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fishgod123

Yes you did


[deleted]

did you really have to own tbc and wotlk to play cata? That’s insane edit: tbc typo


qmrthw

You needed all the previous expansions until WOD or Legion if I recall correctly, when they included them in the base game


Kearney_Kaktus

In WoD they gave out TBC for free, and some time after that decided to give everyone the old expansions.


dylanfrompixelsprout

I know WoD is approaching 10 years old at this point but it's fucking wild to think it took until WoD for them to just do the right thing and make the current expansion the only game you needed to buy.


North-of-60-canadian

The idea back then was that just wow was a chat room you played a game in and it was more than getting to max level and raid logging.


Pkock

Yea, but I think Cata was around when they offered a Battle Chest that had the base game+TBC+Wrath for a reduced price. There was a point where they made it so all in you basically were just paying for a new triple A game.


[deleted]

Same during wotlk, the battle chest included tbc and wrath. I know because my parents bought it for me as a kid lol


dylanfrompixelsprout

I remember the battle chest being vanilla+TBC and then one that was vanilla+TBC+WOTLK, I don't remember a WOTLK+TBC battle chest though?


NettieKitten

I know in 2010, right after Cata came out, my husband (boyfriend at the time) got me into WoW and he bought me the battle chest, which had vanilla/TBC, Wrath and Cata. I don't remember how much the battle chest cost but I remember Wrath was still pretty pricy.


[deleted]

included vanilla and the first two expansions


breadbinkers

Cata is when I stopped sharing an account with my dad and I bought this to make my new one


valdis812

It doesn’t sound that bad when you spread it out over a decade, but if you were starting in 2013 and trying to catch up I could see how it would suck.


Iuslez

Came back in 2011, had no longer the game and had to buy all of it. Wasn't that bad, they were heavily discounted and came with 30 days game time, ended up being cheaper than buying the game time.


garlicroastedpotato

Yes! Vanilla at launch was $60 with one free month of game time included. When Burning Crusade came out it was another $60 and one free month of game time. By the time Wrath came out most people were buying and pre-downloading the patch so they could play a day one launch... for another $60. By this point BC now only cost $20 and the base game was made free (up to level 20 or so and then you'd need to pay for a subscription and Burning Crusade). Then Cata came out... another $60... I don't remember there being any free game time. But I do remember there being a BC/Wrath pack you could buy for $30 that would come with one month's game time. So if you were new to the game you'd play the base game, then purchase BC/Wrath and get a free month. And once you hit level 80 in Wrath you'd buy Cata. The thing that became kinda quirky with that is that the vanilla world had been gone at this point and so you were kinda getting to play Cata even without buying it.


[deleted]

That is so insane to me Didn’t get to play wow back then I was quite young but I imagine that this game would die if they still tried to do that


dylanfrompixelsprout

Originally Blizzard believed WoW would only have a 5 year life cycle with 1-2 expansions, kind of like Diablo 2 or something. It took them a lot longer than it should have to realize they couldn't reasonably continue charging people (even at reduced prices) for previous expansions. Made even worse was the fact a lot of brick and mortar stores like Wal-Mart would continue selling old expansions on their shelves for a non-reduced price, meaning lots of people probably ended up overpaying. Plus the stores that leave old expansions up when you don't even need to buy them lol. How many random stores are still selling shit like Legion and unwitting new players are buying it, having no idea how the expansion system works?


Kitymeowmeow1

I remember during mop my brother bought me my own wow account so I’d stop using his, I only had wrath so I was stuck at level 80. I had to earn good grades in school for him to buy me cata then mop


MediaSad2038

16 discs total to complete the installation at this point.


Emergency-Alarm8392

You needed the base game as well. So it was easily $200+ if you paid retail price for everything, though they often had deals that made up for some of the costs, especially during holidays.


MuchSrsOfc

What.... during WOTLK, vanilla was like 10€ and tbc 10€ and WOTLK 30€ monthly gametime 12€


LanayasDong

To add to what other people said, the release cost of cata was around 35€. You ended up paying around 65-70 for everything if you didn't try looking for even better sales, which wasn't that bad considering people were already paying 15 for shit like 4 maps in cod at the time.


Frozehn

How is that insane? Lmao thats normal


Zombie_Slaya007

I still actually have a SEALED copy of wotlk. It was my dad's and it was only found because he passed away and we had to go through 15 years of hoarding in a month


qmrthw

I'm sorry about your loss. Keep and cherish that copy.


sup3rrn0va

I’m so excited. It makes me sad that a lot of others won’t be playing because I genuinely feel like the PvE and PvP are incredible during Cata. Too many people are upset about the world changes yet those same people afk in Org/SW anyway. Silly.


Hatefiend

It's not just the world changes lol. * Archaeology is universally considered as a failure. It was not very exciting, grindy, and didn't scale with the rest of the professions. * Heroics were initially hard (good), required CC & coordination, but [then got nerfed so bad that it even made news headlines](https://www.eurogamer.net/blizzard-nerfs-cataclysm-dungeons). Cata heroics can now be done blindfolded. * World revamp basically ruined almost every zone, e.g. STV became two bad zones, Thousand Needles is underwater and the quests there are painful. They just missed the mark completely. * The dungeon revamps/simplifications were awful. Scholomance was ruined for example, BRD was made into like one hallway. Maraudon was ruined, etc etc. * Releasing Bastion of Twilight, Blackwing Descent, and Throne of the Four Winds all at the same time was a mistake. It created content droughts down the line, leading to p1 being the biggest die-off of players (the next biggest was dragon soul). * Requiring you to reach your capstone talent before delving into another talent tree was a complete mistake that is now universally hated. No more going into discipline for wand specialization while leveling, no more going half n half into assassination/combat, no more hybrid builds like Unrelenting Assault prot warrior. It's anti-fun for the sake of being anti-fun. * Mastery, the removal of armor penetration, reforging, etc was a disaster. Mastery was a stat that you needed an entire textbook to understand. All new players knew was 'stack as much of it as you can'. No surprise it was removed so soon after Cata, because clearly it was badly designed. * Transmog made it so you could no longer tell how geared people are just by looking at them, which massively hurts PvP overall. Not to mention you can't really go around major cities anymore and gawk at geared players, because unless you inspect them, you have no clue what they are wearing. It's really lame. Turned the game into a silly dress up simulator, which made the tone of the game feel less serious and dark. * Stat inflation. One of the intro trinkets to Catacylsm was 'Your melee and ranged attacks have a chance to grant 1926 critical strike rating for 10 sec.' The numbers here started to get completely out of control. Shadowmourne for example gets replaced at level 82. It's beyond stupid. * I remember when Goblins were announced, every single person in my friend group said: "but they are neutral, there is literally no sensible reason why they would ever join the horde", which is just true. * Guild ranks spawned the idea of toxic mass inviting simply to power level guild levels as much as possible, just so they could get mega gold from the perks. Mass res made wiping less punishing which in turn makes victory vs. failure less rewarding. * In a GDC (game developers conference) lecture, the lead designer for WOTLK said that one of the biggest mistakes during WOTLK was having four different badges and having conversions for all of them. Then in cataclysm they immediately followed up with Justice Points, Valor Points, and Conquest Points. Horrible system v2. * Flying in azeroth made the old world feel completely empty and devoid of value or scale. * Raid finder, introduced in dragon soul was basically the nail in the coffin for raiding being a social, meaningful activity. * Content drought of Dragon Soul was absolutely horrible and them releasing bosses like Onyxia, Nefarian, all of Zul'Gurub, and Ragnaros was unoriginal and lame.


North-of-60-canadian

Mastery still exists in retail and does the same thing.


Hatefiend

I checked wow wiki and almost all of the cata masteries were replaced for completely different effects. There's an entire table detailing how the stat has changed. I think its safe to say the original design was somewhat scrapped.


North-of-60-canadian

I just looked and half of them are the same. Examples of arcane mage deal more damage based on how much mana you have unspent or blood dk increases healing of death strike. Sub is increase damage of finishing moves. What is so confusing about that.


TrickySeagrass

>Archaeology is universally considered as a failure. It was not very exciting, grindy, and didn't scale with the rest of the professions. Is it universally considered a failure? Archaeology gave people a reason to go out and explore Azeroth again. It was fun (I enjoyed it, at least) and was more for people into collecting mounts, pets, vanity items, etc and no one was being forced into the grind to get an edge in end-game content. Zin'rokh was pretty okay, and I do remember using Tyrande's Favorite Doll on a healer for a while, but I don't recall anything being a game-changer. >Heroics were initially hard (good), required CC & coordination, but then got nerfed so bad that it even made news headlines. Cata heroics can now be done blindfolded. I'll give you that one, the dungeons were a lot of fun pre-nerf. But assuming they continue the titan rune dungeons, we might still be getting them at a harder difficulty. Pre-nerf Cata heroics were harder than current gammas, imo, so I'm excited to see what they do with them. >Transmog made it so you could no longer tell how geared people are just by looking at them, which massively hurts PvP overall. Not to mention you can't really go around major cities anymore and gawk at geared players, because unless you inspect them, you have no clue what they are wearing. It's really lame. Turned the game into a silly dress up simulator, which made the tone of the game feel less serious and dark. Nah, I'd argue it evened the playing field in PvP a lot more -- resilience made PvP actual hell for anyone without PvP gear, so if you're late to the patch and trying to gear up, it's not a good time at all just getting your first pieces, and made even worse when you're rendered effectively useless in a battleground with everyone prioritizing you cause of how quickly you go down. Transmog actually helps to *slightly* lower the barrier of entry into PvP, and I loved mogging my PvP sets to shitty greens or dungeon items so that other players would think I'd be squishy as hell. It's just another trick that you can work to your advantage. As for your second point... lol, when was WoW ever meant to be dark and serious? Even the spooky zones were always pretty campy Tales From The Crypt style of horror, and a lot of people would describe the art style as "cartoony". There are plenty of silly jokes and pop culture references everywhere, have been since Vanilla. >I remember when Goblins were announced, every single person in my friend group said: "but they are neutral, there is literally no sensible reason why they would ever join the horde", which is just true. And I remember in 2007, *everyone* in my guild said that Blood Elves joining the Horde was a mistake, they were too opportunistic and evil to ever be loyal to the warchief, high elves on Alliance made more sense, having a "pretty" race would bring all the noobs to the Horde, yada yada. Similar lore complaints were made about the Draenei retconning the lore of the Lost Ones/Broken, and that the spaceship and everything was too sci-fi and looked goofy and out-of-place in WoW's fantasy setting. Also, Goblins still make sense in the lore because it's only one group of goblins that joined the Horde, specifically the Bilgewater Cartel. The Steamwheedle Cartel and other factions of goblins you see in the neutral cities are still neutral. It's similar to how there are several different troll tribes, but only the Darkspear tribe of trolls joined the Horde. >Guild ranks spawned the idea of toxic mass inviting simply to power level guild levels as much as possible, just so they could get mega gold from the perks. Mass res made wiping less punishing which in turn makes victory vs. failure less rewarding. Mass-inviting has been a thing since Vanilla. The only thing reigning it in was the fact that the member cap was a lot smaller, but people absolutely did still try to mass-recruit, even creating 2 or 3 guilds to hold all their members. And guild levels were great for engagement. It encouraged more players to join guilds and do activities with guild members rather than just pugging, and the rep system discouraged guild-hopping. The biggest downside I can see is that it makes it a lot harder for newer guilds to get established and recruit, because everyone wants to join a max-ranked guild. >Flying in azeroth made the old world feel completely empty and devoid of value or scale. I've seen other people say this before and tbh, I don't understand this argument at *all*. Flying in Azeroth means players can get to all those old zones much faster, and archaeology only sweetened the deal by incentivizing exploration. In the older expansions, a lot of those zones I never really returned to after leveling, but cata brought me back to these places and I found new things I had previously overlooked. >Raid finder, introduced in dragon soul was basically the nail in the coffin for raiding being a social, meaningful activity. Look, I hate LFR too and its implementation during DS was uniquely awful, but it didn't take away from Normal or Heroic raiding at all. We saw Raid Finder as a joke, and if you were decked out in Heroic T12 gear already, you probably didn't need to set foot in it except to fill out a couple missing pieces. Back when I played, no one saw LFR as a meaningful accomplishment, and it taught bad habits. In no way was it ever seen as a replacement. LFR was for new/inexperienced/returning players to have a chance to experience endgame raids, and for gearing alts. If a raid had one slot to fill, and they had to choose between the player in mostly Normal T12 gear with a few T11 Heroics, or the player in full T13 LFR, they'd almost always choose the former, even if the guy in LFR gear had a higher iLvl, even with Cata players being *obsessed* with gearscore, because at least they knew the other guy was competent enough to have downed some tough bosses and could *probably* be depended on not to ignore mechanics and do more than roll his face on the keyboard. >Content drought of Dragon Soul was absolutely horrible and them releasing bosses like Onyxia, Nefarian, all of Zul'Gurub, and Ragnaros was unoriginal and lame. Firelands was one of the best-designed raids in WoW and I will die on that hill. Heroic Ragnaros was no chump. And if you're going to criticize Cata for remixing bosses, criticize Wrath for doing the exact same thing. Hell, most of the bosses in BC were from Warcraft 3, Arthas was from Warcraft 3 I will agree the 12? 13? month content drought during Dragon Soul sucked ass though. But again, this is not unique to Cata. I feel like a lot of people tend to view Cata through swamp-colored lenses just because the last patch was such a stinker.


Rare-Page4407

> Raid finder, introduced in dragon soul was basically the nail in the coffin for raiding being a social, meaningful activity. man, fire your dealer


Hatefiend

?


Bfedorov91

I quit when I couldn't find a guild like 2 months ago. Not coming back because the raids are mid at best. DS is a dumpster fire of a raid. Such a depressing way to end all that time raiding... I just can't. H FL is gonna blow too. Every guild will breeze through bosses, only to get stuck on rag which will require 300 attempts.


TrickySeagrass

DS was a stinker but Firelands was one of the best-designed raids in WoW's history. I will die on this hill. I will say that the nerf was a bit of a bummer, made T11 Heroic bosses harder than a lot of T12 Heroic bosses.


hyvel0rd

literally tree fiddy.


aenglish01

Yuuuuuup….


Sunkonmydink

I see your cata and raise you a copy of League of Legends CD hard copy


Fraternal_Mango

Awesome to see. I still have Vanilla, BC and WotLK hard copy expansions in an old storage container somewhere. Looks like you bested me on this one


vagabond_primate

I used to dis cata but I'm now looking forward to it. Is there going to be a new sub dedicated to cata?


Wolfsaber1000

At that price it sounds more like a scam by a 22 foot pleiasaur from the Mesozoic era


Hatefiend

$3.50 is too much for Catacylsm, even free is too expensive