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Blizzard showcasing Heart of the Swarm, Pandaria at this year's Gamescom

Blizzard has revealed that it will be showing off the latest World of Warcraft expansion pack, Mists of Pandaria, at this year's Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.
The publisher announced its plans for the August 15-19 public gaming convention this week, revealing it will present the world premiere of Mists of Pandaria's opening WoW MoP cd key cinematic. The cinematic will play on screens at the Blizzard booth during the first public day of Gamescom (Thursday, August 16).

Blizzard will also be showcasing Diablo III and Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, as part of its Gamescom 2012 lineup. Show attendees will be able to meet members of the development teams at Blizzard's booth during the show, as well as participate in the publisher's yearly dance and costume competitions.

Mists of Pandaria is WOW's fourth expansion. It follows Burning Crusade (2007), Wrath of the Lich King (2008), and Cataclysm (2010). The add-on is set on the new continent of Pandaria and focuses on the Pandaren, as well as the monk player class. The expansion pack, which does not have a release date, will also increase the player level cap to 90.

The second instalment in the Starcraft II three-part series, Heart of the Swarm will follow 2010's Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty and precede the final entry, Legacy of the Void. Last month, Blizzard revealed that Heart of the Swarm is 99 percent finished.

As part of Activision Blizzard's February financial results call, the company revealed it was not expecting to ship both Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria in 2012.

Gamescom will run from August 15-19 in Cologne, Germany.

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Blizzard's highly polished item hunt still shines.

Unlike Cataclysm, which tried to be the expansion for everyone, the fourth expansion to Blizzard’s perennially popular MMO is aimed at the experienced player, adding in plenty of high level content to churn through after leveling from 85 to the new cap of 90. If you’ve been away from WoW for a while, much of the core experience remains the same: it’s a ceaseless pursuit of power, where acquiring better items opens up access to more challenging content, which lets you acquire even better items to access even more challenging content, and on and on as you rise from lowly nothing to slayer of the world’s greatest evils. It’s a familiar formula, and still feels rewarding, where your in-game character serves as a controllable trophy rack, broadcasting to others the towering terrors you were skilled enough to defeat, inspiring envy in low-level onlookers and fueling personal pride.

Blizzard’s clearly learned a lot over World of Warcaft’s nearly eight year run, and has molded questing in Mists of Pandaria into its finest form yet; a focused, fast-paced, story-heavy experience. Goals are always clustered close together, usually supported by a strong narrative, dressed up with a surprising amount of voiced dialogue and quick in-game cut-scenes that never take you out of the action for long. You’re often shuttled between locations in WoW MoP cd key custom rides; you may hop on a hot air balloon or ride atop the back of a slithering dragon to take in Pandaria’s beautiful sights while you’re given more of the story. There’s a lot of content to see from level 85 to 90, and because of all the attention to detail, there’s little dead space.

The presence of all that detail helps to fight back against the wearying grind that tends to set in while playing many MMOs, as it feels like the surrounding world changes based on your actions. Monuments crumble, monsters rise from the ocean and the configurations of NPCs in settlements change to reinforce the idea that that Pandaria’s story has a direction and momentum normally reserved for single-player games.

Clever alterations of quest mechanics keep the fun from slowing to a standstill. The majority of quests have kill and collect goals -- familiar territory for any MMO player -- but few are ever exactly the same. In Townlong Steppes, for example, you’ll find a multitude of quests to kill mantids. In one you’ll use a flare to uncover cloaked mantids, in another you’ll kick barrels at mantids and rely on NPC archers to set the creatures aflame and burn through their heavy armor, and in another you’ll kill mantids on a battlefield bristling with explosions. Though you’re always given the same core task, the mixing of rules keeps the quests interesting. The variations also correspond to the storyline, making them feel justified instead of frivolously added for variety’s sake. Considering this is largely true of the entire 85 to 90 run, it’s an especially impressive achievement.

Mixed in you get the occasional vehicle quest where you fire turrets at invading armies or stomp evil monkeys while riding atop a rampaging beast. These alternative quest types help break up the pacing, but are used sparingly so they’re never disruptive. Blizzard also gives even lowly enemies special attack types that require you to stay mobile, helping to occasionally alter the rhythm of standard skill rotation combat.

The writing throughout is also generally strong, taking an ominous tone as the story turns to matters of a rising evil within the typically peaceful land of Pandaria. Though the characters aren’t especially deep, and there are certainly moments of eye-rolling cheesiness as characters strike a tone a little too serious for their own good, it’s still surprisingly easy to get swept up in the tale, thanks in part to the stellar soundtrack. Despite the dire circumstances in Pandaria, WoW still never loses its characteristic goofy humor, so, even as you face off against monstrous beasts, you’re never far from a quest that asks you to shove yaks through a car wash-like contraption, keeping a necessary sense of levity in Pandaria’s hyper colorful world of preposterously large shoulder pads and even bigger vegetables.

As much as Blizzard does well, there are still a few dud quests mixed in, which conjure stinging memories of WoW’s early days. They aren’t especially frequent, and perhaps stand out so sharply because the rest of the questing is so smooth. Questing doesn’t stop after hitting level 90, either, as Blizzard built in a large number of daily quests related to Pandaria’s various factions. The clear the goal was to make the journey to exalted status a little more palatable than the routine grind, so Blizzard fashioned each faction into more plausible pockets of civilization within Pandaria. This idea of more thoroughly developed factions is most strongly exemplified by the Tillers’ home area, where you’re given a private farm to cultivate and upgrade, and can run dailies to gain favor with the faction as well as improve standing with individual NPCs. The level 90 zone Vale of Eternal Blossoms is another strong example, where a rotating set of daily tasks change up your routine and send you further across the zone as your standing increases, giving reputation grinding more of a sense of progression.

Still, the appeal of logging in to run multitudes of dailies with slightly altered goals – one day you might fight a giant crocodile in the Vale, the next a wolf with sword between its teeth – begins to wear thin pretty quickly. It’s still a grind, it’s just presented better, and only one piece of Blizzard’s end game in Pandaria.

Though four dungeons unlock as you level up from 85, the real experience doesn’t start until heroics open up at level 90. These dungeons aren’t prohibitively challenging and can be conquered by pretty much anyone with moderate skill. The focus in on big fights, not trash mobs, so for the majority of each dungeon run you’ll engage towering bosses who exhibit unique attack patterns. Some require you to launch yourself from turrets to exploit weak points, some strafe battle zones with flame so your party needs to flee to the edges, some cast debilitating debuffs and spawn shadow minions, and others teleport you around the battle zone and activate environmental hazards to ensure need to stay alert and active in a fight, resulting in satisfying rounds of combat that don’t suffer from unnecessary frustration.

Each dungeon is also threaded with a significant amount of story content and features elaborately staged encounters. Blizzard knows how to tease its climactic battles better than most other developers, building dungeons like Temple of the Jade Serpent and Stormstout Brewery out in the open world and sending you through on quests, building excitement for the eventual dungeon run and making the structures and creatures feel like natural pieces of a cohesive, and often gorgeous, virtual world.

If heroic dungeons are still too intimidating for you, Blizzard included Scenarios, a more forgiving type of instanced content built for three players. Though less challenging, Scenarios, don’t do anything substantially better than any other part of the game and don’t offer rewards that justify the time investment. Perhaps moving forward Blizzard will continue to roll out important story events in Scenario format (such as with Theramore’s Fall), but even with some creative quest designs, Scenarios just don’t have much of an identity, and feel wholly disconnected from the rest of Pandaria, directly contrasting with Blizzard’s efforts to better intertwine instanced dungeon content with the world at large.
For more dedicated players, Blizzard built in challenge modes for Pandaria’s dungeons, where groups can race to knock down bosses and post clear times to online leaderboards and claim rewards. This, along with raid content that’s just beginning to roll out, seems like it could become an important piece of the WoW experience for more hardcore players in the months to come, as it provides a way for competitive PvE players to really get a sense of how they compare with the rest of the community.

In case PvE encounters aren’t very exciting to you, the PvP game was expanded with two Battlegrounds, both of which feature well-designed game modes that feel very different and provide plenty of tactical depth. On Silvershard Mines, your team needs to capture automated minecarts that run along tracks while preventing the enemy from taking over and doing the same. It’s fast and frantic and results in a satisfying game of risk and reward as some teammates must stay back to defend while others need to band together into assault groups to chase down moving, sometimes heavily guarded targets within a time limit. The Temple of Kotmogu is even more hectic as teams fight over four controllable orbs and hold them to score points, a setup where quick reflexes, communication and sharp situational awareness can make a huge difference in the ensuring chaotic melee.

While this is all content for high level players, there is a reason to start all the way back at level one. The added Monk class can be played as a tank, damage dealer or healer, and is built with mechanics for each specialization that mesh well with the class’ history within Blizzard lore as an agile brewmaster. As a tank the Monk shatters kegs of alcohol on the ground to generate threat, then can light soaked foes on fire by spewing flame breath. While tuned to deal damage, the Monk gains a rapid-fire punch attack that stuns and harms enemies in an arc in front of him, great for setting up lesser enemies for punishment from others in dungeons. He can also pile on spikes of damage by unleashing whirling kicks at enemies, with a chance to spawn replenishing orbs after making kills. With a distinct rhythm of gameplay as he builds and spends two resource types, the Monk is a fun, versatile and genuinely different addition to World of Warcraft’s already stellar class lineup.
Leveling up through all that old content can be a huge chore, though it’s expedited somewhat by a daily buff accessible to the Monk that temporarily boosts experience gain. With the recently reworked talent system that trashed the old talent trees entirely, leveling also doesn’t have the same giddy sense of nonstop rewards it used to. You’re only able to make a talent decision every fifteen levels, activating one talent out of three per tier. Though the less frequent decision making does deflate the excitement of powering up, the new talent system does force some interesting choices, as some are better suited for soloing, filling specific group roles or PvP.

The talent system was recently changed for all WoW players, so there’s no need to pick up Mists to see what Blizzard did. The same goes for playing as the Pandaren race and participating in pet battles, a completely optional Pokemon-like combat system that has absolutely no business being as good as it is. The system lets you fight with, level up and customize all pets you currently own and collect many more throughout World of Warcraft’s zones. The turn-based combat is surprisingly deep, with plenty of differing attack types, defenses, exploitable weaknesses and status ailments. It even features a fully functioning matchmaker, so you can usually find a fight with a live player within seconds. Though the only rewards are achievements and more experience for your pets, it’s a really satisfying system, and hopefully something Blizzard will continue to refine.
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The Verdict

Mists of Pandaria is an expansion built for the high level player that shows off Blizzard’s skill with dungeon design and offers plenty of rewards for long-term play. It’s also the best questing in World of Warcraft, with strong emphasis on storytelling, resulting in an entertaining run from 85 to 90 that seldom tumbles into tedium. While not all the new systems dazzle, more than anything, Mists proves that Blizzard’s venerable MMO is still one of the best around, a mix of breezy questing, top tier class design, and multiple systems to encourage the cutthroat competition that props up the end game. World of Warcraft is still devilishly effective at teasing god-like power, where you start with nothing and climb step by step up a colossal mountain of progression until you can, someday, spike a flag into its peak, look out across the vastness of your experience and revel in a sublime sense of dominance.

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria Reputation gear

very week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

I owe you all the reputation gear guide I promised weeks ago, and so, here it is. Never let it be said that I completely procrastinate on stuff I said I would do for weeks on end. I mean, it's true but you don't have to say it. The various quartermasters for the factions can be found here, if you're trying to figure out where to spend your precious points. They are precious, aren't they? Much like your torso. While there's ilevel 458 justice point gear, I'm going to be focusing on the epics, as those will last you longer overall. By the time you earn enough JP's to buy anything, you often have better gear from the dungeons you're running anyway.

Each faction has different items - some helms, others bracers, etc - and so, ultimately, it's most rewarding to work on Golden Lotus first in order to unlock the August Celestials and Shado-Pan, since that will get you access to the most items. The Klaxxi are a good faction to work alongside the Golden Lotus until you get the Shado-Pan and August Celestials unlocked, since you'll probably unlock revered with them before you finish getting Golden Lotus to revered, and can then focus on Shado-Pan and August Celestials. We'll cover Golden Lotus and Klaxxi rewards first, since you'll have access to them first, and then the other two.

It should be pointed out that if you are raiding 10 or 25 man normal Mogu'shan Vaults, you may already have access to gear on par with these rewards. That's intentional - Blizzard wants raiders to gear up from raiding, with valor points more serving the role of consolation prize if you just can't get that WoW MoP cd key drop you need. But if you primarily run heroic dungeons or LFR, then these reputation rewards will be upgrades.

Of Lotus Gold and Klaxxi Amber

First up we have the Golden Lotus. Like most reputations, there are now decent epic items at honored reputation (this wasn't the case at launch) which are worth your time. Specifically the Golden Lotus have two rings available for purchase at honored, Alani's Inflexible Ring (a tanking ring with double avoidance itemization) and the Ring of the Golden Stair, a DPS ring with crit and expertise.

At revered, the Golden Lotus has shoulder and chest armor available. The chest armor is interesting because it has the exact same socketing options, a blue and yellow socket, and while the Cuirass of the Twin Monoliths is definitely a tank chest, the Dawnblade's Chestguard could serve as either a DPS or tanking chest depending on if you gear for hit and expertise as a tank or not. (There are currently two schools of thought on that, the Mastery/Dodge and Parry tanks vs. the Hit and Expertise/Mastery tanks. Either can be viable, depending on how you tank. ) For shoulders, we have a much more definitive difference between the two.

The Stonetoe Spaulders are DPS shoulders. They have crit and hit and a yellow socket. The Shoulders of Autumnlight are tanking shoulders with dodge and expertise and a yellow socket.
The Klaxxi are the most straightforward faction in terms of gear acquisition - you don't have to unlock them via another faction's quests, you don't have to use them to unlock someone else, and you get a lot of Klaxxi rep from the zone's questing before you even start the dailies. In terms of rep gear, you get everything you need from the Klaxxi by revered, with the Exalted weapons being of the exact same quality and iLevel as heroic dungeon drops (iLevel 463). Still, they exist, and if you don't have better by the time you have exalted you can buy them, so I will mention them here. The Klaxxi also reward blacksmithing patterns, so if you're a smith you'll be interested in getting to honored with them for the various blacksmithing patterns, which can make iLevel 476 breastplates and gloves and iLevel 463 weapons, as well as this expansion's belt buckle. Many of these recipes requiring Living Steel as well as Spirits of Harmony, making them terribly expensive on some servers.

There are two necklaces available at honored for warriors - the Bloodseeker's Solitaire for DPS, and the Paragon's Pale Pendant for tanks. At revered, the Klaxxi offer belts and legs, with warriors being interested in the DPS and tanking options since we still don't have that healing spec. When do I get to yell people back to life, Blizzard? The belts are the Klaxxi Lash of the Consumer (tank all the way) and the DPS oriented Klaxxi Lash of the Rescinder. Considering that the LFR belt Star-Stealer Waistguard has two sockets I'm not knocked out by the Klaxxi tank belt. (The normal mode Star Stealer has the extra socket and equivalent stats to the Klaxxi belt, making it superior. ) But like I said, reputation gear isn't meant to be as good as drops from raids.

The leg options are the Kovok's Riven Legguards (dodge/exp tanking legs that I love just for the name, cause Kovok is awesome) and the Legguards of the Unscathed, which sound like tanking legs but which in fact are DPS legs. And as I said before, at exalted you can get weapons, two of which you can even use if you don't have better yet, the Amber Espada of Klaxxi'vess for SMF and prot warriors and the Amber Flammard of Klaxxi'vess for TG fury and arms warriors (and my long dreamed of arms tanking spec that I'm trying to make work. )
The starry heavens and the guardians who never rest

Now that we've covered the revered rewards for these two factions, what about the Shado-Pan and August Celestials? I'm neither glad nor upset that you asked, since either way I'm going to tell you. It's the whole point of the post.

Like all factions, the Shado-Pan award various items at honored. In their case it's capes. I know, who doesn't love a good cape? The Cloak of the Dark Disciple is your DPS option with crit and mastery and it sounds like Doctor Strange would fight the dude wearing it. Or, optionally, like you could credibly tell people that you are the terror that flaps in the night when you wear it. Yi's Cloak of Courage is a tank cape with parry and mastery, but it has no such duck related potency.

The Shado-Pan are unique in that they offer trinkets. At revered, we have access to the Iron Belly Wok for DPS and Lao-Chin's Liquid Courage for tanks. Also available at revered are helms, the Voice-Amplifying Greathelm for DPS and Yi's Least Favorite Helmet for tanks, who should probably feel mildly insulted right about now.

Finally, the August Celestials and their offerings on display. At honored, the Celestials offer a variety of bracers. Warriors will be interested in Braided Black and White Bracer for DPS, itemized for crit and expertise, while the Battle Shadow Bracers are your parry/hit option for tanks. At revered, the Celestials offer boots and gloves. For DPS, the Tankiss Warstompers baffle and confuse me with their name. Why would you put tank in the name of the DPS boots? The tanking boots, the Yu'lon Guardian Boots, should be named the Yu'lon Armsmaster Boots just to confuse people more.

For DPS, the Streetfighter's Iron Knuckles are your crit/haste glove option. I admit I kind of wish these had a cosmetic effect where they yelled hadouken occasionally when you hit people. The Gloves of the Overwhelming Swarm, tanking gloves, sound like we're getting them from the wrong faction, frankly.

That covers the rewards from the various factions. Next week, either TG vs SMF vs Arms in terms of DPS, or the hit and expertise debate for protection.

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World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Log Three: I May Be Broke, But At Least I Can Ride

Some weeks you have a lot of time to be a panda-person. And some weeks, you don't.

Though I didn't have as much time to take my ferocious little blue-haired pandaren rogue around the Eastern Kingdoms as I had hoped, still, I made some progress. I killed things and completed quests and uncovered areas of the map, and overall, as I reached and passed level 20, finally began to settle into a comfortable MMO groove.

It was assassination that did it for me, really. I originally tried the Combat specialization, thinking it would be akin to the swashbuckler I played many moons ago in another MMO. And it was! I got a boost to AOE damage. Then I remembered that I didn't enjoy playing that swashbuckler much at all, and I went and found a trainer I could respec with. Assassination suits my temperament much better, and as I began to sneak through canyons and caves, leaping from the shadows to fell my targets, combat started to gain a meaty feel that I could really get into.

Being genuinely new to the game at this late stage has its advantages. While other players have had to unlearn tactics and ideas, and had to adapt to new geography wow cd key and lore, from my perspective everything just... is. And while even I can see some of the seams that joint the eras of the world together, from my low-and-leveling perspective everything so far is either the Wandering Isle, and therefore known to be brand-new, or it's not.

But being a newbie has disadvantages, too. The lack of connections and accumulated time and goods is starting to become a problem. I realize, just from looking around me while in-game, that eight years in currency flows like water, and despite money sinks of all kinds no doubt high-level players aren't hurting for cash. But at level 20, I found myself standing in Stormwind, mentally jingling my painfully empty purse in one hand. Thanks to playing the collector's edition of Mists of Pandaria, I had both a battle pet and a mount waiting for me in the mail. But all my questing and leveling so far had left me with only enough gold to train either pet battling or riding.

I picked riding. My panda's tail is cute and all but I'm sick and tired of watching it run around zones at a snail's pace. It's a big world, and traveling it on foot gets tiring, even with occasional purse-draining trips by gryphon.
Kotaku's MMO reviews are a multi-part process. Rather than deliver day one reviews based on beta gameplay, we play the game for a few weeks before issuing our final verdict. Once a week, we deliver a log detailing when and how we played the game. We believe this gives readers a frame of reference for the final review. Since MMO titles support many different types of play, readers can compare our experiences to theirs to determine what the review means to them. Previous looks at Mists of Pandaria: log one, supplemental, and log two.


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Mists of Pandaria: Review in Progress, Day 2

I'm level 87 now, and I just rode through the golden gates of the Shrine of Seven Stars, the new Alliance-only hub city for Pandaria. Not only is it pleasing to look at, it's also useful. Auction house, bank, transmogrification NPC, portals to every major city (including Wrath of the Lich King's Dalaran and The Burning Crusade's Shattrath) -- everything you could possibly need is here in one place. It's almost as if Blizzard is sending us a message that their experiment with returning to the "old world" in homeworld cd key didn't work as well as they'd planned, so now they're focusing all their efforts on distancing players from it as much as possible. That's fine for us in the 87-90 range, but I worry that players entering the game for the first time will visit cities like Stormwind or Orgrimmar and walk away with the impression that WoW's servers are ghost towns.

Edit: Auction houses were actually taken out of the faction cities in Pandaria during the beta. You now have to go back the old capital cities if you want to use them. My mistake!

That said, I'm enjoying my time in Pandaria, especially when it comes to questing. I'd never roll a Pandaren character myself, but (bear with me on this) I've come to love the Asian aesthetic in the expansion as a whole. So many people complain that the trappings of western fantasy are becoming overworked in MMORPGs (and arguably RPGs in general), and with Pandaria, Blizzard has shown that you can do away with almost all the predictable settings and still be fine. This stunning change of environment, I believe is Pandaria's greatest contribution to the fantasy MMORPG genre, and I'd say it has the same effect on making the game feel fresh as The Burning Crusade's "space" setting on a shattered world. I'm so into the new scenery, in fact, that I just spent an ungodly amount of gold on one of the few cool samurai sword models (and it's from Classic, funny enough) in an attempt to make my Warrior look as appropriate as possible.

Old Friends in Disguise


Most of the quests consist of killing and fetching, of course, but Blizzard usually manages to keep them interesting. Most of the quests consist of killing and fetching, of course, but Blizzard usually manages to keep them interesting. It starts out impressively enough. The Alliance has had a bad time of it lately, losing the coastal town of Southshore, the entire kingdom of Gilneas, and (most recently) the port of Theramore to Horde attacks, and so it came as a welcome surprise that Mists of Pandaria starts out with an exciting sequence in which we get to slaughter the Horde at one of their camps in the freshly discovered land of Pandaria. It's full of rousing speeches, on-rails fighter plane bombings, and a final push in which you land and start hunting some orc. In the few hours after release, it even felt something like a real battle, with dozens of fellow Alliance players wreaking havoc. It's a pity, though, that it's all still based on meeting X amount of objectives (although phasing helps convey a sense of altering the world), and I couldn't help but feel the entire sequence would have been more amazing with something like Guild Wars 2's dynamic events.
Still, Mists of Pandaria does much to break the monotony. Earlier today, I jumped into the shoes of a Pandaren Monk named Clem Stormstout as he recalled the time he visited his family's brewery and found himself appalled by what he saw there. You can only click one button to attack in this quest and one button to heal, but the surrounding story was involving enough that I could forget about this excessive simplicity for most of the quest. Elsewhere, I used a gigantic lizard to toss watermelons into vats of tofu, choosing the proper level of strength to knock them as far as I could. Earlier, I controlled a sniper who picked off monkey-like beings named Hozen so a dwarf ally could get past them. So far, my personal favorite was found in a quiet village where all the Pandaren citizens were overcome by a debilitating sense of helplessness, but none so much as one in particular who lay on the outskirts of town waiting for the vultures to come eat him. To save him, I had to roll him back to town by kicking him while fighting off the vultures. And yes, once we got back, I learned why he was such a "sad panda" and set things right. Such humor's hardly new to WOW Cataclysm CD Key and its pandas -- remember all those gnome and goblin quests? -- and I've enjoyed the balance of humor and weighty issues I've found in my quests.

My Kingdom For a Vial of Tiger Blood!


That's not to say that the experience doesn't have its low points, but I've only seen one area that started to try my interest. That's not to say that the experience doesn't have its low points, but I've only seen one area that started to try my interest. The offender was the middle part of the Krasarang Wilds, which is home to (among other things) the Nesingwary hunting party. Veterans of the previous expansions will recognize Nesingwary as a Hemingway-styled questgiver whose purpose seems to be to satirize "kill quests" by asking you to massacre ridiculous amounts of wildlife, but it seemed particularly annoying here. Killing the required cranes was self-explanatory, but it took ages before I was able to get all the blood from the tigers, particularly since the blood has a pitiful drop rate and the tigers are stealthed. It seemed like a forced attempt to draw out time you spent questing in an area. A similar quest from a nearby group also suffered from the same tedious drop rates, and the area as a whole was the most boring and uninspired questing area of Pandaria that I've seen yet. Unwilling to go on -- the general gloominess of the zone didn't help, either -- I just gave up and went elsewhere to sunnier climes.

And that's when I came across Mists of Pandaria's farming quests by accident. I'd heard about these and paid little attention to them after I heard they were based on Farmville, but I found myself more interested in them than I thought I would be. It all starts out when you're trying to help a rookie farmer start his own farm, much to the ridicule of the "Tiller" faction. You buy your seeds, you till the ground, you plant the seeds, you water them, and then, in time, you harvest them. Sounds boring, right? The fun part starts once they start growing, as vermin will sometimes come out that you have to fight, diseased plants will root you in place, and (my personal favorite) some ornery vines will grab you and toss you around like a rag doll if you don't beat them into shape. I won't find out how my crops fared until tomorrow when I'm allowed to harvest them, but for all the lame Farmville jokes that people will no doubt make, I think it's a fine way to add some variety to the drudgery of daily quests.
One thing surprised me. For World of Warcraft -- no, for an MMORPG -- a lot of these quests are really well-written and well-voiced. In the beautiful Valley of the Four Winds, I had to play babysitter to Li-Li, the niece of the aforementioned Clem Stormstout, and occasionally I was genuinely surprised by how realistic her voice acting sounded. And that's a common occurrence. (Although, as a native rural Texan complete with an accent, I was ambivalent about the "aw shucks" nature of a good ol' boy of a Pandaren named Mudmug. As I joked in guild chat, at least Blizzard is spreading its stereotypes evenly. ) I haven't read much quest text for the sake of speed, but I'm sometimes surprised by the poignancy of it when I take the time to read what a random meditating Pandaren has to say. Over the years, Blizzard has learned to excel at telling stories without including quest text or many cinematics, and it shows up in the way stories unfold through the scripted interactions of NPCs around you. Companion NPCs, indeed, are quite common in Pandaria, and I can see how this will assuage the loneliness of leveling once the leveling rush dies off.
The oddest thing about the quests, though, is that I remember so few of them distinctly, even though I've only felt flat-out bored on a couple of occasions -- although I found the opening zone of the Jade Forest inferior to the following Valley of the Four Winds. They're well-paced and there's not a lot of needless running around, but the experience as a whole passes by without stamping itself firmly on my memory. Gone (so far) are most of the epic conflicts that defined zones like Deepholm and the Twilight Highlands; instead, I've spent hours helping an aging Pandaren find the best ingredients for a new beer. Perhaps that's the point. The opening zones of Cataclysm CD Key are peaceful, bucolic places, and I'm constantly reminded of the words that Pandaren once told me aloud, "There's no need to hurry. " That's a philosophy that's in conflict with World of Warcraft's legendary rush-to-the-level-cap attitude, though, and I have a feeling it'll be shattered as I head into the higher zones and start dealing with the Horde more directly.