Beta Patch 15640 UI Changes - Account wide achievements and more!
This patch brought us tons of new interface changes!

  • Support for account wide achievements. When earning an achievement on another character, the icon changes and will tell you which character the achievement was earned on.
  • A new Mounts / Pets interface, including account-wide companion pets.
  • A new help system in the Spellbook, including a "Core Abilities" page that points the most important abilities of your spec.
  • A new way to create premade characters on beta realms.
  • A new loot win frame







Glyph of Verdant Spheres
The new Glyph of Verdant Spheres brings a little bit more green fire to warlocks with the visual Soul Shard counter.



The Veiled Stair
The Veiled Stair is a new mini-zone at the top of Valley of the Four Winds. It contains the Terrace of the Endless Spring raid, some scattered hostile creatures, and the new Black Market. Making his first appearance after the Deathwing encounter, you can find Wrathion sitting on a chair in the Tavern as well!





Capital City Pandaren Areas
Small Pandaren areas were added to both Orgrimmar and Stormwind this patch, currently devoid of any NPCs.



Ji Firepaw Dialogue Update
In a nod to the complaints about Ji Firepaw's comments, he has decided to say something new this build!



Recruit-a-Friend – X-53 Touring Rocket Retiring Soon
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Heads up! The current Recruit-A-Friend reward mount, the experimental X-53 Touring Rocket, will soon be cycled out of the RAF program. If you’ve always wanted a Touring Rocket, but haven’t snagged one yet, this is your last chance to get one by bringing a friend to World of Warcraft.

While we don’t have an official launch date to reveal for the new Recruit-A-Friend mount, we wanted to give you an early heads up that the changeover will be happening “soon” (TM). You have a few weeks to claim the X-53 Touring Rocket before it goes away.

Beta Stability Issues for Some Players - 4/25
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We are currently tracking stability issues for some players with the latest build of the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta. We’re currently working to address these issues, and expect to have a fix in place within the next 48 hours.

We will provide further updates when appropriate. Thank you for your patience and your participation in the beta.

Just a reminder: Blizzard has a careful process for identifying issues, verifying and replicating them, coding the fix, and testing the results in a private quality assurance environment -- before deploying new software to users.

Pet Battles Temporarily Disabled
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
While we've received a number of questions and some feedback regarding the pet battle system added in the last beta patch, we're in the process of disabling this feature. We know a lot of you are very anxious to test out pet battles, but it wasn't our intention to introduce them to the beta at this stage, as we don't yet feel they're in a solid enough state to allow for meaningful feedback.

One we're further along in development, we look forward to implementing pet battles and gathering your thoughts on the feature.

Beta Patch 15640 Misc Changes
There were several small changes in this patch, including the introduction of new factions, new loading screen tips, and more.

New Factions
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
  • The Serpent Riders - Renamed Order of the Cloud Serpent.
  • Order of the Cloud Serpent - Guardians of the East Temple
  • The Lorewalkers - Caretakers of the mysteries of Pandaria, these brave souls roam the continent, hoping to learn from their history.
  • The Brewmasters - These noble Pandaren safeguard the secrets of hereditary brews, braving great hardship to construct their potent concoctions.
  • Huojin Pandaren - Led by the intrepid Ji Firepaw, the Huojin Pandaren are quick to act and quicker to fight for what they believe in.
  • Tushui Pandaren - Led by the stalwart Aysa Cloudsinger, the Tushui Pandaren believe in contemplation and reasoned action.



New Tips
These tips enforce the idea that Valor points will be used to upgrade your gear (likely by increasing item level) as stated in previous interviews. They also note the introduction of account wide achievements, which were implemented in this patch. They also reference Alleria and Turalyon!
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
  • You can earn Valor points from daily quests, scenarios and dungeons to upgrade your best items.
  • You can queue for Scenarios to run short group content.
  • You can change your class specialization, talents or glyphs by visiting a class trainer.
  • Most achievements are account-wide. If you have earned the points on one of your characters, they will all share the points.
  • Visit a Pet Battle Trainer if you want to collect and battle companion pets.
  • You can't fly in Pandaria until your reach level 90.
  • Nobody has seen Alleria or Turalyon in years.
  • Major Glyphs modify your spells in interesting ways. Minor Glyphs are more cosmetic or convenient.
  • Companion pets are account-wide. If one of your characters has a pet, all your characters can use that pet.



Scenarios
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
  • Crypt of Forgotten Kings - Investigate an ancient mogu crypt that has become infested with the Sha.
  • Challenge Test
  • [PH] The Eye of the Tiger - DO NOT TEST
  • Greenstone Village SP - FOR INTERNAL TESTING ONLY
  • Brewmoon Festival



New Objectives
It isn't yet clear if these steps are only for scenarios, so don't assume that all of the mentioned areas will be a scenario just yet.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
  • Bring 100 Unga Brew to the Brewing Cauldron. - Fill the Brewing Cauldron
  • Defeat the Shado-Pan Leader and cleanse the Pool of Life. - Cleansing the Crypt
  • Kill the Abomination of Anger. - Destroy the Sha
  • Defeat the monsters attacking the Greenstone villagers. - Save Greenstone Villagers
  • Defeat Vengeful Hui. - Defeat Vengeful Hui
  • Recover and return three Stolen Kegs to village dojo. - Recover Stolen Kegs from Forest
  • Defeat the Sha corrupted forces inside the Temple of the Jade Serpent. - Complete the Temple of the Jade Serpent
  • Defeat the forces creating chaos within the Stormstout Brewery. - Complete the Stormstout Brewery
  • Defeat the forces opposing you within the Shado-Pan Monastery. - Complete the Shado-Pan Monastery
  • Defeat the Mantid forces assaulting the Gate of the Setting Sun. - Complete the Gate of the Setting Sun
  • Defeat the Mantid forces sieging the Niuzao Temple. - Complete the Siege of Niuzao Temple
  • Complete the Mogu'shan Palace
  • Defeat the necromantic forces within Scholomance. - Complete Scholomance
  • Defeat the forces of the Scarlet Crusade. - Complete the Scarlet Halls
  • Travel to the Masons' Quarter and awaken the unconscious villagers. - Rescue Greenstone Masons
  • Defeat the forces of the Scarlet Crusade inside their monastery. - Complete the Scarlet Monastery
  • Summon and defeat the mighty dragon turtle, Gamara. - Summon & Defeat Gamara
  • Summon and defeat the grummle-eating, snow-stalking horror, Jol'Grum. - Summon and Defeat Jol'Grum
  • Summon and defeat and defeat the playful fire spirit, Hui. - Summon and Defeat Playful Hui
  • Summon and defeat the wandering yaungol warrior, Chagan Firehoof. - Summon and Defeat Chagan Firehoof
  • Ring the gong a final time and claim your reward from Wodin. - Claim your Reward
  • Speak to Mayor Bramblestaff at the inn. - The Brewmoon Festival!
  • Collect the ingredients for Mayor Bramblestaff. - Brewing the Kun-lai Kicker.
  • Stop the Yaungol attack on Binan Village. - The Yaungol attack!
  • Defeat Warbringer Qobi. - Warbringer Qobi



New Mail Templates
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
  • Time For a Celebration! - Yo, name! Since we're neighbors now, I thought it was right to celebrate! Come on down to the Halfhill Market anytime and take a load off! I'll even let you shoot off these fireworks at the market. Just don't set anything on fire, like Chee Chee did that one time...Anyways, see you soon! Your neighbor, Gina Mudclaw. Halfhill Market: The best local market with the best local prices!



Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Betas are not Guaranteed to Work for All
"A real beta rarely works, and when it does, it doesn't work well."

Unlike a lot of companies who invite players into "betas" that are little more than game demos of stable preview builds, Blizzard brings in players to an ever-changing process where our programmers are constantly making changes to the "guts" of the game.

What does that mean for you?

Betas are not guaranteed to work for individual players, ever. It's entirely possible that some users will receive a beta invite, only to find that they're never actually able to play it. This is simply the nature of a true beta. While we'd prefer everyone to be able to have a little fun while helping us test the content and servers, the purpose of the beta is to prepare Mists of Pandaria for launch, not to provide a gaming experience for beta testers.

Additionally, because of how quickly conditions change in a beta, it is extremely difficult to provide technical support that is specific to Mists of Pandaria issues. If it seems like the help you receive is very general in nature (update drivers, uninstall security programs, etc.) it's because the tech support staff does not have more specific information on the issue you are dealing with. Please remember that Blizzard is under no obligation to provide support for a product in beta, although we do try when possible.

All of that being said, we do hope that most of you will enjoy your sneak-peek into the game design process. Just be advised that trying to play a beta like it's a finished game will likely result in a very frustrating experience. Take care out there! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Beta is Buggy
I just hope they can get it together before they actualy release it.
For sure. What we'll do is release "it" for testing so we can gather feedback and bug reports (also referred to as a beta test). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Tier 14 Set Bonus Feedback
There are a lot of class changes for players to get used to in a new expansion. Immediately jumping into set bonus that make rotations more interesting is sort of wasted design space because players often aren't even used to their normal rotations yet. We typically start an expansion with pretty simple set bonuses and work our way up to more elaborate ones. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Human Racial and PvP
The issue where players are changing to human to get the second PvE trinket is something that we want to address in Pandaria. Understand that we want the human racial to be appealing and at this time it is, but we feel that the main issue is that PvP trinkets do not compete with PvE trinkets well enough to validate their use over being human.

With PvP trinkets having PvP power and defense stats in Mists, they will be much better for PvP than the PvE ones. We would also like to introduce a greater variety of PvP trinkets to increase their appeal even further

We would really like to have a greater variety of PvP trinkets. This means that healers will hopefully have more trinkets to choose from too (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria Beta DPS Changes
I really wouldn't stress about weapon attack or spell damage numbers going up or down at this stage in beta. It's hard to know if arbitrary number going up by 20% is a buff or not relative to how you are on live.

If you think you have a pretty good feel for how the various DPS specs are performing relative to each other on beta, then you might be able to draw some conclusions based on number tweaking, but my suspicion is that not many beta testers are in that boat quite yet. Hopefully you'll see things start to stabilize soon.

Remember, our goal is that your DPS should be about the same when you log into 5.0, though some abilities may shift up or down. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pandaren Faction Visual Differences
This is something we really don't want to do. There's no genetic separation between the pandaren who choose Horde and those who choose Alliance. We also want to avoid a scenario where, if you want your pandaren to look a certain way, you're pushed to one faction. The whole idea behind adding our first neutral playable race to World of Warcraft is that anyone can create and customize a pandaren, regardless of faction.

It's a race we just didn't want to give to only one faction. And prohibiting customization options in any way based on one's faction choice defeats the philosophy behind our decision to some extent.

We're fairly confident there won't be any significant gameplay complications from this either. There are plenty of ways for players to customize their appearance, silhouette, etc. as it is, that nameplates have been the most trusted method of determining friend from foe for quite some time now. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Dark Legacy Comics #335
DLC tells us why Pandaren are not Pandas!

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