Good Morning Folks! I was someone who played through Mists of Pandaria at launch, and it was only this morning as I was titling this blog post… that I realized it was “Krasarang” and not “Kasarang”. I have been saying it wrong for twelve years… not that I spend much time talking about this exceptionally skippable zone. Generally speaking, I would do just that, ignore ever going down here on characters and instead make a faster route either out to Townlong Steppes or up to Kun-Lai Summit. However, since all that really matters is the level that I obtain… and since everything scales to my level I figured it was a better call just to bop down and knock out the wilds while it provided the most experience. At this point, I am level 45 and have just started through the first few quest chains in this zone. I figure tonight I will wrap it up and then move to Townlong as I just like that zone better than Kun-Lai.
This is one thing that I miss the most about modern World of Warcraft expansions… is that it felt like there was merit in determining which path you took through the content on each character for efficiency’s sake rather than just sort of needing to do all of it. In this era of the game there always seemed like there was way more content than any given player really needed to do, and as such you could vary things up each time you ran a new alt through it. This is partially due to the fact that Mists of Pandaria has seven zones at launch, with a number of external islands added through the course of the expansion and Dragonflight for example shipped with 4 zones… and a 5th that only really matters if you were creating a new character. Similarly, Shadowlands shipped with four zones… and a fifth which was considered a pseudo-endgame zone in the form of The Maw.
One of the biggest pains with Pandaria Remix is dealing with gear and all of the gem sockets. Essentially tinker gems are a resource that once collected you never have to deal with getting again as you can remove gems freely from gear. However, this means each time you pick up an upgrade, you have to strip the previous piece of gear of gems and then outfit the upgrade in a similar manner. When watching some of the content about the Remix so far, one of the addons that folks kept pointing out is something called Narcissus which has an interface to make this a bit more simplistic. Essentially it gives you a talent point like interface that allows you to select the gems that you want to run and then will automagically socket those into gear. I wish it did this on its own as you swapped items, but unfortunately, it does not. But equipping an item and then checking the two to three gems afterward to remove them from the previous item and equip them into the new item is at least saving me a bunch of clicks.
The real purpose of the addon seems to be a replacement for the default character gear and stats system. There are features that allow you to enter photo mode as well as options to create virtual “group shots” combined with a bunch of characters. There is also a way to save off barbershop customizations to simply the process of swapping between looks. None of these things are things that I really care about right now however… for me, it is just the addon that makes the gear swapping in remix less dumb. Essentially my gameplay pattern is to run a bunch of content and get a bunch of caches until I start to feel like my gear might be weakening… then chain open them with a macro and equip any upgrades before diving forth into the next barrage of questing. My only real complaint is that I wish the infinite caches were stacking and as such took up less inventory space. I am also slightly annoyed by all of the consumables that I get because quite frankly… I hate dealing with consumables.
#showtooltip
/use Cache of Infinite TreasureFor anyone who is curious and needs it, this is the Macro I am using to open the caches. I basically just place it on my hotbar and spam it to chain open them. Far easier than clicking on each individual one.