BlizzCon 2011: Mists of Pandaria Overview Part 2

Posted on October 22, 2011 by necromoonyeti

I left off yesterday having discussed Blizzard’s initial overview of the Pandaria zone, the race of Pandaren, and the new Monk class. As with any expansion, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria will feature much more than simply new quest and raiding content, however. Here is a look at some of the major additions and changes:

Talents 2.0

First of all, the talent system is getting a major overhaul, far beyond the changes it received in past expansions. There will now be only six talent points. That’s it. Blizzard made a big to do about Cataclysm’s failure to revamp talent builds, resulting in only 1-5 realistic choices out of 41 (the rest being pretty much mandatory for any given spec.) The idea in MoP will be to do away with every mandatory talent and instead create a system which should cater to a variety of playing styles without drastically influencing your dps. Or as I understand it, if you use them correctly every possible talent combination should peak for about the same overall benefit.

If that seems like high expectations, note that there will only be six talent points per class, not per spec. Your options will be the same whether you’re healing, tanking, dpsing, pvping, or whatever. Here’s a look at the tentative paladin talent screen:

If you are hoping to load up on all of the healing talents, think again. Your six points are not to be spent as you please, but can only be used once per row. If you get Blessed Life, Sacred Shield and Ardent Defender are gone, no getting around it. Don’t expect to waste thousands of gold checking them all out though. Talents will now function like glyphs, and rather than having to start from scratch you will be able to reset any particular row at any point in time outside of combat. Blizzard suggested this would be necessary for raiding, certain talents being more beneficial for certain bosses, so expect opportunities to put them all to a bit of use. As for those “ability” talents necessary for your spec, they will now just be given outright like other abilities.

Scenarios

Scenarios seem to me the most dubious of the new additions. They will be very short queuable events designed to replace the group quests of old, and they will not have any specific role requirements, so queues will be instant. They will be available at various levels, each should have a level 90 version rewarding a few valor points, and you will be able to queue for them while in dungeon queue. So far so good–it sounds like a pretty nice way to collect extra valor while waiting for those tedious 40 minute queues to pop. Here is a basic example of what the objectives of a Scenario might look like:

But aside from the fact that something that short could get really old really fast, here is the major drawback: Blizzard described a number of them as “pve battlegrounds.” What does this mean? Well, WoW Game Director Tom Chilton was fairly explicit in talking about them as battleground for people afraid to pvp. Does that mean they’ll reward honor? Does that mean the more sheepish players who don’t know what they’re doing–the ones I love graveyard camping oh so very much–will be able to get geared through these? Or even if they don’t, will this actually succeed in keeping bad players out of real battlegrounds? That, to me at least, would be a terrible disappointment.

But it gets worse. I first started to think Blizzard hated pvp servers when they updated village guards to prevent camping. My glorious days of sitting outside Grom’gol Base Camp picking off lowbie horde like flies are dead and gone; may they rest in peace. Scenarios seem to be further pushing towards refusing to reward dedicated pvpers for getting gear. The biggest catch though, really the biggest disappointment in all of Mists of Pandaria, I might as well throw at you now:

Resilience will be a base stat.

No, really. If you stand outside of your enemy faction’s city naked, you will have resilience. Oh, there will still be pvp gear, giving you more resilience, but I’m going to propose right now it will be useless. Right now going up against a raider in world pvp, my 4500 resilience means I win. And it should, because I joined a pvp server to pvp, and the guy I am fighting apparently didn’t. Narrow the gap to say, a 1000 resilience difference, and do you really think my measly Ruthless set is going to hold up against a full Firelands-equipped player?

As a hunter, I am well familiar with the lack of balance in WoW pvp. I win 1 on 1 because I am geared to the hilt. You take that away from me, and I’m just a fish out of water, dying to anyone who actively plays the game whether they care about pvp or not. Part of the idea is to make it so that players can jump into arena sooner–to prevent a block from progression. But isn’t honor already dirt cheap? Doesn’t it only take what, a week, to get fully geared for arena? Maybe it makes no difference, if you play on a pve server, but for me all this is doing is ruining world pvp–my favorite aspect of the game. Low blow Blizzard.

People have been complaining about how it’s too easy to get geared for raiding for ages now. I guess the idea with Scenarios and an overwhelming nerf to resilience is to give us pvpers something to gripe about too. Anyway, enough of that, let’s look at a more positive addition:

World of Pokemon

Lord only knows what has compelled me to so desperately seek out that 150 vanity pet achievement (I’m sitting around 135 at the moment), because I don’t even like the damn things. But it’s all going to pay off now in an addition sure to be both cheesy and addicting: vanity pet arena (I believe Pet Battle System is the official working title). You will now be able to level your pets (up to 25), form teams of between 1 and I believe 3 pets, and square off in turn-based battles both against other collectors and against new world pets that you can catch and add to your collection by defeating.

It’s looking to be a pretty complex process. You can visit trainers all over Azeroth to learn new abilities for your pets, you can trade them, you can auction them at high level, and they will be shared across your account. Imagine a pimped out White Kitten selling for 20k. I will be that man robbing you.

Without going into too much detail, pet stats will be randomly generated, so you might have to catch one multiple times to get the build you want. Pets will be seasonal, so certain ones might only appear in the summer or winter, and some will only appear in the day, at night, in the rain, in the night in rain in September, you get the idea. It’s going to be a whole game within a game, and it might sound silly right now, but I suspect this will soon stand alongside raiding and pvp as a third way to play World of Warcraft.

Other Features

* Dungeons will have a third form: “Challenge Mode”. They will consist of time trial runs in scaled-down gear, so they will never get easier as you gear up. There will be Bronze, Silver, and Gold times to beat, with different gear rewards (including statsless transmogrification sets) depending on your time. There will also be an in-game stats keeper showing your best time for each dungeon compared to other players on your server. I’m not sure how to take this. I play on one of the lowest population servers in Warcraft; we are pvp, and everyone knows everyone, so the competition to be on top is personal. I could see myself getting a bit obsessed over this one.

* Raids will also have a third form: Raid Finder. Breathe a sigh of relief; DF Raiding will be a tier below regular raiding. You won’t be able to just pug your way into a cross-server 25 man heroic run. It’s more a means to learn the mechanics while getting geared for normal raids, and I’m pretty excited about it. On servers like mine where low population means frequently bringing along one to two inexperienced players for progression attempts, there will be no more excuses. If you haven’t downed the boss through Dungeon Finder 10-man, you aren’t coming. I like it.

* There will be 9 new dungeons: six completely new ones, a heroic version of Scholomance, and a heroic version of Scarlet Monastery condensed into two dungeons. There will be three launch-ready raids, similar to Cataclysm.

* Blizzard failed miserably in Cataclysm by creating a lot of compelling world raid bosses and giving none of them any gear worth a damn. MoP is supposed to reintroduce world raiding proper. You can look for me ganking your healer half way through the fight.

* Expect 2-3 new battlegrounds, tentatively titled Stranglethorn Diamond Mines, Valley of Power, and Azshara Crater. If Twin Peaks and Battle for Gilneas were my two biggest disappointments in Cataclysm, these look to compensate thoroughly. Stranglethorn Diamond Mines is going to consist of transporting resources out of a mine down a whole mess of different passageways–the first team to successfully transfer the required amount wins. That means a lot of hiding, sneaking around, scouting ahead, and outsmarting rather than overpowering. It seems perhaps too complex to be 10 on 10, but I’m going to be disappointed if it isn’t, because it sounds perfect for rateds. Valley of Power is much more simplistic–a small square room with few opportunities to evade combat. Yet Blizzard managed to make it refreshingly unique. There will be an orb in the center of the room which any one player can hold, and so long as a faction is holding it they gain points, scaled to go up faster the closer you are to the center of the map (and thus to your enemies). But I don’t expect this to be a 2 minute fight followed by a 10 minute wait like Battle for Gilneas. There is an additional mechanic: whoever holds the orb will take periodic damage increasing over time. If there are no healers, it will eventually drop even if your team never touches the carrier. As for the third proposed battleground, Azshara Crater, Blizzard has said nothing.

* There will be a new arena: Tol’vir Proving Grounds. It looks identical to Nagrand Arena except the four pillars are diamonds rather than squares. Really? For as long as we’ve been waiting, it looks downright pathetic.

* There will be valor from daily quests. Thank god. Daily quests will also give you buffs that allow you to gain extra loot in dungeons. I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

* Many achievements will be account bound. They did not go into too many specifics on this, but I’m pretty damn excited. Achievements are my gig in WoW, even more so than pvp. I’m pushing 11,000 without hardly any from raids, and if this means I can roll a level 29 twink hunter and knock out all of the more insane pvp ones I’m going to be in the money. Not all achievements will be account bound however, and whether that means obvious ones like say, the level 90 achievement, won’t be, or if not all raid/pvp accomplishments will be either, is still up in the air. There will also be multi-toon achievements, like maxing out every profession.

* A few major class/stat changes were mentioned. The epic resilience nerf stands out as the worst, and maybe the worst idea Blizzard have for all of MoP. They will also be doing away with the range weapon slot. Relics will be gone, rogues and warriors will throw their main hand, and hunter bows/guns will become the main hand. Wait, how will hunters survive without a melee weapon? Ah, the most relevant buff of all for me: hunter minimum range is gone. Gone! No more frost mages locking me in place and taking me down without ever so much as taking damage. Hunters will finally be a viable dueling and 2s pvp class. Warlocks will also get a major overhaul to better distinguish the three specs, and the way they described Destruction I suspect they’re going to be pretty op, with a stacking damage buff that hopefully resembles Arcane Blast. Hopefully because I have an idle 85 warlock, that is. Shamans will no longer have buff totems, and lastly, druids will finally be recognized as officially having four specs.

There was one major question left in my mind when all was said and done. I play on one server exclusively. There are ten classes and ten toon slots, so I am full. As it stands, I will never actually get to play a monk. Will that change? Will they finally add an eleventh slot? WoW lead producer J. Allen Brack was asked this in the post-presentation interview, and his answer wasn’t promising: They’ve thought about it, but they’re not quite sure.

BlizzCon 2011: Mists of Pandaria Overview Part 1

Posted on October 21, 2011 by necromoonyeti

If you look at the main stage schedule for BlizzCon 2011, attention to World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria isn’t so much dominant as nearly exclusive, getting six and a half hours of discussion and demonstration, compared to two for Diablo 3 and not a minute for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. With that in mind, I imagine everything presented in the initial general overview of Mists of Pandaria will be granted much more thorough detail down the road. But, if you’ll allow me to take this one step at a time, here are the key points I took out of the overview.

The first thing you’re going to encounter in WoW 5 is the level grind from 85 to 90, so let’s take a look at that first.

The first thing you might notice is that Pandaria looks pretty small. It’s only five zones, for one thing (ignore the blob on the right for the moment), and I certainly would hope at least one of them, probably the middle, is a world battleground akin to Wintergrasp and Tol Barad. Blizzard did not actually make any mention of server battlegrounds in the introduction, and cryptically listed and dually ignored a third “Azshara Crater” battleground when detailing MoP’s two normal bgs, so perhaps this is not the case, but at any rate, Cataclysm’s five questing zones and one pvp zone felt small to me, and here only five are listed in total.

But there are a number of features to take into consideration. This scale compares Pandaria’s five zones on the left to Twilight Highlands on the right. Twilight might not seem that big, dashing around with master riding skill and the like, but if you expand your in-game map you’re going to realize Pandaria is well over half the size of Eastern Kingdoms. And there is a further catch: You can’t fly there until level 90.

This comment met with a great deal of applause from the audience, and I will gladly join them. Aside from my great distaste for the revamped lower level zones of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, what really made Cataclysm feel so weak quest-wise for me was level 60 flying. No more pick up, fly, kill something, fly, turn in, repeat here. No more complete disregard for terrain, either. Can you imagine hopping on a ground mount and waltzing the whole way across Twilight Highlands five times? Pandaria will feel huge.

Yet there are still only five zones. I loved the diversity of having ten in Wrath of the Lich King, but with only a 5 levels I suppose their options here are a bit more limited. They do try to account for this though, giving at least the second leveling zone, Valley of the Four Winds (bottom zone on the map), two distinct quest lines that will make leveling at least your first alt a more unique experience. In this case there will be both a northern “farmlands” region and a southern “coastal jungle” region, both of which should cover about the same level/exp range independently.

There was not much more information on particular zones available at this point, but names always indicate something. Here is what I know of the map breakdown:

The Jade Forest (level 85 starting zone, to the east)
Valley of the Four Winds (second zone, to the south)
Vale of Eternal Blossoms (central zone)
Townlong Steppes (western zone)
Kun-Lai Summit (northern zone)

As you may have guessed from the preview video I posted earlier, they will all have an Asian flavor about them. Another cool feature, for me at least, is that Blizzard will try to make the dungeons more visible. Valley of the Four Winds’ dungeon, Stormstout Brewery, should be visible to scale within the zone proper, not simply as a portal (though I’m sure you still have to “zone in”), and WoW Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton’s comments lead me to believe the others will generally follow suit. Whether this will amount to something new or will merely reflect a continued effort similar to Lost City of Tol’vir in Uldum remains to be seen, but it was certainly emphasized in the overview.

There will be one final zone of course: the Pandaren starting zone. Worgen and goblin starting zones were something of a complete joke in Cataclysm, in so far as they were completely irrelevant to the game if you weren’t the relevant class. Already having ten toons on my server, I have not caught the slightest glimpse of either. I get the bad feeling the Pandaren starting zone will be equally disappointing, but in the meantime it at least looks pretty cool.

This zone, The Wandering Isle, is a giant turtle. No, really. There will be a giant turtle floating around off the coast of Pandaland with a whole mess of forests and mountains and civilizations thriving on its posterior. The reason I suspect it will be as inaccessible to those of us with 10 toons as the worgen and goblin zones?: Pandaren start off neutral.

As in, they start off neither alliance nor horde. You don’t actually choose your faction until level 10, and that answers another question: MoP will introduce only one race, available to either faction. I’m pretty confident Blizzard will keep them isolated with this in mind, because I could see an unwelcome (on their part–harmless and entertaining on mine) cross-faction black market emerging otherwise.

This starting zone is actually playable at BlizzCon, so expect most of the non-official images of MoP appearing over the next few weeks to be of The Wandering Isle.

While I am on the subject of Pandaren, here’s the information you’re probably most interested in in a nutshell:

Pandaren classes:
Hunter
Mage
Monk
Priest
Rogue
Shaman
Warrior

Tentative Pandaren Racials:
Epicurean – Increase stat benefits from food by 100%
Gourmand – Cooking skill increased by 15
Inner Peace – Your Rested experience bonus lasts twice as long
Bouncy – You take 50% less falling damage
Quaking Palm – You touch a secret pressure point on an enemy target, putting it to sleep for 3 sec.

Monks are the next order of business. Allow me to start with a video of one in action:

Did that leg spin look cool at the end? WoW Lead Systems Designer Greg Street quoted one of his colleagues as saying “If we don’t do gnome monks, monks aren’t worth doing.” Yes, gnome monks will be an option, kicking in the faces of all enemies willing to get within half an inch of them. … Actually, the class will be available to every single race except worgen and goblins.

As for what exactly a monk consists of, at face value they pan out to be much like druids without a Boomkin option–leather wearers with the following specs:

Brewmaster – Tank
Mistweaver – Healer
Windwalker – Melee DPS

But as far as how they function, I am a bit confused. Street described them using a combination of energy (chi) and a dual point system:

Monks will use two basic abilities, “Jab” and “Roll”, to build up Light Force and Dark Force, with which they can release higher abilities. Ok, ok, fair enough for tanks and dps. But what about healers? Nothing was said directly, but monks were described as “melee healers” and compared to disc priests for their ability to dish out some dps in the process. Does that mean we’re going to have a healing spec without mana? I am lead to believe so. Will this be raid-functional or strictly pvp? That question remains unanswered.

Well, it’s getting late here, and I didn’t get as far in my BlizzCon coverage as I’d hoped, but I’ll try to pick up where I’ve left off tomorrow. So far I’ve only scratched the surface.