Mists of Pandaria Beta Access

Today I gained access to the World of Warcraft - Mists of Pandaria beta. (I wasn't a sucker enough to buy a year of WoW - but luckily I have a friend who was). After the 20 GB download, I will be sharing my thoughts on it as I go through.

A little background on me - I have been playing WoW since November of 2004.  I quit during patch 4.1 after doing all of the current content, came back in 4.3 with Scroll of Resurrection, got completely geared in 3 days, killed Deathwing, and haven't gone back.

My initial thoughts on it (after watching videos of the new instances etc):


1. Rehashing Old Content

• Scholomance is being completely redone in a more streamlined manner, with some new bosses and some old ones. 
• Scarlet Monastery is being completely redone, turning the initial four into two (Graveyard and Cathedral have been combined, as well as Armory and Library)
• Ragefire Chasm is being completely redone, with a little more depth and story to it, as well as new models such as the fire hounds used in the Firelands

To me this is a good and a bad thing, but mostly bad. 
Scarlet Monasterys two lesser wings were quit lackluster, and needed to be redone or integrated.
Scholo was (and this may be nostalgia) pretty great on its own.
Ragefire Chasm was empty and boring, and I'm glad they're doing something to it as well.

HOWEVER - The fact they completely removed (I think) 10 bosses from Scholo is ridiculous.  Granted, most of them were the minor ones before the final boss, but it was still a different style from the "Five major boss" style that almost every dungeon uses today.
I also don't like the fact it is completely linear now.  A lot of the fun in it was being able to skip things you didn't want to do, and missing things if you went through it too quickly.  I also don't like the fact that they introduced new bosses with similar names in the same locations.

This was done a lot in SM too.  Mograine, Herod and Doan no longer exist, but they have same model counterparts with different names.  To confuse you even more, Whitemane still has the same name.

Players are also unable to run the old dungeons ever again, which, in my opinion, is stupid.  Developers should never release a dungeon, make it an integrated part of the game and story, and then trash it because it's old.

And, finally, it's fun to see old content again, but for christs sake Blizzard has done WAY to much of it recently - ZA, ZG, Deadmines, Ragnaros, SM, Scholo, RFC, Onyxia (twice), Nefarian...  We get it Blizzard, you did something right at one point in time.  It would be nice to see some new bosses from new content, like the Emerald Dream.  Now stop glorifying it and do something else right!

2. Pandas
Where to start.  Possibly at the fact that Pandas started pretty much as an April Fools joke by Blizzard, and were slowly bastardized into WoW game play.  I'm not going to delve too much into that though.
Their racials (better rested experience, better well feed, +15 to cooking, reduction of fall damage) are all just terrible.  Every other race has something that makes slightly different at end game - pandas just get a stat buff from the extra food.  The fall damage will be unnoticeable and the bonus XP will be non existent.  Overall, Blizzard just ended up Panda-ring.

3. Pet Battle System
I haven't seen much about the pet battling system, but I do know you can basically pokemon battle your minipets and are able to capture more by fighting them in the wild. 
I really don't think I need to say more, though it may turn out better than expected.  Is this still WoW I'm playing? 

4. New Talent 'Trees'
Now, I know Blizzard has had a lot of issues with talent trees and the past, and this is understandable.  Keeping everything balanced for a total of thirty specs seems like a near impossible task.  But in my opinion, Blizzard dumbed it down a little too much.  Instead of getting a talent every level past ten and being able to stick it where you want, you now get a (that's right, one) talent point every fifteen levels.  You must spend it in one of three talents in that tree.  You may not double up points in any tier of the six tiers of talents.  This means at level ninety you have a total of six points, one per tier of the tree.
Some of them are a bit ridiculous, some are practically mandatory, especially for the spec you are going.  The biggest thing, though, is that not many new things are being added.  Almost all of the abilities were already in talent trees during Cataclysm. 


That's all for now.  Probably a tl;dr for a lot of you, but for those it wasn't, I would like to hear your thoughts as well!