World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[Minecrawler]

A little bit of artstyle clash in the new questline, going between a closeup shot of Khadgar's more realistic face to Alleria's cartoony face.

Cartoony or not, this is the last time we see her old Legion design, before she becomes this:

Might as well be dead.

Since it did continue, though, there were two jumping off points for the expansions where it made sense to end it. The defeat of Arthas and the defeat of the Burning Legion. There was just nowhere to go after those, and anything that came afterwards would just be underwhelming - and it was.

Well, it did end with Legion. It was a nice conclusion of the story.

But not for blizzard, who has just found another continent with a warhammer empire ripoff on the other side of Azeroth!
We're so lucky to stumble upon "faerin lothar" just in time for her to "develop as a character" and then replace their zealot emperor of light, whom we will inevitably kill off.
She already wuz almost kangs, after all.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Lasts until August 19, 2024.

Pretty packed.

Turned that Horde base into pink mist.

 

[Caim]

Bruh this looks worse than the Warlords of Draenor launch.

And the Warlords of Draenor launch was FUCKED.

 

[Elttharion]

Bruh this looks worse than the Warlords of Draenor launch.

And the Warlords of Draenor launch was FUCKED.

I took time off from work for the WOD launch . At least my guild was still active at the time, we suffered together.

 

[Dr1f7]

xD

 

[frajaq]

I joined some hours later and it has been pretty smooth so far. Kinda interesting gearing system, and you can get some nice transmogs pretty cheap, Reins of the Onyx Serpent isnt absurdly expensive either

 

[Crayll]

Trying it out, my main problems with regular retail are still here unfortunately. Feels like quests are just busywork between you and everything else rather than part of the fun. Dragonriding is neat, but again makes the world feel super small.
That said I do like the setting much more than I expected, never played the original MoP. The pandas were offputting at first but I actually don't mind it too much, and the feeling of coming into a new foreign land and establishing your faction is great. Music is real nice too.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I am level 32. I have finished the Jade Forest, and I am 1/3rd of the way through Valley of the Four Winds. Just reached Mudmug's place. Haven't done any dungeon or raid spam yet. I am reminded of why I loved MoP. The writing and the voice acting still holds up. I like Rell Nightwind's squad (shame most of them are dead today). 12 years later and I relate a lot more to Chen Stormstout now.

So far my only real disappointment is that PvP is turned off, which is a shame given how about half of the story is about the faction war. It would have been nice if - like Season of Discovery - they had added some mass scale PvP wars like Ashenvale to take part in.

It's fun being able to play around with cool powers, like having Heroic Leap on a Death Knight (on a 30 second cooldown), and using the four frost themed gems. The Brittle gem which causes enemies you kill to explode into frost shards that gorge into nearby enemies and can cause a chain reaction of deaths if you pull a lot of mobs is really fun. I also like being able to use the prismatic gems to stack mastery to make my button presses feel really impactful.

Music is real nice too.

Jeremy Soule did some of the music for MoP. The obvious giveaway are the horns.

 

[Habichtswalder]

I think MoP is genuinely a great expansion. I'm not playing the remix right now but I leveled a character up in MoP-Chromietime a few months ago. And through that I was reminded that the leveling experience and storytelling is quite joyful.

I remember when MoP was announced more than a decade ago I was unhappy because I didn't want to play as a panda and thought the entire race was too silly for WoW. I'm also not really a fan of the old chinese culture. But man, they proved me wrong. In retrospective it was a very good expansion and still holds up today.

 

[J1M]

Every zone is China with a farm on fire. They were too similar. Like a continent with 5 Ashenvales.

But also Timeless Isle was the best zone. Wouldn't be dangerous enough now to have the same feel.

 

[janior]

pandas are not warcraft

 

[Abesolus]

pandas are not warcraft

Shit's over we need to move on. im too old and bald to care at this point...

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I hit level 54 last night. Finished the Valley of the Four Winds questline and I am now half way through Krassarang Wilds.

Every zone is China

Pandaria does not feel like China. I'm not talking about superficial aspects conveyed to us in Hollywood movies like paddyfields or Chinese mountains, or Asian dragons, or schlocky fortune cookie wisdom, or Hollywood Ying-Yang, etc. I mean the actual place.

When I think of historical China, I think of a humongous, powerful state apparatus. Of an emperor in his massive palace, of tax collectors filling out forms at their desk, scholars overseeing examinations, ministers overseeing huge civil construction projects like the Great Canal, etc. I think of warring clans that conquer and enslave each other and genocides. I think of provincial lords levying massive armies. I think of master strategists like Zhuge Liang who is able to use reverse psychology to win a hopelessly outnumbered battle by throwing open the doors to his undermanned fort and making his enemy too fearful to walk in and claim. And so on.

In the actual Pandaria we get, there is no emperor. There is no state apparatus. The bureaucracy is completely absent. There are no tax collectors. There are no ministers. Oh yes, there is "scholar" in the form of the Lorewalkers, but they are local hobbyists rather than a social class of administrators of the bureaucracy. The only construction project we see is Yu'lon's new statue, but we only see up to 30 people working on it, and another 15 people in the mines. Who is maintaining all of the roads and bridges and dams we see in the Jade Forest? Do local mayors and elders pressure their townsfolk to help out and repair when needed? Where are the Pandaren fortresses? Where are their provincial lords and armies? Where are the several different dynasties of emperors? Where are the different warring clans? At Blizzcon 2011, we found out that there were going to be four different clans of Pandaren (Tiger, Ox, Crane, Serpent), but this didn't make it to the live game. We only see two Pandaren militaries: the Golden Lotus (who amounted to a couple dozen NPCs, most of whom were killed offscreen in patch 5.4), and the Shado-Pan, which comes across as a small volunteer order that is mostly absent from the towns and cities and only shows up to fight the invading Yaungol and Mantid.

If anything, it feels like the Mogu are the Chinese. They're the ones with the powerful emperor overseeing massive civil construction projects like the wall, his two palaces, the vaults, the two statues, etc. It's the Mogu who have all of the legendary warriors and strategists. It's the Mogu who have different dynasties. It's the Mogu who have different warring clans. It's the Mogu who have armies, from... where? We don't actually visit any Mogu towns or cities in MoP. Where are all of these clans and armies coming from?

 

[J1M]

"The zones are too visually similar."

"Well, actually, we live in a society..."

 

[Caim]

I hit level 54 last night. Finished the Valley of the Four Winds questline and I am now half way through Krassarang Wilds.

Every zone is China

Pandaria does not feel like China. I'm not talking about superficial aspects conveyed to us in Hollywood movies like paddyfields or Chinese mountains, or Asian dragons, or schlocky fortune cookie wisdom, or Hollywood Ying-Yang, etc. I mean the actual place.

When I think of historical China, I think of a humongous, powerful state apparatus. Of an emperor in his massive palace, of tax collectors filling out forms at their desk, scholars overseeing examinations, ministers overseeing huge civil construction projects like the Great Canal, etc. I think of warring clans that conquer and enslave each other and genocides. I think of provincial lords levying massive armies. I think of master strategists like Zhuge Liang who is able to use reverse psychology to win a hopelessly outnumbered battle by throwing open the doors to his undermanned fort and making his enemy too fearful to walk in and claim. And so on.

In the actual Pandaria we get, there is no emperor. There is no state apparatus. The bureaucracy is completely absent. There are no tax collectors. There are no ministers. Oh yes, there is "scholar" in the form of the Lorewalkers, but they are local hobbyists rather than a social class of administrators of the bureaucracy. The only construction project we see is Yu'lon's new statue, but we only see up to 30 people working on it, and another 15 people in the mines. Who is maintaining all of the roads and bridges and dams we see in the Jade Forest? Do local mayors and elders pressure their townsfolk to help out and repair when needed? Where are the Pandaren fortresses? Where are their provincial lords and armies? Where are the several different dynasties of emperors? Where are the different warring clans? At Blizzcon 2011, we found out that there were going to be four different clans of Pandaren (Tiger, Ox, Crane, Serpent), but this didn't make it to the live game. We only see two Pandaren militaries: the Golden Lotus (who amounted to a couple dozen NPCs, most of whom were killed offscreen in patch 5.4), and the Shado-Pan, which comes across as a small volunteer order that is mostly absent from the towns and cities and only shows up to fight the invading Yaungol and Mantid.

If anything, it feels like the Mogu are the Chinese. They're the ones with the powerful emperor overseeing massive civil construction projects like the wall, his two palaces, the vaults, the two statues, etc. It's the Mogu who have all of the legendary warriors and strategists. It's the Mogu who have different dynasties. It's the Mogu who have different warring clans. It's the Mogu who have armies, from... where? We don't actually visit any Mogu towns or cities in MoP. Where are all of these clans and armies coming from?

Have some fun with it. Have there be a fort that is severely undermanned because famine cause the Pandaren to literally start eating each other. Now there's a Sha-infected lardass of the Pandaren as a world boss who ate all the other ones. Or have a Pandaren version of the Taiping Rebellion where a Pandaren wacko hears about the Light from a missionary, understands only half of it and is now calling himself the brother of the Light, causing a massive war that has a very confused Alliance having to deal with a tidal wave of panda bears yelling "For the Light!" while Garrosh watches and does the "Buzz look an alien!" laugh from Toy Story.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

The big appeal is the new “Cloak of Infinite Potential”. It’s a cloak that scales infinitely, players will receive “Threads” that empower the cloak with stats, allowing players to grind out to never-before-seen levels of power.



However, an old tactic popped up that’s practically derailed the event. On the Timeless Isle zone, there are frogs that spawn infinitely. Unlike most spawn points, the frogs spawn instantly after being killed, allowing coordinated teams to endlessly kill frogs without a break.

These frogs (like all mobs in the Remix event) were dropping Bronze coins, Threads, and even Lesser Charms of Good Fortune. The charms became the sticking point, as for every 10 collected allows players to fulfill a repeatable quest for the game’s factions, and each turn-in awards a small chest for the event which comes with Threads, gems, and other event-specific goodies.

Players farmed these frogs until their stats were ENORMOUS and some players could almost one-shot heroic raids. Most notably, one player had over 7 million HP (for reference, most tanks in Retail WoW have around 1.2-2 million).

lol Blizzard.

 

[Caim]

The big appeal is the new “Cloak of Infinite Potential”. It’s a cloak that scales infinitely, players will receive “Threads” that empower the cloak with stats, allowing players to grind out to never-before-seen levels of power.



However, an old tactic popped up that’s practically derailed the event. On the Timeless Isle zone, there are frogs that spawn infinitely. Unlike most spawn points, the frogs spawn instantly after being killed, allowing coordinated teams to endlessly kill frogs without a break.

These frogs (like all mobs in the Remix event) were dropping Bronze coins, Threads, and even Lesser Charms of Good Fortune. The charms became the sticking point, as for every 10 collected allows players to fulfill a repeatable quest for the game’s factions, and each turn-in awards a small chest for the event which comes with Threads, gems, and other event-specific goodies.

Players farmed these frogs until their stats were ENORMOUS and some players could almost one-shot heroic raids. Most notably, one player had over 7 million HP (for reference, most tanks in Retail WoW have around 1.2-2 million).

lol Blizzard.

Seen a clip of someone going up against Garrosh, the final boss of the final raid of Mists of Pandaria.

The second-highest DPS in that rad was a bit over 420k. The highest was 4.4 MILLION. That's more than the rest of the raid combined. Garrosh lost percentages of his health at about the rate you can count out loud. That is VERY FAST for... well, the final boss of the entire expansion.

 

[J1M]

100% predictable. Players farmed those same frogs when MoP was around the first time for gear upgrade currency. The fact that they didn't check this shows that nobody on the remix team played the game back then.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

100% predictable. Players farmed those same frogs when MoP was around the first time for gear upgrade currency. The fact that they didn't check this shows that nobody on the remix team played the game back then.

Frogs was for people too lazy to do the legendary questline to get their cloaks to jump across the bridge and fight the elites inside the Ordon Sanctuary, which was the final area of the expansion and the hardest area outside of raids.

 

[frajaq]

Already got my Onyx Serpent mount from this event, plus some weapon sets, dont care much about the rest honestly

still have to lvl up my Warrior using the bonus on the cloak, going pretty fast

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I reached level 64 last night (after having not played since I reached 54 on Friday). I finished VotE and Krassarang Wilds and I am now half way through Kun-Lai Summit.


The fun in the MoP levelling questline is frontloaded. Jade Forest starts off as very fun with you machinegunning the Horde, and then meeting Lorewalker Cho. Cho's voice actor Jim Cummings really carries the story here. The Alliance side quest where you drink the dreambrew and see Anduin and Garrosh also hypes up the events you are participating in as being enormous. The missions where you play as Rell Nightwind's squad were funny. There is also a sidequestline at Tian Monastery where you get introduced to the masters at a banquet, which was pretty funny. The quest with the evil Pandaren witch was neat. The designs of the Sha are good, they look like hug menacing gooey monsters. Environmentally, I like the Jade Forest with the red painted houses on top of the chinese hills connected by bridges, and the bamboo forests, but it would be nice to see this zone redesigned on a much larger scale like the Dragon Isles zone, with much taller Chinese hills. I would have liked to have seen the Jinyu town fleshed out more.

The Valley of the Four Winds storyline is overall fun as you are tagging along with Chen Stormstout and Lili and seeing the humorous situations they get involved in. Mudmug was funny. There was also that funny rape analogy quest about the Pandaren girl who was abducted by the rabbits who forced her to feed them carrots and they're going "OH YEAH!" and she's acting as if it's a traumatizing experience. The story lost my interest after I left Chen and Li Li behind to go to Stoneplow village. The 90s Asian martial arts movie training sequence was neat. Environmentally, I like the farmland to the North of Halfhill with the fields of humongous crops. The river/lake area to north is also okay. The rest of the zone is rather boring, empty flatlands and hills. I did like the informational segments with the place that kept different varieties of grain and the silk moth farm.

Krassarang Wilds I really like visually. It too could benefit from being redesigned as a Dragonflight zone with the jungle trees being Emerald Dream sized so you could better fly through them. The zone also has some of the most beautiful music which I listened to a lot when doing fishing dailies way back when. Unfortunately, the story was almost entirely boring. I didn't get invested until I reached the Temple of Chi-Ji and was fighting with Anduin against a big Sha. Curiously we don't see the Thai or Indian/Mughal/whatever architecture seen in Chi-Ji's temple anywhere else in Pandaria. I saluted when that Night Elf guy drank the vial (of what I presume to be dark animus) and sacrificed himself to bring back his daughter. I was surprised that the Anglers Wharf did not have an inn to set your hearthstone too.

Going back to Stoneplow village, with the NPCs from both VotFE and Krassarang showing up for the big battle there was pretty fun.

Kun-Lai I kinda like visually, with the reddish grasslands flanked by grey and white snowy mountains and blue sky. I don't like it as much as the Jade Forest or Krassarang. The story starts off as pretty meh. I got a little bit more invested when Admiral Taylor began trying to build a base and build an army of Alliance Pandaren, but you don't expand Westwind Rest and the army never does anything. After that you're doing boring stuff for Grummles.

I have tallied up the bronze I need for the stuff I want:

2200 kite recolor
2200 x 6 cranes
4400 x 2 juggernaut recolors
4400 x 4 skyscreamer recolors
38500 Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent
38500 Thundering Onyx Cloud Serpent
38500 Iron Juggernaut
3000 DH weapon
3000 Monk weapon
3000 Paladin weapon
3000 warrior weapon
4000 DH armor
4000 mage armor
4000 monk armor
4000 shaman armor
5000 raid tot cloth armor
5000 raid tot leather armor
5000 raid SoO cloth armor
5000 raid SoO rogue armor
8000 Garrosh heirloom spear

= 221,200 bronze total

I earned 6k bronze in 1 hour of questing, so I need to do about 37 hours of questing to get the bronze I need. Unfortunately I've been spending all of my bronze on buying prismatic gems (trying to jack up my crit, mastery, and stamina as much as possible), and then I am going to have to spend my bronze upgrading my ilevel. I would like to kill Garrosh on mythic for the new "Paragon of the Mists" title. Might become my new favorite title, replacing Legend of Pandaria. I like "Paragon" more than "Legend", and "Mists" is a more creative way to refer to my favorite expansion and continent than the straight up noun "Pandaria". It's also a prestigious limited time title. So it's Legend of Pandaria but just better. Maybe I will keep Legend on my retail paladin main and Paragon on my new Timerunner character. Anyway, it's going to be a long time before I can start using the bronze I earn for buying cosmetics.



EDIT:

One thing I forgot to say about Remix is that I am enjoying playing with the four Frost themed tinker gems (Brittle where killing an enemy makes them exploded into lots of ice shards upon death, that feels really impactful. The Frost shield also looks cool. Seeing hailstorms appear is also cool, Etc). They make my Frost Death Knight feel more Frosty, and makes up for how lackluster DK animations usually feel. It would be nice if these powers would carry over into retail.

 

[frajaq]

holy shit you're actually gonna play this a lot

just finished lvling my alt Warrior to 70 (it went super super fast with all the bonuses), and bought everything I wanted. Now I might go back to retail and try to learn how to learn Discipline on my Priest, there's still time to kill before the JRPGs I want to play come in June/July

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I now have the two rings and the two trinkets. PUGed every normal raid except ToT, which I will do tomorrow, and then I will have the necklace. I am currently ilevel 354 (I have a full set of blues which have been upgraded to 402/388). So far normal difficulty raids have been just as easy as LFR. The boss doesn't live long enough for the mechanics to matter. Once I finish ToT normal and get the neck I'm going to start pushing heroic to get more bronze for ilevel upgrades and to get purples for more stats. Once I have a full set of purples then it seems like the thing to do is to attempt mythic SoO and see whether or not maxxing out ilevel is even necessary.

 

[Dr1f7]

"see, this button does 100 damage. now, THIS button does 102 damage.. this one does 95 and this one does 30 damage per second for 3 seconds! This button increases my chance for my other buttons to do extra damage, but has a 3 minute cooldown. This button does 50 damage to all enemies in a cone and this one does 50 damage to all enemies in a circle. This button does 102 damage AND applies a debuff that increases other damage by 1%, but to just one target. this button refreshes the cooldowns of my other buttons. this button does 30 damage to an enemy and heals me for 5% of the damage that I received in the last 5 seconds. this button does 25 damage to an enemy and heals me for 7% of the damage that I received in the last 4 seconds. These two buttons share a cool down, so you really need to think strategically to decide which to use. Now, this button does 150 damage but you need to stand still for 1 second to cast it. This button makes that particular other button do 170 damage and removes the cast time! but that button has a 7 minute cooldown. This button makes me walk 2% faster for 3 seconds.

 

[mediocrepoet]

^^ This is basically why I stopped raiding. Well that and I basically hated all the hardcore raider types and realized I was paying money to spend time with people I actively disliked.

But it was like: There's an epic fight happening... maybe. I can't see shit!

You're a healer? Have fun staring at health bars while ignoring all the sparkle shit flying everywhere.

You're a dps? Have fun staring at a monster's ankle/anus. Assuming you can see anything with all the sparkle shit blasting out your eyeballs.

You're a tank? Have fun staring at a monster's nutsack. Assuming you can see anything with all the sparkle shit blasting out your eyeballs.