While Cataclysm is creeping in much sooner than most people expected, it looks like they are accelerating the content to a significant degree.
The pre-patch is coming at the end of this month, with the launch a short few weeks after. Players will have two months before the next content drop, Rise of the Zandalari. Luckily, this is a relatively small update introducing “new” Heroic dungeons.
Towards the end of 2024, the first major content will drop, the Firelands, followed by the Hour of Twilight in January 2025. If this update brings the same content as the Hour of Twilight update in the original release, that would introduce the final raid, Dragon Soul. This means that after around 8-10 months of Cataclysm there will be no more content drops to and the expansion will be in its “final” state.
There were also a handful of oddities in the Official announcement that may need to be cleared up.
Swift Zulian Tiger: Zul’Gurub is changing from a raid to a leveling zone and this mount will no longer be obtainable.
This is likely a misunderstanding or typo by Blizzard. Zul’Gurub becomes a Heroic Dungeon, not a leveling zone. The mount will likely still be going away.
With the release of Cataclysm Classic, the Insane in the Membrane Feat of Strength will no longer be available.
This is a strange one. The “Insane in the Membrane” achievement did not originally go away in Cataclysm, and in fact, is still obtainable to this day even in Dragonflight. The requirements for the achievement were changed in Cataclysm, as a faction was removed.
Flexible Raiding
In the initial posts, Blizzard mentioned “Flexible Raiding”. This term was confusing for a lot of players because Flexible Raids are a current feature in Dragonflight, but they are very much not the same thing.
Flexible Raiding was a feature added in Cataclysm that allowed players to swap between 10 and 25-man raids on a boss-by-boss basis. If you wanted to clear the first half of a raid as a 10-man group and the latter half as a 25-man group, you were and are free to do so.
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