Patch 5.1 Invades Pandaria - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Hello friends,

Patch 5.1 splashed onto the shores of Pandaria yesterday afternoon, and with it came a few big changes to the game. Some of the changes were great, while others fall short (by a lot). Here's my take on 5.1.

The Good: 

Reputation Improvements! 

With patch 5.1 Blizzard has heard the player feedback about rep grinds and implemented a way to increase your reputation leveling speed. Upon reaching revered with a Pandaria faction players will be able to purchase commendations for that faction, unlocking a 100% bonus to reputation gains for that faction for all characters on the account.

While this change is only a bandage that doesn't address the real issue with the repetitive faction grinds, it's a welcome change for players needing relief from a never-ending daily quest grinds. This change comes just in time, since patch 5.1 adds even more faction dailies for the Horde and the Alliance.

Brawler's Guild

Probably the most anticipated change in the patch will be the additional of a secretive fight club that players can join (if they can manage to get an elusive invitation). Players can purchase an invite from the Black Market Auction House or get one as a drop from one of the rare faction NPCs in Krasarang. If you aren't able to purchase an invite, someone else who is already in the Brawler's Guild can also invite you.

Personally, I don't see the appeal of the Brawler's Guild - it seems to me like a developer just thought of it on a whim as a reference to a good movie. But, this fight club reference has garnered a lot of hype since it's announcement, and I know that on my server the rare spawns that drop the invitation are hotly contested.

The Bad: 

More Daily Quests


Yes, with 5.1 comes a host of additional daily quests for the players that have been craving additional daily quests to distract them from the lack of actual content in the game.

With the Horde and the Alliance forces landing on the shores of Krasarang, we will be asked to fight for the honor and glory of our factions by completing daily quests... boy, where do I sign up.

Pet Battle Updates

5.1 brings a few much needed changes to the pet battle UI. Pets will now be denoted by the color of their rarity in the battle UI frame (good). Additionally, the pet journal allows more sorting functionality (also good). My issue with the update is that they didn't go far enough! Some really great mods had been created for showing pet battle quality inside of battle. The greatest thing about the mod I was using is that not only did it show the quality, but it showed if you already owned the pet AND if it was an upgrade for you. The updated Blizzard UI doesn't show whether a pet is an upgrade, meaning you need to open up your pet journal and manually search for every individual pet to check if it's an upgrade. Same thing on mouse-over of wild pets - the tooltip will show you own the pet, but not what quality is in your journal.


The Ugly: 

New Item Tooltips

In a study from the school of fixing things that aren't broken, Blizzard decided to update the layout of item tooltips for the first time in 7 years. The old layout grouped primary stats at the top of the item, sockets in the middle, and secondary stats at the bottom of the item. For some reason it was decided that a better approach would be to smash the primary stats and the secondary stats together - so instead of having something that's easy to read and functional, we get a tooltip with a jumble of information that isn't easy to read at a glance.

Compare for yourself - do you hate the new tooltips as much as I do?

Item Upgrades

The patch also adds item upgrades - personally, I'm indifferent to this feature, but I think it may turn off some casual players. At most I think it adds an unnecessary level of complexity to gearing your character. A player now needs to know what gear is BiS, what to gem it with, what to enchant it with, what to transmogrify it to, what stats to reforge, and now, whether or not to upgrade it... sometimes, less is more.

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Those are my reflections on 5.1. So, what did everyone else think of the patch?

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Paladin-Bias

Thoughts on Cataclysm

Hello!

So, I'm sure by now pretty much anyone reading this played the newest World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm and drawn your own conclusions about it. Or if you haven't played it then you may have no interest in my opinions of the game.

But regardless whichever category you fall under- read this post anyway, I have a family to feed!

First Impressions-

When I first booted up the game, it was after a long (re:16 hour) workday, and I knew I had maybe an hour tops to play before bed. I threw in the installation disc, grabbed some chow, and sat down expecting to watch a loading bar. Thankfully however the game was ready to play

quickly and I was off to the races.

Prior to the expansion I had done zero research regarding leveling, or strategies for traversing the new content, so I was a little overwhelmed at first. I headed to Mount Hyjal and started questing through the typical "kill 10 boars" or "loot 5 orbs of evil" quests. I was disheartened to see a realm first level 85 achievement pop up on the first night, and was annoyed that people were hitting level cap in less than one day, a drastic change compared to WOTLK.

Overall however, I found myself sucked into the questing, the new zone, and the new achievements and ended the night craving much more.

Hindsight-

I played through Hyjal, Deepholm, Vash'ir, and Uldum over the next few days and got a good idea of the game-play of the expansion. While there were some really awesome quest lines, I think the majority were far too familiar, predictable, and underwhelming. For example, the end of the Hyjal quests involved defeated Ragnaros with some legends from WoW lore, (amazing concept right?) but it ended up being a drawn out fight involving too much repetition (heal the guy, dodge the fire, kill the adds, repeat) to be fun.

In addition, it seems like the developers heard all the positive reaction to their cut sequences (Wrathgate) from the fans and decided that they needed to strike the iron while it was hot. So expect A LOT more cut scenes in Cata. And this is by no means a good thing. The Wrathgate sequence was a triumph of visual and emotional imagery which provided not only entertainment, but emotional appeal. When Bolvar calls out to Arthas, you hear the passion in his tone, and to see him fall to apparent betrayal by the Forsaken really sparks a variety of emotions in the player.

The Cata cut sequences by comparison are boring, unnecessary, and extremely random. It seems kind of like the development team ended up with some extra budget while designing Uldum and decided every other zone needed a cut-scene.

There is one cut scene where you literally ride about 50 yards on a caravan while some guy in a funny hat talks about something irrelevant to anything that matters in the game.

I found myself literally annoyed by these cut scenes at several times, because they took me out of the game, which was Blizzard's argument originally as to why there weren't more cut scenes to begin with!

Closing Thoughts-

Aside from the frustrating an pointless cut scenes, if I had to give my overall opinion of Cata, I would say everything seems too formulaic. Don't mistake me for an elitist when I say that, I realize that they have something that works, so obviously there will be redundancies. But it just seems like everything is just a re-skinned regurgitation from the past. New, expensive crafting pets and mounts to create- check; new, rare drop mounts and pets to farm- check; new factions to farm rep for, check. This may just be me being cynical as a completionist, but it feels too much like I've already beaten this game before...

Anyway, overall I know I'm going to be wasting more time than I should playing the expansion, so i can't hate on it too much. It looks better than ever, some of the quests are downright epic and/or hilarious, they added a ton of new places to explore, they added new things to farm, and the guild achievements and perks are amazing and really add extra unity to guilds. Overall Cataclysm has some brown spots, but this is one piece of fruit still worth eating.