What if MoP?

[Darksoldierr]

I think question is rather what if MoP would have come after Cata or WoD after Cata then MoP

[Sylreick]

It's not necessarily Pandaren alone that was the problem. It was that goofy/funny beer-loving jolliness just overshadowed anything that might have been serious in it. Even for the serious things, you had Winnie the Pooh narrating it. Replacing them with human/trolls wouldn't do much except hurt the theme and at that point it would have been better to go with another story entirely.

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Yeah I have to laugh at those who thought having Pandaren as a playable race as childish, speaks volumes about how insecure they are.. And that if there was a Disney movie involving cows oh hang on there was it was called Home on The Range http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299172/ and surprise, surprise it was released before WoW came into being, and yet no one says a peep about the Tauren being seen as childish..

Except that the Tauren are based on a pretty well known mythological creature. The minotaur. Pandaren have no equal there. Also, Tauren can be menacing/intimidating. The most a Pandaren can get is arrogant/prideful, there was not a single menacing nor intimidating Pandaren amongst them.

[grexly75]

Except that the Tauren are based on a pretty well known mythological creature. The minotaur. Pandaren have no equal there. Also, Tauren can be menacing/intimidating. The most a Pandaren can get is arrogant/prideful, there was not a single menacing nor intimidating Pandaren amongst them.

The funny thing though is that a lot of people point toward a movie for tarnishing their outlook on the Pandaren, I mean if Kungfu Panda had never been made would those people still think the same way about them..

[Sylreick]

The funny thing though is that a lot of people point toward a movie for tarnishing their outlook on the Pandaren, I mean if Kungfu Panda had never been made would those people still think the same way about them..

I'd still think of them as that April fools joke, which was the first I had ever heard of Pandaren (didn't bother with the RTS Warcrafts, not a big fan of RTS games, and don't read the books either).

But the movie is just the easiest target of the bunch. The freshest in the minds of the audience.

[Stormspark]

I didn't dislike MOP because of pandas, or because of the theme. I disliked it because of the massive lack of 5-man content and the extreme focus on LFR's, scenarios, and daily quests to "gear up" for normal raids rather than just being able to do 5-man heroics for it like in WOD. My dislike of MOP had NOTHING to do with pandas. I really enjoyed the levelling and the atmosphere, and Pandaria itself was an amazing place.

[yjmark]

And what I find funny and very ironic is that now that we have only one daily.. People are now moaning about having nothing to do, I mean once you are relatively well geared there is no reason to do the daily dungeon since getting garrison resources is easy.. And that you can bypass dungeons altogether and go straight into LFR and if not for the ring quest requiring 3 of those dungeons well you can guess the rest..

Agreed. Classic Blizz swinging the pendulum too far. They really need to learn moderation...lol.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

MoP would have felt empty without the Pandaren.

[Louisa Bannon]

MoP was basically everything an Emerald Dream expansion might have been reworked as an April Fool's theme.

See: http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/01/17/mi...eam-expansion/

I don't care about the lore inconsistencies because WoW lore has always been a dumbed down pastiche of Norse, Welsh, Irish, etc mythology crapped over with endless pop culture references.

[Cthulhu 2020]

What ruined it for me was the sillyness. I mean, dungeons about killing rabbits and monkeys? The pandas only added to the sillyness.

DungeonS? There was more than 1? The "silliest" part of pandaria was valley of the four winds, including its dungeon. The rest of the expansion was really really serious.

Anyone who says that pandas and/or the story of pandaria was very silly I guess didn't play past valley?

[SL1200]

A lot of things made mop bad, not just the pandrian. The entire theme wasn't warcraft, at least not the warcraft I love.

[Backjauer]

DungeonS? There was more than 1? The "silliest" part of pandaria was valley of the four winds, including its dungeon. The rest of the expansion was really really serious.

Anyone who says that pandas and/or the story of pandaria was very silly I guess didn't play past valley?

I agree with this statement totally.

even the whole "every Panda is a drunk" thing some people are claiming is incorrect, the Shadopan seemed quite focused. The general populace might be a bunch of drunks, but they are civilians, it's their culture.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Nothing ruined MoP. It added more content in single patches than entire expansions added previously.
Some of the biggest changes the game has ever seen came with it, including CMs, Pet Battles, "Timeless Isle" concept, Connected Realms, and Flex raiding.

If people didn't like it, its because they didn't appreciate the asian theme and art associated with it.
Or they are a casual who complains that they have "nothing to do" when they have 8k achievement points and are 0/15 any difficulty.

[Kikiyodragon]

Nothing ruined MoP. It added more content in single patches than entire expansions added previously.
Some of the biggest changes the game has ever seen came with it, including CMs, Pet Battles, "Timeless Isle" concept, Connected Realms, and Flex raiding.

If people didn't like it, its because they didn't appreciate the asian theme and art associated with it.
Or they are a casual who complains that they have "nothing to do" when they have 8k achievement points and are 0/15 any difficulty.

Or "sooperhardcore" or too edgy/"mature" for "kung foo pandaz." I agree with your statement, and many others in this thread. It was a great expansion.

My only issue with the expansion was with the dungeons. Three remade and six new, with little varying theme between them, and no additional dungeons throughout the expansion.

[Solarnova]

What ruined it for me was the sillyness. I mean, dungeons about killing rabbits and monkeys? The pandas only added to the sillyness.

That's the same thing that destroyed Icecrown Citadel immersion for me, too much comic relief in what is supposed to be a darker and more sinister place than Naxxramas.

[Cthulhu 2020]

The general populace was drunk a lot, but brewing was their culture, being zen was their culture, because if they weren't zen and happy they'd bring about the fucking sha, which kill and murder people. On Pandaria, your negative emotions could literally take form and kill you.

So if you think drunk pandas are silly, you probably didn't understand that part.

The Shado-pan are an elite group of ninja warriors. If you think kung fu panda is silly and thus elite ninja panda warriors are a joke, you clearly didn't know that ninja panda warriors were in Warcraft 3 as established lore five years before the kung fu panda movies even came out. Panda-men were established long before silly bird-men, silly wolf-men, and silly mechanical gnomes were ever a part of the warcraft universe.

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That's the same thing that destroyed Icecrown Citadel immersion for me, too much comic relief in what is supposed to be a darker and more sinister place than Naxxramas.

Wait, ICC had comic relief? I guess you're talking about putricide. I find happy go lucky psychopathic killers even more evil than their GRRR GRRR GRRR I'M SERIOUS counterparts. See: Kill la Kill's grand seamstress, Nui. Those characters are the most evil thing to ever happen.

[Famine]

What ruined it for me was the sillyness. I mean, dungeons about killing rabbits and monkeys? The pandas only added to the sillyness.

This is extremely fair, imo.

Right from the very start (trailer release) you could see that a new style of 'humor' was being introduced to the game. Some, absolutely, welcomed this. Personally, I relate it to 'jar jar binks' - both Star Wars and WoW had elements of comic relief. But Jar Jar and some of the crap in MoP just took it waaaaaay too far.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It wasn't so much that it was Chinese or pandas as it was that after Cata, we were so hyped for a full on Alliance-Horde war expansion that the detour we got with... fighting vermin in fields and manifestations of pride broke our spirits. Didn't help that the expansion immediately afterwards had the two factions sign a peace agreement.

[Mustardisbad]

I loved the theme of MoP, music, all the new npcs, humor, and the awesome looking raid bosses. However there was something about the gameplay that just seemed boring.

Chinese themed trolls and humans wouldnt have worked as well as the pandaren. There were many people who wanted to see the pandaren and, to me atleast, it was lovely to see their culture after finding hints of them throughout WoW and playing as Chen in Warcraft 3.

[Deleted]

I think the biggest problem with MoP, and I generally really liked it and I love Pandaren, is that it felt like it wasn't the logical next step after Cataclysm. We have all these open plotpoints from Cataclysm - Naga, Neptulon, Azshara, Emerald Dream, N'Zoth, other Old Gods, Titans - yet the two expansions after are about pandas and orcs in an alternate timeline. Kinda feels like we've drifted away from what people wanted to see next and from what logically should've been the next chapter of WoW. Just fucking give us the Dark Below already.