Cataclysm

Cataclysm is the expansion that took the world I'd spent a few years in and rearranged the furniture while I was out of the room. Deathwing came up through the middle of Azeroth and broke it, and Blizzard used that as the excuse to rebuild the entire old world. Every low-level zone I'd leveled through a dozen times was suddenly different. That was the whole pitch, and it landed as a strange mix of exciting and unsettling.

I have complicated feelings about it, and I think most people who were around then do too. On one hand, the revamp was genuinely impressive. Zones that had been dull, disconnected quest-strings for years finally told a story, flowed properly, made sense. And they finally let you fly in the old world, which is the kind of thing that sounds small until you've spent hundreds of hours running around Azeroth on the ground. Two new races, Worgen and Goblin, and I rolled both just to see the starting zone, because of course I did.

On the other hand, there was a loss in it I didn't fully clock at the time. The old world I'd learned WoW in was gone. Not updated. Gone. The rough, sprawling, slightly broken 2004 version that pulled a lot of us in got paved over, and you can't go back and visit. Classic servers eventually gave people that, years later, and the fact that they were so popular tells you I wasn't the only one who missed it.

Cataclysm was also the expansion during which I joined the guild that I'm still in today, at least with my main Horde characters.  That alone has provided quite a bit of stability for me in the times since then.

It was also the expansion during which I started to get more deliberate about my alt leveling process.  I have tracking data from Cataclysm on my leveling times to max.  The average was around 24.7 hours.  I still didn't have a character of each class at max level, but I was only missing one or two by the end of the expansion.

The endgame gets a mixed reputation and I won't pretend I loved all of it. The heroics at launch were brutal, on purpose, and plenty of people bounced. But Cataclysm handed me something that mattered more to me than any raid tier list, and it's the reason I'll always have a soft spot for it. This is the expansion where they added the Raid Finder, LFR, first bolted onto the Dragon Soul raid near the end. For a guy who was never going to schedule his life around a raid roster, that was the door finally opening. I could walk into current raid content, see the fights everybody was talking about, and put Deathwing down myself. And because I'm the way I am, I didn't see it once and move on. I ran it across a whole stack of characters, watching the same raid unfold from behind a warlock, then a paladin, then whatever else I had parked at the cap. LFR is the thing that let me actually experience this game's raids, and it started here.

Cataclysm was ambitious in a way WoW rarely is. It also spent its ambition redecorating the past instead of building the future. I respect it more than I enjoyed it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar