Mists of Pandaria

[Sheepherder]

Honestly, I really don't think level-up materials being shared across servers is going to matter at all.

It won't.  You'll have more people in the zone, but as I recall the spawn rates on mineral nodes are already variable.

[Lantyssa]

I remember a certain HRose asking demanding stridently exclaiming about exactly this years ago. He repeatedly talked about how barriers were a bad thing and the server barriers in WoW was one that he bemoaned very loudly. As was his way.

I'm also poking at GW2 doing something similar (and other games starting to do various cross-realm things), and how I floated the idea of a home instance, but having the freedom to move about so you are never restricted from playing with anyone else.  This is a good step in that direction.

(Now I do like the idea of a single server, but that only works in a vast wide-open game.  Preferably one without levels, or a shallow curve.  In a level-based game with a large population, some sort of instancing is going to be required.  CoX would have been a perfect example had there been only one server.)

[Simond]

It's also a great way to give the benefits of server merges without the "OMG the sky is falling!" of actual server merges.


Also:

[Rendakor]

Woah. Do want.

[luckton]

Aye, tis the NPC Black Market, where NPC vendors will randomly auction off rare items and effects, some of which was taken out of the game long ago.

Now if we could just get commission/buy orders done...

[luckton]

I unshelfed my once-main DK over the weekend and started researching the MoP changes.  Overall, GC's comments on them have been accurate; there really isn't any 'HUGE' changes like some other classes are getting, which is fine by me.  If anything, I'm looking forward to having more tanking/mitigation options available to me via the talent tiers.

- Rolling Blood; replaces the usage of Pestilence on my bar.  Now I can spread diseases 'and' do aggroing damage!

- AMZ; always my favorite when Unholy tanks walked the grounds of Azeroth.  This and AMS will do wonders for those magic fights.

- Death's Advance; another Unholy talent that'll help me tons.  Also means I don't have to invest in movement-boosting enchants.

- Conversion; At least, unless they make Death Siphon more attractable, if at all.  Until then, hello feral regen for DKs 

- Runic Corruption; as I do Unholy DPS for my off-spec, I'm familiar with both R. Empower and R. Corrupt.  I much prefer the latter in my gameplay, and I'm sure this will occur here too with others.

- Gorefiend's Grasp; the final tier is all new abilities.  For tanking, I see GG as the best choice for me.

[SurfD]

Screw cross-stealing of nodes - rare-spawn hunter pets could be a nightmare

And on a totally unrelated note, I just tamed Terrorpene, Ankha, and Ban'thalos all within 5 minutes of eachother about 10 minutes ago :P

Sadly, I fucked up an attempt to tame Skitterflame, and some DK killed Karkin while I was working out a strategy to tame it an hour or so later.

[Merusk]

This all sounds interesting and I'd love to play the beta sometime but it keeps wiping all of my mounts so I can't actually get anywhere.   

Seems like they should fix that little bug first.

[Azazel]

Well, fuck you then Blizz.  Bring back those awesome 3-5 man outdoor group quests if your intent is for us to run into each other then.

Also, I still say the resource sharing thing is going to skew server economies, and not in good ways.

This seems consistent with their stated desire to get "more people out and about in the world" and the removal of the "Have Group, Will Travel" guild perk. Of course, the overdone phasing in Cata served only to make the world seem even emptier than it actually is...

[Simond]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2779-Mists-of-Pandaria-Beta-Build-15699

Glyph of Rune Strike was renamed Glyph of Army of the Dead. The ghouls summoned by your Army of the Dead no longer taunt their target.
Glyph of Scourge Strike was renamed Glyph of Foul Menagerie. Causes your Army of the Dead spell to summon an assortment of undead minions.

I AM THE GOD OF DEATH!

[luckton]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2779-Mists-of-Pandaria-Beta-Build-15699

Glyph of Rune Strike was renamed Glyph of Army of the Dead. The ghouls summoned by your Army of the Dead no longer taunt their target.
Glyph of Scourge Strike was renamed Glyph of Foul Menagerie. Causes your Army of the Dead spell to summon an assortment of undead minions.

I AM THE GOD OF DEATH!

 

I really like those changes.  The AotD glyph makes it a reliable cooldown for every 5-man, not just the ones where the mechanics would let you get away with it.

[Setanta]

Thank god for the AotD glyph. I hate tanking a 5man boss only to have some retard pop AotD straight off the bat, leading to rage starvation as a warrior or a significant drop in my DPS as vengeance isn't activating. TBH, I wish AotD had never been built into the DK's arsenal.

[Miasma]

New login screen is up.  It's okay, I would have preferred more green.

[luckton]

As long as I don't have to stare at Deathwing's ugly mug anymore, I'm happy.  It's clean, it's a throwback to the Dark Portal, I approve. :)

[Simond]

http://www.disargeria.net/2012/05/23/zen-flight/

[luckton]

Daily quest cap of 25 is being axed with MoP.

[Paelos]

So it's all you can eat now?

[Fordel]

There's supposed to be hundreds of different daily quests for MoP now, so you can just cherry pick which ever ones you enjoy.

[Ingmar]

It's a nice change just from a perspective of it not hurting you in your regular progress if you want to go back and raise some low level faction that works via dailies, too.

[Sjofn]

MoP is shaping up to be the expansion that changes things so drastically that I will not be able to pick up WoW again. That's not necessarily bad, but christ my level 85 characters are nigh incomprehensible to me now. I could always roll with the changes previously, but MoP goes much further than that.

It's sort of funny, because I actually approve of the bulk of the changes (I like the new talent system, for example), but I am apparently too old and set in my ways to relearn, say, the warrior utterly. I have some sort of mental block that goes NO I REFUSE TO RELEARN SOMETHING I ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO WELL and I go play something else. :P

[Fordel]

Clearly you'll just have to reroll all your classes as Pandas.

[Sjofn]

Pandas can't be paladins. 

[Fordel]

You had to break that habit sooner or later!

[Sjofn]

NEVER

[Simond]

...and I go play something else. :P

Where you'll have to...learn to play a class from scratch anyway? 

[Sjofn]

Yep! It doesn't bug me to learn a new class in a new game. But a class I've been playing for years, but I took a break from for a while? Before with WoW, it was more like riding a bike (and to be fair, it looks like holy paladins are still going to be like riding a bike ... but fuck soloing as one of those, and no mistake, I would be mostly soloing). Now it's like some sort of alien moon bike that I can sort of, if I squint, see that it is, indeed, a bike, but I'm sort of not sure how to ride it. I'd rather just walk at that point.

[Azazel]

I have to say, I love my warrior right now, but I agree with you. The MoP changes make me feel like dropping that character when it comes out. Which is fucked, since I like my fucking warrior (the way it is), so they'll just be removing one more tank from the LFD queue.

[Miasma]

We'll have an army of adorable monk tanks to replace you HAHAHAAHAHAH!

I still hate pandas.


Priests didn't seem to change too much so I can adapt.  I don't like most of the changes though, haven't decided if it's just a hatred of change or if it's genuine, I'll figure that out at launch I guess.

[Sjofn]

That IS the alternative for me, just playing a monk. Since it's a new class, I have no pre-existing mental blocks about NO THIS IS HOW WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT WHY IS IT DIFFERENT for that class.

Thinking about it, for some classes it really already happened. I barely touched my druid in Cataclysm because the healing changes for THAT class made me sad. Although that was more of a protest that they were made more like other healers than anything, I guess.

[caladein]

I generally find what they've done with Hunter and Shaman to be improvements.  I do lose out on some interesting gameplay on my Hunter with the simplified buff landscape, but I get it back with being able to choose any spec for any pet family which is fun as non-Turtle/Beetle Tenacity pets are pretty worthless as a PvE Hunter right now.

[Fordel]

That IS the alternative for me, just playing a monk. Since it's a new class, I have no pre-existing mental blocks about NO THIS IS HOW WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT WHY IS IT DIFFERENT for that class.

Thinking about it, for some classes it really already happened. I barely touched my druid in Cataclysm because the healing changes for THAT class made me sad. Although that was more of a protest that they were made more like other healers than anything, I guess.

Yea, I don't have a god damn clue what they did to my moonkin.

[Lantyssa]

It's sort of funny, because I actually approve of the bulk of the changes (I like the new talent system, for example), but I am apparently too old and set in my ways to relearn, say, the warrior utterly. I have some sort of mental block that goes NO I REFUSE TO RELEARN SOMETHING I ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO WELL and I go play something else. :P

But... you like Paladins.  Haven't you done that every expansion anyways?

[Sjofn]

Nope. Yes, they changed paladins (well, not holy paladins, which was one of my giant complaints about the class by WotLK and why we BROKE UP) pretty much every expansion, but never so drastically I had literally no idea what was going on it with any more. The biggest change prior to all this was holy power, and while it did make ret paladins sort of "wait, what?" and way too RNG-y for my tastes, I was never really a ret paladin past vanilla, so it wasn't a big deal.

I stopped playing my hunter in Cataclysm because I didn't want to relearn that class, though. Even though I thought the changes to it were really good for it.

Honestly, half of it is I have a gazillion passives that Do Shit that I'm never going to remember, because I didn't specifically choose them, and because I didn't level up and gain it, it's not going to go into my head as something I will have to give a shit about. I also hate rebuilding my bars, and now that some things only exist in Spec A or Spec B that everyone already had (which again, is okay in the big picture), I get to drive myself mad trying to figure out "Okay, is this thing I used to use gone from this spec? Or maybe this class? Shit, where is it? Am I just not seeing it?" And fuck that!

[Merusk]

I stopped playing my hunter in WOTLK because I couldn't get used to the new systems then so I get what you're saying.  However, now I've gone back to it and found it's fantastic and fun again. Funny how that works.

I played with a Prot pally on the beta server and it doesn't seem that much different from now.  Is ret really that different? (Never enjoyed ret)

[Sjofn]

I have no idea what Ret is like now and I have no intention of finding out, 'cause Ret has never been my thing. :P