What was it like before Cataclysm?

Before cataclysm all red mobs were changed to yellow ones in northshire and all elite mobs turned to normal ones in entire old world, around 2.3
Around 3.3 entire zone didn't had a single class quest
Why do you ask?

It's hard to do class quests and group quests when the playerbase is changed and no one wants to team up for anything.

>how every village or town had the same exact town hall
perhaps you missed the point of how the reused buildings made reference back to Warcraft RTS games.

wc2 and 3 had different tiers of town hall, of course wotlk kid like you wouldn't know

TBC and WotLK were the beginning of the end for sure. They introduced things, which were at the time, innocuous and fun, but over time became problematic for the longevity of the game. I understand it actually. Blizzard had no idea how long the popularity of their game was going to last, but they still rushed content and introduced longevity killing concepts. Blizzard wanted people to see Outlands, they wanted people to fight the Lich King, but it all happened too fast. They should have shown restraint.

Arenas were a highly requested feature among the more hardcore PvPers, but ultimately made the game focus more on class balance and class homogenization. It's not fun to play your Mage in arena and get absolutely fucking rocked by Rogues you can't do anything about. But this causes classes to lose their unique tool kits in an effort to curb imbalance which makes everything feel samey. Now everyone has, Big Damage Button, Reliable Damage Button, Big Damage Cooldown, Survival Cooldown, Healing Cooldown, Movement Ability, and so on.

Flying mounts did more harm to the open world than anything else and only became a much larger problem once opened up to the entire world in Cataclysm.

Wrath introduced dungeon finder and the simplified dungeon gameplay based around gathering up 8 groups of dudes and AoEing them down now that everyone had dope ass AoE. This is perhaps the worst change of all to the game because it irrevocably ruined the playerbase. Now new players expect this level of complexity and when introduced with harder dungeons they retaliated, as evidenced by early Cataclysm.

The problem is that these issues were not wholly transparent when first introduced. Arenas kicked ass at first. Flying was cool and new. The dungeon finder was a welcome addition to the more barren low level dungeons. It just all coalesced into something much worse when rolled together and given age.

more like you cant expect every low level area to stay populated enough years into the game

The issue primarily is the rise of MOBAs and now currently the rise of BR games. Back when WoW was out you had small server communities playing various online games, but only WoW was big enough that all your friends and everyone you knew online was playing it. So you toughed it out and waited those 30 minutes while chatting with people for the group to fill and everyone to get there.

Nowadays little Timmy isn't gonna want to wait because he can just hop into Apex or Fortnite, find a game, and get right into the action.

That being said, I think you'll be surprised when Classic comes out. People are more masochistic than most give them credit for.

That's your excuse for lazy design? If there was supposed to be any "refference" on that topic, the buildings should be used either once or on some special occasions, like putting a barracks in a PVP areas.

Not to mention, any base I used to built in any average MP warcraft 3 game was way more interesting and diversified that WoW's shitholes containing of like three huts and a shed.

quests before
>kill X rats
quests now
>kill X rats controlling this robot shredder because fuck playing the class you wanted to play

Not much has improved then. Although I gotta admit, I dropped WoW on TBC launch and then out of curiosity I played for like a week mid-WOTLK. Dustwallow marsh was completely redone and for once I legitimately enjoyed questing. Still, the moment I left dustwallow I dropped the game again for good this time because devs did not fix any of the other shit aspects.

You know, to me, really a way how questing should be done in an MMO was shown in guild wars 1. Relying on open areas will forever be kill x rats quest because what can you come up with. The areas don't need to be open in the first place, after the initial wave of players they will remain empty.

straight up design wise it was lazier too.
all tbc dungeons were either hallways or caverns of time wave cancer.

karazhan and maybe bt were the only effort raids and kara was scrap vanilla content.

>wotlk kid who loves brd shows his newfagtory once again
Not even surprised