*Mists of Pandaria* Expansion Announcement

Shadowwolf · October 21, 2011, 09:34:59 PM

For those unaware, Blizzard announced the next WoW expansion.

Some of the notable changes are youll be able to play as a Pandarian on either Horde or Alliance and it brings a unique class of Monk to the game. Some preliminary info organized for you here:

http://www.wowheadnews.com/blog=196426/blizzcon-2011-mists-of-pandaria-and-what-we-know#.

Fleecy · October 22, 2011, 11:52:09 AM

That pet battle thing reminds me of like Pokemon or something heh.

Icemunch · October 22, 2011, 05:45:04 PM

i kind of agree ... my son was actually excited for the new expansion when we told him what was going on ... its like they are marketing the child .. sales are down .. market the kids that will beg for their parents to buy ..

capnpop · October 22, 2011, 06:26:57 PM

gotta catch em all!

Shadowwolf · October 22, 2011, 10:59:15 PM

Im going to record the presentation for those of you who didnt get the live stream or didnt get to go to Blizzcon. There is a TON of information in the panel which was 87 min long on Friday and it made me feel a lot better about the expansion aside from just reading quips on Wowhead.

Shadowwolf · October 23, 2011, 09:18:40 AM

http://www.twguild.org/blizzcon/

As promised, ill get the lore and quest panel done today sometime. This is done in HTML5 with WebM so it will only work with newer browsers, iPhone, iPad, and Android stuff. Sorry for that but the initial compilation was a 16gb file and this was the only way I could get it down to a manageable level, even DiVX couldnt shrink it as well.

To view full screen, right-click the video in your browser and there is a full screen option. At the moment the 720p version is up there, I should have the 1080p version encoded and uploaded this afternoon sometime.

If you have any issues playing it, please let me know.

Shadowwolf · October 23, 2011, 11:34:49 PM

Talent system is up now.

So far here is what I have up for your viewing pleasure.

WoW: Intro to Mists of Pandaria
WoW: Class Talent System
WoW: Dungeons and Raids QA
WoW: Quests & Lore QA
WoW: Classes, Items and Prof. QA

The last WoW related video I have to post is on WoW Art, I will try to finish that up tomorrow. You can navigate the videos on the lower left side of the pages as well.

Cottonbaler · October 24, 2011, 10:31:22 AM

FYI for others - I couldn't open the .webm file.

I'm using IE9 and when I went searching I found this site: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_video.asp

The site says my browser is capable of HTML 5, but then there is a table part way down that says .webm is not supported on IE.

It looks like Firefox will support it though.

CB/BP

Shadowwolf · October 24, 2011, 11:20:42 AM

IE9 needs a plugin because Microsoft is a bunch of aholes when it comes to supporting anything they didnt come up with or own =(

http://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf/

Lord Entropy · October 24, 2011, 03:01:49 PM

These are awesome Shadow, thanks for taking the time to put them up. I'm actually quite excited about this new expansion - it seems like they've learned some lessons from cataclysm - at least so far.

Shadowwolf · October 24, 2011, 05:18:14 PM

Was a minor issue with editing on the Intro video Koth found at about 68min in, so I re-recorded it and its as-is on the Blizz stream.

Sakuramoon · October 24, 2011, 05:28:04 PM

Here is what i think.......

Zone's........ Look's awesome
Dungeon's... Will be Fun
Talents....... Are you kidding me.......

Shadowwolf · October 24, 2011, 07:48:43 PM

tbh I think the talent system will be good if they do it properly. It will bring back the hybrid nature of a lot of classes (the main reason I like my druid most) and it wont feel like youre locked into a specific spec so rigidly. I like being able to do DPS decently as resto w/o the need to respec, or having a feral druid who mostly is cat form to be able to maybe quickly offtank without a respec, thats what Vanilla and BC was so fun with in classes.

Id rather them forget the damn Pokemon style pet crap and just focus on making talents and stuff come out good.

Lord Entropy · October 25, 2011, 06:12:38 AM

Yeah, I agree shadow. So far I think the new talent system looks promising, though I hope they add more choices. I rolled a Druid in vanilla too and went through the pain of leveling him up so that I could play a feral/resto hybrid. This new system has the potential to bring some of that back. "Normalizing" the cookie-cutter spec seems like a reasonable thing to do especially since there are a lot of people out there who pick bad talents in the current system out of ignorance. I think they should up it to a talent every 10 levels or give 4 choices per tier or maybe both.

Plus they can solve a whole bunch of balance problems with specs that had really good utility, like frost mages and sub rogues.

Not too interested in the combat pet part, but it's nice to see they hope to get people out in the world more instead of queuing in SW.

Valerian · October 25, 2011, 07:51:09 AM

Having been away from the game for awhile now, I'm looking at what they're planning to do with talents and I think I agree with you guys. The talent system had become pretty rigid from what I remember. For example, I used to be able to spec my mage half fire, half frost but that went away in cata. Now there is more room for hybrid builds which is what makes some of the classes I like to play fun. My only concern is that you won't get enough choices to reeeeeally have alot of variety in builds. From what I can tell so far, at level 90, you'll have 7 choices to make. I choice on spec specialization and then 6 talent choices, from the three options every 15 levels. Maybe chooseing from talents every 10 levels would be better and offer more variety. But maybe 6 will be enough. Guess we'll have to see.