On Wednesday March 21, during my guild’s raid, I happened to log into my Battle.net account and happened to see that I had the Mists of Pandaria Beta available in my list of games. Needless to say I was quite excited. Quickly taking pictures to show my guildies who were skeptical who thought I was making stuff up. Needless to say, and to my guildies who read this I apologize, but I was distracted the rest of the evening.
After finally getting it up and running and transferring over my DK, I immediately spec’d him, though there was nothing more to do with my Death Knight, as the current phase of Mists of Pandaria beta is to focus testing on the Pandaren 1-10 starting zone.
I leveled 1 Pandaren monk through the starting zone, and bugs aside, the experience was extremely well put together. I expect that once the bugs are fixed it will be even better. The story has a nice flow. The different quests where you save folks, collect things, even hopping on poles, give some new yet familiar quest elements to the game.
The entire Pandaren starting zone is very well put together. The story is clean, the quests are varied and introduce you to a lot of the new mechanics for quests and the new models for mobs.
Next up for testing was running the Temple of the Jade Serpent. We got to fight some pretty bad dudes. Interesting but very familiar mechanics, dispell, don’t stand in the bad. But the enemy models are truly top notch, especially the Sha of Doubt, now I know it says its a place holder model, but damn if it doesn’t look awesome.
Overall the dungeon had a nice flow to it, the art is amazing. Looks like the loot currently is ilvl 425.
Questing in the new zone was a lot of the same, there was 1 quest that felt different where you had to revive crewmen, however the animation for each took a while, and you have to perform this on 6 people, this felt like an unnecessary slowdown to my pace. However I do appreciate Blizzard not having us just bandage folks up like in the past. Parts of the Jade Forest remind me of Sholazar Basin, it definitely isn’t exactly like it. The bamboo, the mist that permeates the ground, it definitely has its own flair.
Even with all the bugs I have found so far I am really digging the expansion, and what Mists of Pandaria has to offer.
To cap it off here are some screenshots:
Pandaria, looking at the first dungeon area in the Jade Forest
Creating a Pandaren in the starting zone
Pandas in balloons!
Final boss of the first dungeon
Looking out on the Jade Forest
Some loot in the first dungeon
More loot from the first dungeon
really nice, Thank you very much for sharing