World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

[Kuja]

So, today at Blizzcon, the guys at Blizzard announced the 4th expansion pack for the behemoth known as World of Warcraft. Unsurprisingly, at least for anyone who heard about the trademark rumor, it's been named Mists of Pandaria.



Kuja's initial reaction: mixed.

Pandaren have never exactly been my favorite running joke. I wasn't a fan of them when Samwise Didier first penned them into Warcraft. It seems like Blizzard is no longer treating them like an in-joke at any rate but rather a "serious" playable race. Now, I love Kung Fu Panda, (I've got a copy on my shelf) but an entire race of them is...well, we'll wait and see how Blizzard handles it. What I'm more concerned about is the new kung fu pandas eating up screen time that other races (worgen, draenei, and possibly tauren) really need.

Monk class...hnngh. I really didn't think we needed yet another class. Ten classes, thirty different varieties. It's nice to get another tank/healer combo, though, but on the other hand it's going to mean even more competition for raid slots. Again, waiting to see how it's handled.

Pandaria itself looks pretty sharp. Blizzard keeps getting better at landscape and architectural design.

Apparently word on the story is going to involve a ramp-up in the Horde/Alliance conflict, but this time without a Big Bad to distract people. I'm rather glad for this. The Horde/Alliance war felt aggressively stupid, happening as it was with a giant black dragon flying around torching the planet. On the other hand, at this point I hold little hope for Blizzard actually deigning to give the Alliance any victories. More likely they'll end up torching their own ships to ward the Horde off and call it a win. Yes, I'm a little bitter - the story for Cataclysm has been horrible Alliance-side.

New talent system - hnngh. Here we go again. Hopefully Blizzard figures out a way to make Ret not feel like a mishmash of button-slamming.

Pet battle system - apparently our non-combat pets can play pokemon now. GO FORTH AND CONQUER, ENCHANTED LANTERN!

3 raids and 9 dungeons at the start, including two revamped SM wings and a new Scholomance. Interesting, and nice to see Blizzard learning from the mistake they made with Cataclysm's anemic dungeon content.

Final thought for now: new expansion comes with a new race and new class...right after an expansion with two new races...which followed one with a new class...which followed one with two new races. Are we ever gonna get new character slots?

[White Haven]

The more I hear about this new expansion, the more I think this whole thing is one massive Blizztroll of its own playerbase. Talking with some friends and each tihng I hear is more unbelievable than the last.

[Darmalus]

On the other hand, at this point I hold little hope for Blizzard actually deigning to give the Alliance any victories. More likely they'll end up torching their own ships to ward the Horde off and call it a win. Yes, I'm a little bitter - the story for Cataclysm has been horrible Alliance-side.

I always wonder when I hear variations of that, because Horde-side, it seems like Hellscream just orders Horde forces to their mostly useless deaths (or kills them himself), followed by a 3rd party saving the day (with player help). Goblins must work fast, I think we left the entire Horde navy and airforce in tiny bits in Gilneas and Twilight Highlands.

On the expansion, Pandaria sounds interesting, I will enjoy the eye-candy if nothing else. I wonder if Pandarans will be able to talk to each other, or if they will mysteriously forget their native language (maybe the last quest giver bonks you on the head). I'm cautiously hopeful about the talent changes. I'm 'meh' on the pokemon battles. Enchanted Broom, I choose you!

[Highlord Laan]

And, meanwhile, all the storylines with the Draenei that have been swinging in the breeze since they were kicked to the curb in their own expansion will remain unresolved, Worgen players will have to roll horde to see the end of their starting zones story, Gilneas City will be swept under the rug, and Allied content in Twilight Highlands will stay unfinished.

I wonder what great deeds Metzen's green jesus will accomplish in the next expansion.

[Minischoles]

Pandaren have never exactly been my favorite running joke. I wasn't a fan of them when Samwise Didier first penned them into Warcraft. It seems like Blizzard is no longer treating them like an in-joke at any rate but rather a "serious" playable race. Now, I love Kung Fu Panda, (I've got a copy on my shelf) but an entire race of them is...well, we'll wait and see how Blizzard handles it. What I'm more concerned about is the new kung fu pandas eating up screen time that other races (worgen, draenei, and possibly tauren) really need.

At first I thought they were trolling, but apparently Blizzard really does decide what to do by threads on the forums, and Pandaren get at least 2-3 threads a week. Guess the absolute haemmorhage of subscribers has to be addressed whatever way possible - this and the Diablo offer ought to make it not look like they're losing people every day.
Worgen have been left in the state they are (needing to play an entire other faction just to finish their story). Draenei are forgotten and have been for a while and Tauren's have always had an anemic story.

Monk class...hnngh. I really didn't think we needed yet another class. Ten classes, thirty different varieties. It's nice to get another tank/healer combo, though, but on the other hand it's going to mean even more competition for raid slots. Again, waiting to see how it's handled.

Going to be hideously and completely overpowered on launch and for several months afterwards, before getting nerfed into utter uselessness and will get buffed and nerfed every single patch and hotfix as Blizzard struggles to balance them (just going by WOTLK for Death Knights). There new healing style will either:
a) make every other healing style look fucking stupid and thus be completely overpowered prompting mass rerolls and then huge gamebreaking nerfs or
b) be utterly pointless and they'll be marginalised.

DPS style is apparently leather melee, because we don't have enough agi leather already and melee aren't already completely useless in a raid setting when compared to ranged....oh wait, they are with raids already taking the bare minimum of melee possible.

Pandaria itself looks pretty sharp. Blizzard keeps getting better at landscape and architectural design.

Apparently word on the story is going to involve a ramp-up in the Horde/Alliance conflict, but this time without a Big Bad to distract people. I'm rather glad for this. The Horde/Alliance war felt aggressively stupid, happening as it was with a giant black dragon flying around torching the planet. On the other hand, at this point I hold little hope for Blizzard actually deigning to give the Alliance any victories. More likely they'll end up torching their own ships to ward the Horde off and call it a win. Yes, I'm a little bitter - the story for Cataclysm has been horrible Alliance-side.

New architecture and landscape will just make the horrid grind through Outlands look even worse (odds of them updating that are less than zero). Story will be shitty for Alliance as it is now that isn't likely to change at all.

New talent system - hnngh. Here we go again. Hopefully Blizzard figures out a way to make Ret not feel like a mishmash of button-slamming.

It'll be a clusterfuck of epic proportions - Blizzards apparent design for Cata was to give us more choices (lol) and less terrible talents (lol) - both things they failed fucking horribly at, despite everyone from alpha to beta screaming at them about it.
New Talent system won't promote any kind of diversity except amongst casuals, within a week of it going live in beta each talent will be theorycrafted and we'll get the cookie cutter specs back again.

Pet battle system - apparently our non-combat pets can play pokemon now. GO FORTH AND CONQUER, ENCHANTED LANTERN!

3 raids and 9 dungeons at the start, including two revamped SM wings and a new Scholomance. Interesting, and nice to see Blizzard learning from the mistake they made with Cataclysm's anemic dungeon content.

Final thought for now: new expansion comes with a new race and new class...right after an expansion with two new races...which followed one with a new class...which followed one with two new races. Are we ever gonna get new character slots?

Pet system, I don't even have words.

Dungeons is good, but likelihood is their idea of more dungeons will only last the first patch, and by the second or third you're stuck farming them yet again for the latest points to get your gear.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The way they'll do the pandarens is that they'll all be their own faction until level 10, at which point they decide if they want to go alliance or horde. After that the choice is irreversable.

The Pokemon game sounds hilarious, and I'd ignore it except I... *cough* already have all the pets.

Also, I like that they're restricting flying to level 90. Makes people actually interact with the new content.

[Civil War Man]

I always wonder when I hear variations of that, because Horde-side, it seems like Hellscream just orders Horde forces to their mostly useless deaths (or kills them himself), followed by a 3rd party saving the day (with player help).

For the Alliance, the Night Elves manage to make some progress, but for the most part, when the Horde-Alliance conflict even shows up in Alliance questing, it tends to be either an overwhelming loss, a momentary victory that is immediately erased by a Horde counter-attack, or something that is not phased and therefore results in no lasting impact on the game world.

[Vendetta]

I always wonder when I hear variations of that, because Horde-side, it seems like Hellscream just orders Horde forces to their mostly useless deaths (or kills them himself), followed by a 3rd party saving the day (with player help).

For the Alliance, the Night Elves manage to make some progress, but for the most part, when the Horde-Alliance conflict even shows up in Alliance questing, it tends to be either an overwhelming loss, a momentary victory that is immediately erased by a Horde counter-attack, or something that is not phased and therefore results in no lasting impact on the game world.

Turns out when your creative director was imported from Games Workshop you get eternal stasis and doomed losing battles. Who knew?

[Flagg]

I always wonder when I hear variations of that, because Horde-side, it seems like Hellscream just orders Horde forces to their mostly useless deaths (or kills them himself), followed by a 3rd party saving the day (with player help).

For the Alliance, the Night Elves manage to make some progress, but for the most part, when the Horde-Alliance conflict even shows up in Alliance questing, it tends to be either an overwhelming loss, a momentary victory that is immediately erased by a Horde counter-attack, or something that is not phased and therefore results in no lasting impact on the game world.

Oh well?

[Civil War Man]

Turns out when your creative director was imported from Games Workshop you get eternal stasis and doomed losing battles. Who knew?

Along with writers who are pretty open about being more emotionally invested in the Horde's story.

Anyway, regarding the expansion, I thought the talent thing is pretty funny. The developers have basically just said "Fuck it, choose what you want to do at level 10 and we'll basically pick out the talents for you."

[Darmalus]

I kind of like the direction they are going with talents. I'd rather choose something significant and interactive every 10 or 15 levels than get to choose +2% frost (or whatever) damage ever other level.

I wonder what they are going to do with spells. The current glut only makes sense if only 1/2 or 1/3 are useful at a time (frost mages don't generally cast fire or arcane spells, etc.). I'm not sure how this would be for other classes, I don't look too hard at alternate builds on my alts.

[Skgoa]

Wasn't that the obvious end result of what they started the first time they revised the talents? "Useless" talents have been slashed away bit by bit. I was amongst those shaman who had an jack-of-all-trades build originally. That died with Burning Crusade, since they had the great idea to give us exactly one viable build for solo and 5-man content.

So yeah, can anyone tell why I quit a month after BC came out?

[Molyneux]

I'm actually fairly optimistic about this. I've been planning on giving WoW a rest, and the new expansion rollout sounds like a great excuse to do so - let my account cool off until I can roll a new panda shammy.

[Civil War Man]

Found out a little more information about the expansion from a translated interview posted on MMO Champion. The playable Pandaren, whether Alliance or Horde, are not really pillars of the Pandaren community, as they are a small group that chose to go out adventuring and traveling the world like Chen Stormstout from Warcraft 3. Most Pandaren on the continent will be either neutral or hostile towards both factions, because they are pissed that the Alliance and Horde brought their war with them when they showed up.

The developers mentioned that Mists of Panderia will be about the war, without a big bad guy hanging over everyone's head like all the other expansions, and so the pre-expansion event will involve sparking a full-blown all-out world war between the two factions, as opposed to the brush wars and skirmishes that are currently in the game.

What's going to be included in this event to cause open war? Spoiler

The Horde attack and destroy Theramore.

[OmegaChief]

... if those spoilers are accurate, I would very much like to see Ms Proudmoore's reaction to that.

[Minischoles]

Pretty typical that the new expansion starts with Spoiler

Alliance getting hit that hard by the Horde

. I am actually really hoping that this absence of a big bad means we get some pvp focus for the game, pvp balancing has been universally awful since WOTLK and the state of some classes right now is downright shameful.

[TheFeniX]

Monk class...hnngh. I really didn't think we needed yet another class. Ten classes, thirty different varieties. It's nice to get another tank/healer combo, though, but on the other hand it's going to mean even more competition for raid slots. Again, waiting to see how it's handled.

Huh. If I still played the game, my GM would owe me 5 bucks. We had a short discussion about this (he reads everything he can on WoW) and the only class I could think of that wouldn't be a total mashup of other classes would be a Monk. Although considering people still get annoyed when I can instantly Death Gate and enchant any new weapon that drops, I wondered how they would react to a class that doesn't even need weapons (if that's the route Blizz goes rather than making fist weapons actually useful and adding tons into the game).

I thought Psionics might have been something different, but I could imagine PvP getting annoying with a class designed to mind-fuck people to death. Or considering there are already gnomes (and goblins) as well as guns, why not have a gadgeteer class? Would overlap with Engineering though, so I didn't think they'd dick with it.

As for races, I always wondered why they didn't just rip off Dracons from Wizardy and/or Krynn considering the number of dragon/drakes running around Warcraft.

New talent system - hnngh. Here we go again. Hopefully Blizzard figures out a way to make Ret not feel like a mishmash of button-slamming.

Oh man, ret DPS. I always laughed when people asked why I preferred Frost DK DPS over Ret DPS. Having a bad run of procs or just getting lazy with my DK could drop my DPS maybe 10%. Although my DPS set for my pally wasn't nearly as good, I could end up pulling anywhere from 12k to 18k (over the course of 2-3 minutes) with it's RNG insanity. Maybe I just sucked at ret.

[Molyneux]

Monk class...hnngh. I really didn't think we needed yet another class. Ten classes, thirty different varieties. It's nice to get another tank/healer combo, though, but on the other hand it's going to mean even more competition for raid slots. Again, waiting to see how it's handled.

Huh. If I still played the game, my GM would owe me 5 bucks. We had a short discussion about this (he reads everything he can on WoW) and the only class I could think of that wouldn't be a total mashup of other classes would be a Monk. Although considering people still get annoyed when I can instantly Death Gate and enchant any new weapon that drops, I wondered how they would react to a class that doesn't even need weapons (if that's the route Blizz goes rather than making fist weapons actually useful and adding tons into the game).

I thought Psionics might have been something different, but I could imagine PvP getting annoying with a class designed to mind-fuck people to death. Or considering there are already gnomes (and goblins) as well as guns, why not have a gadgeteer class? Would overlap with Engineering though, so I didn't think they'd dick with it.

As for races, I always wondered why they didn't just rip off Dracons from Wizardy and/or Krynn considering the number of dragon/drakes running around Warcraft.

New talent system - hnngh. Here we go again. Hopefully Blizzard figures out a way to make Ret not feel like a mishmash of button-slamming.

Oh man, ret DPS. I always laughed when people asked why I preferred Frost DK DPS over Ret DPS. Having a bad run of procs or just getting lazy with my DK could drop my DPS maybe 10%. Although my DPS set for my pally wasn't nearly as good, I could end up pulling anywhere from 12k to 18k (over the course of 2-3 minutes) with it's RNG insanity. Maybe I just sucked at ret.

Honestly, I've been hoping for awhile that the next "Hero class" will be something along the lines of Gnomish/Goblin Mekgineer. Start the character out with a basic steam-mech, then have them power it up by integrating equipment and such into the chassis as you level - balance might be a bit difficult, but I think it could turn out great if handled well.

[Civil War Man]

Honestly, I've been hoping for awhile that the next "Hero class" will be something along the lines of Gnomish/Goblin Mekgineer. Start the character out with a basic steam-mech, then have them power it up by integrating equipment and such into the chassis as you level - balance might be a bit difficult, but I think it could turn out great if handled well.

I doubt they will do that due to engineering being a profession. In fact, I remember reading that during one of the Blizzcon Q&As, one of the devs talked about how much a pain in the ass engineering was as a profession because it was closer to being a class of its own than the other professions. Most of them give you stuff like gear or consumables, while some engineering gadgets basically give you new abilities.

[DudeGuyMan]

What's going to be included in this event to cause open war? Spoiler

The Horde attack and destroy Theramore.

Bahahaha. Half the reason I quit is because I was tired of paying $15 a month to play the bitch in Metzen's personal Mary Sue fanfic, and it's clear nobody is stopping him.

[Highlord Laan]

... if those spoilers are accurate, I would very much like to see Ms Proudmoore's reaction to that.

Whining and hand wringing, after which the Alliance will take terrible revenge on the Horde by burning down a few guard towers in the Barrens. Which will or course, be rebuilt as if nothing had ever happened.

[Darmalus]

I've never heard any Alliance talk about how awesome Theramore is, generally various complaints about how its quests suck and its in the middle of nowhere. Did Cataclysm dramatically improve it, or is this just a "It's a sucky quest hub, but it's OUR sucky quest hub!" sort of deal? I think New Kagarth fills the same role for Horde in the Eastern Kingdoms, you can burn that down if you want.

Edit: I haven't covered every low level quest hub since Cata came out, so these places could be sex-on-toast now without me knowing.

[Civil War Man]

I've always liked Theramore, mostly because of Tethyr. I view the quest to take down Tethyr, where you are running along a dock firing cannons at a giant kraken shooting jets of water at you, as a forerunner to Wrath and Cataclysm questing.

[OmegaChief]

I've never heard any Alliance talk about how awesome Theramore is, generally various complaints about how its quests suck and its in the middle of nowhere. Did Cataclysm dramatically improve it, or is this just a "It's a sucky quest hub, but it's OUR sucky quest hub!" sort of deal? I think New Kagarth fills the same role for Horde in the Eastern Kingdoms, you can burn that down if you want.

Edit: I haven't covered every low level quest hub since Cata came out, so these places could be sex-on-toast now without me knowing.

Well along with a couple of neat quests there (Like the gaint sea monster fight CWM pointed out) there's also the fact that the Alliance is going to loose one of it's major settlments while the Horde is going to... uh... um...

... well somthing bad has to happen to the Horde right? I mean it's not like Green Jesus Thrall is going to save the world while the Alliance jsut stands there and goes "yay".

[Darmalus]

I don't think we even HAD anything to lose prior to Cataclysm. Outside the faction cities (Org, TB, UC) we were in ramshackle little outposts made of wood and leather, or camped out in caves and ruins and stuff. Unless some NPC you like dies, no one cares if you burn down a tent. It's only in the last expansion that we started having actual stone structures and things for the Orcs and Forsaken (Tauren and Trolls still don't have buildings worth caring about).

You guys had places like Theramore and Menethil, places that looked like actual towns or mini-cities, important places, places to care about. Splintertree looks like a temporary work camp, its hard to care about a temporary military/industrial structure.