How Long will Cataclysm Classic Drag On?

Joyous Journeys, the 50% xp buff, landed in Cataclysm Classic last week.  Now a staple of the WoW Classic progression server experience, it is also a herald of Blizz landing at a point where they know people are running out of stuff to do but they have a content schedule all planned out so they throw us a bone in the hopes we’ll busy ourselves leveling up alts.

The funny thing about this is that Cataclysm Classic only launched back on May 20th, so we’re just coming up on the five month mark in a few days… and yet it feels tired, like it has already outstayed its welcome.

And we are not close to done yet.  Blizzard plans to get, at a minimum, a full nine months out of this expansion before they start in on Mists of Pandaria… if they start in on Mists of Pandaria.  As I noted in my post asking when WoW Classic progression should end, Blizz already played the Mists of Pandaria card pretty hard in retail with the remix to distract players there from running out of content with Dragonflight.

So there is an open question as to whether or not that has diluted interest in a classic version of Pandaria.

That aside, the plan seems to be to put out the Firelands update in November and Dragon Soul in January, so that will get us into at least February before anything besides Cataclysm is happening.

But that is all raiding content.  Anybody outside of the raiding community, which is our group for sure, has pretty much all they are going to get out of Cataclysm Classic by this point.  So we’re looking at another four months of working on alts or doing holiday events or… I don’t know… walking away to do something else while we wait for pandas and pet battles?

Our group is fiddling with heroics now, and I’d like to get through heroic Deadmines… but beyond that I don’t have a lot of investment in Cataclysm.  We’ve also peeked into heroic Shadowfang Keep, where the first boss did us in, and heroic Lost City of Tol’vir, where the third boss stopped us.

Cata is also an expansion where we played at the very start, quit in annoyance, and then didn’t come back until the back half of Mists of Pandaria, so how the end to Cata plays out… and the Pandaria pre-events and launch… are all not part of my experience.

I can only look at old charts and… sure, Cata sees the first big decline… but is it that big when compared to later late expansion fall offs?  Also, there is a base of maybe 5 million players in China that was pretty static for a lot of this era as they were late to get the game so were behind an expansion.

Also, look at that optimistic spike with Warlords of Draenor, the expansion that would get Blizz to stop announcing subscription numbers.  We had such hope that Blizz was going to get back to something good… or give us real housing.  Reviewing those old posts should be fun.

Back to Cata, the next four months or more will be all for raiders.  We could spend the time running heroics, but since Blizz decided that Wrath heroics were too easy any dialed the difficulty up, I am not convinced they are worth the effort.

As Potshot noted on the Shadowfang Keep, run, we don’t HAVE to do those.  Banging our head against them isn’t fun after a certain point and there are other games out there.  We could jump on board the Throne and Liberty train or spend the holidays in another private server survival game like Nightingale.

Something for the group to discuss.

But this gets me back to how EverQuest runs their progression servers, where expansions last for three months.  In that time the core raider demographic… which is what those servers cater to after the first few expansions peel off the casuals… go from the server first race to having farmed sufficiently to move on to the next expansion.

Now, many EQ expansions do not have has much in them as a WoW expansion… though both games have dialed back on content as time has moved on… but EQ also launches an expansion every year… and used to do two a year.  That is how a game just five years older than WoW has three times as many expansions.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there for us, aside from the fact that Cataclysm Classic is likely to linger on beyond our interest in it.  We have started doing a few other side tasks, like doing Wrath raids as a short group for transmog stuff.  (25 man Naxx trash was actually pretty tough, we had to dial it down to 10 man.)  And I might work on one more alt, just to get my hunter up to level cap.  But he is already almost level 84.  Beyond that though, I am wondering what the remains of Cata Classic will have for us.