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World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Launches On September 25
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.
If you call in for tech support on September 25th and the hold time is more than one hour, you can bet your arse many nerds have taken the day off to play this.
Honestly, the technology underpinning WoW is just too dated these days. Players expect more - Tera is a perfect example of that, a combat system where you actually have to hit your opponent (yes, some of it is simulated, but it feels real.
I have 5 level 80+ chars on WoW, but haven't played the game in at least a year, maybe two, and don't plan to go back to it, even for Pandas.
What little gaming time I have, I spend on games that are trying to innovate.
If Blizzard wants me back, they need to do something other than yet another expansion money grab. They need to do something new, innovative and wonderful. Sadly, I don't see much of this coming from them any more. I played Diablo 3 for about 3 hours before I got bored and switched back to Tera.
Hey Blizzard, how about this: World of Starcraft. And make it awesome, using latest technology - not an groaning engine that's 10 years old.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
The level-cap was quite a challenge in Everquest. Which is also _the_ hardcore PvE MMO. Maybe start playing that one, it is free2play now. Vanilla WoW is child's play compared to EQ.
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.
It just goes on, and on, and on, and on....
MMO's, tic-tac-toe, and thermonuclear war...they're the games you can NEVER WIN.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
If you wanted a non-dumbed down WoW you would be playing Everquest. WoW has ALWAYS been dumbed down. It was Everquest-light and it sold like hot-cakes to the twelve year olds that couldn't handle WoW or were spit out by the community.
Hence you got Barren-chat, a type of chat that would have had the ban-hammers flying in any hardcore game but is the staple for WoW.
Complaining that WoW got dumbed down is like complaining teletubbies lost their hard satirical edge. That Full House lost its black humor. That reality TV became boring.
It might very well be true on an absolute scale but when you are the bottom, digging down doesn't really make a difference anymore. When you are last in a race, stopping won't make you drop any more places.
Go play a real game. Here is a hint, if you encounter barren-chat, that ain't a real game. Real games have a population of 200k, 300k at most. WoW has 10 million.
And people wonder why democracy sucks.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.