World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Launches On September 25 247
New submitter JestersGrind writes "Blizzard has announced that Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion of the popular World of Warcraft MMO, will be launched on September 25, 2012 and can be pre-ordered now."
The game page has a good deal of information about the new expansion. The level cap is increased to 90, there is a new race (Pandaren) and a new class (Monk), and the talent system has been completely redesigned. They've added Challenge Modes for dungeons, which normalizes player gear and lets them compete to see who can clear it the fastest. The MMO-Champion website keeps track of all the minor details, if you're interested.
Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:4, Informative)
WoW went from being a genuinely hard game
When was it ever a 'genuinely hard game'? I played since the first day it launched but I must have missed this mythical period. Even on the first day there were numerous people who were 75% or mote towards hitting the level cap . You could blow through half the game or more solo.
sigh (Score:2, Informative)
*rolls eyes*
Panderen, which started out as an easter egg joke in Warcraft 3 somehow got turned into a full blown expansions in WoW, because, honestly, blizzard has totally ran out of ideas at this point....
Re:Said it here first... (Score:3, Informative)
Judging from my flatmate, I'd say it's Day Z. I'd count as a nerd in some people's books, but I never found WoW or Starcraft or any other Blizzard games particularly interesting... I guess maybe I'm a kind of hipster nerd.
Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:4, Informative)
Besides I just remembered that there are vanilla WoW servers, so if you love it so much, why don't you play vanilla? But as GP said, vanilla WoW wasn't very hard. The endgame content basically only needed tons of grinding (and an immense pain-tolerance because of all the bugs). Scholo, strat etc. hard? Only if you have terrible equipment, but that.. again.. can be fixed by just grinding.
In the end all "challenges" in WoW can easily be beaten by investing more time, and it has been that way since launch.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Informative)
In a blizzard survey of subscribers, The pandaren were the #1 requested expansion pack subject. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the majority of the WoW players don't.
Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't difficult, just inconvenient.
Quests individually weren't difficult - just spread all to hell and gone over the world with no rational organization, so you spent a lot of time running hither and yon rather than doing anything useful.
Dungeons weren't difficult - just inconvenient as hell to get people to do with you and took forever and a day to get people to the dungeon.
Raids weren't (usually) difficult - the mechanics were pretty simple assuming you had an appropriate class composition and the people playing understood that they can't just willy-nilly spam debuffs on the target without overwriting things.
Raid strategies weren't as widely known because there weren't as many tools for publicizing them and so on.
Contrast that with today:
- Quests are much more intelligently laid out, and questing is more about telling stories than it is about "challenge". Getting to the level cap via questing is trivial, but that's good because the level cap keeps going up.
- Dungeons have 2 modes, one which is normal and one which is a more challenging (mechanically and numerically) heroic mode. Some of the Cataclysm dungeons had mechanics that made them extremely tricky for PUGs to handle, and even now some of the heroics are tricky due to other mechanics.
- Raids have multiple modes. LFR mode is trivial to do (except when the people in your PUG intentionally or unintentionally screw things up), Normal mode can be a bit of a challenge but nothing that a decent guild can't handle. Heroic is challenging as hell.
Raid strategies are trivial to find and learn because we have great out of game tools for them - videos of how to tank a fight, the different phases, etc.
They gave us something for everyone, difficulty wise, now. But anyone who thinks WoW was more difficult (as opposed to inconvenient) in the past is definitely not right.
Re:Long time WoW player here (Score:4, Informative)
Your WoW characters don't disappear when you unsubscribe. It's entirely feasible to have multiple high level characters and not be subscribed to the game for long periods of time.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't mean it isn't a good idea or isn't interesting, either.
Re:The grind never ends (Score:4, Informative)
Dictionary.com disagrees with your definition of game; the ability to win is not part of the definition.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/game?s=t [reference.com]