Mists of Pandaria

[Trippy]

Hero classes!

[SurfD]

I wonder.  Storm Bolt does 300% extra damage to things immune to stun.  Does this also apply to a Player Character who is "immune" to stuns due to diminishing returns?

[Ingmar]

It says permanently immune to stun, so I doubt it.

[Fordel]

That wording is referring to bosses and shit, not player characters.

[Nevermore]

I'm sure it'll work just like Deep Freeze in that respect.

[Rokal]

Fanmade Mists login screen:

[proudft]

All that effort and they couldn't update the copyright year? 

[Miasma]

I don't like pandas but it would be nice to have something lush and green to look at for a change.

[Simond]

It's going to be a dragon roaring, but one of those Oriental-style ones instead. Innovation!

[Sheepherder]

I wonder if you can substitute out the main screen.  I'm getting tired of motherfucking dragons.

[Azazel]

Hey! Maybe it'll be a Dark Portal with a Dragon sitting on top of it!

[Paelos]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2620-Mists-of-Pandaria-Challenge-Mode-Dungeons-Class-Transmogrification-List

Challenge Modes!

I like that idea a lot actually. It's a good way of making heroics look like they did back before the unpleasantness, and still making 5 man people wanting challenging content feel valued.

[Miasma]

I'm surprised you can use the lfd for those, seem like the type of thing you would want to do with people you know on vent.  Going to be a lot of raging for anything less than gold, interesting.

[Wolf]

that's all blizzcon info, is it not? I guess everyone was too busy hating pandas at that point to pay attention to the features they announced.

[Ingmar]

Yeah it isn't new.

[Lt.Dan]

New or not, I'm still hating pandas

[Ratman_tf]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2620-Mists-of-Pandaria-Challenge-Mode-Dungeons-Class-Transmogrification-List

Challenge Modes!

I like that idea a lot actually. It's a good way of making heroics look like they did back before the unpleasantness, and still making 5 man people wanting challenging content feel valued.

It seems like Blizz can't decide if getting lewt is an important part of the game or not. (Yes, it's been an issue since forever, but still...)

[Wolf]

loot is important to different players for different things. Loot and, the correct distribution of such, allows me and my guild to do heroic raids. Loot allows other people to outgear older content and see it. Some people just like bigger numbers. If you want to do the dungeon in challenge mode, you're bumped down to the low ilvl and you get a "challenge". What's confusing about that?

I've done ZA timed run in a full 346 group and it was one of the more fun times I've had this expansion :)

[Miasma]

So long as you aren't forced to do the challenge modes to get better gear it should be fine.  Offering transmog gear, pets and stuff like they are planning is a good way to go.

[Simond]

MoP talents explained (again): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3881924100#6

I have been looking at the MoP talent trees, and to be honest, I'm incredibly disappointed. It looks so dumbed down with very little customization, compared to where talents are right now.
It almost seems like Blizzard is going backwards with talent trees; the game releases with a simple, 6 point talent tree. Then, as the game grows, developers decide to make talent trees more sophisticated with more freedom and options overall.
So my question is, with only 6 'tiers' of talents after MoP, what is happening to all the other talents that are currently in game? Are they going to be skills you learn from your class trainer, either active or passive? Or removed from the game completely?

A little of both. :)

To better explain, let's divide the current talents into five categories: 1) mandatory, 2) very cool, but not mandatory, 3) sort of cool, 4) boring, and 5) useless.

We're going to give you all of the "mandatory" talents to your class spec, and you'll learn those talents at certain levels like you do with core class spells. Players who skip over what we consider mandatory talents today -- like Raging Blow or Hot Streak -- are unintentionally (or maybe even intentionally) gimping themselves, and that's not what we want to have happen. We want players to be able to experience the full power of their class, so we're going to award certain talents straight-out.

The second category of talents -- the cool, but not mandatory ones -- are really the heart of the new talent system (they're the talents you'll probably be choosing from in each of new six tiers). You may be glad you have talent A, but talent B and talent C are also compelling options, and it should ideally be an interesting choice about which one you take and when.

The third category of talents are still pretty cool, but they just aren't at the same level as other talents. These talents make good glyphs. For example, an early version of the warrior tree had Rude Interruption as a talent, but we feel it's too situational to compete with the other talents, so we'll likely make it a glyph.

The next category are boring talents -- the kind that reduce cooldowns or increase damage on some abilities. In most cases, we're just baking talents these right into the spells themselves. While there were occasionally situations where you got to decide which of these talents to take, the answers often relied on complex math problems that some other player ended up solving for most of us. 

Finally, the current trees (despite our best efforts) still have some bad talents. They're the talents you almost inevtiably end up with when you have a talent tree with X rows and Y columns that you need to populate. In the end, not a lot of players end up taking these talents, so we'll just cut them. We don't think they'll be missed, but if turns out that players wind up actually missing some of the Cataclysm talents in the Mist of Pandaria design, then we've probably made a mistake somewhere. Ideally, you won't miss a thing and will have more fun picking talents that cater to your play style (or, at the very least, the current situation.)

[Rendakor]

"They're not awful, this isn't a stupid idea, we promise. Please keep giving us money!"

[Malakili]

No matter how you structure them, as long as their are choices there are going to be good choices and bad choices.  Just nuke talent trees altogether if your goal is to prevent bad choices.

[Fabricated]

I thought the whole point of the talent tree thing period was that you had to think about what talents you took and you could certainly make bad choices. Like it was a really small metagame. Kinda stupid to try and structure your talent trees as such that you could close your eyes and randomly assign points and still have a viable build.

[Simond]

Yeah, and then you have people who've just randomly selected all their talents bitching about how their class is underpowered.

[Rendakor]

Are there really that many people left that are that bad at the game? I honestly figured that as long as WoW's been out, anyone playing it has been doing so for years and has at least passing familiarity with their class, talents, etc. to the point where they're making intelligent choices and not just clicking random buttons.

[Ratman_tf]

I'd be happy if they dumped talents altogether.

Are talents for multispeccing? They wound up having to put a dual spec option in the game, so that didn't work out.
Are talents for customizing your character? People don't use them to customize, they use them to optimize.
Are talents for displaying system mastery? Then you have people gimping their characters. Ha-ha, you took the retard talent. Dumbass.

Just dump all that shit, make the characters clearly what they're intended to do in the game, and stop fucking around.

[Simond]

Are there really that many people left that are that bad at the game? I honestly figured that as long as WoW's been out, anyone playing it has been doing so for years and has at least passing familiarity with their class, talents, etc. to the point where they're making intelligent choices and not just clicking random buttons.

WoW is still pulling in new customers, and also just because someone has been playing for a while it doesn't necessarily follow that they'll be any good. For an example, just join a few PUGs.

[Fordel]

Are there really that many people left that are that bad at the game? I honestly figured that as long as WoW's been out, anyone playing it has been doing so for years and has at least passing familiarity with their class, talents, etc. to the point where they're making intelligent choices and not just clicking random buttons.

WoW is still pulling in new customers, and also just because someone has been playing for a while it doesn't necessarily follow that they'll be any good. For an example, just join a few PUGs.

Or to put it another way, Blizzard used that logic and made Cataclysm.

See how that turned out? 

[Wolf]

Are there really that many people left that are that bad at the game? I honestly figured that as long as WoW's been out, anyone playing it has been doing so for years and has at least passing familiarity with their class, talents, etc. to the point where they're making intelligent choices and not just clicking random buttons.

I had a retribution paladin casual come to one of our alt-raids. After the fact I realised he didn't have the 3% raid dmg increase/replenishment talent. That's a talent that says 1 point for 5% personal damage, and he skipped it. So yeah, I'm all for rolling the important stuff into the spec.

Ratman - that's what they're doing. You could call new talents flavor.

[Nevermore]

I had a retribution paladin casual come to one of our alt-raids. After the fact I realised he didn't have the 3% raid dmg increase/replenishment talent. That's a talent that says 1 point for 5% personal damage, and he skipped it. So yeah, I'm all for rolling the important stuff into the spec.

But then what will you use as your idiot filter?

[Wolf]

his toon's name was all I needed :)

He's still someone's friend and we needed a warm body, plus replnishment and dmg would have been nice.

[Ironwood]

Are there really that many people left that are that bad at the game?

Oh God Yes.

Have you pugged lately ?

[Rendakor]

Only LFR, and with 25 people it's pretty easy to hide as a lone idiot. I wasn't going over parses or anything as long as we were killing shit, and it was rare that I noticed someone dying a lot that a simple whisper "hey stop standing in that" didn't fix. I only did the new 5 mans once for achievements; that was with 3 guildies and our lone pug wasn't noticeably terrible.

[Ironwood]

What the fuck are they doing without Communion ?  Seriously ?

LFR is full of idiots.  And people who nick my shit.

[Wolf]

Last time I went to LFR I literally got shouted at for doing too much damage. I'm not joking. Something along the lines of "if you're doing the fight right, you'd be doing as much damage as everyone else". Right. Good thing I don't need anything on both characters I'm playing right now, so I don't have to go till Pandas.

And about the communion thing - I really don't know how you don't take that talent. And this dude very often complains about how people in his pug suck.