The Mists of Pandaria

I had mentioned before that I do play online MMORPGS, one of which being World of Warcraft. I have several characters on a few servers, but currently I only have two that I'm active on - a resto (healing) druid and a beastmaster hunter. Anyway, I figured I'd write a little about WoW because coming up this Tuesday, Blizzard will be releasing the fourth expansion to the game: Mists of Pandaria.

Mist of Pandaria will now move the level cap to 90 and introduce the new race Pandaren as well as the new class monk. When Blizzard announced this fact, I am very sure that I was not the only person who thought "so we're now in Kung Fu Panda?"

Along with the introduction of those things, Blizzard has made some gameplay changes. First and probably most noticeable was the change to the talent system. Where before you chose a specialization and chose talents within a tree, now you choose talents regardless of specialization. Also, there is only a level prerequisite to obtaining a particular talent. You do not have to get the talents above like when you had the talent trees.

In addition to changes in the talent system came changes to specializations. Many of the spells that you would have found in a certain class have been changed to specialization dependent. This means you need to be a particular spec to have it. Apparently, Blizzard did this to streamline the classes and make their specializations take on roles "most suited" to their build.

There are quite a few more changes, like scenarios, challenge mode, and battle pets, but the above is mostly what I was very concerned about. To me, Blizzard has lost some creativity in creating new content by introducing the World of Warcraft to Kung Fu Panda. There was much more that was already in the Warcraft universe that could have been explored. Personally, I would have liked to maybe have seen a third faction crop up or the introduction of another hero class - perhaps maybe make faction specific hero classes like have Blademasters for Horde and Demon Hunters for Alliance. Still despite my rage, I'll probably be continuing to play this game...