Mists of Pandaria

[Soulflame]

Blizzard has my eldest's complete attention with red pandaren.   

[Nevermore]

They could very well end up generating a lot of new subs with pandas from kids who are just getting old enough to play, aka the Kung Fu Panda crowd.

[Wolf]

no threat modifier yet, plus meta is still timed, even if it has higher uptime it will still not be 100%. So don't get excited.

At the moment with the taunt/nocrit/some pretty major CDs, best case it can be used to off-tank specific boss abilities on specific boss encounters. Good option for me, nothing you guys should care about :)

For Demo to be a full tank they need that glyph that flips demonic fury to give Meta 100% uptime, and give it a threat modifier.

[apocrypha]

I demand shaman tanking!

If shaman could tank I'd make one called Sherman.

[Merusk]

Was just looking at MMO-Champ's feed.  Shit, they're working double time on this, aren't they.  Almost makes me wonder if they pulled some folks off of Titan because there is a crapload of content and little features going in.   

[Lakov_Sanite]

    Mists of Pandaria finally introduces real models for belts!

[luckton]

    Mists of Pandaria finally introduces real models for belts!

Yeah, saw some of those.  Can't wait for bracers 

[Lakov_Sanite]

Also I'm really digging this hunter set

[FieryBalrog]

Digging the white one. The others, not so much.

[Wolf]

The only set from the challenges I don't like is the priest one. Figures. Hate.

wowhead has some of the raiding tier sets too - http://www.wowheadnews.com/blog=201923/mists-of-pandaria-day-two-quest-armor-sets-challenge-mode-sets-and-3d-models#priest-item-sets

[Lakov_Sanite]

Priest T1 set the precedent for ugly and they have kept up with it pretty well over the years.

[caladein]

no threat modifier yet, plus meta is still timed, even if it has higher uptime it will still not be 100%. So don't get excited.

At the moment with the taunt/nocrit/some pretty major CDs, best case it can be used to off-tank specific boss abilities on specific boss encounters. Good option for me, nothing you guys should care about :)

For Demo to be a full tank they need that glyph that flips demonic fury to give Meta 100% uptime, and give it a threat modifier.

The summary post says that Meta doesn't have a CD/duration anymore.  Also that the threat mod is baked into the Demon Hunting glyph right now as well as Demonic Slash generating Fury.

[Wolf]

I blame being hit by walls of text before I've finished my coffee.

So, the idea is to balance stuff in a way that slash gives enough fury to have 100% uptime on meta, without limiting your button presses much. That's actually pretty slick. I hope it pans out, it'll solve certain roster issues we've been having :)

[Rokal]

Was just looking at MMO-Champ's feed.  Shit, they're working double time on this, aren't they.  Almost makes me wonder if they pulled some folks off of Titan because there is a crapload of content and little features going in.  

If you want to see how they managed to pull of MoP in such a 'short' amount of time, all you have to do is look at the Cata patch cycle. They've had a year and a half since it launched and they've released:
4.1: two troll raids re-used as troll dungeons
4.2: one new raid, new daily quest hub that uses the same tileset
4.3: raid that uses 90% pre-existing assets, three new dungeons that use 90% pre-existing assets

They released only one 'traditional' patch (4.2) which had a smaller raid than people are accustomed to. They've been trying for years to put out expansions faster, and they're finally succeeding. It's not because they're iterating faster or hiring more people, it's because they're doing less work per patch and less ambitious patch content.

This is the reason why Orgrimmar was selected as the last raid in MoP, rather than having you fight Garrosh in some secret orc facility in a new area. It drastically cuts down the amount of art they need to generate for the raid. The downside is of course that the raid probably won't be as interesting as it could have been, but it means another $40 expansion pack will be closer around the corner.

It's been pretty clear from the level of content that's done today, and even based on what we saw at BlizzCon, that this expansion was created a little faster than previous expansions. How did you deal with a more accelerated process?

We're being smarter and more efficient and we're developing our teams so that we kind of piggyback off of each other. So while some of our teams were working on the outstanding dungeons and raids that were in 4.3, the others were working on the content for Pandaria. We have this patch plan so that all of our teams can roll out content faster, and we're just trying to be really smart about how we build content such that we can provide more content. We're committed to providing more content to players, so we're being smarter about our development time and our man hours.

[dd0029]

Depending on how they do the resuse things, it can work. Rift has their sliver idea which is just a phased portion of a zone. This has worked well because they are using out of the way world locations that were already interesting but mostly unseen on the race to 50.

[FieryBalrog]

4.3 was a pretty big patch from my PoV, even if the raid is a huge rehash of assets.

Priest set looks goofy as fuck, thanks Blizz.

[Nevermore]

Also I'm really digging this hunter set

That's a pretty radical change for Hunters, making the monster head a shoulder piece instead of a hat. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

But it's an ACTUAL head, not just some faux monster-looking piece.

[Miasma]

The white hunter set makes it look like he's wearing those big bunny slippers.

And why are there three colors, do you get different ones for bronze, silver and gold because I thought only silver got the transmog gear.

[Rokal]

4.3 was a pretty big patch from my PoV, even if the raid is a huge rehash of assets.

Priest set looks goofy as fuck, thanks Blizz.

The dungeons were also largely re-used assets. Pre-existing areas, models, etc. 4.3 included large new features, but features aren't the most time-consuming effort for a new patch or expansion: art assets are.

[Simond]

Make female red panda (blue eyes, pigtail) named Ranko.
Get to Singing Pools.

 

[FieryBalrog]

4.3 was a pretty big patch from my PoV, even if the raid is a huge rehash of assets.

Priest set looks goofy as fuck, thanks Blizz.

The dungeons were also largely re-used assets. Pre-existing areas, models, etc. 4.3 included large new features, but features aren't the most time-consuming effort for a new patch or expansion: art assets are.

I mostly agree with that. Although I hadn't seen Well of Eternity before, maybe I'm just forgetting or I missed that area in WoW.

But, for actually playing the game, transmog was a complete game-changer for me. Got to see tons of old raid content I never saw, and actually had a point to it.

[Fordel]

I want to say the Well of Eternity is a re-skinned Sunwell, but I don't know for certain.

[Rokal]

It's some re-used Sunwell assets combined with the felwood/darkshore tileset, iirc.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Re-doing the troll dungeons WAS lazy but for all the deathwing dungeons re-using the assets made sense and I was ok with that.  At some point you have to make your world cohesive and that means you re-visit things on occasion. Of course, don't do this every single time but I enjoyed all three of the new dungeons, I LIKED wyrmrest temple being used for...something.

[FieryBalrog]

By contrast I hadn't been to the troll content when they were raids, so they were very fresh for me. And coming at them fresh, they seemed really well done. ZG in particular was a great callback to the days of BRD style dungeons, a living breathing troll city with a lot of goofy optional shit.

Dragon Soul doesn't seem nearly as cohesive or thematically strong.

[Paelos]

I think there's a difference in reusing assets and reusing entire zones. Reusing models and things like that? The players will generally accept it as long as you don't make bosses look too similar. There will be a loud vocal minority on MMO Champ who scream that the frame for your dragon is the same frame as the winged guardian or some shit, but nobody listens to them.

Reusing entire zones? With the exception of Naxx, I think it's a bad idea at this point. Naxx was an isolated situation where only a minute fraction of the playerbase ever set foot in the place, so it made sense to reuse it since the vast majority of people would be seeing the updated version for the first time. I could make a solid argument that Sunwell could be redone without too much of a fuss from the players because, again, it really wasn't played by many people.

Other things wouldn't fare as well, though. Redoing dungeons and stuff? That was generally not as well liked. Even deadmines, which was a favorite amongst most, wasn't appreciated in the later format.

[Rendakor]

From a lore perspective, I thought the new Deadmines was pretty awesome. My only complaints with it were design-oriented; it really should have been split into two wings.

The Caverns of Time dungeons (CoS, Old Hillsbrad) are another good example of reused assets; as long as the 'new' zone is different enough and there's a reason that makes sense for us to be going BACK there, I'm fine with reusing content in moderation. ZA/ZG wouldn't have been so bad if we had gotten a legit new raid (some new content to go with our recycled) that patch instead of...nothing else.

[Sjofn]

The only complaints I really remember about DM and SFK was that they were really long. I really enjoyed them both, to be honest, but they WERE really long.

Of course, I enjoyed ZA and ZG too, because I only raided ZA a little, and ZG not at all.

[Fabricated]

The Hour of Twilight dungeons did a good job of reusing assets IMO. Well of Eternity does a good job of not looking like anything that's been done before outside of monster models.

[Ingmar]

They could reuse both AQ raids much like they did Naxx as well, frankly, the number of people left in the game who raided anything past Molten Core in Vanilla has got to be awfully small.

[Paelos]

They could reuse both AQ raids much like they did Naxx as well, frankly, the number of people left in the game who raided anything past Molten Core in Vanilla has got to be awfully small.

They could, and I thought about that when I mentioned Sunwell. However, I don't think AQ would be well received today unless they fixed a lot of the issues with length. Also, the whole "bug" thing never really made any sense at all.

[luckton]

Also, the whole "bug" thing never really made any sense at all.

This.  I hated the AQ patch in vanilla.  I give Bliz an A for effort in creating some original content coming off the RTS series, but the actual content itself was poor.

[Soulflame]

It makes perfect sense!  They're bugs raised up to intelligence by an old god in order to reach step 3: Profit!

[Malakili]

Also, the whole "bug" thing never really made any sense at all.

This.  I hated the AQ patch in vanilla.  I give Bliz an A for effort in creating some original content coming off the RTS series, but the actual content itself was poor.

I thought the server wide gate opening event was a pretty sweet idea, I wish they did more stuff like that.  We had the 3 major raiding guilds on the server (mostly) amicably negotiate who would get the official opening, and then they organized the time to do it.  Hundreds of people showed up, most MMOey experience I've had in WoW.