Mists of Pandaria

[Paelos]

Blizzard has no idea how to balance a hybrid class, that's why people that play druids and pallys always have something to complain about when xpacs hit.

[Simond]

And you know MoP will be silly all the time, because...?

I've played WoW.

Part of why I quit is because I played the goblin starting area, and the jokes got old after the first 5 minutes. In thinking on it further, I wouldn't say it's pandas or pokemons or anything specific like that. It's that Blizzard has, in general, lost their sense of humor.

Ah, so you just hate fun. Gotcha.

Yeah, part of the issue in Cataclysm at cap for a lot of my friends (it seemed like, anyway) was how long the dungeons could be, and they were long because of filler, for the most part.

I hate how long the heroic dungeons are in Cata. Give me back the 10 to 20 minute dungeons of Wrath any day. If I want to run for longer, I can just do two of them.

That is, apparently, part of the plan.

[Miasma]

People who enjoy wow as it is, most likely don't give two shits about pandas.

You have not been reading the WoW forums since this was announced, people who enjoy wow are raging all over the place.  Plus there is some lgbt thing and Samwise's terrible musician buddy said some bad things and Metzen is busy drawing up plans to destroy another alliance outpost.

It's pretty poisonous over there and has been ever since blizzcon started.  Edit: You know, more poisonous than normal.

[Ingmar]

It's pretty poisonous over there and has been ever since blizzcon started.

It's been pretty poisonous since open beta started in 2004.

[Miasma]

Hah, you beat my edit.

[Merusk]

The LGBT thing should just show you it's trollers looking to troll.  At the lore Q&A one woman.. ONE.. stepped up and asked "Why are there no LBGT characters?"  The response was essentially, "We haven't had a character that felt like that was a necessary part of their arc. We're not actively looking to exclude people, but it hasn't made sense in the narrative to this point."

That was the end of it.  The forums, in their usual classy way, decided this was a horde of LGBT people looking to push their agenda and gay-up WoW and damnit we can't have that!   The furor would have been less if they'd said "Why aren't there any black characters?" but it still would have been there.. only it would have been deleted PDQ.

I don't know about the musician thing, I must've missed it.  Ditto the Metzen destroying another outpost thing... but lots of people were up-in-arms when he came into the opening ceremony wearing an Alliance hoodie, so there you go.  The paradigm of all internet cesspools turns something nondescript into a bitching point.. not news.

[Simond]

I think that the 'musician thing' was the lead, um, singer (growler? shouter?) of Cannibal Corpse trash-talking the Alliance. Which, you know, he's been doing for a while: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_Lv0r-l4c

Outpost-destruction? Hope nobody is bound in Theramore. 

[SurfD]

The musician thing came from one of the bands that played (which is, from what i can tell, a Horde themed Undead band or something) where the Lead singer of the band decided to do a bit of "heavy metal Horde Role Play" during the performance, and wsa cussing at the the alliance, and saying Horde rule, alliance suck (though appearently with a fairly heafty dose of foul language).   Outraged alliance fanboys decided that this must represent Blizzards IRL opinion of Alliance Players or some stupid shit like that and got all huffy on the fourms.

[Merusk]

Oh, right.  Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftains.   I can't imagine why they'd have a song trashing the Alliance.. Tauren are so pro-Alliance, y'know. 

And as Simond pointed out, that was the lead singer for CC.  Boy is he going to miss all those Alliance dollars when they do their next album! 

[Amaron]

The entire creation myth of the game is that all the species started out as robots created by the Titans.   That started in vanilla with Uldaman.   Pandaren are god damn normal compared to that.   I can understand that people feel this is more "in their face" but the game really has always been this way.

[Rokal]

Most of the current dungeons don't have that many interesting mechanics, they just have a ton of trash that took a lot of time when the dungeons were current. For example Grim Batol had a ton of brutal trash that you had to grind through, but only 4 actual bosses. Cut the trash down by 60% and you have as much good gameplay in the dungeon but only spend half as long in there.

The only dungeons that really had too much trash, imo, were SFK and DM which was due to them being remakes of long dungeons. GB had a crazy amount of trash, but if you did the dragons well it actually took less time to clear the trash than any of the other level 85 dungeons.

I thought the boss mechanics were interesting for 5-mans in Cata, but that's what I suspect will be changing. We won't see anything like Ozruk in MoP. Dangerous mechanics will be gone because they 'set groups up to fail'.

[Ingmar]

There's only like a 20% chance that the dragons get done well in GB, though.

[Merusk]

It was lower than that in my experience, but I stopped running dungeons 7 or 8 months ago.  PVP for gear FTW.

[Rokal]

Cata dungeons obviously worked much better with organized groups of friends rather than complete strangers.

MoP dungeons might work poorly for organized groups (boring transparent loot treadmill), but they will work much better for strangers using the LFD tool.

It comes down to how much you use LFD. I sort of benefited from skipping Wrath, because I hadn't gotten used to using LFD when Cata launched. My natural behavior when I wanted to run a dungeon at 85 was "get 4 friends to run this with me". If I'd played Wrath a lot, it might have been "use LFD tool" which would have meant failure for most of my early runs.

After playing Cata since it launched, I'm now much more used to using the LFD tool for dungeons since guildies are on less with no new content to run. I'll probably be using LFD more often in MoP.

[Sjofn]

You are forgetting that some of us have friends that are absolutely terrible at the game.

[caladein]

Cata dungeons at launch were really weird because there was about a week (maybe less) of them being the best time ever and then it all went down a cliff for a while.

[Rokal]

Nah, I'm not forgetting. We have a few players in our guild that are awful, including a priest that we usually raid with. Dies to every single mechanic you can possibly die to. The difference is, there is some hope of him learning each mechanic with us. If we just got a PuG via LFD, every new player we are grouped with is another forced learning experience.

Ultimately, I'll get over the nerfed MoP dungeons because I'm that excited about Pandaren and Monks. I do hope that, if they plan to make dungeon content easy in greens at 90, they give everyone doing 'challenge mode' an even lower ilvl. You could have easy 5-mans with level 90 greens and still make challenge mode hard by giving everyone the ilvl of lvl 87 greens, for example. I suspect they won't do this, and challenge mode will instead be 'the dungeons are still easy but now there is a time limit'. Wrath dungeons with time trials would have still been shitty dungeons.

[Sjofn]

I liked Wrath dungeons better than Cataclysm ones, personally. Not just because of the time thing, either (I like heroic Deadmines a lot, for heaven't sake, and that takes forever), they just felt better to me.

[Lantyssa]

You are forgetting that some of us have friends that are absolutely terrible at the game.

My first time through Grim Batol, and I was tanking in barely cut-off gear, we one-shot the third boss.

Noobish tank, Drach was in the party, and it went off flawlessly.  Figure that one out.

[Mrbloodworth]

lol @ Corpsegrinder.

[Sjofn]

You are forgetting that some of us have friends that are absolutely terrible at the game.

My first time through Grim Batol, and I was tanking in barely cut-off gear, we one-shot the third boss.

Noobish tank, Drach was in the party, and it went off flawlessly.  Figure that one out.

Pics or it didn't happen!

[Ingmar]

You are forgetting that some of us have friends that are absolutely terrible at the game.

My first time through Grim Batol, and I was tanking in barely cut-off gear, we one-shot the third boss.

Noobish tank, Drach was in the party, and it went off flawlessly.  Figure that one out.

Drach died though right? Twice?

EDIT: Also... was it heroic or normal? That one has an 85 normal. You can see how my brain cannot handle the idea of Drach not dying on that fight on heroic.

[Nevermore]

You are forgetting that some of us have friends that are absolutely terrible at the game.

My first time through Grim Batol, and I was tanking in barely cut-off gear, we one-shot the third boss.

Noobish tank, Drach was in the party, and it went off flawlessly.  Figure that one out.

Drach died though right? Twice?

Which trash pull did he accidentally hit hero on?

[Sjofn]

Ahh, heroism on trash is probably my favorite Classic Drachmir Move, although dying twice is a good one too. I've heard the draenei dude death sound so often, they are linked together forever. If I'm killing draenei dude NPCs, when they die, I think of Drachmir.

My least favorite, of course, is that fucking earth elemental.

[Ingmar]

Well you'll be happy to know that his wolves have their taunt turned on again too, and he doesn't seem to know how to turn it off!

[Lakov_Sanite]

Grim batol elemental death gave me a grand mal seizure.


That's not a joke.

[Ingmar]

Yeah I remember reading about some problems with the death animation on those things along those lines, I believe they changed them eventually?

[Lakov_Sanite]

Yeah I remember reading about some problems with the death animation on those things along those lines, I believe they changed them eventually?

Not sure, can't say I ever went back in there.

[Lantyssa]

Drach died though right? Twice?

EDIT: Also... was it heroic or normal? That one has an 85 normal. You can see how my brain cannot handle the idea of Drach not dying on that fight on heroic.

Heroic.  No deaths (on that fight).  I'm not kidding when I say flawless.

Though I think it was the Slap "you have no right to beat this fight so easily" in the Face thing kicking in.

[Ingmar]

Fight must have been bugged. 

[Shrike]

Initially, I wasn't thrilled with the whole panda-people concept. My first thought was, hey, wasn't this a joke thing way back when? Then I remembered they were (briefly) in WCIII and I really did like the art in Pandaland. Kinda tired of frozen wastelands and nuclear hells from the last two expansions, so a nice quiet bamboo forest to frolic in is a welcome change.

Now the monk thing did give me pause. I have a real hate-on for the whole Dragonball-Z "it's over 9000!" thing. Serious hate. Don't like monks/marital artists/whatever in games. Then I watched the live feed and saw...draenei monks. Heavenly lights shown, choirs of angels sang, and life was good as I contemplated putting a cloven hoof through some orc's face. Yeah, I'm down with the monk now.

[Azazel]

I think that the 'musician thing' was the lead, um, singer (growler? shouter?) of Cannibal Corpse trash-talking the Alliance. Which, you know, he's been doing for a while: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_Lv0r-l4c

Outpost-destruction? Hope nobody is bound in Theramore. 

That was 

[Mrbloodworth]

Huh, I didn't know they added him as an NPC.

"We need to get these tanks back up and runnin'! They ain't gonna fix themselves. Mobu's gonna be the one to handle that stuff. Talk to him and see what he needs. Maybe you can shut him up before he finally drives me into a berserker frenzy and I cleave his little gnome-sized frame in two!

[sinij]

By comparison Cata thread was 30 pages long at this point. I am not sure if you can judge interest by thread length, but there is A LOT LESS excitement about pandas as far as f13 posting goes.

[kaid]

I am not so sure if its less interest in MoP or the feeling of being a bit burned by Cata making people a bit gunshy this time around. I still find it sad I managed in my tiny family guild to do all the wrath content except killing LK and at least we got to him a bunch.

In cata we were able to do none of the raid content which eventually blew my guild up. I know its been nerfed pretty hard but the brick wall of difficulty it initially had was so dissapointing. In wrath nax let us get people who normally never raided to enjoy raiding even if they were not the most skilled people. Now its know the entire fight before you even try it and if anybody does anything wrong even for a split second you fail.

Seriously normal mode should not be that hard it should be causual pugable heroic mode is where the difficulty should be so the eppeeners can have their dick waving contests.