Retrospective - World of Warcraft: Mist of Pandaria Part 1

My Warlords of Draenor review was very popular, so I figured it would only be fair to show you a final review, once all the raid tiers have been finished, and talk about how the last expansion played out. What is my view on the Mists of Pandaria as a whole? Well, in order to fully explore everything about the Mists of Pandaria, I'm going to need two (maybe three) whole blog posts to talk about it. Trust me, I'm gonna cover pretty much everything. So buckle down and join me in the doozy of a post as I talk about the Mists of Pandaria.

So, I'm going to delve into a lot of the expansion on the whole, so if you want the TL;DR up front: Pandaria was a building block for Blizzard to experiment with new things, see what players liked, and use that to build the success that is Warlords. It started out messy, but cleaned itself up, and ended up being a decent expansion.

Note: The main points will be styled like this, if you want to skip around my rambling. 

Pandaria was a polarizing expansion from the get-go, and I feel like a lot of people dismissed the entire expansion because 'pandas don't make sense, this is silly'. I feel like that whole line of thinking was prevalent throughout the entire expansion, and people refused to experience it because of that. I, for one, enjoyed the colorful expansions, and all of the lore that could explored. It was a great time for Blizzard to explore new methods of storytelling. Blizzard created several main figureheads, unlike expansions past, so that players could find a character they could relate to. This was big, as usually the expansions had gone in a way where there was a big bad guy, and you had to stop him. There were several characters, but you really didn't care about them because they only showed up in a few quests and at the end of a raid after you did all the work (Janna, Thrall, anyone in BC). Pandaria had several main characters. Lorewalker Cho was always around telling you the newest threat, Chen Stormstout was always questing with you, and Wrathion was very involved with you in the Legendary process. But the problem wasn't that they were there, it's that they weren't memorable characters. I think it speaks volumes that I can't remember who accompanies us in the Siege of Orgrimmar, Cho or Chen. The characters in Pandaria, although deep and lore-heavy, just didn't resonate with me. This may be more a personal thing, but I think it stems from a lack of a big bad guy. While it was nice to have a break from that, and just resolve Horde-Alliance conflicts (the focus of Patch 5.1), it was a tad frustrating to not really feel like we were gearing up to beat the final bad guy, just a new threat. AT first it's, "Oh, we gotta clear the Sha out.", then "Oh, we gotta resolve Horde-Alliance conflict", then "Oh, we gotta stop the Thunder King, he's a bad guy who's gonna do things.", and then"Oh hey Garrosh is being a silly head, we gotta stop him." There was always a new threat, but no goal that really kept you motivated to be the best. In Wrath of the Lich King, or even Cataclysm, you were constantly reminded during questing of the big bad guy who was wrecking havoc on your fun, and you strived to beat him. I think in a game like this it's important to have a reason to keep getting stronger, and Pandaria just didnt have that end goal for the end of the expansion, just new threats to counter.

That being said, the questing was really great. Pandaria has some of the best storytelling in their leveling process. Up until this point, a lot of questing had been either: walk here and talk to this guy, or kill these guys. There wasn't a lot of diversity. Pandaria switched questing up by having all sorts of new cool quests, like riding yaks to be washed, hiking up mountains, and throwing explosive fish. Not only that, but the questing integrated with the story so much better. The Jade Forest was easily one of my favorite places to level, and all of my alts I would play it out. The hunters you run into are humorous and a heart-warming tale, you genuinely feel bad when the Jade Serpent Tower falls, and it's a beautiful zone to run around in.

Often a way to judge to how the beginning of the expansion will go is by the pre-expansion patch (I talk about it slightly here). The pre-expansion patch, often puts a lot of the gameplay changes in so that p[layers can become accustomed to the changes. There were great changes, such as AoE looting, so players no longer had to click on hundreds of stacked mobs, but just one mob. Another change was the inclusion of achievement wide mounts, so any character could use the mounts one character had struggled to obtain. However, there was one polarizing feature, that many people took offense to. The change to the talent system. Once an over-complicated procedure, it had been simplified to six simple decisions.

(old talent tree)

(new talent tree)

Note all of the choices in the old one. It's complicated and seems to offer a lot of choices, but many of these choices were niche choices, only leaving one or two possible scenarios, or else you got left in the dust. Also talents were something you would set and forget. There was no need to change the talents for fights or anything because they were primary stat boosters necessary to compete. If you didn't roll those exact talents then you were already behind everyone else. The new system was a breath of fresh air, as it narrowed down the choices, and made every choice feel nice, and it relied more on playstyle than necessity. Many people dismissed it as 'dumbing down WoW', but in retrospect, it was a great decision as it allowed for people to add abilities based how they wanted to play. Each tier generally held a common theme, and 3 choices. For example, the paladin level 15 talents (pictured above) feature 3 different ways of increasing movement speed: 

• Speed of Light is a 70% boost over 8 seconds, but with a 45 second cooldown. This great for people who need a small burst of speed, but not over a period of time.
• Long Arm of the Law increase your movement speed 45% for 3 secs when you use your primary spell, so a great combat spell. This primary spell is a ranged spell, so Long Arm of the Law is great if you need to move in between targets quickly by using the primary spell on your other target, who's far away.
• Pursuit of Justice increases your movement speed by 15%, plus another 5% for each Holy Power up to 3. Holy Power is the Paladin resource to manage how we cast our spell, similar to Mana, but easier to get. Pursuit of Justice is an all-around great spell movement speed, but like Long Arm of the Law, the extra speed is reliant on being in combat, but that base 15% is always present, so it make a nice set and forget passive talent.

Now some people love Pursuit of Justice, and some people love Speed of Light (no one really loves Long Arm of the Law). But it goes to show how well done the talent system was at really customizing the class you wanted to play. Now sure, there are some tiers where the choice is pretty obvious, but it's nice to see easily which choice to take instead of blindly guessing with a 64 point system.

Also new to Pandaria was the introduction of battle pets. I plan on doing a full post on this in the future, but basically WoW added a simplistic version of Pokemon into the game. Pet collecting had been going on since Burning Crusade, and now people had ways to build them up and fight them against other people. To make a future post short, battle pets are awesome, and helped us do something with all the pets we had collected over the years. I'll save the details for the other post, but it was something fun and new to do in the game, and lots of people I know love it (although the difficulty on the new content leaves something to be desired)

Now, once the player hit 90, the max level, it is often said that the true game really starts for World of Warcraft. And they had several options of things to so. And usually the first thing people would do is start the train of dailies. Blizzard had multiple factions added for Mists of Pandaria, and each faction would have a slew of daily quests to do to earn their respect, but also to earn currency to get raid quality gear. Getting raid quality gear helped you get into raids, etc. You begin the 'loot treadmill', as they say. It often goes like this:

(by the way, for the uninitiated, the loot quality goes Gray<White<Green<Blue<Purple< Orange)

1. Hit max Level (In Mists, this was 90. In Warlords, it's 100.)
2. Get Normal Dungeon blue-quality gear.
3. Once you get enough Normal Dungeon blues, you can enter Heroic dungeons and get better blue quality gear.
4. Once you get enough Heroic blue quality gear, you're ready to go into Raid A and get Purple A quality gear. Purple A quality gear is much better than Heroic blue quality gear.
5. Once you get enough Purple A gear and you clear all of the bosses you can go back and do Raid A on a higher difficulty and get better Purple A gear.
6. Repeat Raid A at Step 5 or step 6 until Raid B is released. Then you can do Raid B if you have enough Purple A gear. You will get Purple B gear. Purple B gear is better than Purple A for the most part.
7. This repeats until a new expansion is released, and you start over at Step 1.

I swear this is a lot more fun than it sounds. It's all because of the people you get to play with, and I grossly oversimplified it to make a point about the train of daily quests. Doing these trains of quests day after day got you rewards, and good ones at that. These quests would eventually reward you gear at step 3 and 4 of the treadmill, while you're only able to get to step 2. Those helped boosted the gear level of a lot of people in the game so that they could get into raids quicker. However, there was a downside: these quests took a  while to do. Doing all of the dailies every day took upwards of 3 hours, and since dailies reset every day, you'd need to do this every day until you become exalted with the faction, or as many players did, just quit. The plethora of quests needed to do to stay competitive and ready to raid burned out a lot of people quickly, and they left frustrated. Unfortunately, Warlords went too far in the opposite direction, with zero daily quests to advance the reps and relying on killing massive amounts of monsters to get the same quality gear. But that's another post.

There was also the farm. Since this expansion's motif was all about peace and tranquility, a farm was a nice addition to show how hard work can yield results. This farm would let you plant seeds, and then the next day the seeds would grow into resources that the player could use to make gear, make food, or make potions to boost combat stats. Farms were a great idea, and lead to the garrison in Warlords, which many people see as the best feature of the expansion. The success of the farm, and the want for more lead to a more expansive feature. The best part is that farms were just a simple add-on. It wasn't advertised as a feature, but players found it, and took off with it, and it helped change the whole WoW economy.

A quick note on the cooking. Cooking allowed for people to make food to make them stronger. However, Mists made cooking very complicated. There were six paths one could take, and each made three recipes: one with cheap mats, one with mid range mats, and then a feast that you could feed your friends that cost many mats. Seeing Draenor's Cooking progression (much more simplistic) makes me think that this whole process was overly complicated. Having the learn 6 different cooking paths was just overkill, and while it was necessary to be able to raid effectively, I think Draenor did it right at setting the barrier at getting mats instead of waiting for daily cooldowns.

There's so much more to cover, but I'm gonna save it for next time. Next post I talk about the raiding tier and the patches and the PvP.

Have a great Tuesday!
-David