YO.
Been playing MoP since launch, and thought I'd share some opinions and give a little review. They're surprising!
I admit, I bought it in hope expecting it wouldn't be too much of a money sink. However, i'm impressed actually. It has none of the cute, chintsey, shitty atmosphere people were expecting. It's pretty dark. The pet battles are awesome, as are the scenarios (and the incoming brawlers guild looks good too). All serve as a nice addition to dungeons and there's always something to do whether it be solo playing or in groups.
Pandaria is truely an awesome continent! Lots of little vanilla-esque side things to do. For isntance I was flying about and saw a named elite lobster-man mob. Killed it, he dropped a weird use item and a parchment letter. the letter riddled at locations for other named lobster men. eventualyl found them, killed them, combined the items to get a meta item. followed another riddle to find a summoning locaton, killed the overlord for a blue fist weapon - Lobstmourne! Also little bits of lore items and trasures to find.
As for raids. Sadly i'm not overly impressed. they seem to favour short 6 boss raids with no depth. seems like gone are the days of getting immersed in tghe massive halls of Icecrown Citadel or corridoors of Kara etc etc. I still miss Ulduar
![Sad :(](http://handsofjustice.co.uk/forum/Smileys/emotions/sad.gif)
At lv90 there are lots of dailies. and i mean lots. Luckily, they all offer valor points and the rep itself allows you to buy more stuff with valour points. you dont necessrily need to do them, but can seem a bit overkill. I only do them on a weekend, and can find enough other stuff to do on en evening without needing to touch them. They serve a purpose. About it.
Professions are cool again. Overhaul to Archeology in the pandaria zone and it seems to offer more rewards now and is worth doing. Cooking is ace. you learn a sub cooking profession for your class/stat type now. you also plant your own mats (they take a day to grow) and the farming mini game is pretty cool. you can also grow crafting mats too aswell at the spirit motes (replacement for the motes of fire etc etc).
Dungeons are completely imemrsive and look fantastic. Theyve really gone all out on this. Especially Shadow Pan monastery. It's like the beginning of Batman Begins. Great stuff. theyve also tweaked the difficulty of heroics to make them more akin to WotLK than Cata, so it isnt full of twats calling each other 'tards' after few wipes.
the new talent system is very cool. It doesnt really feel dumbed down at all when playing. It is disappointing that all talents are assigned automatically (for me it feels like a bit of the RPG element has been taken away), but the talents are all completely situational and functional. you can switch them anytime you want too, so if your party needs a silence, you remove a CC talent from the same tree and replace it with a silence before a fight. It feels like every talent you chose is a decision and not just a cookie cutter thing.
Overall - it isn't perfect i admit, but the 'oh look pandas, pokemon and farmville' pre-judgers would be surprised. It definitely feels more like Wrath (maybe even TBC) than Cata and theyve put a lot of emphasis on giving players stuff to do when not raiding. The first content patch is incoming and it looks pretty good. So far I'm enjoying it and haven;t felt bored. Hopefully the faster rate of content patches Blizz have promised do deliver.