Of the new zones, the Dread Wastes is our favorite, offering gloomy, foreboding wastelands that sharply contrast with the jade forests and peaceful breweries of earlier areas. Tranquil fields, snowy peaks, and ornate temples are all incredibly pleasing to the eye-an impressive feat, given the engine’s old age. Pandaria offers the best high-level questing area since World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, in terms of variety and sheer awe at your surroundings. Capturing and battling trainers and friends alike is addictively amusing, and watching your team do battle to classic Warcraft II music will give you the same giddy uncertainty of a Pokémon encounter. What could’ve easily been a throwaway change-the introduction of the Pet Battle system-ends up being the best distraction/obsession in the game, giving glorious purpose to the formerly vanity-only pets that players have been collecting all along. The adjustments may feel a bit shocking for vets who’ve been away for a long while, but it’ll only take a handful of fights to get back into the swing of things. Combat is pretty much the same as you remember it-but the new quests and dungeons offer just enough innovative encounters to keep things interesting. Each class has also undergone varying degrees of transformation to make your role of choice feel as dynamic as possible, and the changes largely succeed. That’s not the only change, though-months’ worth of tweaks and balance changes have polished WOW to a mirror finish, with nearly every parameter adjusted to make players’ lives as pleasant as possible. One thing’s for certain: The new talent system makes leveling a lot less exciting for fresh alts, as you’re only granted new choices every 15 levels. It’s a change made to promote player ingenuity, placing less emphasis on “cookie-cutter” builds-but time will tell if this accomplishes the opposite effect, by making every character feel homogenous to the rest of their class. Instead, you’ll find a consolidated list of 18 abilities which you’ll have to pick and choose from, no matter your specialization. Those that are returning to a previously-max-level character will find a staggering suite of changes. After the stellar starting zones of the Goblins and Worgen in Cataclysm, it’s a bit disappointing to blow through the low-level Pandaren content so quickly, though it’s definitely fun while it lasts. Questing hasn’t changed much-killing and collecting is usually the name of the game-but Blizzard has mastered the art of perfectly pacing the quest hubs, so that it’s on to the next area as soon as you’re starting to feel fatigue for your surroundings. Creating a Pandaren plops you into their short-but-sweet Wandering Isle starting zone, on the terraformed shell of a gargantuan turtle. Personality-wise, the Pandaren’s philosophical musings and generally mellow attitude make them one of the most amiable races to choose from. If you haven’t guessed it by now, this expansion is heavily themed around Pan-Asian motifs that means plenty of mythological creatures and master martial artists roam the Pandarian countryside. The long-anticipated race is now playable for both factions (a first for the MMO), alongside the latest class, the Monk. This is the mystical homeland of the Pandaren, a race of portly panda people with origins tracing back to the Warcraft III. After the widespread zones of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, MOP keeps things centralized with the appearance of Pandaria, a massive island consisting of seven varied zones.
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