WoW: Pandaria

A few days late, but for people who asked about farming / tilling:

My main is now exalted with the Tillers, and as a result I now have a 16-slot plot of land where I can plant vegetables or, as I've been doing, growing random herbs and ore daily. Once you get your rep up, there are special seeds that let you "grow" random herbs, ore, enchanting mats, cloth and motes of harmony, so for 10 minutes a day, I get 3-6 Golden Lotus (worth about 200g each on the AH) and other herbs, or 3-4 stacks of ore that I can use for prospecting gems or whatnot. It's totally optional, and I think it's been of a nifty addition.

...and you can get a cat and a dog and piggies!

MoP is on sale for $20 ending on the 29th of Novembeard.

This is also the 5.1 patch release day, for those still playing.

By coincidence on the same day that NCsoft nuked the City of Heroes servers I got an email from Blizzard giving me some free time on my lapsed WoW account. What makes this a bit different than the last time (just prior to MoP's release)?

It's for 10 days instead of 7.
It doesn't expire until January 6, 2013. The last offer had to be used within a few weeks.
It offers full access to MoP during the 10 day period.

On the one hand it's a pretty generous look at the expansion (a dedicated player could do a lot in 10 days) but on the other I still can't shake the feeling that I am just done with WoW. The pull to go back is really weak. It's not even Blizzard's fault, really, I'm feeling the same way about a number of older MMOs I've played.

Still tempted, though.

Yeah, I'm a smidge tempted, but then I remember that I lost my Wow install (with UI settings) in a HD crash, and the idea of restoring that all doesn't hold a lot of thrill.

Depending on how long ago you lost the settings, Blizzard saved them. Addons are pretty consolidated at this point, only thing I think is remotely needed is a barchanger (so you can move things around) and deadly boss mods to remind you when not to stand in the new colored flames.

I am still playing, panda land is very pretty. They just made old raids mostly soloable for most people Still some hairy points don't expect a walkthrough but most of it is doable with tiny to solo groups.
And since you don't have to be in a raid anymore..
This week is the new 90 Darkmoon, go ride the merry go round get a level buff , queue.
There are bad things, seems that they are dinkering around with transmog and made more main hands/one handed thus the crying over that is loud.

I would say if you found wow comfortable , it still can be. If you are bored of it nothing has changed enough to bring you back.

Half my art team resubscribed this week just after seeing some of the Pandaria mounts.

I had a moment of weakness and picked up Pandaria a couple of weeks ago, but I've been finding it hard to get motivated to actually get into it. I'm kind of tired of my old high-level characters, and thought starting a new panda instead would be nice but friends have been non-committal on whether they'd like to join me, so I've held off on that, and then I start thinking about other games that I really ought to be playing instead... It's not really Pandaria's fault, as I haven't even seen any of it yet, but I guess it just isn't the right time for it.

I don't know, I really like MoP thus far, and I wasn't half this excited for either the Wrath or Cata early stages. During both of those previous expacs, I found my interest waning way before the first content patch, but with Pandaria, I feel like everything is better timed? Just as my friends got to exalted with the opening factions, they released 5.1 and now there's new plot, a little bit of tide-you-over content, and a new faction to grind.

I'll admit, a lot of it has to do with the minigames; whenever I get burnt out grinding Klaxxi or August Celestials, I get my inner child on and pet battle. Once that's done, I can check my farm, or visit the Lorewalkers for a brief storytime, or hell, go do old content to farm up old gear to make my transmog prettier. Don't get me wrong; I love the classic elements too. I'm the main healer for my raid group, and going up against the Empress and the various Shas is loads of fun. But I love having the option to take a break from the typical wow mechanics of farm/grind/spend/repeat with diverting time wasters.

I resisted pet battling for a really long time until the other night, and I just got into it. It's amazing, especially if you're an achieve-whore. I'll always inevitably compare it to Pokemon (I'm sorry) but it actually holds up pretty well, mechanics wise. I like that the capture system is a lot more merciful than Pokemon's. My only complaint is that most type match-ups in Pokemon make a degree of sense, the type match-ups in pet battles are completely bananas.

I've gotten pretty far into the Dominance Offensive storyline and I think I'm pretty sure it's just going to be Tides of War, so if you read/heard anything about it then you already know what's going to happen, but it still pisses me off. They spent ALL THIS TIME trying to expand Garrosh's character and give him a little growth in Cata only to THROW IT ALL OUT THE WINDOW.

Lor'themar is actually doing stuff, though. And they finally gave him an eyepatch. And a new voice actor that can pronounce his homeland correctly. Woohoo.

Most the throwing of Garrosh out the window I think is a direct response to the players loathing him. They just didn't pick the outcome that may have worked better. This is not unlike killing Arthas, who they said repeatedly they would have brought back but the players weren't having it.

Disclaimer: I don't really care about lore in WoW, and find all of it way too silly and overdone to have any resonance whatsoever. It's a badly written soap opera, where lots of the the characters are furry or have green skin.

Anyways, having said that, why would Blizzard consider bringing Arthas back? They told his story, it had a nice arc, it's done. Create new characters, for God's sake. I'm glad in this one instance that the player base "aren't having it", but I hope their not having it has nothing to do with how much they like the character. Honestly, whether you liked or disliked Arthas, his story is told.

The desire to see "your favorite characters" over & over & over is fucking retarded. What makes characters interesting is their growth and, often how they end. Take away the end, and you lose a lot of resonance. And if you postpone the end indefinitely, you don't really have growth, either. You have a character whose "growth" is just an endless meandering set of personality changes that must get progressively ridiculous in order to keep the interest of the fan base. See also: soap operas.

See also also: Boba Fett. Cool character at first. General embarrassment by the end of the prequel trilogy.

Edit - Fixed typos. Wow... the first draft of this post came off like an illiterate 15 year old. How appropriate.

They could do more with the Scourge though, since there's still a Lich King. Fordragon could be corrupted by the Burning Legion, or whatever. Maybe they left that loophole in case they run out of ideas for future expansions, heh.

My biggest problem with WoW's lore is anything involving Chris Metzen's voice.

I loathed him too until I played through Stonetalon Mountains. I like Garrosh cause he's at least a 2 dimensional character, as opposed to one dimensional characters like Thrall. Blizzard absolutely sucks at writing, but I gave them credit because Garrosh had levels, up until MoP where they turned him into a moustache-twirling villain.

And yeah, as much as I like Arthas, he needs to stay dead. They already established in Icecrown that he's past the point of no return, so there's no chance of him turning good again, and now that he doesn't have the helmet or Frostmourne he has no power. Also for the record, I really love Kael'thas, but no more setbacks please. There's still plenty of ground to cover before we start recycling villains again.

Part of the problem, I think, is that if/when they add new characters, they are written terribly (because of course they are) and do not get the same benefit of nostalgia like the characters from the RTS games do.

Does anyone feel like everything this expansion is like "it's your turn to be the bad guy now?" I mean, in Wrath, Varian was the "the Horde did something! That's an EXCUSE FOR REVENGE, MOTHERFUCKERS" guy and Jaina was the voice of reason, then now they pulled this stupid-ass WMD shit so they can trade places. And in Burning Crusade, the blood elves were essentially bad guys in an alliance of convenience, with (most of) the rest of the Horde to be the moderating influence, and now it's the orcs under Garrosh who are the problem, with the elves playing loyal but troubled subordinates?

The blood elves got an actually decent storyline progressing their story from the RTS. The orc bullshit with Garrosh is far, far worse.

I agree, and this semi-arbitrary role reversal I perceive to be a big part of it. Garrosh himself went from emo kid to hothead to total dick over the course of the game, which is somewhat odd considering that Thrall was supposed to be the guy to provide him with a new role model.

Now that you mention it, I did kinda like the blood elves' storyline up through Wrath. (I completely lost their thread after that.)

The orcs, as well as most other races, just seem... lame.

Exception: I really liked the undead storyline in Cataclysm. It felt appropriately tragic, and yet... realistic. Or at least as realistic as a storyline involving thinking undead can be.

It's all just ~Metzen~. Perhaps if they'd actually done more than 10% of their story progression in game instead of in shitty Knaak novels it would go over better.

Yeah, that's the thing that bugs me the most. There was almost zero context in game for the Theramore scenario. It was just

• Goblins bomb the city
• Jaina gets angry at orcs

I've only done the horde-side of that scenario, but at the end you free a blood elf who sets off the bomb, I thought.

I've only done it as Alliance. It starts off with a shot of some Goblins on a zeppelin who literally say nothing but something along the lines of "Heh, this bomb is going to blow up", then they drop it and the gameplay starts with you killing orcs.

That's ... wow. That's super lame.

He doesn't set off the bomb, he just gets you out of the city before the zeppelin arrives. The whole contrived scenario is that you're supposed to rescue your spy in the city (this elf). It's really just an excuse to get you to Theramore, since Theramore clearly doesn't have much in the way of air defenses, and if you're just planning to nuke the place why bother putting a spy there?

Yeah, and it's pretty weird that on a planet full of extremely powerful beings, nobody could prevent someone from merrily flying a slow-moving blimp above a city and dropping a bomb on it. It's amazing this doesn't happen all the time. The even sillier part is that the destruction of Theramore was written to be the focal point of "See, the Alliance and the Horde hate each other SO MUCH" by evoking some sense of outrage between factions. It's yet another clumsy attempt to try to hide the fact that having two factions in the game makes almost no sense at all. Really, there's just no good reason for it other than to simplify the PvP-related things and even then it's hard to completely justify. Continuing to restrict communication between Alliance and Horde players after all these years is even more ridiculous.

They couldn't stop the blimp because they'd already shipped all their auto-dismounting anti-air hammers to Krasarang.

5.2 is on the ptr, already. New raid tier, upgrades to sunsong ranch (including the ability to turn it into an inn. Hooray for player housing!), New world bosses, four more scenarios, A new daily quest hub, rogues get some much-needed love, and warlocks get green fire.

As someone who plays on a PvE server and who is utterly uninterested in open-world PvP, I'm OK with this. I don't want some would-be griefer texting me insults or taunts just because I don't flag myself for his enjoyment.

They don't have to let them send you private messages and they could still split the global chat between both factions. It's just silly that they can't talk at all.

Patch notes!

Some interesting tidbits:

Plus a bunch of class changes, including a bunch of new rogue talents. Rogues are currently the least played class in the game, at something like 1% of the population. Die-hard, longtime rogue players have been complaining since 5.0 that rogues simply aren't fun to play, anymore (they aren't), and hopefully this patch will address that. The new world boss mechanic will be interesting. I feel it'll basically turn Galleon (who's respawn time will be upped with 5.2), the Sha of Anger, and the two new world bosses to be huge zerg matches between alliance and horde. Although, I suppose it'll be nice to be able to go in with a small group against one of the bosses and get a chance at loot (two if you use a bonus roll). Sunsong ranch is pretty much player housing with this patch as well. My farm is almost fully upgraded, and being able to use it as a log-out point will be sweet.

MMO-Champion has also datamined a bunch of new npc models, mounts, and new pvp and t15 gear.

Here's what they've got for T15, so far:


That druid gear...

Druid and warlock look backwards!

That mage and druid set looks really cool. I'm very "meh" about the hunter tier. Looks like it's gonna be Saurokstalker? But yay, more eyeballs I guess.

Also Re: Bombing of Theramore: It's really just an excuse to fill Jaina with the RAGE, because we really didn't have enough of that on the Alliance side. (Cough-Varian-cough) The whole thing seems kind of pointless, because the big change (the Horde getting kicked out of Dalaran) can't be implemented in-game without invalidating an entire expansion pack, and 90% of the playerbase is not going to notice and/or care that Rhonin is gone.

It's probably a response to accusations of Horde favoritism, I think. So they toned down Varian's RAGE and made him more "concerned father", and they took Garrosh's hot-headedness up to 11. The Horde are the bad guys of the expansion, Lor'themar wants to jump ship, etc etc.

I had no idea so many major lore characters were killed in the bombing of Theramore. Marcus Jonathan, Rhonin, and a few others all died. NONE of which was mentioned in the scenario. None of which is even noted in game, aside from Jonathan, who's NPC model was renamed to General Hammond Clay.

Theramore is just a huge blunder all-round.

Yeah that really bugs me. Without reading the tie-in novels, the explanation of certain events in-game is really insufficient. It should be game first, novels second.

The Well of Eternity instance explains very little about it in comparison to the books. I can't tell you how many times someone asked "Wait...isn't Illidan a bad guy?". They really dropped the ball on the Theramore bombing too.

By the way, unless you're absolutely dying to know what really happened to Theramore, spare yourself the pain and don't read Tides of War, or anything written by Knaak for that matter.

After doing weeks and weeks of rep grind dailies I've bought enough valor gear to do LFR. I got into a pug Mogo'shan Vaults and the raid disbanded at Gara'jal the Spiritbinder even though there was still three more bosses. Is Mogo'shan Vaults in two parts like the Deathwing raids?

Yes. All the current raids are in two parts except for Terrace.

Why the fuck were Marcus Jonathan and Rhonin even in Theramore?