Sometime around 4 am on Sunday morning, I hit level 90. I'd been taking my time and enjoying the sights of the last two leveling zones, but I wanted to hurry to the end because World of Warcraft -- for better or for worse -- has always placed its best content at the level cap. Along the way, I realized that Blizzard was right about the Pandaria's questing structure being a little less linear and more based on exploration than Cataclysm's, but there's a hitch: I'd left most of the zones I'd leveled through roughly at the 80% completion mark (mainly for a change of scenery) and unfortunately I found myself running out of "real" quests at my level toward the end. That wasn't such a problem, though; Mists, it turns out, has hundreds of level-90 daily quests awaiting at endgame, and thus I pushed to 90 using these after I'd exhausted the story stuff.
was a little surprised to discover a small disappointment among them. Remember my little crop I started growing a couple of days ago and how similar I said it was to crops in Farmville? The big difference, it turns out, is that crops don't wither if you don't harvest them within a set amount of time as they do in Zynga's ridiculously popular Facebook farm. I didn't think it was possible to dumb down Farmville further than it already has been, but Blizzard appears to have pulled it off. That's a shame, because harvesting your crops before they wither is what accounts for the lion's share of Farmville's addictiveness, and while I've never cared for farming games myself, I could see the idea working as addictively in this context. The need to deal with those troublesome crops I mentioned does provide an alternative to dealing with withering crops, but I can't help but feel that the extra step would have helped the implementation of farming as a whole.
Not a Worst-Case Scenario
I haven't tried the new Heroics yet, but I did tackle several of the new "scenarios" meant for level 90 players -- essentially mini instances for three players that (in theory) don't require tanks or healers to finish. I'd worried about these; the pre-launch scenario that Blizzard released the week before Mists of Pandaria's official release was a boring affair centering on the fall of the Alliance port of Theramore, and from the Alliance perspective, it wasn't any more complicated than "kill this stationary group of enemies, then kill this stationary group of enemies, and just to spice things up, we'll make you set a couple of ships on fire." Compared to some of Blizzard's previous pre-launch events it was a severe disappointment, especially considering that players who hadn't read Blizzard's book Jaina Proudmoore: Tides of War (myself included) had very little idea of what was going on. I hate to say it, but the event set the mood for the release, and seemed to leave the majority of players disappointed.
The scenarios included with the release are much better, although I think the damage has been done. They flow better, for one thing, and they also do a better job of conveying the storyline through the voiceovers from the NPCs you assist. In one, I had to defend some kegs of ale from attacks by lizards atop a stormy summit where lightning occasionally caught the kegs on fire; in another, I emptied a gloomy crypt of the Sha who were infesting it. Still another presented a version of previously open-world arenas like the Crucible of Carnage; and the most interactive one I saw had us rescue a group of villagers from enemies, complete with having to save the kegs of beer scattered throughout the Jade Forest and roll them back to the hub.
Not a Worst-Case Scenario
It's probably because I and the other players I was with had just hit 90, but each scenario was a little more challenging than I was expecting. After a frustrated Death Knight dropped from the group in the Crypt of the Forgotten Kings, a Mage and I had to finish the rest of the short instance on our own, which was tough enough that we wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't switched to my tanking spec. Elsewhere, a couple of bugs soured the experience, such as when a jade lion boss in the Greenstone Village scenario wasn't showing any indication in the form of animations or cast bars that he was healing himself somehow, and killing him took roughly 15 minutes even after we caught on that we could still down him if we kept him stunned.
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