Morning Folks! Right now I am pretty much splitting time between Diablo IV, Guild Wars 2, and World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix. Last night for example I farmed the world boss in D4 and got another level, and then did a round of dailies and some World vs World in Guild Wars 2, and finally settled into some leveling in PMIX as I seem to be calling it. At this point I am level 30 and have just entered the Valley of the Four Winds… or more so that first rest stop just inside the zone. I have to say that it has been a while since I have experienced any of the Pandaria content and I feel like collectively we the players… judged it way too harshly. Currently, the mechanical state of World of Warcraft is in one of the best states it has ever been, and combining that with a more classical era World of Warcraft expansion… is absolutely wonderful and refreshing. Not that Dragonflight, Shadowlands, and Battle for Azeroth were bad… but they don’t feel anywhere near as “epic” as Pandaria did. The whole stranger in a strange land aspect of the game really works here.
Last night I also unlocked the first of the exclusive mounts, the August Phoenix. This comes from leveling any character to 20 during the Pandaria Remix event. I guess my long-term radar for playing this event is to try and gobble up as many of the exclusive rewards as I can. A number of these are tied to quest completion and finishing each zone’s story, and other batches are tied to purchases with the event currency Bronze. I am pretty much ratholing all of my bronze to this point because I am still seeing viable upgrades from drops. I feel like at some point that is probably going to stop and I will need to invest in some of the big upgrade items from the vendors. For the moment I am holding onto as much of the event currency as I can until I know specifically what I need to spend it on in order to be viable.
One of the things I think I briefly mentioned yesterday but did not really go into detail on is the Cloak of Infinite Potential. This is an item that you get from completing one of the very first quests before diving into Pandaria proper, and it grows with you as you adventure. At seemingly random intervals you will find threads of time from defeating enemies and they will add equally random stats to your cloak. I figure at some point in the far future I will have an equal number of stats in all of the possible columns. The other aspect of the cloak is that as you collect threads, you gain achievements that will cause your alts to start out with ever stronger versions of this cloak adding to the replayability and speeding up your leveling process from that point forward. I already feel exceptionally powerful as is, but it will probably be truly silly to level an alt once you have a fully unlocked cloak.
The other thing that I thought I would give some examples of is the various special gems that I am picking up and slotting into my gear. Like I said yesterday prismatic gems are good old fashioned stat hits, but throughout gameplay, I am picking up all manner of unique abilities and procs that I now have associated with my gear. Of these, the only one that is an active ability is “Lifestorm” which is a big AOE lightning attack that heals me when it finishes. Trailblazer is one of the movement abilities that you slot into your boots and most of these are active, but this one just gives you a 30% boost most of the time you are out of combat. Slay is just “does an execute” which is pretty amazing and I am a fan of the two fire-based procs as they seem to be firing off all the freaking time. All of which is making this experience feel way more interesting than leveling would normally be.
Getting used to hotbar combat again is very much “a thing”. However, all of the tweaks and changes to the normal formula of World of Warcraft combined with seeing a living breathing world full of players who are actively calling out world boss spawns… makes this feel like a totally different game. I feel like the experiments that Blizzard is trying with these alternate variants of World of Warcraft are probably paying extreme dividends in player engagement. While the Battle Royale mode was not really my jam I still gave it a shot and found it at least partially enjoyable. Pandaria Remix is entirely in my wheelhouse and the fact that it is a 90-day event gave me the drive to go ahead and give it a shot. So as much as I hate FOMO mechanics… it seems to have worked on me this time.
One of the best aspects of fan-run private servers was always that they could have slightly modified rulesets. Project Ascension for example is an attempt to take World of Warcraft and make it completely classless. I’ve not played it but it certainly seems interesting. It feels like the core Blizzard team is maybe taking inspiration from some of these custom server types out there and deciding that they can in fact do that as well. While “Retail” World of Warcraft may never really be my main squeeze again, I fully support nonsensical alternate realities like Pandaria Remix. Maybe the future of Warcraft is not a single monolith but a bunch of custom slices that cater to specific player interests. Classic Warcraft seems to be thriving and I can see timewalking remixes thrive as well pending they roll them out regularly enough.
Have you been playing Pandaria Remix? What are your thoughts so far?