Dragon Army - Some notes from playing the Mists of Pandaria Beta

Posted: 4587 days ago

Edited: 4586 days ago

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New features:

The ranged weapon slot is gone. For rogues and warriors (at least) you’ll still be able to throw (and shoot?) but, since there’s no weapon slot, you’ll lose the agility, stamina, etc. that the weapon gave you even though it’s still in your bag. So don’t go spending a lot on ranged weapons prior to the release.
The talent trees have been redone and greatly simplified (and will be reset when you enter MoP for the first time). You’ll need to choose a specialization for your main spec (and off-spec if you choose) and then you’ll have a choice of a few optional abilities depending on your character’s level (one choice at level 15, 30, 45, etc. up to a 6th choice at level 90). There are 3 options for each of the abilities corresponding roughly to your 3 different talent trees but you can pull abilities from different trees.
You will pick up additional abilities automatically as you level.
You are now allowed only 6 glyphs, 3 major and 3 minor. Your glyph choices will also be reset when you enter MoP for the first time but you’ll still have all the glyphs that you purchased earlier to choose from.
If you have auto-loot turned on and kill multiple members of a mob, clicking on one of the corpses will loot them all.
If a quest giver has multiple quests the additional quests will automatically be offered once you select one.

Problems (hopefully) specific to the Beta:

There’s a Panda in the Trade District near the bank/auction house range that will offer to port you to either Pandaria (Dawn’s Blossom) or Wayward Landing (I’d choose Wayward Landing) both in the starting area of Jade Forest. Hopefully when MoP goes live there will be a story line and maybe a quest chain to describe the discovery of Pandaria.
Your current graphics settings will be reset on entering MoP the first time and you may have to reduce the graphics quality to get a decent frame rate.
When characters are copied to the Beta you lose all your macros and you’ll probably need to repopulate your action bars as well.
I haven’t found any profession trainers in Pandaria yet but, as of 4/25 you can visit the profession trainers in SW, for example and get your maximum skill raised to 600. I haven’t seen and herbs for picking or any mining deposits in Pandaria yet. You can, however, advance your mining skill (and gain some XP) by mining elementium veins and pyrite deposits in Uldum, for example. Unfortunately you can't smelt Elementium for some reason. Archeology in Pandaria seems to be working with 5 things to find within each area (up from 3).
The gear that’s given as quest rewards and from drops has a generic appearance. The same is true of the food items.
Some pets appear huge.

Current bugs in the Beta:

A lot of bugs were fixed during Tuesday's maintenance (4/24). However, the client code is pretty unstable with frequent crashes with random error #132 and there were numerous short server disconnects on 4/25.
The kite master in Pearlfin/Glassfin village doesn't display a route map. So you can fly into Pearlfin village but you can't fly out from there.
There are too few graveyards meaning sometimes you’ll have a long ways to travel if you die.

General comments:

At 85 your experience bar has 10,000,000 points, at 86 it has 11,600,000 and at 87 it has 14,600,000. As usual you’ll need to grind quests, kill things and discover new areas to advance. At this time (4/25) you can't advance your experience after you reach level 87.
The starting area for a level 85 is Jade Forest. While you can enter the next area (Valley of the Four Winds) at level 85, you won’t be able to do quests there until you reach 86.
You won’t be able to fly In Pandaria until you reach level 90.
The green gear that you get from completing quests (as far as I’ve gone) is either level 384 or 399. The blue gear is level 404 or 419. While some of this gear may be higher level or have better stats than your current Cata gear, green and blue gear don’t have gem slots so think twice about changing out your Cata purples.
Mobs are generally level 85 in The Jade Forest, 86 in the east part of Valley of the Four Winds and 87 in the west.
There are portals to Stormwind in both The Wayward Landing and Dawn's Blossom.

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