Mists of Pandaria

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I think that with the hard modes (especially on the last bosses of each of the Cataclysm raids), Blizzard achieved some kind of middle ground in fact. You can farm DS on normal while being an average player as much as you want but, except for Morchok, all of the same bosses in hard mode recquire some skill and the real fun begins there.

You didn't need any resist gear in MC and minimal for AQ. The raids had such a big amount of shit players though that it made content look a lot harder than it was. Your average progression guild had 25-30 terribles and probably didn't know about half of them how bad they really are.

Funny though, they add 3 difficulty settings and you complain they don't want a middle ground...

As for the talent trees "dumbing down" in "Mists of Pandaria", I think that if it's well implemented, it's a great idea, each build will be much more personal. I'm sick and tired of having to shift my mage from arcane to fire and back again with the exact same talent tree than the other mages in decent guilds to be optimal in raid with each new patch. I dread the kung-fu panda and pet pokemon shit from "Mists of Pandaria" but I welcome the idea of being able to personalize your character and gameplay style through the talent trees without one being "optimal".

NDA is off, so now there's a bunch of new info.

Some of it:

• The final patch of Mists of Pandaria will be the Siege of Orgrimmar! Both factions lay siege to the city to bring Garrosh down and end his reign of Warchief.
• The new LFR loot system will allow everyone to roll individually. Upon winning a roll, if the boss has an item that you can use, you will win it. It will only be in LFR to begin with, but can be added to other parts of the game later.
• An 11th character slot has been added.
• AoE Looting has been added.
• There will not be an item squish in Mist of Pandaria.
• No new race models are ready to be added yet.
• There will be nine level 90 heroics for players as well as three raids with 14 raid bosses and three difficulties. There will be an additional two world bosses.
• Scenarios will take place at level 90, in an instance, and reward reputation and Valor points. They don't need a healer, tank, and DPS, just DPS is fine. Each will take 10 to 30 minutes to complete and five or more will be available for launch.
• In Challenge Modes, the vast majority of players will most likely earn a bronze medal even if they are a relatively unskilled player. After a player earns all the medals at the Bronze level, they will be rewarded with an achievement and title. Completing all of the Silver medals will earn a set of spectacular gear for transmogrification, and completing all of the gold will earn a unique epic flying mount. Challenge modes will be available for the six new dungeons at launch.
• Cloud Serpents are the Pandaren's mount of choice. You can raise your own by doing 20 days of daily quests.
• The Tillers faction will let you run your own farm! The farmer's market will provide daily quest to improve your farm every day, you will be able to clear plots of land and plant things like cooking ingredients, herbalism nodes, gifts for NPCs to build your reputation... etc.
• Warlocks got the most class changes in MoP, along with new pets.
• There will be more mounts and less color swaps for different rewards.
• They are adding armor to creatures to give them varied appearances, something other than just simple color changes.
• There are now seven zones, up from five. This was done to add more content to the game and give players a less linear progression path so that leveling for a second or third time isn’t the exact same.
• There will be one new arena and two new battlegrounds at launch.
• PvP pet battles are going to be fun and causal, only tracking the number of wins and not the number of losses. When fighting another player, you cannot see the other players name or communicate with them.
• Currently, every race except Goblin and Worgen can learn the ways of the monk.
• The Pre Mists of Pandaria Patch will be roughly two weeks before launch and bring simple rewards. It might involve a scenario with Theramore and the Alliance vs Horde theme. Chen Stormstout might also come to the local cities and get players excited about what is coming.

At least they're getting rid of that moron.

Yeah. Overall the stuff actually sounds pretty good, talent trees and Kung Fu Panda nonwithstanding.

Garrosh being corrupted was SO predictable...still, might be a cool fight, seeing Garrosh taken by Sargeras blood of something. Will probably link to the next expansion being about facing the Legion again, but this time attacking it, finnally revealing the Titans and all that...

Very nice.

Any word on who becomes the new Warchief? Could be interesting if it's Vol'jin. Might bring some relevance to the poor fucker.

I'd imagine it'll be Mary-Sue Thrall again, remember something about him being gone from Warchiefing only temporarily. Would be cool if Vol'jin though, yes.

And I'm not sure if Garrosh is going to be corrupt, he could just go full-out retard ruler a-la Macbeth, that'd actually be nice. No magic, just human(oid) nature.

Meanwhile in Hyboria:

The Little Prince

The Lurker at the Treshold I

The Lurker at the Treshold II

I'm torn between my respect for Blizzard and my dislike of how shitty the raiding game in WoW has become since WotLK came out (Ulduar notwithstanding). And some of those bullet points are just...it's difficult to imagine how running a farm could possibly fit into the game.

Of course they'll go with the corruption angle. That's how all the major Warcraft villains end up becoming evil. It's either Sargeras and the legion or the Old Gods. Or both.
Also, I think the Garrosh plot could have worked better if Garrosh had just killed Thrall.

Yes, everything corrupt must die. I'm still butthurted that we killed Illidan without a single good reason...

He made the mistake of stocking his base with purples, so he had to die.

Only thing that sounds appealing is the five man dungeon challenges but for me to resub for that I'd need five or six of my friends to do the same and that probably isn't happening. The rest sounds moronic. Oh, and lol at them promising only four months between major raid content patches with other patches in between. When have we heard that before (hint, at least three other times).

And first wave of beta started today. I believe that shocks most people who have been following the expansion's development.

Shades of Ultimas past

Trying to compete against GW2 in the most retarded ways possible, that's bound to work well.

What's funny is not all of the people who signed up for that annual pass got Beta access immediately (as was previously promised). Blizzard edited the wording on the promotion the day before and now people will be invited in waves.

Yeah, that annual pass became a huge joke. Blizzard advertised as a way so people could finish Cataclysm in 2-3 months, Get Diablo III in Jan/Feb and keep playing it while Pandaria Beta doesn't arrive. Instead people are going to get 7 months of absolutly no new content in Cataclysm, and the Pandaria beta even before Diablo III. And of course, majestic PR of giant game developers go "we said that, but then changed the text, so fuck you".

i reckon the yearly subbers will get pandas for free..

Well to be fair, I think a couple million sheepies bought in, they'd need to set up a whole new IT center with a dozen servers for them all to take part.

So how much does Blizzard pay this abija fellow or is he doing it purely out the goodness of his heart?

Yeeeeah, no. It's correct that you didn't need resist gear for every boss in MC or AQ (or Naxx for that matter) but for certain bosses it was definitely required.

Guess my guild was fucking awesome then.

Going from 40 to 25 was already annoying enough, not updating the raids when the first XP hit was also annoying as fuck, losing your hard earned purples by 68 at the latest was really annoying and then the announced changes with Wrath were the last straw to make me quit for good.

Does Blizz still have 11 million subs or is the number finally declining?

It's been between 10 and 12 million.

One thing I don't necessarily get is the "hard-earned epics" thing, though. I had some hard-earned PvP gear from Vanilla that got outdated very quickly, and I spent several months earning it, yet it didn't tick me off. It's like what, do people expect that Tier 2 will last them a lifetime? What it did in BC and other expacs was give a starting boost to be ahead of others, plus raiding skills and determination are usually better base than a bunch of enthusiastic newbs trying to kill a boss or two. Other than that... I've switched a ton of tiers now, and it's not bothered me that much.

What DOES bother me is back then raiding was 40-man, and now you can do a 25-retard run and score some gimped top tier loot without any effort whatsoever. Yeah, that's fucking annoying.

I kinda hoped that the enchanted purples from BWL/AQ/Naxx would last until raiding gear in BC. Just that the first greens in BC were ridiculously overpowered when compared to the non-raiding endgame stuff from vanilla. I have no idea why Blizz had to pump the item levels that much. Of course, I was coming from Ultima Online, not Everquest or Asheron's Call so I didn't really know what to expect, as gear-whoring in UO is very minimal compared to the theme park MMOs.

Ah, good point there. The power levels do jump quite far and quite quick, even now, with "just" 5 levels to jump.

Hell, I'm in MoP beta right now and it looks like already at L85 you're able to get BLUE QUEST REWARDS that are almost as good as endboss normal loot of the final tier (i403 with neat procs on weapons from endboss, i404 from a goddamned blue placeholder). Can see how that would miff people a lot. Fortunately this is currently somewhat mitigated with T13 gear being fairly shitty, but still, stat bloat is way worse than in Vanilla -> BC transition now, it seems.