World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Review (Part 1)

By Daniel Owens

To better my writing skills and establish a presence in the MMO gaming community are the passions that bring me here, I enjoy writing about new and upcoming MMO's. My goal is to bring to the reader as many promising MMO's as I can find.

TLDR: Skip to the bottom for a note just for you.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Expansion Pack has finally been released, new and old players alike are rejoicing over Blizzard's latest addition to their MMO Franchise. An expansion such as this one is extremely hard to review and compress into one article, and can never be truly justified by doing so, but let's give it a shot anyways. I will try cut down on this review by posting informative links where a wall of text is not necessary.

With more content being released than any previous expansion, WoW players are flocking to the new expansion ready to take on new content. The launch day went smoother than any other, with only roughly 20 mins of login troubles for most users, although there was the expected queue times on most populated servers of nearly 2 hours and a whole bunch of players who were strangely surprised about it, as if they have never experienced such an oddity before.

Cataclysm brings forward two new races, the Goblins and the Worgens. While the Worgens are now the community favourite (taking the throne away from Blood Elves), Goblins have quickly proven their worth within the game and have broken all my personal expectations for an ugly little gnome like being.

Level Cap: 85

The level cap has now been pushed to 85 and is receiving a mixed response. A lot of players are claiming that it is way too easy to reach level 85 (most of these claims from people who have only hit level 81) and that the experience is not what they were expecting. This general sort of whinging is expected when a few people hit 85 in the first day. Athene proved this with his brilliant display of hitting 85 in just 5 hours, proving once again that he is the greatest player to ever live. Just kidding, the guy is like competing in the Special Olympics and still using steroids, then claiming that you're the best Athlete in the history of sports.

All these claims of levelling being too fast these days are to be taken with a grain of salt. Blizzard has provided an experience for each type of player. You might be the person who wants to progress as fast as possible, hit end game, quit for a year then come back next expansion. You can do this if that is how YOU play. On the other hand though, Blizzard has provided multiple levelling paths that can take you one day to reach 85 or a month. There is so much new content to be explored and so many new questing hubs that if you hit 85 "too fast" then you're just playing the game wrong.

Talent Trees

There has been a big change to the Talent Trees, players may no longer just shove points into an overwhelming amount of options. First of all players must offload all their points into one tree before unlocking the others, this trains new players (and the less hardcore) into focusing on just one tree before they get into the realm of talent calculators and hours of research on numerous websites.

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In return for this inconvenience, players automatically receive bonuses when selecting a tree, generally receiving one new spell and some enhancements to their abilities. For instance on my Shaman I picked Enhancement, which at level 10 gave me Lava Lash and some boosts to my stats and attacks, along with dual weild a talent not generally received at level 10. This has made levelling a lot easier as an enhance shammy.

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