, whatever you've not played as much with.

The accumulation of gold, and pushing myself towards a million gold, was exciting for a while.
And that is just doing alchemy cooldowns, and buying/selling things on the auction house.

My Ferals were exciting for a while.
And then they announced two major nerfs (removal of Powershifting breaking Root & removal of Berserk breaking/making immune to Fear) and a minor nerf (DoT damage reduced, Direct Damage increased), and again Warcraft lost its luster.
But I did have three plus months of prepaid time... so moped about the forums for a bit, and did alchemy cooldowns sporadically.

Then I started 5x Horde Paladins, and leveled them up as Exorcism/Shockadin casters to 57th in Cloth BoA gear.
The intention was, and I suppose is, to get them to 72nd for play in the immensely popular 70-74 bracket.
A single weekend of pvp, will get a full set of honor gear which will be close to best-in-slot (with the odd Sunwell piece being superior), and that gear will never become obsolete or need to be replaced.
One school of magic will suck as far as lockouts go, but no one has Holy resistance... and with five of them, they'll be close to immune to dying in BG's.
I'll likely go back to them, at some point and given they're 57th, 72nd is fairly close.

The arena videos and assorted threads for the DK teams got me excited too.
And I actually switched from a fun composition to a different composition, and so far it is fun/new/interesting.
The team is by far the strongest I've personally played in PvP, and even running AV as my PvP for 90% of my pvp time (ran 150+ games, the AV weekend prior to this one), it is still fun.

You just need to find something that is different to what you've done before.
Decide what you want, and think how it will rock when you get there.



It isn't so much that Cataclysm sucks, while Burning Crusade was an absolutely amazing expansion through and through.
Even though the BC era is my favorite, and the Cataclysm era is my least favorite.

I think it is more the amount of consecutive or mostly consecutive time you spend with the same game.
When things are new, and you are exploring or discovering something, it is naturally more exciting; I was pretty close to quitting warcraft towards the end of Classic Warcraft, then got interested with Burning Crusade... and almost quit again, but saw Ellay videos and got into boxing.
So BC for me, was exciting at the start and at the end, and looking back it is my favorite period of warcraft; but I almost quit during that favorite era.

Taking breaks from the game, makes it fresh when you come back to the game.

There is the long thread of people who quit the game, in the Cataclysm era.
Some of the reasons are boring questing that is incredibly linear.
But the questing process is relatively quick, compared to say 10 levels of WotLK... and people complained of the collection quests there, then the very next expansion complain of the rail-roading of Cataclysm.
Once the leveling is done, and that is a very small percentage of the game, Cata is essentially the exact same as BC or WotLK or whatever the next one will be.
There are dungeons, heroics, raids, battlegrounds, arena, world pvp or farming.
Tradeskills use a different cloth or dust, but the basic formulas are the same, and likely will be the same into the future -- it is a winning formula.

Despite games like Rift coming along (which had just over a million pre-orders), with the passage of time the player base grows.
Warcraft, including Cataclysm, is massively successful.