Someone correct me if I am wrong but WotLK all takes place in northrend which was untouched by cata. Cata really just effected classic areas. I don’t have an actual answer for you as I’ve been clean since start of warlords but just wanted to clarify as wotlk and cata are my peak wow times.

Cata Classic is a fairly divisive topic in the community, mostly because of the split views of the expansion itself. There’s no guarantee we’ll get one at this point, so if you want to see the content now I’d recommend playing it in retail.

That said, you’ll reach level 60 in retail long before you finish Cata (which is combined with the Vanilla zones in Chromie Time). You could always freeze your level if you really wanted to play through it all without one-shotting everything once you outlevel it, I just wanted to bring it to your attention. Leveling is very quick nowadays.

I freaking love that video and have watched it tons of times… But what does that have to do with your question?

The problem you’re going to find is that gold buying has taken over from what the experience used to be. People don’t raid as guilds much anymore, it’s all about spending hundreds of dollars on wow tokens (or getting it via other means) to buy gear that drops in raids.

If you don’t buy this gold then you’re dealing with a hyperinflated economy where you either go participate in these gdkp raids to make money or you get left behind. It’s also killed the main purpose of guilds as well as why would you use your lockouts with your guild when you could participate in gdkp runs to make gold instead?

Greed on Blizzards behalf ruined the classic experience ultimately for me at least. It’s no longer about working together to achieve a goal, it’s become very toxic where you’re incentivised to get people kicked out of your raid so that you get a bigger cut of the money.