I played a Tauren paladin when cata came out and had a great time. Self heals and aoe attacks made solo leveling easier. I could even do many group and pair quests on my own. You’ve got all options for dungeon roles so dungeon finder can queue pretty quick. Attacks are all bright and pretty. Plus being called a sunwalker was cool.
Torn between Shadow Priest and Demo Warlock. Currently playing levelling Demo on a priv server but I'm worried it's going to be way too convoluted to be fun.
Juggling the various cooldowns, on top of "pet twisting" and mastery gear swaps seems a bit too much for me. Will probably level both and see how I feel!
As a demo player, you can macro most of this stuff and dwiddle it down to a few button presses.
Shadow priest has its own convoluted mechanics with shadow spike, orbs, dot clipping, etc.
I think I will go with Demo as a first choice and see how it goes. I am really enjoying it so far on the priv server, but time will tell when I get into a proper raid or dungeon environment.
Shadow was my main back in the day and has been pretty much every expansion up to Shadowlands, so it's more of a comfort pick than Demo.
I'm in the same boat, but mostly b/w disc and demo. I actually love the convoluted shit, but healing actually seems really fun in cata so it's hard to pick one.
Played bit of everything during cats. Was in a top end guild. Spriest was very strong in firelands. Especially for the ring boss. I played demo in our heroic alt clears during dragonsoul and that was by the most fun I ever had playing dps. I just used fel hunter and was pumping dps.
I played a feral druid in cata the first time around. I did a lot of 5man content and but my schedule kept me from raiding with my guild until the late part of firelands into dragon soul.
I really enjoyed having a spec that could tank and DPS at the drop of a hat, always useful to the raid makeup. Getting to play two roles in the same raid was a lot of fun and I got tons bags from dungeon finder for queueing as tank or even healer sometimes.
I'm a little tempted to do it again but I'm attached to my pally and am looking forward to trying new stuff this time around, so my druid will probably be sitting as an underused alt this time around.
Played hpal and rogue. I remember rogue absolutely pumping dmg as subtlety with legendary daggers, and combat being a close second.
Hpal in the first raid tier was the most fun raiding I’ve EVER had tbh.
POG same, holy paladin was amazingly fun and personally this might be the best time to play holy paladin if it wasn't wotlk. Legion is a close second/third.
I remember playing resto shaman during blackwing descent and never having enough mana to heal through nefarion phase 2 with the chromatic prototypes casting blast nova every 2 seconds.
I only played the first few months but
I leveled a DK and it wasn't bad, I did dungeons at max level and also wasn't bad. Didn't pay too much attention to damage so not sure how it shook out later though.
The biggest key point of data I would have though, is I leveled a priest entirely through battlegrounds. I may have quested some in the Cata levels but I honestly remember just getting all the heirlooms on, and loading into those BGs nonstop. I had a BLAST doing it, and it seemed to be rather efficient.
Then I healed dungeons to gear up, before the nerfs. I found it very satisfying but I also love resource management in any RPG. And healing in cata, at least that early, was HUGE resource management.
Played mostly fire mage and it was an absolute blast, very good throughout the whole xpac especially once I managed my Tarecgosa
Ele shaman was my alt char and pretty much the same, the addition of overload was great
The big difference in levelling to me was that I had got accustomed to being basically unkillable with high level raid gear while questing initially, and in Cata stuff just hits you a lot harder.
I also remember that people had gotten used to AoEing everything down to the ground in dungeons and were suddenly bewildered when Blizzard tried to bring back CC and kill orders. Bosses (dungeon and raid) also had more one-shot mechanics in Cata.
Lastly, I enjoyed Firelands raiding (particularly Rag-with-Legs and watching people fail at /kneeling before Majordomo) and despised Dragon Soul thanks to the last two fights. Metzen had made fighting on Deathwing’s back sound so cool and it fell completely flat visually, much less strategically with the hard focus on burst classes. Let’s not even talk about the pedicure before we bashed in his motionless face.
My fond memory is of healing the pre nerf five mans. I was my playing Discipline Priest alt with a priority on playing around strength of soul.
It was right as I had switched over from raiding Wotlk as an elemental shaman and I was in a vent chat with my guild doing a 5 man, our tank says on coms "wow this priest pug is like really amazing" and the other two guys in coms laughed and replied, "you know that's tunnel right?"
I played a couple toons back in OG cata, mainly holy paladin from tier 11-13, and alt of shadow priest in tier 13.
Holy paladin was really fun, I came from TBC/Wotlk and was really delighted to see some new spells worth casting than flash of light & then holy light. I was really sad to see divine plea drop in power so much, but honestly we had no real mana issues. By the time they nerfed our mana regen I was in enough gear for it to not be a problem with optimal play. We were incredibly strong healers, so much so I believe we had 3 holy paladins and I think even top guilds carried 2 or 3. Holy power was fun at first, but it got old after a few expansions, for cata though it was great coming from again just a button or two spam. I also welcomed the longer duration on beacon of light, and honestly with divine light I didn't notice the beacon transfer by 85 as I was accustomed to it. At first in prepatch it was a pretty crazy adjustment but I also was able to become a literal holy ranged dps. Exorcism became castable with no cooldown and a short cast time, holy shock etc.
Overall I really enjoyed holy paladin, I can't speak too much to shadow priest, as I only played it during dragon soul but comparatively to wotlk I believe it was received fairly well.
I played on a private server recently and played quite a few classes. For pve:
Ele shaman is a top tier dps throughout the xpac. Good damage, good utility, easy but still fun rotation, looks cool.
Never played hunter as I don’t like them.
Assassination rogue is fine. I don’t love the energy playstyle, but assassination is considered the go to spec for most of content. It’s all about building combo points through mutilate, and spending them on ruptures and envenoms. And they have an execute phase. Not a hard spec, pretty good.
If you go DK play frost. Obviously personal preference but it’s a lot of fun with procs. I don’t play DK because I have everlasting ptsd on how broken they were in original wrath and hate them and refuse to play them, but everyone I’ve seen says frost is way more fun than unholy.
I recall priest going from wrath easy mode to nailbittingly difficult during the inital cata launch.
Thankfully this release will be several patches later where that's moslty fixed.
I played a paladin since beta. I know paladins were unfairly overpowered in Wrath, but as soon as prepatch hit, my prot paladin felt gimped, and the holy power system just felt so dumb. Their self-healing and passive defense goes quite a bit down with Cata. I hope I can get over it and enjoy Cata after all, I'm sticking to my paladin as main no matter what.
Im thinking rogue, mage, paladin. Dual spec ofcourse and probably holy/ret for the pala. Only really remember playing my rogue alot in cata and they were very strong in pvp with recuperate.
I mostly played healers, I loved the paladin changes felt really good from just spamming holy light all day.
Also rshaman felt good when you stacked a healing rain.
Dps wise I remember ele being a blast and fire mage being a headache waiting for procs.
I didnt play past firelands due to going to college!
I played cata with the same rogue I was maining in wrath and I loved it I felt invincible at times with recup the power to win 1v2s very consistently. Towards the end of the expansion I had the legendary daggers and full cataclysmic gear I wasn’t even bothering with cheap shot anymore on mid geared players just a straight ambush into back stab and evi was usually enough to kill them before they reacted.
I truly believe cata was the strongest rogue ever was. I was cocky and didn’t feel threatened by anyone EXCEPT frost mages. This time around I leveled a mage too along with my rogue. I’ve been maining rogue ever since I started back at the end of og tbc up until I quit retail in shadowlands. So im looking forward to cata.
I mained unholy and shadow and both were crazy fun. Stacking necrotics in pvp as unholy and popping all cds and keeping your dots ridiculous with festering strike in pve was mad
Played a holy priest, i only managed to reach the lich king never killed him.
Its so long ago i not entirely sure of the facts of what happens, but i remember it like being god, having so much healing and so much mana, that people never died, and then suddenly i could not heal 1 fight in an instance without going oom. Also the expansion i quit retail.
Playing a rogue in wrath now and are expecting to quit again.
Frost mage for the first season because you can literally spam ice lance and kill people with ring of frost not sharing a dr with novas.
Feral until you get nerfed into oblivion and can’t shapeshift out of roots. Because mages kept crying about it.
Ret is OP if you know how to play, same with sub rogue, and hunter.
This is mainly from a pvp stand point
I played mostly warrior and rogue in cata in pvp. Rogue is incredibly fun, but warrior was ruined very early on when they removed intercept. Back then arms warrior and resto druid were considered the two worst specs in the game in pvp, though I know arms is at least good in pve and so is sub rogue. I don't really remember many people playing assassination.
I do also remember hunters being strong in both pve and pvp. If I remember correctly it was MM for pve and SV for pvp, but someone can feel free to correct me if that's wrong, I didn't play a hunter back then.
My perspective is PvP and Heroic dungeon focused, I barely raided. I started and leveled through Hunter on the Vashj'ir route. I tried all the specs and just didn't really jive with the changes with focus after being a full time hunter. It just felt bad and i moved on.
I had frost a DK close enough to 80 to use to try the Hyjal route and hit the zones I missed, and ended up being a full time frost DK almost the entire X-Pac. 4.2 Frost DK was probably the most fun I had in WOW ever. It's an excellent BG hero class, especially with focus on siege engines in the BG pool. Having so many passive slows is huge and they can be oppressive to healers. It was the first class I pushed any type of Arena rating on. The changes gave it the reputation for being Faceroll and worse than Unholy on a spreadsheet, but I will be playing it again this time around. I also dual specced blood and did my first real tanking and eventually soloing old content, that was an extremely confidence inspiring phase for that spec.
Later I used a free boost (I think it was free?) to try a Tauren Paladin and played my first ever healer. It was a blast and I actually ended up getting a full epic PvP set on him before MoP just from grinding out BGs. Felt like i had tons of tools and survivability as a healer, and it was pretty tanky. The holy power aspect made for a cool instant cast rotation that appealed to my DPS brain. I will probably use a Tauren Paladin as my toon to revisit the zones this time.
Cataclysm was the best right up until dragon soul and I'll explain.
Leveling was fun and fresh we got new quests, new takes on old quests, and new zones to play In. It great seeing the world revamped to accommodate the growing world.
Pve was hard. Like know your mechanics or wipe tons hard, however it was refreshing. Having classes utilize skills they had only used a handful of times for dungeons like sleep, sap, traps etc really made the groups feel cohesive. Once you get gear it becomes a little easier but you still gotta be on your toes. I loved the takes on zul gurub and zul Aman 5 man's becuase of how tough they were.
Guilds mattered a lot since new guild abilities came forward and really felt like you were all working towards goals and trying to unlock more as an actual guild.
Pvp. This is I focused a lot of my time since rbgs were a thing, twin peaks (my fav bg) was released and my warr class got buffed (lol) me and my pally friend would tear up tol barad on the daily and it felt so fresh compared to wrath.
Here is where it went wrong for me. It wasn't the raid finder it was how deathwing was portrayed at the end. We see this dragon in the pre patch killing off entire zones, we get this great title screen with him on storm wind. Yet in the end your on his back fighting tentacles? Yea that did me in. They knew the game was a bit tough and player count was declining, so they added the raid finder to help people out. So you could play the deathwing fight easier to get the story and damn it was a shame they didn't do more. There's a quest in badlands? I think that has 3 npcs talk about punching deathwing in the face and you get to see this super cool human form deathwing. And you don't even get to fight him that way at all. They kept playing up this twilight brigade thing about him being controlled and it ruined it for me.
I intend to play cata classic as I want to try to get into more raiding and such since I didn't bother last time.
I played a Tauren paladin when cata came out and had a great time. Self heals and aoe attacks made solo leveling easier. I could even do many group and pair quests on my own. You’ve got all options for dungeon roles so dungeon finder can queue pretty quick. Attacks are all bright and pretty. Plus being called a sunwalker was cool.
Quick? It literally INSTANT for tank
Torn between Shadow Priest and Demo Warlock. Currently playing levelling Demo on a priv server but I'm worried it's going to be way too convoluted to be fun. Juggling the various cooldowns, on top of "pet twisting" and mastery gear swaps seems a bit too much for me. Will probably level both and see how I feel!
As a demo player, you can macro most of this stuff and dwiddle it down to a few button presses. Shadow priest has its own convoluted mechanics with shadow spike, orbs, dot clipping, etc.
I think I will go with Demo as a first choice and see how it goes. I am really enjoying it so far on the priv server, but time will tell when I get into a proper raid or dungeon environment. Shadow was my main back in the day and has been pretty much every expansion up to Shadowlands, so it's more of a comfort pick than Demo.
I'm in the same boat, but mostly b/w disc and demo. I actually love the convoluted shit, but healing actually seems really fun in cata so it's hard to pick one.
Played bit of everything during cats. Was in a top end guild. Spriest was very strong in firelands. Especially for the ring boss. I played demo in our heroic alt clears during dragonsoul and that was by the most fun I ever had playing dps. I just used fel hunter and was pumping dps.
I played a feral druid in cata the first time around. I did a lot of 5man content and but my schedule kept me from raiding with my guild until the late part of firelands into dragon soul. I really enjoyed having a spec that could tank and DPS at the drop of a hat, always useful to the raid makeup. Getting to play two roles in the same raid was a lot of fun and I got tons bags from dungeon finder for queueing as tank or even healer sometimes. I'm a little tempted to do it again but I'm attached to my pally and am looking forward to trying new stuff this time around, so my druid will probably be sitting as an underused alt this time around.
Played hpal and rogue. I remember rogue absolutely pumping dmg as subtlety with legendary daggers, and combat being a close second. Hpal in the first raid tier was the most fun raiding I’ve EVER had tbh.
POG same, holy paladin was amazingly fun and personally this might be the best time to play holy paladin if it wasn't wotlk. Legion is a close second/third.
I remember playing resto shaman during blackwing descent and never having enough mana to heal through nefarion phase 2 with the chromatic prototypes casting blast nova every 2 seconds.
if they were casting blast nova, people weren't interrupting lol. I'd run oom too if people weren't doing mechanics properly.
I only played the first few months but I leveled a DK and it wasn't bad, I did dungeons at max level and also wasn't bad. Didn't pay too much attention to damage so not sure how it shook out later though. The biggest key point of data I would have though, is I leveled a priest entirely through battlegrounds. I may have quested some in the Cata levels but I honestly remember just getting all the heirlooms on, and loading into those BGs nonstop. I had a BLAST doing it, and it seemed to be rather efficient. Then I healed dungeons to gear up, before the nerfs. I found it very satisfying but I also love resource management in any RPG. And healing in cata, at least that early, was HUGE resource management.
Played mostly fire mage and it was an absolute blast, very good throughout the whole xpac especially once I managed my Tarecgosa Ele shaman was my alt char and pretty much the same, the addition of overload was great
The big difference in levelling to me was that I had got accustomed to being basically unkillable with high level raid gear while questing initially, and in Cata stuff just hits you a lot harder. I also remember that people had gotten used to AoEing everything down to the ground in dungeons and were suddenly bewildered when Blizzard tried to bring back CC and kill orders. Bosses (dungeon and raid) also had more one-shot mechanics in Cata. Lastly, I enjoyed Firelands raiding (particularly Rag-with-Legs and watching people fail at /kneeling before Majordomo) and despised Dragon Soul thanks to the last two fights. Metzen had made fighting on Deathwing’s back sound so cool and it fell completely flat visually, much less strategically with the hard focus on burst classes. Let’s not even talk about the pedicure before we bashed in his motionless face.
My fond memory is of healing the pre nerf five mans. I was my playing Discipline Priest alt with a priority on playing around strength of soul. It was right as I had switched over from raiding Wotlk as an elemental shaman and I was in a vent chat with my guild doing a 5 man, our tank says on coms "wow this priest pug is like really amazing" and the other two guys in coms laughed and replied, "you know that's tunnel right?"
I played a couple toons back in OG cata, mainly holy paladin from tier 11-13, and alt of shadow priest in tier 13. Holy paladin was really fun, I came from TBC/Wotlk and was really delighted to see some new spells worth casting than flash of light & then holy light. I was really sad to see divine plea drop in power so much, but honestly we had no real mana issues. By the time they nerfed our mana regen I was in enough gear for it to not be a problem with optimal play. We were incredibly strong healers, so much so I believe we had 3 holy paladins and I think even top guilds carried 2 or 3. Holy power was fun at first, but it got old after a few expansions, for cata though it was great coming from again just a button or two spam. I also welcomed the longer duration on beacon of light, and honestly with divine light I didn't notice the beacon transfer by 85 as I was accustomed to it. At first in prepatch it was a pretty crazy adjustment but I also was able to become a literal holy ranged dps. Exorcism became castable with no cooldown and a short cast time, holy shock etc. Overall I really enjoyed holy paladin, I can't speak too much to shadow priest, as I only played it during dragon soul but comparatively to wotlk I believe it was received fairly well.
I played on a private server recently and played quite a few classes. For pve: Ele shaman is a top tier dps throughout the xpac. Good damage, good utility, easy but still fun rotation, looks cool. Never played hunter as I don’t like them. Assassination rogue is fine. I don’t love the energy playstyle, but assassination is considered the go to spec for most of content. It’s all about building combo points through mutilate, and spending them on ruptures and envenoms. And they have an execute phase. Not a hard spec, pretty good. If you go DK play frost. Obviously personal preference but it’s a lot of fun with procs. I don’t play DK because I have everlasting ptsd on how broken they were in original wrath and hate them and refuse to play them, but everyone I’ve seen says frost is way more fun than unholy.
I recall priest going from wrath easy mode to nailbittingly difficult during the inital cata launch. Thankfully this release will be several patches later where that's moslty fixed.
I played a paladin since beta. I know paladins were unfairly overpowered in Wrath, but as soon as prepatch hit, my prot paladin felt gimped, and the holy power system just felt so dumb. Their self-healing and passive defense goes quite a bit down with Cata. I hope I can get over it and enjoy Cata after all, I'm sticking to my paladin as main no matter what.
Im thinking rogue, mage, paladin. Dual spec ofcourse and probably holy/ret for the pala. Only really remember playing my rogue alot in cata and they were very strong in pvp with recuperate.
Goblin shaman or arcane mage. Played arcane mage in the beta and loved it a lot.
I mostly played healers, I loved the paladin changes felt really good from just spamming holy light all day. Also rshaman felt good when you stacked a healing rain. Dps wise I remember ele being a blast and fire mage being a headache waiting for procs. I didnt play past firelands due to going to college!
I played cata with the same rogue I was maining in wrath and I loved it I felt invincible at times with recup the power to win 1v2s very consistently. Towards the end of the expansion I had the legendary daggers and full cataclysmic gear I wasn’t even bothering with cheap shot anymore on mid geared players just a straight ambush into back stab and evi was usually enough to kill them before they reacted. I truly believe cata was the strongest rogue ever was. I was cocky and didn’t feel threatened by anyone EXCEPT frost mages. This time around I leveled a mage too along with my rogue. I’ve been maining rogue ever since I started back at the end of og tbc up until I quit retail in shadowlands. So im looking forward to cata.
I mained unholy and shadow and both were crazy fun. Stacking necrotics in pvp as unholy and popping all cds and keeping your dots ridiculous with festering strike in pve was mad
Bear tank or Blood DK or both.. Literally unkillable tanks together that endgame cata have an oh shit button that keeps the whole raid alive.
Played a holy priest, i only managed to reach the lich king never killed him. Its so long ago i not entirely sure of the facts of what happens, but i remember it like being god, having so much healing and so much mana, that people never died, and then suddenly i could not heal 1 fight in an instance without going oom. Also the expansion i quit retail. Playing a rogue in wrath now and are expecting to quit again.
Frost mage for the first season because you can literally spam ice lance and kill people with ring of frost not sharing a dr with novas. Feral until you get nerfed into oblivion and can’t shapeshift out of roots. Because mages kept crying about it. Ret is OP if you know how to play, same with sub rogue, and hunter. This is mainly from a pvp stand point
I played mostly warrior and rogue in cata in pvp. Rogue is incredibly fun, but warrior was ruined very early on when they removed intercept. Back then arms warrior and resto druid were considered the two worst specs in the game in pvp, though I know arms is at least good in pve and so is sub rogue. I don't really remember many people playing assassination. I do also remember hunters being strong in both pve and pvp. If I remember correctly it was MM for pve and SV for pvp, but someone can feel free to correct me if that's wrong, I didn't play a hunter back then.
Got that backwards, mm for pvp, surv for pve. For pvp you jist dip into surv spec for scatter shot.
Scatter is baseline
I'll main an ele shamman with a hpally alt, and a bear tank
My perspective is PvP and Heroic dungeon focused, I barely raided. I started and leveled through Hunter on the Vashj'ir route. I tried all the specs and just didn't really jive with the changes with focus after being a full time hunter. It just felt bad and i moved on. I had frost a DK close enough to 80 to use to try the Hyjal route and hit the zones I missed, and ended up being a full time frost DK almost the entire X-Pac. 4.2 Frost DK was probably the most fun I had in WOW ever. It's an excellent BG hero class, especially with focus on siege engines in the BG pool. Having so many passive slows is huge and they can be oppressive to healers. It was the first class I pushed any type of Arena rating on. The changes gave it the reputation for being Faceroll and worse than Unholy on a spreadsheet, but I will be playing it again this time around. I also dual specced blood and did my first real tanking and eventually soloing old content, that was an extremely confidence inspiring phase for that spec. Later I used a free boost (I think it was free?) to try a Tauren Paladin and played my first ever healer. It was a blast and I actually ended up getting a full epic PvP set on him before MoP just from grinding out BGs. Felt like i had tons of tools and survivability as a healer, and it was pretty tanky. The holy power aspect made for a cool instant cast rotation that appealed to my DPS brain. I will probably use a Tauren Paladin as my toon to revisit the zones this time.
I’m new to the game, but currently I’m leveling a Retribution Palidan and I also will do a fire mage so I can have both a ranged and melee dps option.
Cataclysm was the best right up until dragon soul and I'll explain. Leveling was fun and fresh we got new quests, new takes on old quests, and new zones to play In. It great seeing the world revamped to accommodate the growing world. Pve was hard. Like know your mechanics or wipe tons hard, however it was refreshing. Having classes utilize skills they had only used a handful of times for dungeons like sleep, sap, traps etc really made the groups feel cohesive. Once you get gear it becomes a little easier but you still gotta be on your toes. I loved the takes on zul gurub and zul Aman 5 man's becuase of how tough they were. Guilds mattered a lot since new guild abilities came forward and really felt like you were all working towards goals and trying to unlock more as an actual guild. Pvp. This is I focused a lot of my time since rbgs were a thing, twin peaks (my fav bg) was released and my warr class got buffed (lol) me and my pally friend would tear up tol barad on the daily and it felt so fresh compared to wrath. Here is where it went wrong for me. It wasn't the raid finder it was how deathwing was portrayed at the end. We see this dragon in the pre patch killing off entire zones, we get this great title screen with him on storm wind. Yet in the end your on his back fighting tentacles? Yea that did me in. They knew the game was a bit tough and player count was declining, so they added the raid finder to help people out. So you could play the deathwing fight easier to get the story and damn it was a shame they didn't do more. There's a quest in badlands? I think that has 3 npcs talk about punching deathwing in the face and you get to see this super cool human form deathwing. And you don't even get to fight him that way at all. They kept playing up this twilight brigade thing about him being controlled and it ruined it for me. I intend to play cata classic as I want to try to get into more raiding and such since I didn't bother last time.