mists-of-pandria
Latest
Arcane Brilliance: A preliminary look at the Pandaria talent tree for mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we engage in wild, baseless speculation and make hasty, groundless assumptions based on that wild, baseless speculation. So ... just like every week. A quick recap for those of you who have limited internet access and choose (understandably) to use each of your precious online moments reading this column each week, but otherwise ignore the internet completely: Blizzard announced a new expansion for World of Warcraft. It has pandas. The WoW online community appears to be simultaneously overjoyed, mildly excited, meh, and borderline suicidal. Monks are the new class, and they will be able to tank while drunk, which makes them pretty much identical to every other tank I know. Most importantly, though, the design team plans to throw our current talent system into a virtual wood chipper, pick up the pieces that come out of the other side, and mash them together into a completely new, singular talent tree for each class. The three distinct mage trees will survive, but the majority of the school-specific talents and spells we have now are slated to become baseline abilities that we'll gain as we level (automatically -- no more going to a mage trainer). Ability customization once Mists of Pandaria hits will exist as six talent choices available regardless of spec, one choice between three talents every 15 experience levels. Talent specs as we have known them since the game began in 2004 will cease to exist once patch 5.0 hits, and I expect that to occur in less than a year.
WoW: Mists of Pandaria will introduce Pokemon-like Pet Battle System
The Blizzard Entertainment developers are walking through the biggest features of the newly announced Mists of Pandaria expansion, and while you can head on over to our sister site at WoW Insider for all of the details, there was one big new feature that we couldn't ignore. Players have been able to collect pets in the World of Warcraft for quite a while now, but a new Pet Battle System will come with the next expansion that allows players to both customize their pets with new names and other items, and even battle each other. And if you think that sounds a little bit like Pokemon, you're not wrong at all. The battle system, which Blizzard's lead designer Cory Stockton walked through, will have players choosing three pets to fight with at a time, turn-based battles using three abilities per battle (out of six), and even "Master Trainers" which can be beaten around the world of Azeroth to unlock new abilities. Pets can be obtained in all kinds of different ways, and there will be new "wild pets" that can only be found out in the world (in Goldshire, the devs suggested, while it's raining, during the Spring, only at night). Blizzard has given away special pets during holidays, at events like BlizzCon, and even sold pets for real money on the store. As if World of Warcraft needed to be any more addictive, Blizzard has somehow figured out a way to include their own version of Pokemon inside of it.
