10-24-2011, 03:50 PM
Here's my initial thoughts on what I've heard about Mists of Pandaria recently:
New Race: Pandarens
I have been expecting this would happen in the next expansion for a long time so I've had a while to get used to the idea. I think the models look pretty good, though it would be weird to see a bunch of pandas running around. I like that one of their racials helps them level up faster (more rested XP) and it's interesting to see the food/cooking buffs since those will certainly help out all classes. Overall, I was expecting this to happen so I'm relatively neutral to this addition; I don't see this as a particularly great or bad thing.
New Class: Monk
This sounds like a potentially interesting class. It's wise of Blizzard to make them be able to fill any role (tank/heal/dps) since, during the leveling experience, the random dungeons will be 5 monks, more often than not.
The healing role for the monk intrigues me. I'm interested to see how this will be implemented to give the monks a good reason to be hanging out at melee range while still being able to heal people at a range. I think this will be particularly interesting if Blizzard does allow the monks to do some melee attacking in addition to healing. That type of hybrid approach has been completely abandoned in WoW for years, so it would be interesting to see it added back in.
I haven't seen a lot of info on how the tanking or dps works. No auto-attack is interesting though I'm not sure it will really make that big of a difference. I guess the biggest difference is that it will be harder to multi-task while playing a monk since every time you don't hit a button you're losing out on all of your attacks rather than just most of them.
Overall, this new class isn't a major draw to me, though I think it could be interesting to see how it turns out.
New Zones
I think the new zones look interesting. I don't think that they look too horribly different than a lot of the areas that are already in the game. The architecture reminds me a lot of the Night Elf architecture, so even that doesn't seem particularly ground-breaking. Insects as bad guys have already been done (hi Silithid!) though we'll see how some of the other villain races turn out. Either way, this seems like a nice extention of the existing game but it is nothing that is going to completely reinvent the game.
Talents Changes
I agree with Quark that I feel like they've got a decent talent system in place for Cataclysm. I think that a slight overhaul of the existing system would make more sense than completely scrapping it and starting over. In particular, I think that this change is going to make the leveling process a whole lot more boring. Now instead of having something new basically every level, there are going to be more boring level-ups where you don't get any new spells, you don't get any new glyph slots and you don't get any new talent points. Considering how many levels you now have to go through to level up (90!), adding more boring level-ups seems like it will detract from the game rather than add to it.
Pet System (i.e. WoW meets Pokemon)
I think this seems kind of gimmicky. I have actually enjoyed the base Pokemon games because they are nice portable games that I can take with me on planes or other trips. Adding this into WoW means you lose that convenience aspect but I imagine some people will enjoy it. I wonder how this will be integrated into the overall game. Do you have to flip a switch to enable those random battles? Will it be like Final Fantasy or Pokemon where you're running through the world, suddenly your screen flashes and you get teleported into a random pet battle? This just doesn’t really seem like it is going to integrate with the rest of the game particularly well but I guess we'll see. I think the one good thing about this is that if the game actually gives some hints about where to go to find the pets you're missing, that could be handy. It would be nice to have that integrated into the game rather than forcing me to go to Wowhead or some other website to figure out where to go to find new pets.
Challenge Dungeons
I think this is potentially the best thing that this expansion is adding! These will allow dungeons to stay challenging and interesting over time. If this can recapture some of the fun I had running heroics early on in TBC (remember running Shadow Labyrinth and having to actually pull and CC things carefully or you'd get destroyed?!) this could be awesome!
PvE Scenarios
These sound kind of fun, particularly for DPS classes that have such horrible queues for random heroics. Hopefully there's a bunch of them available so they don't get stale/boring too quickly.
Valor Points for pretty much anything
I think this is probably a good thing. It is nice to have a reason to do some things such as daily quests beyond just reputation gains. I wonder big of a difference in points gain there will be between raids, ranodm heroics, daily quests, PvE scenarios, Challenge Dungeons, etc. The actual details of this will determine whether this is a big deal or not.
The Diablo III promotion
At first, I was very tempted to sign up for the year of WoW to get Diablo III for free. I definitely plan on playing Diablo III, so getting that tossed in sounded good. Also, while I don't really think that it is worth paying $12-15 to play WoW, at this point (given my lack of time and burn-out level) the effectively lower amount (due to getting Diablo III for free) per month for the year was tempting. As an added bonus, I thought the Tyrael-like mount looked pretty cool, so the completionist/cool-things-seeker in me was tempted.
However, after I've thought about it a bit more, I continue to have a lack of time to play and I'm not sure I'd be interested in getting into raiding again (unless it were at the very end of the expansion when I could reasonably expect to get to see the content quickly and less painfully than it would be to learn it when it's cutting-edge), so the main two issues that caused me to stop playing are still in effect. If I were to come back, I think the main things I would be interested in doing are:
- Level up my alts
- Go back and do the quests in all of the newly re-made zones that I haven't done, yet
- Do daily quests to get the fire hippogriff (which I think looks cool)
- Do random dungeons with people I know when I occasionally feel like it
All of those could be potentially fun to do occasionally (particularly on weekend mornings when there isn't much else to do) but it's tough to justify signing up for a year if those are the main things I'd be doing.
Conclusion
From the initial information out there, this expansion seems like kind of a mixed bag. There's some stuff that is getting changed that I think works well as it is, right now, and there's some new stuff getting added that I probably don't care about.
New Race: Pandarens
I have been expecting this would happen in the next expansion for a long time so I've had a while to get used to the idea. I think the models look pretty good, though it would be weird to see a bunch of pandas running around. I like that one of their racials helps them level up faster (more rested XP) and it's interesting to see the food/cooking buffs since those will certainly help out all classes. Overall, I was expecting this to happen so I'm relatively neutral to this addition; I don't see this as a particularly great or bad thing.
New Class: Monk
This sounds like a potentially interesting class. It's wise of Blizzard to make them be able to fill any role (tank/heal/dps) since, during the leveling experience, the random dungeons will be 5 monks, more often than not.
The healing role for the monk intrigues me. I'm interested to see how this will be implemented to give the monks a good reason to be hanging out at melee range while still being able to heal people at a range. I think this will be particularly interesting if Blizzard does allow the monks to do some melee attacking in addition to healing. That type of hybrid approach has been completely abandoned in WoW for years, so it would be interesting to see it added back in.
I haven't seen a lot of info on how the tanking or dps works. No auto-attack is interesting though I'm not sure it will really make that big of a difference. I guess the biggest difference is that it will be harder to multi-task while playing a monk since every time you don't hit a button you're losing out on all of your attacks rather than just most of them.
Overall, this new class isn't a major draw to me, though I think it could be interesting to see how it turns out.
New Zones
I think the new zones look interesting. I don't think that they look too horribly different than a lot of the areas that are already in the game. The architecture reminds me a lot of the Night Elf architecture, so even that doesn't seem particularly ground-breaking. Insects as bad guys have already been done (hi Silithid!) though we'll see how some of the other villain races turn out. Either way, this seems like a nice extention of the existing game but it is nothing that is going to completely reinvent the game.
Talents Changes
I agree with Quark that I feel like they've got a decent talent system in place for Cataclysm. I think that a slight overhaul of the existing system would make more sense than completely scrapping it and starting over. In particular, I think that this change is going to make the leveling process a whole lot more boring. Now instead of having something new basically every level, there are going to be more boring level-ups where you don't get any new spells, you don't get any new glyph slots and you don't get any new talent points. Considering how many levels you now have to go through to level up (90!), adding more boring level-ups seems like it will detract from the game rather than add to it.
Pet System (i.e. WoW meets Pokemon)
I think this seems kind of gimmicky. I have actually enjoyed the base Pokemon games because they are nice portable games that I can take with me on planes or other trips. Adding this into WoW means you lose that convenience aspect but I imagine some people will enjoy it. I wonder how this will be integrated into the overall game. Do you have to flip a switch to enable those random battles? Will it be like Final Fantasy or Pokemon where you're running through the world, suddenly your screen flashes and you get teleported into a random pet battle? This just doesn’t really seem like it is going to integrate with the rest of the game particularly well but I guess we'll see. I think the one good thing about this is that if the game actually gives some hints about where to go to find the pets you're missing, that could be handy. It would be nice to have that integrated into the game rather than forcing me to go to Wowhead or some other website to figure out where to go to find new pets.
Challenge Dungeons
I think this is potentially the best thing that this expansion is adding! These will allow dungeons to stay challenging and interesting over time. If this can recapture some of the fun I had running heroics early on in TBC (remember running Shadow Labyrinth and having to actually pull and CC things carefully or you'd get destroyed?!) this could be awesome!
PvE Scenarios
These sound kind of fun, particularly for DPS classes that have such horrible queues for random heroics. Hopefully there's a bunch of them available so they don't get stale/boring too quickly.
Valor Points for pretty much anything
I think this is probably a good thing. It is nice to have a reason to do some things such as daily quests beyond just reputation gains. I wonder big of a difference in points gain there will be between raids, ranodm heroics, daily quests, PvE scenarios, Challenge Dungeons, etc. The actual details of this will determine whether this is a big deal or not.
The Diablo III promotion
At first, I was very tempted to sign up for the year of WoW to get Diablo III for free. I definitely plan on playing Diablo III, so getting that tossed in sounded good. Also, while I don't really think that it is worth paying $12-15 to play WoW, at this point (given my lack of time and burn-out level) the effectively lower amount (due to getting Diablo III for free) per month for the year was tempting. As an added bonus, I thought the Tyrael-like mount looked pretty cool, so the completionist/cool-things-seeker in me was tempted.
However, after I've thought about it a bit more, I continue to have a lack of time to play and I'm not sure I'd be interested in getting into raiding again (unless it were at the very end of the expansion when I could reasonably expect to get to see the content quickly and less painfully than it would be to learn it when it's cutting-edge), so the main two issues that caused me to stop playing are still in effect. If I were to come back, I think the main things I would be interested in doing are:
- Level up my alts
- Go back and do the quests in all of the newly re-made zones that I haven't done, yet
- Do daily quests to get the fire hippogriff (which I think looks cool)
- Do random dungeons with people I know when I occasionally feel like it
All of those could be potentially fun to do occasionally (particularly on weekend mornings when there isn't much else to do) but it's tough to justify signing up for a year if those are the main things I'd be doing.
Conclusion
From the initial information out there, this expansion seems like kind of a mixed bag. There's some stuff that is getting changed that I think works well as it is, right now, and there's some new stuff getting added that I probably don't care about.
-TheDragoon