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Thursday, April 5, 2012

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!

19 comments:

  1. I dont really know much about WoW but i used to play alot of Warcraft 3, now that game is sick

    http://tryingsomethingnu.blogspot.com/

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  2. well i have to say that i havent played since cata came. for me wow died after burning crusade and that was the last time i actually enjoyed it a lot. skill dissappeared and was replaced by desperate new features to attract more people.

    pandas are just simply silly

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  3. I stopped playing WoW at the beginning of 2008 after they took away the ability to successfully use twink characters. After my 39 warlock, and other twinks were useless i quit. They have made so many changes to the game i don't think i can ever come back to play again.

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  4. This sounds good. Maybe I'll give it a try ;)

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  5. lol wow has gone downhill i played it for about 6months and was bored everyday of that time...............
    I dont know how people continue to play it doing the same lame dailys and raids over and over, yea sure can be a challenge but wows full of dumb people

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  6. A 20 gig download? That would take days for me to download, they didn't compress the file? I think this beta would bring back some players.

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    1. YIKES! That is a large download!

      http://memedoctor.blogspot.com/
      https://twitter.com/#!/MemeDoctor

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    2. You have to download the entire game again basically - even if you have the game installed, which is really stupid. Luckily, you can download while you play, so once you have a few gigs downloaded you can play while it does the rest.

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  7. i'd heard of the pet battle thing. seems like it'd be kinds like a pokemon mmo, which has always seemed like a no-brainer idea to make happen

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  8. thanks for that, was considering resubbing, but not anymore!

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  9. some of the concepts im seeing in the new WoW are interesting, however.. i quit playing after Cataclysm, so i dont know if i will ever return. in fact, im 99.99% sure i will never even get as far as thinking about resubbing!
    good reads.

    happy blogging!

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  10. My friend is all over this shit
    referring your blog at this very moment

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  11. I quit a while ago, probably gonna start soon. Missed the raids

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  12. ARG! Don't remind me of WoW! It took me five years to quit!! NO!

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  13. Although I never played much of wow, the whole pet fighting thing does seem silly.

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