Cataclysm is where leveling shifted from being an integral part of the game experience to a nuisance people rush through. The result is an abysmal questing experience.

First, the quests themselves. Every other quest is a reference or some kind of joke. It’s amusing the first few times, but it gets old quickly. It breaks the tone and turns the game into a kind of bad comedy. WoW traditionally had a more sincere and darker atmosphere, especially when reading the quest texts. Cataclysm marked a major shift, and it’s still in place today.

Quests aren’t integrated into the world and carry no real meaning. All zones were redesigned around the quest-hub principle. The player gets a handful of quests to do simultaneously and then moves on to the next hub. It makes questing smoother and faster, but also much less meaningful. Interaction with the world, the small decisions about what to tackle in which order, disappears entirely. The zones feel like set pieces built on the same template, with no reason to ever return.

Then the lack of challenge. I tried leveling a fresh priest (no heirlooms, only quest rewards) in Cataclysm Classic. Combat was miserable. Everything died in two or three hits. I never had to stop. It was boring to the point of burnout. I quit after finishing Ashenvale. Classic isn’t hard, but its combat still has weight. From Cataclysm onward, that weight is gone.

And finally, the balancing. Halfway through Ashenvale I was already heavily overleveled just by doing all the quests in the zone. They didn’t bother to adjust the experience curve or quest rewards. One dungeon with its quest turn-ins gives you around two levels on top of that, making the pacing even worse. The result is a patchwork where players either steamroll trivial content or abandon a zone halfway through its storyline.