My first impressions of the new World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm? It's confusing.
To put this in the proper context, I've been playing World of Warcraft since closed beta some seven years ago. Over that time I've put in thousands of hours. I've also periodically quit when bored, but I've always resubbed again eventually. I'll read about something Blizzard is patching into the game, like the dungeon finder tool, and it gets me thinking about playing again. That's about all it takes, the gravitational pull of WoW is so great. So with Cataclysm out I resubbed to see all the changes and the new content. I was gone for nearly a year, but when I left I had three level 80s with gear scores above 5000 and an assortment of other alts. I knew the game well. I no longer feel like that about WoW. I have to relearn a great deal of the game.
It wasn't a surprise that the game world had changed. I caught smatterings of what was going on in months preceding the release of Cataclysm. The changes are still confusing to me at times. I had Orgrimmar mapped out in my head, so the new Org is jarring (and wet). It's not exactly a welcome change as a result. I had quite a bit of trouble finding the herbalism trainer to get my grand poobah rating in herbs on my level 80 rogue, and that was with a guard putting a marker on my mini-map. I'm sure that there are some improvements but I don't see them yet and now I have to remove the mostly worthless mental map in my head and replace it with a new and mostly worthless mental map.
Likewise the talent system was revamped. I haven't played the new talents structures enough to know if I like this new talent approach better, but clearly it's better for new players since it makes it harder for new players to make bad talent point choices. Instead of splitting points between three talent trees as they level, players pick one tree when they hit level 10 and are stuck with that tree for most of their leveling unless they switch talent specs. My guess is if you go to the message boards for a given class, you will find that the new talent trees are awful for that class but terrific for other classes and clear proof that Blizzard hates [warlocks, priests, mages, rogues, paladins, etc.].
(Actually, the reshaping of the world and the revision of the talent trees are a part of what everyone gets with the baseline World of Warcraft game, but clearly they were designed to coincide with Cataclysm as a kind of relaunch of WoW.)
