Character Creation (March Beta)
March 24th, 2012
MMO-Champ posted some videos from the current Beta that show some of the parts of Pandaren Character Creation! (NOTE: Nothing is 100% Complete, this is Beta):
Mists of Pandaria Press Tour
March 19th, 2012
The NDA on the press tour is finally lifted and the floodgates are now open!
The Mists of Pandaria Press Tour in 5 Minutes
Warning: Somewhat a Spoiler Below…
This is a summarized version of MoP. Click here to read the whole thing!
- The final patch of Mists of Pandaria will be the Siege of Orgrimmar! Both factions lay siege to the city to bring Garrosh down and end his reign of Warchief.
- The new LFR loot system will allow everyone to roll individually. The highest few rolls will win an item from the boss. Upon winning a roll, if the boss has an item that you can use, you will win it. If not, you will get some amount of gold. It will only be in LFR to begin with, but can be added to other parts of the game later.
- An 11th character slot has been added.
- AoE Looting has been added.
- There will not be an item squish in Mist of Pandaria.
- No new race models are ready to be added yet.
- There will be nine level 90 heroics for players as well as three raids with 14 raid bosses and three difficulties. There will be an additional two world bosses.
- Scenarios will take place at level 90, in an instance, and reward reputation and Valor points. They don’t need a healer, tank, and DPS, just DPS is fine. Each will take 10 to 30 minutes to complete and five or more will be available for launch.
- In Challenge Modes, the vast majority of players will most likely earn a bronze medal even if they are a relatively unskilled player. After a player earns all the medals at the Bronze level, they will be rewarded with an achievement and title. Completing all of the Silver medals will earn a set of spectacular gear for transmogrification, and completing all of the gold will earn a unique epic flying mount. Challenge modes will be available for the six new dungeons at launch.
- Cloud Serpents are the Pandaren’s mount of choice. You can raise your own by doing 20 days of daily quests.
- The Tillers faction will let you run your own farm! The farmer’s market will provide daily quest to improve your farm every day, you will be able to clear plots of land and plant things like cooking ingredients, herbalism nodes, gifts for NPCs to build your reputation… etc.
- Warlocks got the most class changes in MoP, along with new pets.
- There will be more mounts and less color swaps for different rewards.
- They are adding armor to creatures to give them varied appearances, something other than just simple color changes.
- There are now seven zones, up from five. This was done to add more content to the game and give players a less linear progression path so that leveling for a second or third time isn’t the exact same.
- There will be one new arena and two new battlegrounds at launch.
- PvP pet battles are going to be fun and causal, only tracking the number of wins and not the number of losses. When fighting another player, you cannot see the other players name or communicate with them.
- Currently, every race except Goblin and Worgen can learn the ways of the monk.
- The Pre Mists of Pandaria Patch will be roughly two weeks before launch and bring simple rewards. It might involve a scenario with Theramore and the Alliance vs Horde theme. Chen Stormstout might also come to the local cities and get players excited about what is coming.
Female Pandaren Model and Concept Art
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Monk Skills List
Meet the Pandaren Monk (Blizz Insider #42)
October 28th, 2011
Check out the latest Blizzard Insider for some Pandaren Monk insight! (Source)
With the launch of the next World of Warcraft expansion, the Mists of Pandaria will lift to reveal the pandaren, a long-secluded race that has spent generations mastering the way of the monk — World of Warcraft’s newest playable class.
To get an inside look at the upcoming World of Warcraft race and class options, the Blizzard Insider recently sat down with Lead Systems Designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street to discuss the design decisions that went into creating the pandaren monk. So read on, and be among the first to meet the brawling heroes who are, even now, secretly training within the mists. (Source)
Blizzard Insider: How will the pandaren race differ from the other races of Azeroth? What ideas are being explored for their racial abilities?
Ghostcrawler: Ultimately, the challenge with races is to make them feel unique without actually providing them with so much power that players feel like they don’t have a choice in which race they want to be. If tauren are the best warriors, then Horde players might feel like they are sacrificing too much in order to try out a different race or stick with a race they really like. With the pandaren, you probably won’t see anything so amazing that everyone gravitates to them… except that their art and animation is just so wonderful.
The biggest difference for the pandaren is that they can join the Horde or the Alliance, which is something we’ve never tried before. That alone will make them feel unique. They also have a very strong cultural kit. Our trolls might be somewhat Jamaican and the draenei have Eastern European accents, but the pandaren have a very strong Asian influence. That affects everything from their animations — which have a martial arts vibe, even for non-monks — to their hairstyles.
For racial abilities, we’re giving them a bonus to cooking… and to eating. We’re also giving them a moderate bonus to rested experience to make it less daunting to level one all the way up to level 90. They also get the mystical-martial ability to paralyze opponents by touching their pressure points. Finally, we came up with a silly racial, Bouncy, that causes them to take less falling damage. While the pandaren are as noble and epic as any of our races, we felt like we had to acknowledge their, shall we say, endomorphic body shape in some way.
Of course, as with any design this early out, this may all change by the time the new expansion goes live.
Read the full interview after the break below or by click here!
Mists of Pandaria Developer Q&A
October 28th, 2011
Mists of Pandaria Content & Features
Host: Community Manager Zarhym & Panelists
Lead Content Designer Cory “Mumper” Stockton
Lead Sys Designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street
- From yesterday’s Q&A -
Below is the full rundown of all the questions that were answered during the Mist of Pandaria Q&A session:
- Players will be able to travel to Pandaria via new quests from Orgrimmar and Stormwind.
- Pets are being fixed so stats won’t lag behind for several seconds upon logging in or dismounting in patch 5.0
- Monks will have the same hit cap as e.g. an Arms warrior and their energy regen drives everything they do, so their regen will scale the same as rogues and haste in general will scale their damage by the same percentages.
- Blizzard is contemplating increased players conquest point caps by 10-15% to encourage world PvP
- When asked whether the new talent system will work differently in PvP and PvE, Blizzard responded:
- What we don’t want to do is just launch into having different coefficients and talents and everything for PvP and PvE. That just doubles the size of the game which makes it more complex to balance and harder for players to understand.
- Leveling from 85-90 will take place on the new Pandaria continent
- Pandaria will have separate player hubs for Alliance and Horde, no sanctuary with the goal to encourage PvP. AH, Bank and general vendors will be available. Valor, conquest, profession and faction vendors will be scattered around Pandaria.
- When asked if the new talent system would be expanded past 6 specializing skills, Blizzard responded basically saying no. Response below:
- We tried a lot of tiers. We were worried at more than 6 that the combinatorial complexity of >729 different variations of talents would be challenging to balance or for players to even comprehend. We want to focus on having fewer awesome talents than many tiers that will force us to dilute individual abilities in the name of balance
- Guild levels will be increased with new perks. Examples: reduce cost on void storage and transmogrification
- Pandaria is located south of Azeroth. The exact opposite of Northrend.
- The account-wide “Pet Library” feature if successful might be extended to mounts.
More from Blizzard
October 27th, 2011
Pandas? Why??
Blizzard has given the Panderan a rich culture and a specific way of thinking. A history that goes back beyond the sundering with their own struggles and accomplishments. They have an identity beyond “Look, its Pandas.”
This is something I want to touch on a bit more. People seem to think that Pandaren were a joke, a throw away easter egg that we never fully intended as a playable race.
I will direct you to recall the Warcraft RPG (pen and paper) manuals released in 2003. While much of it hasn’t been canon for quite some time, the Pandaren occupy a greater amount of pages and space within the manuals to establish their lore and story than pretty much every other creature on Azeroth. To give it some context, they occupy the same number of pages as Trolls in the Monster Manual, and share the same amount space in the Alliance and Horde Compendium with Orcs or Humans, and just like them … you guessed it… Pandaren were a playable race.
(there’s also an awesome sketch Metzen did of a Pandaren, Dwarf, Furbolg, and Gnome hanging out all friendly-like)
As I said a lot of this was pre-World of Warcraft, and by whatever stroke of fate, Trolls and Forsaken became playable races and Pandaren, Naga, and Furbolgs did not. Some other mix could have just as easily been true, and no one would have questioned it. Worgen didn’t even exist back then, of course, they were a new creation for World of Warcraft.
It would simply be inaccurate to state that Pandaren were a throw away. Our intent, going back to Warcraft III, when the vast majority of the world lore and story was established for the franchise, was always to have a deep and rich history for a race known as the Pandaren.
http://www.wowpedia.org/File:Heroraces.jpg?c=1 There’s the pic.
Haha, yup, that’s the one. Thank you. And this is actually a great resource covering the contents of the manuals, just please keep in mind that much of it is now highly inaccurate and the visual style of the Pandaren have changed quite a bit since then.
Metzen: Why the Pandarens
October 25th, 2011
Why are Pandaren next in line of playable WoW Races? Hear what Metzen has to say:
Why the Pandarens?
As Chris Metzen said in his interview on DirecTV just after opening ceremony, the pandaren race was originally planned to be added as the Alliance race in The Burning Crusade.
As Chris Metzen said in his interview on DirecTV just after opening ceremony, the pandaren race was originally planned to be added as the Alliance race in The Burning Crusade.
There are a number of reasons why that didn’t happen, but none of them are because we thought they wouldn’t make for compelling characters with interesting stories and living environments. We’ve wanted to add the pandaren people into the game for a long time. And, when recording feedback over the years from events like BlizzCon and many other avenues, the number one request (by a large margin) has been for us to add pandaren to the game. A lot of people want it and we feel the timing’s just right post-Cataclysm.
We want the next expansion to be less focused on a primary antagonist, and more on the conflict between the Horde and the Alliance after the fall of Deathwing, particularly as a new land with diverse and foreign cultures is discovered.
The original World of Warcraft didn’t have a primary antagonist and that wasn’t strange to most players. Granted, we’ve set a precedent in the last few expansions of having the one major bad boy. But now, we want to focus much more on creating a bunch of varied content which lets you choose what you want to do in the game on any given day. We want to focus more on what’s fun than what you have to do to excel — and, by that, I mean we want more progression paths in the game to better cater to the extremely diverse player population.
We wouldn’t have gone forward with this idea if we weren’t confident about whether or not we’re breathing some new life into the game and changing up the formula.
I understand the debate over this isn’t going to be settled today — or over the weekend — but give it a bit to sink in, check out the remaining panels (including the Q&A panel tomorrow), and be on the lookout for more information about our design intent for Mists of Pandaria.
As a side note, even with some of the inappropriate comments and spam going on today, we do still really appreciate how passionate everyone is about the direction of the game. We share that passion and look forward to continuing to divulge our evolving philosophy on making this the funnest game possible. And we’ll make sure there are plenty of opportunities for open conversations between community managers, developers, and players as time advances (it’s difficult for me to follow any thread for too long while working BlizzCon). For instance, we’ll be doing a CoverItLive developer Q&A next week with Lead Content Designer, Cory “Mumper” Stockton, and Lead Systems Designer, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, next week. Stay tuned for more info on that! (Source)
Samwise on Mists of Pandaria
October 21st, 2011
Joystiq nabbed an interview with Samwise Didier who is, in a way, the spiritual father of Mists of Pandaria. As art director, he’s had an influence on every Blizzard game for years, but this one’s special: he originally created the Pandaren.
“It was one of the last things that I really wanted to see in World of Warcraft, which is Warcraft in general … Now I can almost say, well, I think I’ve done good with Warcraft — they’re finally in.”
Check out the full article.
