'World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria' misses the mark with kung fu pandas

TERA, The Secret World, Guild Wars 2, and an impending re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV add up to an extremely competitive market and a lot of quality content. Factor inThe Old Republic, which released at the tail end of 2011, and the market is practically choking on triple-A MMO titles. So what hope does Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion to an eight-year old game, have? A good amount, actually, but that’s due to the already invested World of Warcraft player base.To get more news about Buy World of Warcraft Gold, you can visit lootwow.com official website.

Mists of Pandaria makes do with a nearly decade-old graphics engine and aging mechanics, but the game is starting to feel stale. Blizzard may have the largest amount of players compared to other MMOs on the market, but they’re playing catch-up and it shows. Mists of Pandaria has neither the form nor function of its contemporary competitors, so playing feels like a step back in time. This isn’t an expansion for people who like MMOs and it won’t inspire a mass return of players. This is an expansion for people who are already happy with WoW.
It would be impossible to discuss Mists of Pandaria without addressing the pandaren. The pandaren have taken a lot of flak for looking like Kung Fu Panda rip-offs and, while you can defend their existence as a legitimate piece of lore that predates the Dreamworks films, it’s clear that the race has undergone some changes since their introduction to the world of Warcraft. Not all of these changes have been for the better.

Although they are anthropomorphic pandas and always have been, early sketches of the race depicted them as more muscular than chubby, and their samurai armor gave off an air of ferocity and strength. Now that the race has been made playable in Mists, they’ve been significantly de-fanged. Every pandaren has a belly, and they remark constantly how they love to eat, very similar to Po from the Kung Fu Panda franchise. They have not one, but two racial bonuses that apply to food: Gourmand, which gives a +15 to cooking, and Epicurean, which doubles stats from food buffs.
It’s very, very hard to take a pandaren seriously. To be fair, Blizzard seems to realize this and makes a little jab at the critics. Type out “/silly” as a female pandaren and she might deliver said jab: “So I was talking to this Tauren the other day. No, I mean a Worgen. No. Wait, which one’s a cow, and which one’s a dog? Ugh! All these talking animals are stupid!”

Although pandaren are the masters of Mists’ new Monk class, every race other than worgen and goblins can become a Monk. The Monk is neat in theory, but it’s in conflict with WoW‘s eight-year old combat system. It doesn’t feel right for a master of martial arts to be forced into standing still while performing a whirlwind kick, or performing a rapid-punch combo that looks like something out of Dragonball Z. The moves are cool and fun to watch, but you can’t help but wish it felt a bit more dynamic.

The Monk class gets something akin to a dodge, but it only goes forward, makes your character travel way too far, and since WoW demands you manually face your target, what this means is that you’ll often dodge forward, then have to quickly turn around to face the enemy again. It’s a minor annoyance but an annoyance all the same, and it’s not as easy or convenient as dodging is in other modern MMOs.

There are also mini-boss fights that allow groups of players to take down a single monster without grouping up or worrying about “tagging” a la Guild Wars 2, but these are few and far between. Their presence, like dodging for Monks, tries to shoehorn in new concepts to an old game, but they’re not a natural progression of the game’s mechanics. That all being said, a good amount of Monks I bumped into were veteran players who said they were loving the class. If you like how WoW plays, there’s nothing to dislike about the class. Mists just won’t be winning over anyone new when other games on the market feel less static.
If you choose to roll a Monk or any new character, you’ll encounter Mists’ revamped talent system. The new talent system asks you to select a tree, which is classified according to the MMO holy trinity of tank, heals, and DPS. When I leveled my pandaren Monk for example, I could choose to be a Brewmaster, a Mistweaver, or a Windwalker. Each path is described with nice flavor text that helps explain mechanics, but under the name you’ll also see a label that identifies the path as that of a tank, healer, or DPS class.