Mists of Pandaria Exceed Your Expectations?

[Jaylock]

I want to know honestly, do you believe that Mist of panda exceeded your expectations for an expansion?

I saw on the official forums some guy going off about how much it exceeded his expectations, with many many many people countering him and downvoting him.

For me Mist of panda was... meh. Some of the raid fights were okay, but it seemed to miss the mark on captivating me, and making me want to replay it. Also although they touted that there was "so much to do" in this expansion, i think its safe to say, scenarios, pet battles, and the dailies were not really considered content by the majority of the players.

I feel they could have used some polish in the replayability department, and making the expansion more engaging, but thats just me. Some things I liked, some I didnt.

Feel free to agree or disagree, but please lets keep the discussion civil.

/thoughts?

[melodramocracy]

I liked it more than I thought I would.

Some aspects of it annoyed me to no end, namely the amount of tween content at the start of it. The overall vibe of Pandaria also never gave me much of a sense of awe, at least not the way that certain parts of Northrend did, for example. 5 mans were terribly undertuned, as well as being somewhat uncreative in several instances

All that aside, there's a lot of good content in this expansion. How they told the story (even if you didn't enjoy it) was more effective than ever. End game began to look like something more than simply idling in town waiting to raid, which is healthy for the game. Raids overall were quite good, even if ToT is pretty overrated.

It's too bad so much is being gutted in WoD on several levels, because they're on the right path with some of their game elements.

[Zagnut]

Production values were great, much better than Cataclysm, and design was good once they realized everyone was sick of dailies. Lorewise and tonewise it was a trainwreck. Listening to apologists go "But these are DARK AND SERIOUS stories about fat cartoon pandas!" was a joke.

Especially galling was being Alliance, eating dick all through Cata, having Theramore blown up, having the blues tell us "Don't worry guys, we just needed to give you a reason for revenge!" like all that other Cata shit didn't happen, and then when MoP starts and we're supposed to go get revenge, we're subjected to having some fat sanctimonious panda tell us "DUH WAR IS BAD AND BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME AND YOU ARE BAD FOR WANTING REVENGE".

[Darsithis]

I didn't really have an expectation going into it.

Mists of Pandaria has been one of my favorite expansions so far, much better than Cata. While I enjoyed Cataclysm's initial difficulty, I didn't like the look & feel of the zones, I didn't like that most of it took place in the same continents we already knew and I didn't like that it was so nebulous. Dragon Soul was a real let down. So far in Mists, though, I've had multiple raid tiers I really liked (ToT and SoO) and a lot more emphasis on my alts.

I do have very high expectations for WoD, however, so we'll see how that goes.

[McNeil]

It was meh. I didn't like most of the zones and story at all, not to mention see'ing panda's in my face all the time. The leveling is incredibly slow and gets dull after the starting quests with Alliance/Horde. This expansion has to have my least favorite 5-man dungeons ever, the only ones I actually liked were the rehashed ones (Scholo and SM).

I'm 50/50 with the pandaren being playable, I have one of them at level 63 but I can't be bothered to level him further. The monk class... not sure if I like it, it may be a lot more fun on different specs and when your at max level.

Pet battles is a nice little feature, wasted some hours and got a collection of level 20 pets. I haven't played it in over a year now though. I never cared for challenge modes, and for scenario's only the heroic versions. I don't like scenario's except the ones after launch.

The raiding was pretty good, with my favorite raid being Throne of Thunder. I hated Terrace and HoF though, and SoO got really dull after being out for so long.

Overall its better then Cata, but still not nearly as good as TBC and WotLK.

[Gimlix]

First announcement was dislike and hate. Like Pandas? I was so mad at Blizzard, and the 50% dislike on YT trailer didn't show anything good either!
But MoP was a great expansion i just dont like the theme but content was really good!

[Stormspark]

No, I was really disappointed in the end. It was fun at first. But the fact that they turned everything into a grind and expected everyone to run LFR for gear turned me off to the expansion. I spent most of the expansion levelling alts and soloing old content. Levelling was fun, but intentionally turning everything into a grind (ie, putting stuff in WAY out of the way places that didn't even have a flight path), expecting people to do LFR every week both for gear and for the legendary questline, was too much. MOP was the only expansion that caused me to take nearly a year off that wasn't for financial issues. My only other break was a 4-month break in WOTLK which was for financial issues (I could literally not afford to play), and not because of the game. That break wasn't really by choice. Money has not been an issue for me for several years now, so my MOP break was by choice.

In the end, the ONLY good thing that came out of MOP was flex. But the flex implementation in 5.4 was still incomplete, and "too little too late". 6.0 is fixing a lot of the issues I had with MOP though, so it looks like it will be good. Time will tell.

[Deleted]

All in all, it was meh.

You come in at 5.0. and level through the zones. Fun at first, but a linear grind afterwards. Jade Forest is memorable, but Dread Wastes is just abysmal. You do your "heroic" dungeons, which are not only laughably easy, but are filled with annoying RP moments like Niuzao's gong. You go into LFR, snoring your way through a lootshower. Want to raid higher up? Unlock all faction gear gated behind dailies, having to do dailies in order to unlock even more dailies.

5.1 is where things got somewhat better. The Shieldwall/Offensive questlines were top-notch and really deserve a thumbs up.
5.2 was cool aswell. The Thunder King and the mogu are the only addition Pandaria brought to the game which I can deem worthy of the lore. ToT cool raid aswell. Some things were getting back on track, but LFR and scenarios were beyond saving.
5.3 was a left turn. Open world event on a very, very small scale. Heroic scenario bullshit.
5.4 had the great addition of flex. Not the difficulty level, but scalable instances. SoO was a decent raid from what I've seen, but its ending (and that of MoP) is just cringeworthy. Generic Horde/Alliance conflict coming to its climax without either side taking a huge blow due to appealing whiney fans who want everything equal.

Overall, the xpac was beyond my expectations feature wise. Lorewise I wish it'd just be removed from the game completely. Should've been Vanilla > BC > WotLK > Cata > WoD. Would've saved Blizzard from the "lol orcs again" complains, which are completely justified.
6/10, because of LFR, scenario enforcing and the huge dump that was taken on the lore.

[Deleted]

PvE in Mists exceeded expectations after they had been sunk by Dragon Soul. Enjoyed tier 14 a lot. Missed ToT due to quitting but since I come back, SoO has been quite impressive, not the best but a good way to end the expansion. Decent story, good amount of bosses, mix of simple and complex mechanics, a good end.

PvP was a total disaster. While more specs had more viability than ever before, some were still godly overpowered like warriors while some lacked even the most basic fundamentals a spec needs to compete in PvP. The sheer power of 1-shot macros and cooldown stacking making playing PvP just painful at the best of times. The worst thing by far was the enormous abundance of CC, instant cast CC and CC too easy to use like scatter trap or deep freeze ring of frost combo.

I even remember playing the beta for MoP, just reading and testing the talent system and spell changes. Anyone who had even the slightest concept of PvP design saw how rampant and ridiculous the amount of CC was.

[Frozenbeef]

Jaylock thread....


First half yes i really enjoyed it more than i thought i would especially the battle pets, i wasn't planning to go near them.. so far i've got 550 unique pets and like 75 level 25 :S

Second half complete and utter let down, 14 months with not a single content update is just shoddy, there are f2p mmos out there with sub numbers in the thousands that get content more than that.

[Trollhamaren]

It did not, strongly dislike this xpac, really boring in terms of gameplay and lore.

[Saffa]

I loved, love, it. I would be happy if WoD was coming out November 2015 tbh.

- - - Updated - - -

Jaylock thread....


First half yes i really enjoyed it more than i thought i would especially the battle pets, i wasn't planning to go near them.. so far i've got 550 unique pets and like 75 level 25 :S

Second half complete and utter let down, 14 months with not a single content update is just shoddy, there are f2p mmos out there with sub numbers in the thousands that get content more than that.

Play one of them, all of them. They do not have the depth of WoW.

[draykorinee]

Fuck it a Jaylock thread that isn't total shit.

It was below my expectations, the initial daily grind and gear walled behind rep grinds that were linked to daily grinds, the 90 lesser charms, ugh it was awful. Throw in the woeful 14 months of SoO, the horrid legendary grind and the really iritating overuse of one theme. I did like the raids, I kind of liked the dungeons, but really this expansion was below my expetations.

[l33t]

It is kind of love/hate, to be honest...

If not for too short time to play it, first raid tier would be awesome.
If not for thrash packs, ToT would be my third favouride raid, after Kara and Ulduar.
If not for too long to play it (and stupid green impotent jezus roleplay at the end), SoO would be great.

If not for CC overloading, pvp would be the best ever.

If not for the mechanics of "whoever bid the gold cap first, wins", BMAH would be perfect.

If not for stupidest grinding RNG ever, legendary quest would be perfect.

If not for idiotic playing vs time requirements, turning everything into a zerg rush instead of careful planning and CC, challenge modes would be great.

If not for imbalanced computer-owned pets, pet battles would be super-awesome.

Et cetera, et cetera. MoP was great; but it had too much of an experimental issues, trials and errors.
And I still don't get why the hell pandas can join both factions but undead can't... been dreaming of playing my undead warlock for Alliance since bc. /sad

[clevin]

hmm.... I didn't have expectations going in, but in looking back...

1) The raids were of a uniformly high quality. I don't mean they were all amazing or that there aren't fights that I think were badly done, etc. But each of the raids was good with no huge "WTF" raids.

2) the patches between raids were... OK. The patch that expanded Krasarang was, at least on the Alliance side, well done. Yes, Lion's Landing was basically dailies, but they did a good job of interweaving a thread of story through that and I liked that the story didn't just advance when you hit a new rep level but in between that so you might always see a new story quest as you turned in quests. Timeless was boring for me and showed the lack of attention that they give to end of expansion stuff. As I've said before, here's an Island that appears OUT OF TIME. And they don't really attach much of a story to it aside from the vision stuff. We never explore the nature of this place, etc.

3) The massive number of dailies in 5.0 made me wonder about them and began a worrying trend, the idea of putting us on rails. For example, they didn't want dungeons to give rep because they felt i t was double-dipping - you got gear and rep. But come on, when we invade Shado Pan Monastery and help from Zhu from the sha, that (in the game world) SHOULD increase our standing with the faction. Doing things like gating SP rep behind Golden Lotus rep also felt very artificial and as if they only did that to keep people playing longer.

4) No 5 mans past the launch ones. HUGE fail. HUGE. It meant you had to LFR for a tier if you were gearing a new toon in the later tiers. You couldn't move from 5 man heroics into ToT for example since none of the 5 mans gave loot that would be a reasonable step to normal ToT. You were fine if you were coming out of normal HoF/MSV, but if you were gearing an alt? LFR for you. Same for SoO.

5) The huge, long content drought. Huge fail. Huge. Any experience development person could have told them that stuffing the Titan team on WoW would hurt the progress of WoW at that point. It's a cliche in dev management. The would have been better to have those folks work on tools or even simply pay they for 6 months for nothing than do do what they did and delay WoW. it makes me wonder about senior management meddling, TBH.

Overall? Good. Not great. Add 5 mans at each raid patch, add better/more content in the between raids patches and cut the content drought to ~7-9 months at the end and it's great.

[Deleted]

I can't wait for it to be over, and move forward to WoD.
In all fairness, I can't really complain about the quality of the content that MoP offered, other than the amount of dailies during the initial phase being a bit much for my liking. I did like the majority of the PvE encounters a lot, SoO most of all.
The atmosphere is what bothered me the most, it was just impossible for me to be interested in the Pandaren, Pandaria or anything it had to offer; lore-wise or scenario/setting-wise.
As has been mentioned before, the excessive amount of months without any new content is beyond ridiculous.
So overall, it was decent, but the good didn't quite outweigh the bad in my opinion.

[Deleted]

No never, doesnt fit as a wow expansion, doesnt make sense, doesnt fit as an xpac after LK and cata. its just bloody orrible cheesy corny crap, end of..
The only good that came out of MoP is that ive had 2 years of not paying for WoW lol and i honestly dont feel like ive missed anything, apart from some friends who also fukked off. making a return for WoD tho so ask again at end of that

[FKNL]

For me it did. With that said my expectations coming into the expansion were pretty low.

[Archangel Tyrael]

It was worse than I thought.

Does that count OP?

[Driahtvacahtve]

Yeah turned out to be several things I enjoyed more than I would have expected. Things like heroic scenarios, the story telling of the various zones/patches, and the Timeless Isle, kept me enjoying myself well more than I had thought I would. I found the music and atmosphere to go beyond my reasonably high expectations as well, still enjoying leveling all the way through the Jade Forest on my 20th 90 or however many it is now.