First impressionsFollow

So, for those of us who avoided MoP information before launch and didn't participate in beta, what do you think so far?

I logged in for all of an hour today. I rolled my Pandaren monk and did a few quests. I like the look and feel of the starting zone; it's pretty and wide open, reminds me somewhat of feudal China dropped into Nagrand. The voice acting seems pretty good. I'm enjoying the fighting animation for the monk class, although I'd prefer my Pandaren a little less...portly :) Launch seems a lot smoother, mobs seem to spawn faster, and there are fewer unique NPCs which need to be killed by 45,000 people.

Thoughts so far?

I rerolled and my new DK on Fenris isn't elvel 85 yet, so I didn't get to check out Jade Forest. I did roll a monk this morning and got to level 6. the Wandering Isle is enormous, maybe too big. I think at level 6 I've only got about 1/3 of it discovered. That means either the quests from 6-12 don't give that much exp, or there is a lot of running and exploring involved in them. I'm not looking forward to either of those things.

The monk class is ok, it just feels a lot like a modified rogue. The animations are pretty cool, though, and my female Pandaren is a cutie patootie. I ended up naming her Chopsuzy, since Shaolynn was taken.

Edit: Yay Rukkuss, I made you a scholar!

Edited, Sep 25th 2012 12:53pm by Bigdaddyjug

I also, logged in for an hour this morning. I didn't do much other than run around and pay for the new profession trainings and 1 or 2 quests on the alliance side. Just enough to get on the ground and off the ship.

Most of the time I spent on the pet battles. I was also hesitant to embrace this new feature, however, I can see this becoming addicting, especially as a time killer. Reminds me of older Final Fantasy games where the camera would zoom in and the music changes. Maybe It's just me.

I plan on investing a few hours in Panderia tonight. I'm most looking forward to running a new instance. I want to see if I'm going to use all my new CC capabilities or if it's going to be run in, get aggro, burn down, repeat.

Pet battles seem fun though. Especially finding and capturing new pets.

Just dinged 87 and the zones I touched up to now are pretty... erm... pretty. Mainly Jade Forest but also maybe half of Krasarang Wilds. Except for 1 or 2 Northrend zones that I like for their dark atmosphere I think my favourite WoW zones might all be located in Pandaria. Look-wise. The quests and stories are pretty nice too.

What I don't like is that on my server it is a really nasty gankfest. WoWProgress tells me my faction (Alliance) is outnumbered 6 to 1 but it feels even worse. I often come across a questgiver where 10-15 Horde are lingering around and aside from me there is not one Alliance. Althought we are on a PvP server most Horde players seem to understand how much leveling sucks as Alliance right now and leave me alone. But there is always this one jerk who starts attacking and the moment I fight back two or three of the others can't resist anymore and join in. As a guildie of mine put it this evening "by now I know really every graveyard on Pandaria".
I don't mind the occasional clash with the opposing faction but the imbalance on my server has gotten extremely bad over the last half year. And then it stops being fun because being outnumbered all the time can get pretty tiresome. :<

So for me the revival of World PvP is really not that exciting.

I just got myself a magikarp and now I have to resist the urge to yell "Use a splash attack!" every time I use his basic attack.

First pet captured .... rare Stormwind Rat. I was kinda dreading the pet battles thing, but I have to agree, it's likely gonna be an addicting time killer/filler.

Well hopefully one day they will have an expansion where you will be able to level 1-90(95?) in all new content or you can level in the more familiar zones of vanilla/bc because to be honest thats one of the problems i have is doing the same quests over and over while leveling.... i didnt mind the goblin/worg deal because they had some new material(new story lines) in the old worlds because of the cataclysm and i have a level 85 of each and had fun leveling them so maybe the monk i have will be a slow project....

Chances are the first handful of green rewards you get won't be an upgrade. If you run any randoms though they reward some IL 405 blues (in both quests and loot) that might be an upgrade to you.

If you are full 376+ it will last you until mid to latter Jade Forest. First quest in Valley of the Four Winds rewards you with a 399 iLevel item.

At one point, I ran out of quests, no bread crumbs for me. I had to have missed something, somewhere. So, I checked the grey'd out map and saw the flags for all the fp's, so I just headed to the next nearest one. I'll go back later & see what I missed.
And I'm addicted to the pet battles. Not just for the fights, but to trap blues. No commons or greens for me, tyvm...which means I have to fight and trap the same ones over and over til i get the blues!
OCD and ****.... So... are there purples?

I noticed that crafted gear is pretty good.

Plate Armor is 384 unless you get lucky and it spits out a blue, those are 415.

They are all random stats, but in making some 10-15 pieces, I only saw one intellect piece. It was all strength with new suffixes (that have the old secondaries). 2 secondaries + stamina + strength or intellect, basically.

The Blue-quality gear looks different than the Green-quality.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/the-scryers/Relghar/simple (note the shoulders)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/the-scryers/Miende/simple (note her shoulders too)

All of those Ghost-Forged pieces are made with the same recipes, but look different as you can see.

(Edit: Please excuse the sucky weapon on that warrior; the 365 agi mug had a lot more DPS than the 333 hammer he was wearing and I ran out of mats for Truegold and figured he'd use that mug until he got his first quested 1h strength)

Edited, Sep 26th 2012 10:27pm by Lyrailis

So I was just looking on Wowhead and noticed that MoP dailies reward 56 gold and 5 VP. That means that someone who took the time to do 25 dailies in a day would make 1400 gold per day just off dailies.

Gotta love inflation, amirite?

So far I love this expansion!

The reason I think i love it so much is because of the WoW community.
On a few boards, people were complaining for months that monks are just something borrowed from Diablo, pandas are just something to cash in from Kung Fu panda, that pet battles were just going to be pokemon, and that WoW will turn into farmville. I feel all the negative expectations kept my overall expectations to a minimum, or at least in check. Basically the expansion wasn't over hyped to such a degree that it will inevitable disappoint you for not meeting all expectations.

Thus far, the pet battle system seems to be a hit, even among it's doubters, me included. The panda's seem to have a great story behind them. The environment was lush and beautiful. It doesn't seem rushed. The monk actions/animations are very respectable. The continent seems massive.

Although it's still very very early in it's release, I am finding that there's a lot to do and content updates down the road will only add or improve on what there is.

In about a month, with 90's running around, and battlegrounds, raids, heroics, all in full swing, I think we'll have a clearer picture of how MoP will play out.