Mists of Pandaria: A Retrospective

[Strangewayes]

Since we are entering the end of this expansion, I thought it might be a good time to go over what you thought of it.

For myself. This was probably the expansion I've played the least. And Enjoyed the least.
No it wasn't because of Pandaren. Although I found the Major Pandaren leaders the most unlikeable characters in the story this xpac.

I suppose its because of many things.
I think this is the first expansion where I felt from a mechanics standpoint, we weren't playing an expansion, but were in a kind of laboratory, having different types of Quests and Dailies tested on us. The change in gameplay from the grindy starter factions to the Storyline focused Shieldwall was stark. And again from the Isle of Thunder to the Timeless Isle.

The addition of Mini-Boss rares, as well as the tighter grouping of mobs in the open world seemed different to the last expansion. It also made things more irritating, especially if you were a mage who needed spacing to kill mobs without dying yourself. The respawn rate on world mobs was also far higher, making you feel like you can't barely make a dent in the mob density of an area.

LFR introduced the concept from Blizzard, that everyone should be raiding and should have some level of Raid gear. Which seems to contrast with their words in that they liked that players utilized different content. It also contradicts their actions by making more side-games like Pet Battles and Brawlers Guild. Do they want to make the gear level across all players to be averaged out by introducing LFR? I'm not sure.

PVP also seemed to be part of the testing ground this xpac with the introduction of PVP Power and Base Resilience. Also despite vowing they wanted to avoid a "CC arms race" this xpac, it exactly what ended up happening. Their attempts to "prune" abilities to address button bloat, made it seem like they didn't know how their own game worked, removing abilities like Eyes of the Beast which weren't the cause of ability bloat at all since they were side abilities not usually posted on the main bars.

All in all, I liked bits and pieces of Pandaria, the Pet Battles, the Proving Grounds, Brawlers Guild, Challenge Modes. But overall I'd say this is my personal least liked expansion so far.

Anyway post your thoughts on MoP

[Simulacrum]

All starting and leveling content was awful. Dailies were awful. Faction rep system was awful. 5 mans were ass. Starting raids were pretty good, though, but then the starting tier is always the best one for healers.

Mid-expansion raids were okay, dailies mostly irrelevant, only thing you needed to do to prepare for raids now was suddently just get lesser charms (total 180 from the start of the expansion). Added solo content was pointless for anyone but newly dinged characters. 5 mans were removed what little remaining purpose they had with the addition of heroic scenarios.

End-expansion raids pretty good, but the healer game has been retarded to the point where I can't stand it anymore. Island of time was pretty fun, for the couple of weeks that I did it.

Uh, and pet battles were okay, I guess? Beat doing dailies for charms, at least...

[Marxman]

Leveling: 3/5 - Leveling was extremely time consuming and tedious before the nerfs. Zones and quest flow was good. I wish it was a little less formulaic (quest hub A has 5 quests then sends you to quest hub B which has 4 quests then sends you to quest hub C etc.).

World content (max level): 2/5 - 5.0 was AWFUL. It was the grindiest the game has been since vanilla. The daily debacle nearly crushed my soul. Gating dailies behind other dailies which are all required to spend VP is just... unbelievably poor design. 5.1 was meh, 5.2/5.3 were both pretty good, and 5.4 was a little better than that. Overall I really enjoyed the treasure hunting in Pandaria, the rare spawn systems in place, and things like that. Really makes the world more interesting. Still, 5.0 leaves a sour taste in my mouth that I won't soon forget. Ugh.

Dungeons: 3/5 - The dungeons that are in place are all pretty good. The problem is they're all super stale and incredibly trivial at this point. Not making new 5-mans throughout the expansion was a large mistake, though I do understand their reasoning for it. I preferred the Cata 5-man design, with higher tiers of 5-mans and better catch-up gear for alts. The current catch-up in LFR is too RNG-based for my taste.

Raids: 4/5 - ToT and SoO were both great. The first tier raids were also fairly okay, with Heart of Fear being by far the worst of the bunch. I like the way they've handled LFR and Flex this expansion. Though as I mentioned before, I wish there were PvE alternatives for catch-up gear other than "grind LFR and pray for drops".

[sahib]

I was pretty tired of WoW at the end of Cata, but decided to give Pandaria a go. Managed to level up to 87. Wondered why it was such an unpleasant experience with all the quests being what they were. Then I came upon the FarmVille area......

By that moment I just said "Oh, fuck it".

I recently started playing again on a different realm, with a different faction and a different class. I'm already affraid what will happen once I ding 85 but for now it's all good.

[Draenei]

My opinion is essentially redundant, but I'll share it anyway purely for the sake of getting something off my chest and maybe putting things into perspective for people in agreement.
I'm sure it has been noted many times now about Blizzard's unfortunate attempt at reviving the colossal cataclysm to the player-base that came with Cataclysm, by investing in an expansion that was obviously focused less toward the western consumer.
There also seemed to be many underlying messages sprawled throughout the freshly-printed pages of MoP's centric storyline as well. This made playing the expansion... uncomfortable. However aesthetically pleasing the content may be.
Cataclysm was an ill-prepared mess.
Mists of Pandaria has been something a little different.
An expansion where Blizzard wanted money and weren't afraid to degrade itself as a company along with the Warcraft franchise in the process. Have they done it before? Yes. Was it more apparent this time? Indubitably.
Whilst I complain, I must say that I have continued to play regardless. I enjoy watching the evolution of this game, and in some cases, it's devolution, but also how it affects the character I created Pre-BC.
Nine years later, I can still be more immersed in this game than I have ever been in a virtual universe before; even if the experience may be less satisfying than before.

[Deleted]

Levelling was pretty good.

Dailies were good too, people whining about it were idiots since you never had to do them. I only did the very first set of dailies for a long time and only this week did I run out of coins. So yea, a few weeks of dailies let me have coins for an entire expac (almost) lol, so it's k (I did do thunder isle dailies but only a couple times to see the story).

Raids were quite phenomenal.

9/10 pretty solid expansion.
And this is coming from someone who's suffering from quite the WoW burnout.

[Deleted]

I liked the whole expansion except for Timeless ISLE, the raids were great and i loved the dailies in 5.0

[melodramocracy]

Overall I enjoyed it. Good variety of things to do, although end game still felt a bit compartmentalized, challenges if you went very purposefully looking for them. The expansion gets demerit points for way too much tween content, dino isle being far too shallow compared to what preceded and followed it, and the fact that Garrosh escapes.

[Chonar]

I very much enjoyed MoP.
- Rarespawns were handled FAR better than;
* Classic (useless, irrelevant, but fun for 'unique' items)
* TBC (too rare, achievement hunters ate them up)
* WoTLK (Loquen'anak; Hunter pet or Achievement notch?)
* Cata (Too rare, useless after first tier, non-soloable when they were still worth something)

I loved the continuitiy with the faces we met. Lorewalker Cho leading us from Jade Forest to Kun-Lai, Chen Stormstout accompanying us from Four Winds to Dread Wastes... meeting and defeating Gara'jal the Spiritbinder in Mogu'shan Vaults, and him making good on his 'I'll be back' promise in Throne of Thunder... Wakening and befriending (of a sorts) the Klaxxi Paragons, only to have to fight them in Siege because our alignments were opposite one another...

The introduction of pet battles and everything that came with it (including a whole metagame) has been an amazing experience, and I loved how its questline basically was one big trip through all content, all zones, culminating in the Vale itself.

And I especially love how I feel a sense of... I wouldnt call it 'shame' since I am not directly responsible, but still, a sense of.. Je ne sais quoi when I look at the destruction of the Serpent Spire and Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and how at least part of that feeling is made undone with the destruction of Y'Shaarj's heart.
And I love how Pandaria's story began, and how it ended. "What is worth fighting for?" was more than a neat one-liner, it was really the theme of the expansion.

And at the very end of it, the final quest with Lorewalker cho in the Vale after defeating Garrosh... the question was answered by Shao-hao. I couldnt think of any better way this expansion could've ended, with that one sentence, ending with 'surely that, is worth fighting for'. Nearly brought a tear to my eye.

Nearly.

Indeed, the story was wonderfully told for those who allow themselves to be swept up in it all. I had a fantastic experience altogether.

Though, literally the only PVP I've done has been the two battlegrounds needed for the legendary. So I can't comment on that. Maybe I'd be a bit more sour if I was predominantly a PVPer, but I play an MMO to dungeoncrawl, not play TF2 medieval mode.

[Fahrenheit]

Terrible, made me leave. Leveled to 90, looked around and say "nope, not gonna jerk off the panda folk for dailies ad nauseam" and unsubbed for a year.

Just resubbed about a couple of weeks ago.

[Cinnamohn]

The dreadful leveling experience, the lackluster dungeons, the unbearable shitfest that is LFR, and the isle of a thousand chests can all go fuck themselves.

I love the Brawler's Guild and, to a lesser extent, pet battles, though.

[Deleted]

It was not the worst expansion but pretty damn close, I have not played wow this little since TBC when I was a newb that did not know how to end game properly.

[Matt0193]

Voted indifferent. I wasn't a fan of the various asian themes but the actual content was fine. Gameplay balanced out Story/design, imo.

[Annoying]

I'm not a big fan of the "you didn't have to do x" argument. You did have to do dailies. If you wanted coins, dailies. If you wanted to actually spend valor points, dailies. I was a human enchanter in a raiding guild. It was expected of me to grind the enchants as fast as possible. You have no clue how bad the golden lotus non-daily grind was. I killed something like 15,000 mogu for keys, opening something like 500 chests. On the bright side, it only took like 3 or 4 thousand more to get the mount, which sat in my bags until AC exalted.

[DizzyBala]

I have only just bought the expansion and spent the last two weeks getting my character back up to date.

The reason primarily for buying Mists this late was that I wasn't interested in any of the lore, I wasn't interested in playing as a Pandaren and I wasn't interested in most of the new features they brought with the expansion.

Quite a few people hated Cataclysm but I didn't. It wasn't my favourite, Wrath has that honour but I preferred it to Burning Crusade and Mists because I could get behind the story that Deathwing had emerged and he wanted to destroy Azeroth in a big way and I had to stop him. Once you believe in the premise, it makes all the meaningless grinding seem that much more bareable.

I have mixed emotions about Warlords because it reminds me too much of the Burning Crusade and I hate Orcs.

[Deleted]

Worst xpac for me, made me left retail.

[FobManX]

I enjoyed the expansion overall.

Positives:

Excellent raiding endgame. No TOC's or Firelands disasters.
Story ended up being quite good, even with branching in different directions(Mantids, Mogu, Sha, and then Garrosh).
Character balance doesn't seem all that bad, at least not in PVE. Don't really PVP much.
Timeless Isle was unique and interesting. Isle of Thunder was also fun.
Flex raiding is an awesome addition. All in all, this expansion has focused more on group play.

Negatives:

Initial grind to 90 sucked. Too long, felt grindier than before, and the zones didn't really have that wow factor that previous exp. new zones had.
Too many dailies/factions to grind early on.

[Deleted]

The most fun I've had this expansion is to clear old raid instances(Ulduar/ICC/Firelands etc). So, there's that.

[Dundebuns]

Leveling curve was painful, never really felt like you were progressing much, since leveling is ingrained in WoW players as 'get to the next numeric' and less 'let's finish this zone for its story and content'.

Dallies were fine, but them being tied to the fastest routes to gear up the way they were was really bad. They should provide an alternate route and cosmetic/mounts, and not the coins they did. Decoupling Dailies form getting gear in raids was the only way they could have saved that.

I liked the idea of the farm, and it was the first step towards developing personal phases within the world, aka Garrisons.

[Horizon]

for me it was the worst expansion yet, the theme has been my big issue and I can't get over it : /